Read
… learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.
Isaiah 1:17
Reflect
If you don’t know who Emmett Till is, you should know. Honestly, I’m amazed I didn’t know his story until my daughter told me about him when she was in middle school. It’s an incredible and tragic tale that entails two injustices that defy imagination.
Emmett was from Chicago, but he had traveled to Mississippi to visit his great-uncle and cousins. One day, they went into the town of Money, Miss., and went to the general store to get some candy. Being from Chicago, Emmett was not accustomed to the severe racial limits placed on African-Americans in the South, including an unspoken but strict separation between young black men and white women. In his youthful innocence, Emmett called out to the shopkeeper’s wife, Carolyn Bryant, “Bye, baby,” as he left the store. By the time the story reached her husband, Emmett had grabbed her, made sexual advances toward her and whistled at her as he left.
Even if her story was true, it shouldn’t have amounted to anything but maybe a stern talk from his uncle about the proper way to address a lady. (Of course, it wasn’t true. She admitted as much in a 2017 interview.) Instead, it turned into a gruesome death sentence. Four days after the incident, on August 28, 1955, Bryant’s husband, Roy, took his half-brother, J.W. Milam, and went to the home of Emmett’s uncle to fetch the boy. After making threats toward his uncle, Mose Wright, the brothers kidnapped Emmett and took him to a toolhouse near the Tallahatchie River. There, they relentlessly beat Emmett and eventually shot him in the head, and then bound his body to a discarded cotton gin fan with barbed wire. As a final insult, they threw Emmett Till into the River, when he was found three days later.
At first, it appeared that justice might actually take place. Both Bryant and Milam were arrested and charged with kidnapping and murdering Emmett. Outrage about the murder had spread across the nation, in part because Emmett’s mother, in her sadness and anger, allowed photos of her son’s disfigured body to be taken and printed in Jet magazine and in the Chicago Defender. Racism finally had a face – Emmett’s unrecognizable face – and people who might not have taken sides were now seeing the destruction caused by unbridled hatred.
But then injustice was multiplied. Bryant’s and Milam’s trial took place less exactly one month after the murder, and despite a positive identification from Mose Wright, the all-white jury quickly decided that the duo was not responsible for his death. And in a final insult, the men took their confession to Look magazine a few months later and told the whole, grisly story. Not only had they done it, they’d gotten away with it and they’d been paid $4,000 for their confession.
There was never any justice for Emmett Till or for his mother, Mamie. The only consolation is that millions of people were able to the ultimate fruit of racism, and this knowledge gave a huge boost to the civil rights movement. Only 100 days after Emmett’s death, Rosa Parks refused to give her seat up on a bus. Reportedly, she had Emmett’s tragic story on her mind when she refused to go to the back of the bus.
There aren’t a lot of good aspects to this story, but it should serve to all of us as an admonition to always be on the side of right and good, and that right and good must always line up with scripture. In the past, people have almost surgically lifted scripture from context to justify their biases and hatred. There’s even a church in Kansas that twists scripture to justify their racism and hatred for people that they claim God hates. (Note to self: God doesn’t hate anyone. He hates sin, but he doesn’t hate people.) If we’re truly following scripture, we will love everyone and extend the message of God’s grace, mercy and salvation to anyone who doesn’t personally know Him.
But what of justice? Aren’t we guaranteed that on Earth? Sadly, no. Sometimes manmade justice will be elusive, and it won’t be up to us to make sure it happens. Ultimately, it will happen for everyone, and it will take place at God’s final judgment. Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam might have escape the clutches of Mississippi’s courts, but they eventually had to face the Lord. Standing in the Lord’s perfect presence with the sins of racism and murder must be torturous and unbearable.
When it comes to us, all each of us can do is to make sure that when it comes to us that we side with what’s right and good, and that we stand up to oppression and seek justice. If enough people are courageous and stand up to a broken status quo, the status quo can change, and justice can prevail.
Reflection copyright © 2024 Doug DeBolt.
