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* The Jim Crow Laws and Racism in American History * order against demonstrations, appeared before federal Judge Frank Johnson. They showed him television footage of Bloody Sunday. John Lewis, one of those who was beaten, testified. President Lyndon Johnson made a nationwide television address on March 11. He claimed it was “wrong—deadly wrong” to deny American citizens their voting rights.° The speech brought results. On March 20, Judge Johnson overturned Hare’s injunc- tion. President Johnson sent seventy deputy marshals to join Alabama National Guard members in protect- ing the marchers. Once again, on March 21, the demonstrators proceeded. This time, the marchers numbered in the thousands. Whites took shots at them along their four- day journey. But more than thirty thousand people, black and white, joined in for the last three miles of the fifty-four-mile trek. x ee Tes Crow was finally * * dying. Alabama Governor * 1 0 a x George Wallace in 1963 * i % declared, “Segregation ies now, segregation tomor- row, and segregation forever.” But those who VIOLENCE favored segregation were fighting a losing battle. AND The courts were against them. Thanks to the VICTORY nationwide exposure of television, public opin- ion was against them. Some white Southerners fought back with the only weapon they had left—violence. Emmett Till It was supposed to be a relaxing summer vacation. Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till and his cousin, Curtis Jones, went from Chicago to rural Mississippi in 1955. Before Till left, his mother warned him to be careful, because customs were different in the South. One day, Till and his cousin went to a grocery store. The owner’s wife was tending the store by her- self. It is not certain what Till did, but the woman considered it an improper advance. When her husband found out, he and his brother went to Curtis Jones’s n August 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Louis Till took the train from Chicago to Money, Mississippi, to visit his great-uncle, Mose Wright. The gregarious youngster, weeks away from beginning the eighth grade, spent his first few days in Mississippi relaxing and enjoying the company of his cousins and new friends. Till amused his southern companions by bragging about having a white girlfriend back home. Doubting Till’s claims—and unconvinced by his bravado—his friends dared him to talk to Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who worked the counter at her husband's convenience store. Till took the bet and went inside. We will never know for sure what happened next on that hot afternoon of August 24. Carolyn Bryant said that Till grabbed her hand, called her “baby,” and asked her on a date. Other reports accused Till of whistling at Bryant. Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley (later known as Mamie Till Mobley), assumed that he simply had trouble speaking to Bryant Defendants Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, with their attorney, September 4955. The two men were charged with murdering Emmett Till. because of his stuttering problem. He tried to ask for bubble gum, Bradley rea- soned, but Bryant mistook the stutters for whistles. Whatever the specifics of Till’s encounter with Bryant, white ven- geance came swiftly. Three nights later, Emmett Till with his mother, Mamie Bradley, ca. 1950. Roy Bryant—Carolyn’s husband—and his half-brother J. W. Milam appeared at Mose Wright’s house. Armed, they demanded that the sixty-four-year-old Wright surrender the boy. If Wright refused or told anyone what had hap- pened, Bryant and Milam told him, “you'll never live to be sixty-five.” They put Till in the back of Milam’s 1955 Chev- rolet pickup and sped off into the Delta night. The two white men pistol-whipped Till for his perceived transgression. Then they shot him in the head, tied a seventy- five-pound weight around his neck, and threw him in the Tallahatchie River. A white boy found the body while fishing three days later. It had so badly decom- posed that only an initialed ring could identify it as the fourteen-year-old from Chicago. The murder and kidnapping trial proceeded as so many others had dur- ing those years in the South. The jury, after deliberating for just over an hour, acquitted Bryant and Milam, even as a 327 grieving Mose Wright risked his life to identify the murderers from the witness stand. The verdict drew applause from the whites in the courtroom. A juror joked that they would have reached the verdict sooner had they not taken a soda break. Bryant and Milam promptly sold their story—and their confession—to Look magazine for $4,000. Unlike many other southern lynch- ings, however, the murder of Emmett