MONEY, MISS. — Deep in the Mississippi Delta, some poor agricultural towns are separated by a large stretch of corn and cotton.
Yes, this was it, this is the place … now covered in thick weeds and ivy is Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, where a 14-year old Black child from Chicago named Emmett Luis Till was accused of having committed the crime of whistling at a white woman, a white woman who has since admitted that not only did she lie about the facts of the trumped up case, but of whom others have said she had been known for flirting with men, Black guys included.
Was she so in love with her alleged parade-worthy “good looks” that she set Black men up by teasing them into responding to her? Was she just another typical white woman who lusted so badly for Black men that she wanted to see him harmed because other Black men refused to even so much as look her in the eyes because of their fear?
But Emmett Till wasn’t afraid of her.
He had come down south to visit his mother’s family, though he knew nothing of the despicable ways of horny white women who were married to jealous white men with women who lusted after the big King Kong ding-dongs they’d heard so much about, but had likely never seen for themselves.
A visit to Money, Mississippi today, we hear, still leaves standing a derelict and mostly forgotten Bryant’s, and even though the 14-year old’s lynching marks a pivotal point in Civil Rights history, very few who live in or around the poverty-stricken town care to be reminded of their nationally historic past.
Except for a marker erected outside Bryant’s, little is said about the worst lynching above all lynchings in the history of the south; and outside of a few marches from time to time, this is yet another piece of history that Black America doesn’t seem to care a lot about preserving.
There is a scripture in Deuteronomy 8 that states, “…13 and when your herds and your flocks multiply, and your silver and gold multiply, and all that you have multiplies, 14 then your heart will become proud and you will forget the LORD your God who brought you out from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. 15 “He led you through the great and terrible wilderness, with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water; He brought water for you out of the rock of flint…” … and you have forgotten who and whose you are.
Those who say they believe in God ought to know that their own past is something the Lord never wants them to forget. The Bible says so. People tend to get prideful and forget where they came from when they are not reminded that the way things are now wasn’t always this way. To disrespect one’s history is to spit on the path others trod so that we might enjoy what they knew they would ever have.
Sacrifices were made, and we need not forget those sacrifices. It is too easy to repeat history when you forget that it has already happened.
Some say the Bryant’s dilapidated store should be made into a into a BLACK HISTORY museum, and like many other places critical to the civil rights movement, it should at least be prevented from caving in from decay. It should always serve as a reminder to us that this road our ancestors and elders traveled, the one that we take advantage of so easily was not GIVEN to them by any stretch of the imagination. Our current freedoms were hard earned, and were not just a result of the charities of benevolent whites.
The slow deterioration of Money, MS, and the history of white Klan christian terrorism against Black people is something #BlackLivesMatter should be using as leverage for the current movement. Black Lives Matter has found itself in the midst of a fight that still allows Blacks to be lynched at will by whites who get away with the murders.
Sad is the lackadaisical way this turning point was pushed aside by Black people; sadder still are the Black Americans who believe that a Civil Rights Museum at the location and a walking trail along the last places Emmett Till saw with his gouged out eyes will not change Money’s economy. Or is it even about the local economy more than it is the preservation?
There is no guarantee the town would get as rich off Tills’ murder just because visitors come to pay homage, but it should be preserved as a historic legacy regardless. Anything else is the re-lynching of the young man who should never be forgotten. It is a stark reminder of the importance of how Black people’s demands to be counted amongst humanity, which is the only reason America has flourished and progressed as it has today.
“This is one of the poorest areas in the United States of America,” said Johnny B. Thomas, mayor of Glendora, a village near Money. “What you see here in Money is the same thing you’ll see in almost any other place . . . in this region.” Poverty, decay, destruction.
A mixture of distant Till relatives show up to pay their respects from time to time, and they make an annual trek to Till’s gravesite in Chicago. Though many have criticized Till’s uncle and cousins for turning him over to the white folks and doing nothing to pursue once he was removed from the home and dragged to a white man’s hellish nightmare in the middle of his sleep time, it only underscores the reasons for the deep need to be educated and RE-educated about Black American history.
It was not so long ago that the times were very different than they are now. It was not 100 or 150 years ago, it was less than 50, and it really has not ended.
As a child, I remember having to jump off the sidewalk whenever a white person passed us in mid-1960s Georgia. It didn’t matter if we had to fall into a bramblebush and get scored with scratch marks or into the street in the path of an oncoming car, we had to move off the sidewalk to let them pass no matter where it put us. I also remember when we didn’t have to do it any more and the first thing some of the Black kids did was started pushing whites off the sidewalks and into the bushes and streets.
I remember being spat on by a truckload of whites shouting that Rebel war cry ‘Yeehaw’ as they passed me while I was walking to school at the age of nine. I remember having to sit on the back of the city bus behind the Colored sign as a child, and I remember being stared at profusely by white women when I walked through a main floor at Rich’s Department Store in Atlanta as a teen. All the other Black folks were in the basement of the store picking through white folks garbage leftovers in the sales bins, but I will never forget the creepy feeling in the early 1970s of thinking I was going to be attacked or mobbed or something just for walking through the ladies clothing department UPSTAIRS to see what was there. I had no money outside of the $50 I had received from my church for spending change, but I was just a curious teenager who wasn’t as afraid as most of my friends were. I’m the plantation picaninny who would have gotten beaten for coloring outside the lines.
