How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

Emmett Till. Till, as many know, was a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago who was visiting his family in Money, Mississippi, in 1955 when he was brutally murdered by two white men. It is not simply that he was murdered but also that he was kidnapped, beaten, shot in the head, his neck tied to a large metal cotton gin fan, and his body thrown in the Tallahatchie River. Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, said Till had whistled at her, grabbed her, and made lewd comments to her in the grocery store where she worked as a cashier. Six decades later, however, Carolyn admitted that she had lied about the incident. Emmett had never touched her or said anything explicit. We approached Emmett’s casket, its bronze hue radiating under the museum lights. It sat open, exposing us to a photograph of what Emmett’s mother, who insisted on an open-casket funeral, had chosen to show: what white supremacy had done to her son.