Till made national headlines. Refusing to allow her son to become another face- less victim, Mamie Bradley spoke can- didly and frequently to the American people through the press. She insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago, displaying for all to see what Bryant and Milam had done to her son. She allowed Jet magazine to run shocking photos of Till’s mutilated body on its cover. While the murderers escaped unscathed, Till’s tragic death and his mother’s defiance brought the violence of the South into the lives of all Americans. Abstract racial violence now wore the face of an inno- cent fourteen-year-old boy. Bradley's cou- rageous decision to publicize her son's brutal murder and her own grief gave great emotional and moral momentum to the growing civil rights movement. ROSA PARKS AND BOYCOTTING THE BUSES Pools of Defiance by Colin Bootman, oil on canvas, 2001. ip ess than four months after a Emmett Till’s murder, an event three hundred miles to the east of Money, Mississippi, again forced Ameri- cans to confront the painful realities of Jim Crow. For African Americans across the South, the everyday act of riding the bus to work meant sometimes risking harassment but always accepting the 328 code of racial segregation. City laws separated white and black riders and in many cases granted white passengers the power to take seats already claimed by blacks. In Montgomery, Alabama, blacks could never sit in the first ten rows of the bus. If the black section was filled to capacity, African Americans had to stand, even if the white section remained empty. When whites boarded to find the first ten rows full, they forced blacks to move. Bus drivers carried guns, and they often verbally and physically tormented black passengers. Whatever their social or political or religious differences, Montgomery blacks shared the experience of riding what they called the “yellow monsters.” GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER Shadows fiom the persimmon and cedar trees in the yard cloaked two white men us they emerged fiom the sedan and spoke to a man and a woman in the backseat. When they finished their brief conversation, Roy Bryant and his half brother, J. W. Milam, walked boldly toward the shack with vengeance on their minds. Milam, the bigger of the two, carried a long flashlight in one hand and an Army-issue .45 pistol in the other The brothers walked through the screened front porch of the cotton field shac und stopped at the door, ready for action. Bryant pounded on the door. The shack remained silent, He pounded again and shouted, “Preacher! Preacher, get up and open this door!” Someone moved inside the darkened house, and soon a voice called out, “Who's that?” “This is Mr. Bryant, Preacher. From Money.” “AUl right, suh.” The door slowly swung open, and a thin Black man, sixty-four- year-old Mose “Preacher” Wright, stepped out onto the porch Milam shined the flashlight into Wright's face and pointed his gun at the old man. “You got two boys from Chicago here?” Yessuh.” He nodded back into the house. “They’s sleeping.” Milam stepped clos “Ye Bryant nodded. “Well, then, we need to talk to him.” “T want the one who done the talkin’ in Money. Is he here?” suh.” The old man’s voice trembled. With the flashlight casting eerie shadows through the dark shack, Wright led the two white men to a back bedroom where fourteen-year-old Emmett “Bobo” Till slept with three of his cousins. Bryant shook Emmett Till awake while Milam shined the flashlight in the boy's face. When he awoke, Milam asked, “Are you the boy who did the talking?” THE BOY WHO TRIGGERED THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOV “Yeah,” replied Emmett. “Don't say ‘yeah’ to me, nigger,” snarled Milam. “I'll blow your head off. get up and get your clothes on.” Emmett sat up on the bed and began dressing while his great-uncle, Mose, pleaded for him. “He ain't got good sense because he was raised up in Chicago. The boy didn’t know what he was doing. Don't take him.” By now the commotion had brought Emmetts great-aunt, Elizabeth Wright, into the room, and she begged the white men to leave Emmett alone. “Listen, we'll pay you whatever you want to charge; we'll pay you if you'll release him.” “You'd best get yourself back in that bed of yours, girl,” snapped Milam. “Do it now—I want to hear those spring With tears in her eyes, Elisabeth Wright left the room. Emmett continued to dress, oblivious to the danger that was unfolding around him. He reached for his socks and Milam stopped him. “Just the shoes, boy. We got to hurry.” “I don't wear shoes without socks,” said Emmett. His kidnappers cursed him for making them wait while he pulled on his socks and then a pair of canvas shoes with thick crepe soles. When