1955 murder of Emmett Till is remembered in events hosted by Diocese of Mississippi

[Episcopal News Service] The Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi marked 70 years since the murder of Emmett Till with two weekend events at St. Andrew’s Cathedral in Jackson, including one featuring former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry.

On Aug. 9, Mississippi Bishop Dorothy Wells presented a workshop entitled “The History of Us: White, Black and Together in the United States.” The next day, a related event, “Emmett Till: Yet With a Steady Beat,” featured a conversation between Wells and Curry on the legacy of Till’s murder in Mississippi and the United States.

In August 1955, Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago, took the train to visit his great uncle in Money, Mississippi. On Aug. 28, he and his cousins bought snacks from a store owned by Roy and Carolyn Bryant, who were white. Someone in the store said Till whistled at Carolyn Bryant while making his purchase, which prompted her husband and his half-brother to kidnap Till from his uncle’s home that night. They later beat and shot him and threw him into the Tallahatchie River, and his mutilated body was found three days later. The men were acquitted of the murder by an all-white, all-male jury.

During the bishops’ conversation, which was livestreamed and is now available on the cathedral’s YouTube channel, Wells asked Curry why Till’s murder helped galvanize the civil rights movement in a way that other acts of violence against Black Americans hadn’t before.

Growing up in Buffalo, New York, as the child of parents raised in North Carolina and Alabama, Curry recalled seeing in Jet magazine the photo of Till in his open casket. Dissemination of the image was endorsed by his mother Mamie Till-Mobley, who said at the time, “Let the world see what I’ve seen.”

That image “shook people of decency and goodwill of all races,” Curry said, where reports of other lynchings across the South hadn’t. The image meant that memories of what happened to Till, whom Curry called a martyr, wouldn’t be forgotten.

“It was a defining moment, to a great extent, for the civil rights movement,” Curry said, making it not only an important moment for Mississippi but for the entire nation, and especially for America’s Black communities. When Rosa Parks helped initiate the anti-segregation bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955, she thought of Till as she did so, he added.

Wells said that when she visited the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, Mississippi, in April 2024, she found it “gut-wrenching” to think of the fear and pain Till experienced after being abducted. “Everything his mother feared had come to pass,” she said.

Grappling with the mindset of Till’s attackers, Wells wondered, “How do we get to a point in our world where our sense of care for one another is just absent, that you could look at a 14-year-old boy and think, ‘We know we’re going to kill him’?”

After a pause, Curry mentioned the 1945 novel “Invisible Man” by the Harlem-based author Ralph Ellison, in which he wrote, “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

Calling it “one of the most significant books ever written,” he said its description of the dynamic of invisibility means “if someone is invisible, if they’re just a number or a collection, then what you might never do to an individual if you saw them as a person … all of a sudden the unthinkable becomes possible.”

This dynamic wasn’t just at work in the Jim Crow South, he added, but also in the forced removal of Native Americans from their lands in the United States and Nazi Germany’s massacre of Jews, gypsies and homosexuals.

“That’s how otherwise good, decent people, very often church-going or family people, can be complicit or look away or choose not to know and not to see,” Curry said.

The entire conversation between Wells and Curry can be viewed here.

— Melodie Woerman is an Episcopal News Service freelance reporter based in Kansas.