'Let The People See': It Took Courage To Keep Emmett Till's Memory Alive

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. This past summer, the FBI once again reopened its investigation into the Emmett Till case. Till was 14 years old when he was murdered in Mississippi in 1955. His death helped spark the civil rights movement. There have been many books written about the Emmett Till case, especially recently. But a new book by historian Elliott J. Gorn reminds us of the effort it took to keep Till's case before the public. Book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: Let the people see what they did to my boy. Those were the words spoken by Emmett Till's mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, after viewing the brutalized body of her son. During his night of torture near the Delta town of Money, Miss., 14-year-old Emmett Till's right eye had been dislodged from its socket, his tongue choked out of his mouth, the back of his skull crushed and his head penetrated by a bullet. At the insistence of his family, Till's body was shipped back home for burial in Chicago, and Mamie Till-Mobley specifically called for an open casket.

Day and night over Labor Day weekend in 1955, over 100,000 mourners, almost all of them African-American, filed past that open casket, which lay in state in a South Side church. Before the funeral service, a staff photographer from Jet magazine was permitted to photograph Emmett Till's body. And those images were disseminated to other African-American magazines and newspapers, including The Chicago Defender.

But as historian Elliott J. Gorn tells us in his new book on the Emmett Till case, the mainstream press didn't reprint those photographs. And of course, they were considered too graphic for television. Years later, Gorn says many white Americans remembered - falsely remembered the epiphany of Till's ruined face in 1955. But few white people saw the photos until 30 years later when the documentary "Eyes On The Prize" opened with the Emmett Till story. Only then did his mother's words, let the people see what they did to my boy, begin, to be fully realized.

Gorn's book is called "Let The People See." Like Timothy B. Tyson's 2017 book "The Blood Of Emmett Till," it builds on new evidence discovered by the FBI in 2005 to present a detailed reconstruction of Till's kidnapping and killing in Mississippi in retaliation for allegedly having whistled at a white woman named Carolyn Bryant. Gorn also dives deep into a legal analysis of the transcripts of the trial in the town of Sumner, Miss., in which Bryant's husband and his half-brother were tried for Till's murder. Both men were quickly acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury.

But what's most interesting about Gorn's book is his final section called memory in which he traces how Till's story, which seems so well-known today, came very close to passing into oblivion. Gorn points out that in the two years following Till's murder, more than 3,000 articles about him were published. Then the whole of the 1960s brought only 300 articles. In the 1970s, fewer than 50 stories appeared. Just as disturbing is the fact that some of those stories, including one written in 1956 by William Faulkner for Harper's Magazine, relied on a paid interview with the two alleged killers that had been published in Look magazine. That Look story characterized Emmett Till as a defiant sexual aggressor.

Going forward, Gorn says the 10th and 25th anniversaries of Till's murder mostly passed unobserved, even in the black press. It was the rise of African-American studies that helped recover Emmett Till's story, along with the widespread popularity of the 1977 TV serial "Roots," which proved there was a mainstream market for black history. In 1985, a Chicago reporter named Rich Samuels produced a half-hour documentary on the Till case, segments of which were later broadcast on NBC's "Today" show. For the first time in mainstream media, Gorn says, whites saw the photograph of Emmett Till in his coffin.

As the image appeared on the screen, viewers heard the voice of writer James Baldwin who said it was myself in that coffin. It was my brothers in that coffin. I can't describe it so precisely because it had been so mutilated. It had been so violated. It was him, but it was all of us. "Let The People See" is a timely book about the fragility of collective memory and about the courage and persistence of journalists, particularly black journalists, some of whom risked their lives in 1955 to get the facts of the Till story before the public. Most of all, though, "Let The People See" is a vivid reminder of just how easy it is for people not to see things they'd rather not see.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Let The People See" by Elliott J. Gorn. Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, we'll talk about how the Supreme Court became so politicized and how the court looks now with two Trump appointees and a chief justice who's considered the most likely swing vote. My guest will be David A. Kaplan, author of "The Most Dangerous Branch." He was the legal affairs editor at Newsweek. I hope you'll join us.

(SOUNDBITE OF J.J. WRIGHT'S "JTC V")

GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Therese Madden, Mooj Zadie, Thea Chaloner and Seth Kelley. I'm Terry Gross.

(SOUNDBITE OF J.J. WRIGHT'S "JTC V") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.