the boy was dressed, Milam and Bryant pushed him through the house and out to the porch. Mose Wright tried one more time to save his nephew. “Just take him out in the yard and whip him, and I'll be satisfied.” But the two men ignored his plea. Before they stepped into the yard, Milam turned and asked Wright if he recog- nized them. “Nosuh, I don't know you.” “Good, Preacher, How old are you?” “Sixty-four” GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER “Well, if you decide later that you do know any of us here tonight, you'll never live to be sixty-five.” “But where are you taking him?” asked Wright. “Nowhere if he's not the right one,” said Milam. Mose Wright and his wife watched from the porch while the two men walked Emmett to their car. Bryant forced Emmett close to the back window and asked, “Is this the boy?” “Yes,” said the woman from the backseat. Bryant shoved Emmett into the fiont seat, sat next to him, and pulled the door closed. Milam got behind the wheel, and the car, its lights still off, moved into the dark, taking the boy from Chicago with them. His naked and mutilated body would be found by a fisherman three days later in the Tallahatchie River.” The kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till and the trial of his killers became one of the biggest news items of 1955, The viewing of his disfigured corpse at Rainer Funeral Home and his funeral at the Roberts Temple of the Church of God in Christ in Chicago attracted more than ten thousand mourners. The grisly open-casket photo of Emmett that appeared in Jet magazine horrified and angered hundreds of thousands more. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), other civil rights organizations, and political leaders expressed outrage at the cold-blooded murder of this boy from Chicago. In an interview, Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the NAACP labeled the crime a racist act, saying, “It would appear that the state of Mississippi has decided to maintain white supremacy by murdering chil- dren.” Newspapers across the country, especially those in the Northern states, condemned the killing and the racist attitudes that led to it. * This re-creation of actual events is based on statements made by those present and documents related to the case. THE BOY WHO TRIGGERED THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT A huge crowd gathers in front of Roberts Temple of the Church of God in Christ, the Chicago church that held Emmett Till's funeral The protests and condemnations from civil rights leaders and Northerners poked an already raw nerve in the South. The white leaders in Southern states like Mississippi that enforced Jim Crow laws, regulations that segregated Blacks from whites, were still stinging from the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which declared that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional. In May of 1955, the Supreme Court pushed the GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER Bryant and J. W. Milam ambled into the court in September 1955, they were armed not only with their wives, baby boys, and cigars, but with the challenge of the Delta whites to the interference to the outside world.” The trial captured the outside world’s interest for several reasons, The Jet magazine photo of Emmett publicized the gruesome details of the murder, mak- ing it more than just another Southern lynching. The nature of the crime itself, a fourteen-year-old boy brutally murdered by two men, made it news, but the reason for the kidnapping and killing—Emmett had allegedly whistled at and The racial also contributed to its notoriety; at the time, Medgar Evers made “ugly remarks” to a white woman—turned it into big new: context of the and the NAACP were fighting hard to gain equal rights for Blacks in the South, and Emmett’s senseless murder seemed to symboliz the plight of Blacks in the region. Finally, the murder indictment against Milam and Bryant was a land- mark event in Mississippi, a state where more than 500 lynchings had occurred since 1880, because, as far as many people knew, it was the first time white men had been indicted for killing a Black person. The trial gave many African Americans hope that, finally, equal rights for all citizens, regardless of race, might be on the way. For entrenched Southern segregationists, the trial con- firmed the fears that had begun with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling: The white-dominated Southern way of life was in jeopardy. Though everyone involved in the trial already knew the guilt of the defen- dants, the prosecution, led by District Attorney Gerald Chatham, worked dili- gently to present a strong case. A number of eyewitnesses testified against the