Murder of Emmett Till
Emmett Till was a fourteen year old boy who lived in Chicago. He was very outgoing and friendly with everyone he met. After his uncle, Moses (Moh-ss) Wright, came up to visit, he took Emmett and his cousin down to Money, Mississippi. Before he left, his mother informed him that life is very, very different for blacks in the South and the way he acted at home could not be the same as how he acted down there. He didn’t believe her warnings. As Emmett and his mother got to the train station Emmett ran for the train in haste as to not miss his ride. Mamie Till, his mother, yelled to him “Emmett, aren’t you gonna say good bye? What if I never see you again?” Emmett said, “Awhh mama.” Then he gave her a kiss on the cheek and handed her his watch so that she had part of him while he was away. She asked about his father’s ring and he said he was, “going to show it off to the boys” and was on his way without regard to his mother’s warnings.
Money, Mississippi was just a stretch of road with a post office on one end and Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market at the other. Bryant’s sold cool drinks to passing field workers and candy to the neighborhood children. So African Americans were often regulars. As Mamie had said, the south was like a whole other world compared to Chicago. In the south, when a white woman would walk down the sidewalk and a black man was walking towards her, he would have to get off the sidewalk and look at the ground because a black male can never look a white woman in the eyes. Blacks weren’t even allowed to enter through the front doors of white businesses. Moses Wright worked on a field picking cotton. He lived in a small shack on the plantation that he worked for. There were only three small rooms in the shack so everyone squeezed in to the available beds. Emmett had to sleep with his cousin in one room; Moses was in another and in the other room, Wheeler Parker, Emmett’s close cousin and the others. While there Emmet and his cousins would help
Money, Mississippi was just a stretch of road with a post office on one end and Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market at the other. Bryant’s sold cool drinks to passing field workers and candy to the neighborhood children. So African Americans were often regulars. As Mamie had said, the south was like a whole other world compared to Chicago. In the south, when a white woman would walk down the sidewalk and a black man was walking towards her, he would have to get off the sidewalk and look at the ground because a black male can never look a white woman in the eyes. Blacks weren’t even allowed to enter through the front doors of white businesses. Moses Wright worked on a field picking cotton. He lived in a small shack on the plantation that he worked for. There were only three small rooms in the shack so everyone squeezed in to the available beds. Emmett had to sleep with his cousin in one room; Moses was in another and in the other room, Wheeler Parker, Emmett’s close cousin and the others. While there Emmet and his cousins would help