Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (45 page)

In addition to the family bonding, 1985 was a very important year for me for another reason. It was the thirtieth anniversary of Emmett’s murder and the Sumner trial. Every fifth year since 1955, I had been contacted by media. I would relive the tragedy in newspapers and on television, most of it local. But the thirtieth anniversary was different. There was a spark. There seemed to be even greater interest in the Emmett Till story than at other times, interest that came from way beyond Chicago. Maybe the country had just needed time to process everything. It had been a generation
since we had seen the great victories of the civil rights movement, the social, legal, and political changes. The country had been so caught up in the sheer energy, the drive of the movement, and the afterglow that it had taken a while for people to sit down and reflect on the causes of the effects.

There were so many calls and interviews that year. A wonderful documentary was produced by the NBC television station in Chicago. The reporter Rich Samuels and his production team actually tracked down Roy Bryant in Mississippi, but Bryant wouldn’t talk. That documentary wound up winning an Emmy Award. But, more important, the attention to the story created even more interest and the calls kept coming. Then in 1987, a major documentary series was shown on Public Broadcasting Service stations all across the country.
Eyes on the Prize
was an acclaimed documentary on the significant developments in the civil rights movement. The first segment showed the spark for the movement that came from the events surrounding the murder of Emmett Till.

I was delighted to have the chance to meet Henry Hampton, the documentary producer, when I was in Boston that year to receive an award. My cousin Thelma Wright Edwards was living there at the time and we talked to him about his work and Emmett and Thelma’s father, Uncle Moses. Of course, we couldn’t help pointing out a few details that only family members would have known.

By this time, the requests for public appearances really began to pick up. We had been through nearly two full terms of the Reagan administration and there was a lot of concern, a lot of anxiety about civil rights. Something had shifted. New leaders were bringing a new message on social issues and government policy. People were raising questions about things that had been beyond question for so many years, questions about the fairness of so many things that had been done to achieve fairness. Conservatives wanted to turn back the clock on social progress. So people were interested in talking about civil rights. Not just current policies, but the history of it all. It was important for everybody to understand what I had been teaching my students and my Emmett Till Players, that great sacrifices had been made for the progress we had seen. I was becoming part of this dialogue. It was what I had wanted for such a long time. After all, the story of the civil rights movement would be incomplete without a discussion of Emmett Till. And who could discuss Emmett Till better than his mother? Thank God I had prepared myself. I had read everything I could get my hands on. And I had been getting practice at public speaking with the local churches and other groups that had invited me over the years after that college speech class, where I had eulogized Emmett. Beyond
all that, though, I had studied the master, as I considered the important meaning and style of all those speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the ones I had been sharing with my kids.

In 1988, I was honored to be invited by Mrs. Coretta Scott King to make a presentation at a very special event sponsored by the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. The event was called “Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers.” It was to be a four-day conference held that October and would include an impressive lineup of women. I turned to Gene, who told me he would be delighted to go with me, as he was for so many out-of-town appearances yet to come. But this one was to be the first big one for me, and I wanted to do a good job. I felt that I owed that to the people who were coming, looking for answers. I was told to prepare for fifteen minutes, but I brought plenty of material to go longer, just in case.

My presentation during the conference was held in a room that filled up very quickly. Someone wound up moving a back wall and that gave us the other half of the room. As that second section began to fill up, they started opening the two side panels of the room. It seemed like everybody at the conference had come to this session. Every chair was taken. People were standing. They were sitting on the floor. I wound up going for much longer than fifteen minutes and I was so pleased that I had prepared myself for a longer period.

At one point, as I was speaking and looking out at the huge crowd, my attention was drawn to an entrance where I saw two more people walking in. It was Mrs. Coretta Scott King and Mrs. Rosa Parks. Oh, I was just ecstatic to have them come to hear
me
. And, as I continued my talk, I suddenly felt so connected. There was a bond between me and them, even across the room. I wanted to talk to them, but things were hectic as we broke up, and I didn’t get the chance.

Later, as Gene and I walked into the reception that evening, the first person I saw was Mrs. King, who came over to greet me. “Well,
finally
we meet,” she said.

I wasn’t sure at first what she meant by that, but I certainly was thrilled to meet her. She was so warm, so gracious. As it turns out, what she meant was that I had never responded to other invitations that had been sent to me over the years. Invitations to attend the 1963 March on Washington and the funeral of Dr. King in 1968. I didn’t know anything about those invitations. I had never received them and didn’t really have time to consider it much right then because things were moving so quickly. There was so much excitement with so many important people at the reception. Dr. Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women,
hugged me and kissed me and made me feel so welcome. There would be many hugs and kisses that evening, many greetings, but there would be one embrace that would be especially dear to me. The last one. The one that came rushing over to me. The one that held on so tightly. One I would hold on to for so many years to come. It was the one from Mrs. Rosa Parks.

It was almost as if she was apologizing for something, trying to make up for something. I shared that feeling. It just seemed like we should have met so many years before we did. But we would waste no time making up for lost time. I would bring my kids up to Detroit, where she was living, to perform their program. Some of my kids also would participate in her “Pathways to Freedom,” a bus tour that familiarizes children with the significance of the Underground Railroad. She and I would also be there for each other during the special times, like when she would receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. Gene and I would become very close friends with Rosa Parks and Elaine Eason Steele, the cofounder and director of the Rosa & Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. Over the years, we would share so much appreciation and so much love. We would share something else, too. Something that had connected us for so many years. Something that should have brought us together so many years before. It was that something that had made us hug each other so tightly when we met. Rosa Parks would tell me how she felt about Emmett, how she had thought about him on that fateful day when she took that historic stand by keeping her seat.