killers, including Emmett’s great-uncle. In a spectacularly intense moment, Mose Wright stood at the witness stand, pointed at Milam and Bryant, and stated that they were the ones who had come into his home to kidnap Emmett. Wright's act of courage marked one of the first times an African American THE BOY WHO TRIGGERED THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT accused a white of a crime in a Mississippi court of law. Fearing for his life, he had to leave the state immediately after the trial Despite the many testimonies, the clear evidence (including Milam and Bryant's confession to kidnapping), and Chatham’s eloquent closing argument, after deliberating for barely an hour, the all-white jury declared the defendants not guilty, The verdict set off a storm of reactions equal to those before the trial. Segregationists and racists claimed victory for the South. Civil rights activists A courtroom artist’s depiction of Mose Wright testifying against Emmett Till’s killers GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER and Northerners lamented the miscarriage of justice and condemned the acquittal. Both sides agreed on one thing, however: The jury's decision seemed to signal that in the South, Jim Crow laws and racial segregation were not going to go away. But Charles C, Diggs, Jr, a Black congressman from Michigan who had attended the trial, saw things differently. The landmark trial, he suggested, could be used as a starting point for further change. “The Emmett Till trial is over, but we, as Negroes, should never forget its meaning. The fact that Milam and Bryant were acquitted shows us how tremendous a job we face to bring complete democracy to our entire nation. Negroes and other clear-thinking Americans must combine their efforts to press for freedom and equality Congressman Charles C. Diggs, Jr., center, was among those who attended the trial THE BOY WHO TRIGGERED THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT through both political and legal challenges.” The aftershocks of the Emmett Till case continued long after the Tallahatchie county jury set Milam and Bryant free. For many people involved in the civil rights movement, the murder of Emmett Till and the acquittal of his murderers was the last straw. If Black boys could be killed by white men with no fear of criminal prosecution, something had to be done, and there was no better time than 1955 for the movement to begin. “The murder of Emmett Till and the trial of the two men accused of mur- dering him,” wrote journalist and historian David Halberstam, “became the first great media event of the civil rights movement.” It was the kind of atten- tion that the struggling civil rights movement desperately needed to generate from the murder and trial, the national support. With the emotional outrag: and international media attention, and the increased efforts by Americans who were working for equality, the civil rights movement gained the momentum necessary to break free from the social bondage that had enslaved Blacks since before the signing of the Declaration of Independence Myrlie Evers-Williams, whose husband, NAACP field director in Mississippi, Medgar Evers, was killed by an assassin in 1963, recognized the essential role the Emmett Till case played in future events in the South, In her 1967 biography of her husband, she placed the case in its proper historical context: “[IJt was the murder of this fourteen-year-old out-of-state visi- tor that touched off the world-wide clamor and cast the glare of a world spotlight on Mississippi’s racism. ... The Till case, ina way, was the story in microcosm of every Negro in Mississippi. ‘or it was the proof that even youth was no defense against the ultimate terror, that lynching was still the final means by which GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER bility that many fourteen-year-old boys possess led him to violate one of the South’s most fiercely protected taboos at a time when racial tensions were primed to explode. His cocky and naive indiscretion in Money, Mississippi, on the night of August 24, 1955, inflamed the hatred of two local white men, men who believed every word of Tom P. Brady's Black Monday and all the other racist rhetoric that had circulated in Mississippi since the Supreme Court’s Brown w, Board of Education decision. They'd been waiting for trouble, for a glib young negro” from Chicago or New York to step out of line. When he did, they made sure to make an example out of him, An example that no one would ever forget. THE BOY FROM CHICAGO Emmett Louis Till lived and died in the middle of the twentieth century, a dynamic period in American history that came after the invention of telephones, industrial assembly lines, and motion pictures