I also remember arriving in a segregated Columbus, GA, circa mid-1960s, where colored folks had colored taxis marked red, and where we still could not drink out of the same water fountains or use the same bathrooms. They had bathrooms, we had to hit the bushes out back if the TT’s and PP’s could not be held onto. And I am not yet 60 years old.
No, it wasn’t that long ago — it was still going on when I was a child. It would serve us well not to ever let that history out of our sight. EVER. #neverforget
This year, Young Master Till would have turned 76 years old this July 25. He would have just turned 18 the year I was born.
Maybe it disturbs many whites to see homage paid to the ugly side of their ancillary white history and to see the pride of their own racist past -things such as confederate flags- being torn down at the same time, but it is exactly this ugly racist past in which they should have no remarkable pride, and of which they should also be reminded never to do it again as we should be reminded never to let it happen again.
Though Till’s lynching is not the most recent in U.S. history, it was followed in nearly equal horror by the lynchings of 19-year old Michael Donald of Mobile, AL (1981) and the torturous dragging death and mutilation of 49-year old James Byrd Jr. of Paris, TX, (1998) who had just had a birthday also. He was killed for the crime of walking home while Black from a niece’s birthday party; and as recently as 2012, an unarmed 17-year old Trayvon Martin was stalked, harassed, bullied and gunned down in cold blood by murderer George Zimmerman for the crime of walking home from the store while Black.
America has always made up reasons to kill Black people that, in their own eyes, are lawful and just simply because the victim is not white. The laws be damned unless it’s a white victim, and thus the reason for #BlackLivesMatter.
In Sanford, FL, a subdivision memorial needs to be erected and entitled the “Trayvon Martin Trail of Terror Tour,” beginning at the moment and place that Martin was stalked and harassed to the moment he was gunned down for the offense of trying to defend himself from an armed killer who only pursued him because he was Black.
In 1955, in the south, racial attitudes against Black Lives were the norm for a significant segment of society; and as of 2017, that remains unchanged.
Jim Crow has received a graduate juris doctorate degree in the name of James Crowe III, Esquire. The American legal justice systems are still a ‘de facto’ racially separated entity, serving to this day as a foundation for segregated jurisprudence between Blacks and whites.
Today, the battles still rage on for voting rights and school desegregation turned school-to-prison pipelines. Poor whites still believe that racial equity has come at their expense, which explains their justification for supporting a racist misogynist for president of the united states in 2017. Unfortunately, there are as many if not more Black people who think racism ended when they at least visually surpassed it on a superficial level.
It isn’t hard to explain the jubilee of Black people when OJ Simpson was acquitted of the murders of a white woman and a white man, because win, lose or draw, he at LEAST got a fair trial. With so many Blacks who had lived their lives traumatized, with so many on and off the books who had been killed by whites who got away with the murders, no matter what the case–it meant that even if Simpson had done it, some kind of score that was more than 200 years running had finally been settled, if only for a fleeting moment in time.
With Trayvon Martin’s murder, it was back to ‘business as usual’ in good old racist America.
Now, Carolyn Bryant (nee ‘Donham’), living in seclusion someplace has recently made what amounts to a deathbed confession that is enough to chill the bones of both the living and dead alike. She has recently stated that the entire story about Till was thoroughly fabricated, though his cousins say he did whistle at her. But there are also those who know and knew that she had a flirtatious spirit and was likely the one who should have been accused of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. By now we should know that the lies about the purity and virtuousness of a white woman are nothing BUT a pack of lies.; they can be more whorish than the Black women who are accused of it.
One thing is certain – Till’s naked and mutilated body is inextricably bound to hers for all eternity, whether she wants it to be or not.
She got what she wanted from him in the long run, his body and hers thrashing together. For a time and times eternal, his body will follow her to her grave where her own demons should be waiting to collect her soul when she arrives.
The courthouse where Bryant’s husband and his half-brother were acquitted of the murder has been preserved, but it can be rightly guessed that that has more to do with white pride than with the ugliness of the murder, because if it were righteous, they would have preserved it all…not just the piece that makes them appear justified.
However, the ultimate duty of preserving Till’s legacy is not up to them; but Black folks ought to be ashamed for letting it go that easily. This kind of ignorance of our own ancestor’s history makes it easy for them to recolor history and lie and dismiss certain events when we allow it to fade away as if it never happened.
And the truth is, now that Carolyn Bryant Donham has admitted to her wrongs, she ought to be convicted for causing the death of Emmett Till, even in old age and even though it is highly unlikely that she will spend much time in prison once convicted, if any time at all.
By Till’s 80th birthday in July 2021, that “Trail of Horrors” in Money, Mississippi should be thoroughly preserved. Ugly is as ugly does and that is the reason Till died a national icon while those who murdered him go to their graves as the despised and wicked.
Anyone who has money for white racist empowerment in today’s corporate America and money for made up religious holidays ought to be able to easily absorb a few thousand for some Black Lives that really mattered then just as they do now.
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