At the King Center event, I would be puzzled for some time about what Mrs. King had said to me, about those invitations that had never reached me. It was so nice, so satisfying to learn finally that I had not been left behind after all. That people had tried to include me in the events that unfolded after Emmett’s death. That’s when I realized what had happened. Mama. Oh, Mama. I thought about how she had never wanted me to consider being in the thick of it all during the 1960s, how concerned she had been for my own well-being, how she had wanted to keep me close, keep me safe, and told me I had plenty of other things to do. I thought about how she had been there so often to help sort my mail. And open it. Mama had intercepted those invitations. She did it to protect me. I thought about it and I understood it. As only a mother could.

In 1989, there was another special invitation. The Civil Rights Memorial was being dedicated at the headquarters of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery. Morris Dees, the head of the organization, is a passionate and committed lawyer, who dedicated his career to fighting
injustice, and who engineered a major blow to the Ku Klux Klan when he won a seven-million-dollar judgment against the Klan on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald in the lynching death of her son, Michael Donald. That judgment left the KKK bankrupt. Morris Dees raised money to commission a monument by Maya Lin to commemorate the sacrifices made by so many during the civil rights movement. Along with major events, the names of forty people were etched in black granite. Emmett’s was included.

It was a tremendous honor and I quickly gathered up my family to travel to Montgomery for the dedication. Gene’s two daughters, Lillian and Yvonne, went along. Yvonne’s husband, Ron, drove us all in their van. Ollie Gordon went, along with my cousin Deborah Watts from Minneapolis, and Ollie’s friend Bobby Bradley. And Thelma Wright Edwards flew in to join us.

It was bright and hot in Montgomery during that first weekend in November. Still, there was something chilling in the air. The police were all around for protection. They were on rooftops and on the street surrounding the grounds of the center. It was the kind of scene I had expected and never saw during the Sumner trial. There was a reason for all the protection. There had been threats by white supremacists who apparently didn’t want to see this tribute to civil rights so close to the Alabama State Capitol, or anywhere, for that matter. The tension had been building for a while. The former headquarters of the Southern Poverty Law Center already had been firebombed.

It also was chilling to see the monument for the first time. It is a beautiful work of art. It takes your breath away. There is a curved wall of black granite with water flowing over the etched words from Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the words of the prophet Amos: “… Until justice rolls down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” A round black granite table sits in the middle of the plaza, like a timepiece that connects important events and the names of martyrs of the movement, a movement that goes around and around and seems to never end. A continuous flow of water rises up from the center and washes ever so gently over it all.

On the day before the main dedication ceremony, we viewed the monument. I couldn’t hold back. I approached, I searched, following the dates, and I found what I was looking for.

Emmett’s was the third name in the time line following the Reverend George Lee and Lamar Smith, a little before reaching Rosa Parks and the
Montgomery bus boycott. I ran my fingers over the letters of Emmett’s name and felt the cool water. I began to weep. As I stood there, shaking, I missed Emmett even more. And I realized that my heart was still wrestling with something so enormous that even this great honor could not resolve it for me. It was quite a moment and it would take me a while to get over it. It was like touching my son. Like reliving his funeral. But, as I told people there, it also filled me with such joy to see Emmett honored, to see him included among the martyrs of the movement. A list that included everyday people who did amazing things. A list that included Dr. King and Medgar Evers. Myrlie Evers was there, too, at the dedication. It was so good to see her and to hear her wonderful banquet speech. I looked around as I stood there at the monument. I saw others walking up, running their hands over the letters, the words, the names. So many families. So much loss. So much gain.

I would speak about that at the dedication ceremony the next day, there on the platform with Rosa Parks and Julian Bond, Martin Luther King III and Ethel Kennedy, among others. Looking out at thousands who had turned out for the event. Looking down at the monument and the names etched in stone and the water that flowed liked so many tears.

“We cannot afford the luxury of self-pity,” I said in my speech. We had responsibilities, all of us, the families of the victims of the movement. We had been chosen to bear the burdens we bore and I recognized that we had held on to our hope. I had found such peace in working with children, helping them “reach beyond the ordinary and strive for the extraordinary.”

We all rose on the platform to sing “We Shall Overcome,” the other speakers and I. Others who had suffered the great pain of lost loved ones, including: Chris McNair, father of eleven-year-old Denise McNair, the youngest of four girls killed in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church; Dr. Carolyn Goodman, mother of Andrew Goodman; and Rita Schwerner Bender, widow of Michael Schwerner. In 1964, civil rights workers James Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Philadelphia, Mississippi. On the platform, as we sang, our hands and our hearts, like so many events in time, were linked.

I thought about the meaning of the words of the song. I thought about the meaning of the words I had spoken. How “Emmett’s death was not a personal experience for me to hug to myself and weep, but it was a worldwide awakening that would change the course of history.” In looking at his name on that beautiful monument, I realized that Emmett had achieved the significant impact in death that he had been denied in life. Even so, I had never wanted Emmett to be a martyr. I only wanted him to be a good
son. Although I realized all the great things that had been accomplished largely because of the sacrifices made by so many people, I found myself wishing that somehow we could have done it another way.

Despite all the recognition Emmett was getting around the country, I had always hoped that there would be some monument, some honor bestowed on him in Chicago, his hometown. Since I had dedicated my life to teaching, I often told people that a school would be a wonderful tribute. Eventually, an honor would come. Not a school, but a street. A sign of Emmett that people would have to look up to for a seven-mile stretch of Chicago’s South Side. We were thrilled when the city of Chicago agreed to give a section of Seventy-first Street the honorary name “Emmett Till Road.”