but before the development of cellular telephones, DVDs, and personal computers. His brief lifetime spanned a umber of large and small events that permanently influenced American life: the Second World War and the first atomic bomb; the Nazi Holocaust and the establishment of Israel as an independent country; the presidential adminstra- tions from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Dwight D. Eisenhower; the GI Bill and the baby boom; Elvis Presley and rock and roll; McDonald’s and Disneyland; color TV and sitcoms; the polio vaccine and fluoridated toothpaste; integration of Major Le: gue Baseb Il and the beginnings of the civil rights movement. It was a turbulent, progressive era of unprecedented achievements and changes. Born in Chicago, Illinois, on July 25, 1941, Emmett was the only child of GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER Downtown Chicago, 1953 Louis and Mamie Till. Less than five months after his birth, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor forced the United States into World War II, and the war that killed millions of people would also claim the life of Emmett’s father. Shortly before Emmett’s fourth birthday, his father died in Italy as a member of the U.S. armed forces. Emmett, nicknamed “Bobo,” spent most of his childhood in Argo, Illinois, THE BOY FROM CHICAGO a suburb about ten miles southwest of Chicago, living with his mother near her extended family, including her grandmother, Nancy Jane Carthan. As a five- year-old, Emmett fell victim to the nationwide polio epidemic—polio vaccinations would not be available until 195' , the year of his death—but he recovered without any of the permanent physical deformities that afflicted thousands of American children in the 1950s. A speech defect that often caused him to stutter was the only lasting effect of the sometimes fatal disease. When he was twelve, Emmett and his mother moved to an apartment on the South Side of C icago, where she worked as a civilian procurement officer for the Air Force, earning about $3,900 per year, slightly less than the average income for Americans at the time. He enrolled in the seventh grade at James McCosh Elementary School on South Champlain Avenue and quickly made friends among his classmates. It didn’t take long for Emmett and his mother to settle into their new home and neighborhood and to begin to appreciate life in the big city. In 1954, Chicago had a population of more than three and a half million, making it the nation’s second largest city, Over five hundred thousand of its residents were Black, most of whom had arrived in the great migration from Southern states. From 1900 to 1950, Blacks from the South had flocked to Northern cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia seeking greater opportunities and better living conditions, and the migration had a signifi- cant effect on the size and nature of these cities. The Black population of Chicago in 1950, for example, was twelve times larger than it had been just forty years earlier. Life in the sprawling, windy metropolis on the shore of Lake Michigan wasn't easy, but in nearly all cases, it was better than it had been in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, or Georgia. A major hub of American business and trans- GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER tised that the clothes wouldn’t need rinsing, so Emmett ran them through a wash cycle and hung them up to dry. “When [ came home from work,” laughed his mother, “I found all the laundry out on the clothesline, stiff as a board.” He once came home with fifteen dollars and handed the money to his mother. When she asked him where he had gotten so much money, he told her he had earned it cleaning a neighbor's apartment. Thinking the neighbor had overpaid her son, she went to the woman's home to see what kind of work Emmett had done and found that he had washed and painted a hallway and cleaned the entire kitchen all by himself. By all accounts, Emmett prided himself on neatness, and it showed in the fastidious way he kept the house and in the Emmett’s mother, imie Till Bradley attention he paid to his own appearance. Emmett’s helpfulness soon spread outside the home, and on hot, humid summer days, he would haul neighbors’ groceries home in his wagon. Some winter afternoons would find him outside braving the icy winds from Lake Michigan, shoveling snow from neighbors’ sidewalks and stairways. Summer or winter, Emmett spent most weekends in Argo at his great-grandmother's house, running errands or helping her around the house and in her yard. The visits meant a lot to Emmett and to his great-grandmother, and his mother learned that if she needed it, the best leverage she had to discipline Emmett was to