Imena

Today is my Birthaday! So blessed to see another year, Im going to celebrate it with my friends at the Vinetian, so it should be fun

Have a Happy Valentines Day Everyone!

Hello everyone, sorry for the lack of posting. February is a busy month for me it is “National Black History Month” , so Im doing alot of extra things with the Black Student Union, and African Art Productions. Every weekend in this month AAP is doing the full history of African American heritage, and BSU is getting ready to do our annual “Black History Festival” were we have African American speakers, poets, singers, council men and women speak through out the campus. We also participate in several other festivals through out the city, this weekend we are selling African food and trying to get people to participate in our festival/activities as well.

I also wanted to share one of the most important people in African American history, Emmett Till. Emmett Till is also sometimes called the “Sacrificial Lamb”, his story empowered other African Americans in his time to fight for their freedom as human beings, and also opened the American Nation’s eyes to the cruelty and racism shifted towards African Americans.

Emmett Till was the son of Mamie Carthan Till (Bradley, Mobley) and Louis Till. Emmett’s mother was born to John and Alma Carthan in the small Delta town of Webb, Mississippi (”the Delta” being the traditional name for the northwest of the State of Mississippi, even though it is nowhere near the actual Mississippi River delta). When she was two years old, her family moved to Illinois. Emmett’s mother largely raised him on her own; she and Louis Till had separated in 1942.

In 1955, Emmett was sent for a summer stay with his great-uncle, Mose Wright, who lived in Money, Mississippi, (another small town in the Delta, eight miles north of Greenwood).

Prior to his departure for the Delta, Emmett’s mother cautioned him to “mind his manners” with white people.

Till’s mother understood that race relations in Mississippi were very different from those in Chicago. The state had seen many lynchings during the South’s lynching era (ca. 1876-1930), and racially motivated murders were still not unfamiliar, especially in the “Delta” region (the traditional name for northwest Mississippi) where Till was going to visit. Racial tensions were also on the rise after the United States Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education to end segregation in public education.

Bryant’s Store in Money, Mississippi. This picture was taken in 2005, and the building still stands.Till’s cousin, Wheeler Parker, Jr, who was with him at the store, claims Till did nothing but whistle at the woman. “He loved pranks, he loved fun, he loved jokes . . . in Mississippi, people didn’t think the same jokes were funny.” Carolyn Bryant later asserted that Till had grabbed her at the waist and asked her for a date. She said the young man also used “unprintable” words. He had a slight stutter and some have conjectured that Bryant might have misinterpreted what Till said.
Carolyn Bryant

By the time twenty-four-year-old Roy Bryant returned to Money from a road trip three days after his wife’s encounter with Till, it seemed that everyone in Tallahatchie County had heard about the incident, in every conceivable version, and Bryant decided that he and his half-brother, J. D. Milam, 36, would meet around 1:00 a.m. on Sunday to “teach the boy a lesson.”

Murder

They took him to the river and made him strip down naked. “You still better than me?” Milam asked Emmett. “Yeah,” the boy said. Milam shot him in the head. They tied Emmett’s body to a cotton gin fan and dumped it into the river.
Mamie Till spoke out about her son’s death. She held an open-casket funeral for her son, so that the world could see “what they did to my boy.” Emmett’s face was battered beyond recognition and he had a bullet hole in his head. The body had decomposed after spending several days underwater.

Trial
When Mamie Till Bradley came to Mississippi to testify at the trial, she stayed in the home of Dr. T.R.M. Howard in the all-black town of Mound Bayou. Others staying in Howard’s home were black reporters, such as Cloyte Murdock of Ebony Magazine, key witnesses, and Rep. Charles Diggs of Michigan. Howard was a major civil rights leader and fraternal organization official in Mississippi, the head of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), and one of the wealthiest blacks in the state.

On the day before the trial, Frank Young, a black farm worker, came to Howard’s home. He said that he had information indicating that Milam and Bryant had help in their crime. Young’s allegations sparked an investigation that led to unprecedented cooperation between local law enforcement, the NAACP, the RCNL, black journalists, and local reporters. The trial began on September 19. Mose Wright, Emmett’s great-uncle, was one of the main witnesses called up to speak. Pointing to one of the suspected killers, he said “Dar he”, or “there he is,” to refer to the man who had killed his nephew. Knowing his life was in danger, he still managed to gather up enough courage to accuse the killers.

Another key witness for the prosecution was Willie Reed, an eighteen-year old high school student who lived on a plantation near Drew, Mississippi in Sunflower County. The prosecution had located him because of the investigation sparked by Young’s information. Reed testified that he had seen a pickup truck outside of an equipment shed on a plantation near Drew managed by Leslie Milam, a brother of J.W. and Roy Bryant. He said that four whites, including J.W. Milam, were in the cab and three blacks were in the back, one of them Till. When the truck pulled into the shed, he heard human cries that sounded like a beating was underway. He did not identify the other blacks on the truck.

