The Defender: How Chicago's Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America by Ethan Michaeli

Author:Ethan Michaeli [Michaeli, Ethan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Social History, political science, civil rights, social science, Black Studies (Global)
ISBN: 9780547560694
Google: KO_AlAEACAAJ
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2016-07-15T20:24:44.018544+00:00

At 2:30 a.m. on Sunday, August 28, 1955, sixty-four-year-old Moses Wright, a tall, wiry cotton farmer, was awakened by someone knocking on the door of his rough, unpainted house set about fifty feet back from a gravel road outside Money, Mississippi.

“Preacher,” said a man’s voice, using a common nickname for Wright, a minister in the Church of God in Christ. Wright opened the door to find J. W. Milam, a local white man he knew, holding a pistol and a flashlight, as well as two other white men, one of whom introduced himself as Roy Bryant, the owner of a convenience store in town and Milam’s half brother. The third man stayed in the shadows on the porch, his hat drawn down to hide his face.

“We want to see the boy from Chicago,” said Milam.

Understanding that the men were looking for his fourteen-year-old grand-nephew, Emmett Till, whose mother had sent him to Mississippi for the summer vacation, Wright led the two men through the darkened house—the electricity happened not to be working that night—into a back room where Till was sleeping in a bed with Wright’s twelve-year-old son, Simeon. Milam woke up Till and asked him, “Are you that boy from Chicago?”

“Yeah,” answered Till.

“Don’t say ‘yeah’ to me or I’ll knock the hell out of you,” Milam snapped, offended that the boy had not addressed him as “sir,” and ordered him to get dressed.

Wright’s wife was now awake as well and pleaded with the men not to take Till, offering them money to set aside whatever wrong he might have done, but they ignored her and brought the boy to a car waiting on the road. Wright followed the men in the dark and heard them ask a woman seated inside, “Is this the boy?”

When the woman answered yes, the men took the boy away, beyond Wright’s sight.

Within hours, Wright notified the local police and also telephoned Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley, in Chicago. That same day, local sheriff’s deputies arrested Bryant and Milam on suspicion of kidnapping while Bradley began a frantic effort to coordinate a search for her son, notifying local officials in Chicago as well as The Defender, which sent reporter Mattie Smith Colin to sit with the distraught mother through her vigil. Bradley soon ascertained that the kidnapping was related to an incident the previous Wednesday, when her son had gone with a group of friends to the store in Money owned by Bryant and his twenty-one-year-old wife, Carolyn. Till bought some bubblegum from Carolyn and, on the way out, allegedly let loose a wolf whistle directed at her. A moment later, Mrs. Bryant emerged from the store with a look that frightened the boys.

“She’s going to get a pistol,” one of them yelled, prompting the boys to run all the way back to Wright’s farm, where Till begged his cousins not to tell his uncle about the incident. Over the next few days, the boys tried to put the encounter out of their minds even after

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