forbid him visiting Argo. THE BOY FROM CHICAGO The Brown v. Board of Education decision that stirred up so much trouble in the Southern states in May 1954 was hardly noticed by Emmett and his friends. Life in their working-class Chicago neighborhood, though segregated, was pretty good, and the twelve- and thirteen-year-old kids weren't much interested in the politics of the Supreme Court or of the Deep South. Even Emmett’s mother didn’t appreciate the significance of the Supreme Court's announcement at the time. OfF course she was pleased that the United States had made a bold move against seg- regation, but she didn’t expect that ruling would have much direct impact on her and her son. T didn’t realize it at the time that “[t was so far from me,” she says the next thing on the scene was going to be Emmett.” The integration order had no immediate impact on their neighborhood, and Emmett began the 1954-55 school year as a thirteen-year-old eighth grader at his all-Black school, McCosh. During that school year, his social studies teachers probably discussed the Brown decision and speculated about how it might change America, but it was a topic that didn't much interest Emmett. In English class, he may have read some of the brand-new novels that would go on to become classics: William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and J. R. R. Tolkien's trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. His English teacher might have also devoted spe- cial attention to the work of Ernest Hemingway, winner of the 1954 Nobel weren't aly Prize for Literature. Of course, book: ys the first thing on a teenager’s mind, so if Emmett needed a break from school, he could have watched popular programs like Lassie, Drugnet, and The Lone Ranger on the new TV set in their living room. If the TV had to be off, he and his friends probably spent time listening to the hottest new songs on the radio, including “Rock Around the Clock,” “Maybellene,” and “Ain’t That a Shame.” In April 1955, Richard J. Daley was elected mayor of Chicago; he would go on to become the first Chicago mayor to be elected to four consecutive terms. a a ati GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER That same month, a new hamburger franchise, the first of its kind, opened in the nearby suburb of Des Plaines. At the time, neither Emmett nor anyone else in Chicago dreamed that the new hamburger joint, McDonald’s, would ever amount to much. Emmett and his frie ds from Chicago's South Side probably didn’t even know about the new fast-food hamburger stand in the white sub- urb. But the big local news that April wasn’t the mayoral clection or McDonald's, it was the White Sox’ blazing start to the 1955 season. By the end of the month, they occupied first place in the American League standings. On M: 31, 1955, Emmett and his classmates at MeCosh Elementary were wrapping up their school year, getting ready for eighth-grade graduation, and making summer vacation plans. National politics were the last things on their minds, and the McCosh students probably weren't even aware that in Washington, D.C., the United $ ates Supreme Court issued a follow-up to its landmark desegregation ruling of 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren inflamed the already broiling racial tensions in the South when he announced that all states had to integrate their schools “with all deliberate speed.” To Emmett and most of his friends and family in Chicago at the time, the announcement seemed to have little effect on their lives. A handsome teenager, stout at 160 pounds and slightly shorter than many of his classmates, Emmett Till graduated from McCosh and looked forward to a summer of fun: He and his mother had planned a trip to Omaha to visit fam- ily; Minnie Minoso and the White Sox were playing well; and he had all of June, July, and August before he'd have to go back to school. But Emmett’s trip to Omaha got canceled when his great-uncle from Mississippi, Mose Wright, came to Chicago with two of his grandsons. “Emmett heard that Uncle Mose was in town,” recalls Emmett’s mother, “and two of the boys that he grew up with. They were going back to Mississippi. That's what [Emmett] wanted to HE BOY FROM CHICAGO =McDonald'’s : HAMBURGERS fi We have Fold OVER J MILLION The first McDonald’s franchise opened near Chicago on April 15, 1955 do. It messed up our plans completely. After a lot of pressure, my mother and I decided it would be all right to let Emmett go to Mississippi.” Emmett’s mother worried about her son traveling to Mississippi, but her uncle assured her that conditions in the South had improved and that Emmett would be safe. Wright had, after all, cleared $250 that year for his sharecropping work, and for the first time