On September 23 the jury, made up of 12 white males, acquitted both defendants. Deliberations took just 67 minutes; one juror said they took a “soda break” to stretch the time to over an hour. The hasty acquittal outraged people throughout the United States and Europe, and energized the nascent Civil Rights Movement.

Aftermath of the trial
Even during the trial, Howard and black journalists such as James Hicks of the Baltimore Afro-American named several blacks who had allegedly been on the truck near Drew including three employees of J.W. Milam: Henry Lee Loggins, Levi ‘Too-Tight’ Collins, and Joe Willie Hubbard. In the months after the trial, both Hicks and Howard called for a federal investigation into charges that Sheriff H.C. Strider had locked up Collins and Loggins in jail to keep them from testifying.

In a January 1956 article in Look Magazine for which they were paid, JW Milam and Roy Bryant admitted to journalist William Bradford Huie that he and his brother had killed Till. They did not fear being tried again for the same crime because of the Constitutional double jeopardy protection. Milam claimed that initially their intention was to scare Till into line by pistol-whipping him and threatening to throw him off a cliff. Milam claimed that regardless of what they did to Till, he never showed any fear, never seemed to believe they would really kill him, and maintained a completely unrepentant, insolent, and defiant attitude towards them concerning his actions. Thus the brothers said they felt they were left with no choice but to fully make an example of Till. The story focused exclusively on the role of Milam and Bryant in the crime and did not mention the possible part played by others in the crime.

In February 1956 Howard’s version of events of the kidnapping and murder, which stressed the possible involvement of Hubbard and Loggins, appeared in the booklet Time Bomb: Mississippi Exposed and the Full Story of Emmett Till by Olive Arnold Adams. At the same time a still unidentified white reporter using the pseudonym Amos Dixon wrote a series of articles in the California Eagle. The series put forward essentially the same thesis as Time Bomb but offered a more detailed description of the possible role of Loggins, Hubbard, Collins, and Leslie Milam. Time Bomb and Dixon’s articles had no lasting impact in the shaping of public opinion. Huie’s article became the most commonly accepted version of events.

In 1957 Huie returned to the story for Look Magazine in an article which indicated that local residents were shunning Milam and Bryant and that their stores were closed due to a lack of business.

Milam died of cancer in 1980 and Bryant died of cancer in 1994. The men never expressed any remorse for Till’s death and seemed to feel that they had done no wrong. In fact, a few months before he died, Bryant complained bitterly in an interview that he had never made as much money off Till’s death as he deserved and that it had ruined his life. Mamie (as Mamie Till Mobley) outlived them, dying at the age of 81 on January 6, 2003. That same year her autobiography Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (One World Books, co-written with Christopher Benson) was published.

Popular culture
The murder of Emmett Till was felt deeply by African-Americans, civil rights activists and many others. Artistic works drawing on the incident include the first play by eventual Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, poems by Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Audre Lorde, and a song by Bob Dylan called “The Death of Emmett Till.”

The James Baldwin play “Blues for Mister Charlie” is also loosely based on the case.

The 1990’s Alternative Rock band Emmet Swimming is named after Emmett Till. According to the band, “the idea of the name was basically that a 14-year-old boy should be swimming in the river, not dying in it.”

Recent fictionalized accounts include two award-winning novels: Bebe Moore Campbell’s Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine (1992) and Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle (1993).

The 2003 rap song “Through the Wire” by Kanye West uses the image of Till’s mutilated face as a simile for West’s physical appearance after a near-fatal car accident, demonstrating that after fifty years the murder is still firmly entrenched in the public memory.

The 2005 rap music video “Cadillacs On 22s” by David Banner shows Banner wearing a black T-shirt with the words “R.I.P. Emmett Till” Printed on it.

In 2005, the play The State of Mississippi and the Face of Emmett Till premiered in the south for the first time at Dillard University in New Orleans. The show, written by David Barr, was performed again in October (as The Face Of Emmett Till) with a different cast at Coppin State University.

In 2005, a 38-mile stretch of U.S. Highway 49 north from Greenwood, Mississippi to Tutwiler, Mississippi was renamed in honor of Till.

In February 2006, the elementary school that Till had attended in Chicago (James McCosh Math & Science Academy) was renamed in his honor. At the renaming ceremony, plans for building an Emmett Till Museum on the school’s grounds were discussed.

In 2006, the band Make Believe (band) released the album “Of Course”, featuring the song “Pat Tillman, Emmett Till”.

71st Street on Chicago’s South Side is also called Emmett Till St.