he owed nothing to the plantation owner, Life in Mississippi had never been better, Wright said, and he knew that Emmett would enjoy spending time with his cousins down on the farm. Still, Emmett’s mother worried that her son wouldn’t know how to treat white people in the Jim Crow South and warned him before he left for Chicago: “If you have to GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER Money was nothing like Chicago: It had no city parks or baseball fields, no movie theaters or dance halls, no restaurants or department stores. The air in that part of the Delta hung heavy with sweltering humidity, only occasionally stirred up by weak breezes, and the steady buzz of locusts seemed to magnify the stifling Mississippi heat. Most Blacks worked in the fields and lived in beat-up shacks owned by white landowners. The state of Mississippi had the lowest per capita income in the nation, and, ironically enough, the people in “Money” were among the poorest in the state. Mississippi's racism was perhaps the greatest dif- ference from Chicago, and the white people in and around Money vigilantly enforced Jim Crow segregation laws. Just a few weeks before Emmett’ arrival in Money, a Black teenage girl had been fogged for “crowding” a white woman ina store. From the moment Emmett and his cousin arrived on Sunday, August 21, the visitors from Chicago brought excitement to the sleepy little town. Emmett’s Southern cousins and their friends marveled at the ways the Northern boys dressed and acted, and at the stories they told about life in the North. One of the local boy , John Milton Wesley, lived near Money and was seven years old when Emmett arrived in 1955. He remembers that Emmett Till was different from the rest of the Chicago boys. He seemed more mature, and he talked a lot, keeping Wesley and his Mississippi friends “spellbound with stories of white girlfriends, the forbidden fruit.” Emmett wore a straw hat and had “funny-looking, light colored eyes” that the local girls found attractive, but it was the stories of life up North that got the most attention from the kids in Money. Wesley said that Emmett and his friends from Chicago “relished their ability to dazzle us with their lack of fear of white people. It never occurred to us at the time that they always made these boasts when there were no white folks around to challenge them. THE BOY FROM CHICAGO The local kids made an eager and gullible audience. Poverty and racial seg- regation dominated their lives, so the kind of life the Chicago boys talked about seemed as foreign and incredible as the land of Oz Lacking the sophis- educated friends from Illinois, the tication of their more worldly and bette Mississippi boys believed every story they heard, no matter how wild it seemed. The children of poor sharecroppers imagined that anything might be possible in the wonderful world up North. One of the things that impressed Wesley and his friends most were the pho- tos of white women, cut out of magazines, that the boys from Chicago carried in their wallets. The Mississippi boys believed the photos were real and that in the North, black boys could have white girlfriends without any trouble. A soci- ety without racial boundaries was almost impossible for them to comprehend. Wesley said, “We ima didn’t have to sit in the balcony. gined racial bliss and integrated movies where blacks . We could only marvel at what we imagined their lives must be like in a place where your seat on the bus was determined not by the color of your skin but by the availability of a vacant s For his first few days in Money, Emmett had a great time. His brash person- ality and fantastic stories about life in Chicago made him a local celebrity among the Mississippi kids, and his Southern vacation was even more fan than he had expected. But the fun came to an abrupt end on Wednesday night, August 24, when Emmett crossed a Jim Crow boundary he never really understood. os * The Abduction Ir was Sarurpay, AuGusT 20, and Maurice had driven to the train station in Grenada, Mississippi, to pick up Dad, Wheeler, and Bobo. I was so excited that I didn’t know what to do. I kept my eyes on the road looking for their arrival in Dad’s 1946 Ford sedan. Dark Fear Road was gravel, and you could see cars approaching at least a mile away from the dust that would be billowing up from behind. Finally they arrived, Maurice parking the car in the front yard (while Dad could drive, he often deferred to someone else). Dad was the first to ‘exit the car. When Bobo got out, his size was the first thing I noticed. He was quite big for a fourteen-year-old: he must have weighed about 140 pounds and was a little over five foot six; at twelve, I weighed about go pounds and was just five feet tall. 4 
