News |

EMMETT TILL ISN’T JUST A SYMBOL OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT,

Although the shoulders of a Chicagoan named Emmett Till saw only 14 summers of life, they have carried a heavy burden for the last 44 years. Even before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in December of 1955, Emmett Till had already become a martyr for the emerging civil rights movement in the United States.

Over the last five decades, Till has been the subject of writing by Gwendolyn Brooks, Anne Moody, Endesha Ida Mae Holland and James Baldwin. The first episode of the widely admired PBS series on the history of the civil rights movement, “Eyes on the Prize,” devoted nearly 15 minutes to the Till case. In 1986, Toni Morrison published a play about Emmett under the telling title, “Dreaming Till.”

“This boy’s dreadful tragedy I still remember well,” sang Bob Dylan in 1966. “The color of his skin was black and his name was Emmett Till.”

And on Thursday, Chicago’s Pegasus Players opens “The State of Mississippi vs. Emmett Till,” yet another artistic response to what took place near Money, Miss., in the summer of 1955. Even though this is hardly the first take on this most troubled of subjects, there is a significant difference here. Directly below the title appears the name Mamie Till Mobley.

At the age of 78, Emmett’s mother is not only cooperating with a dramatic project about her son for the first time, but is serving as the play’s co-author. Her collaborator is David Barr, a 36-year-old Chicago actor and playwright. Douglas Alan Mann directs, with Bryan Parker (a sophomore at Senn High School) playing the role of Emmett Till.

“My job,” says the modest Barr, a man who clearly feels the historical gravity of this assignment, “is just to get myself out of the way and let Mrs. Till Mobley tell her story.”

After all these years and after refusing overtures from a collection of Hollywood studios, big-name directors and other playwrights, why is Till Mobley, who appears in “Eyes on the Prize” only through archival footage, just telling her story now?

One thing is for sure: His mother never expected Emmett to become such a potent symbol. During that summer of 1955, the cheery young African-American was visiting relatives in Mississippi. (His mother had put him on the train in Chicago.) One evening in late August, Emmett was visiting Roy Bryant’s Meat and Grocery Store in Money. It is unclear exactly what took place there, but soon after Emmett’s visit to the store, Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, abducted Emmett from the home of the boy’s uncle, Mose Wright.

Emmett was beaten and murdered, and his body was dumped in the Tallahatchie River.

A sham, racist trial followed, resulting in the acquittal of Milam and Bryant. But Emmett’s mother, a devastated but strong 33-year-old woman, refused to disappear quietly after she left the courtroom.

She insisted that her son’s body be returned to Chicago and given an open-casket funeral. Despite her heartache, she delayed the burial for four days so the world could witness the evidence of the violence. Pictures of the brutalized body appeared in Jet magazine and on TV. As Till Mobley intended, the world quickly understood what horror had been perpetrated on her son.

Before their deaths, both Milam and Bryant admitted their guilt but declared no remorse.

In their quiet and modest home on a tidy street on Chicago’s South Side, Till Mobley and her genial but fiercely protective second husband, Gene Mobley, are welcoming of visitors. Their home is full of photographs — images of Parks, Harold Washington, Morris Dees and Till Mobley standing beside any number of other luminaries of the civil rights movement — but it’s the youthful visage of Emmett that dominates both their living room and Till Mobley’s life.

“I have wanted to do a play, a movie, a book — the whole nine yards — for years,” she says. “I didn’t realize that I was the problem. I just wasn’t still long enough for someone to pin me down in one place.”

But surely there have been many offers?

“Oh, yes,” she says, specifically citing the ABC television network and Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks SKG film studio. “And there have been many contracts with great big red and black Xs on them. I always said, `No way.’ Because if the story cannot be done properly, it will never be done. I feel that strongly about it. I’m not going to have a bunch of lies. I know that some enhancement is necessary, and it does not have to be done entirely my way, but it’s not going to be lies.”

Over the course of several hours of conversation, it gradually emerges what has upset Till Mobley and caused her to back away from previous efforts to dramatize his story: It’s the dramatic depiction of her son.

“The scripts have always come from one ridiculous angle after another,” Till Mobley says. “In most of them, I didn’t recognize Emmett at all. He was somebody who I would not even have in my house: a terrible character. Some of the things they had him partaking in, he didn’t even know about.”

Most narratives of the Till case, built around information gleaned from the trial and press reports, say that Emmett either spoke to or whistled at a white woman — the wife of one of Emmett’s alleged murderers, Roy Bryant — on a dare from his Southern cousins. Building from that assumption, most of the past dramatic scripts had depicted Emmett as a cocky teenager from Chicago looking for a little fun in a Southern climate he was not equipped to understand.

His mother believes a different chain of events. As a result of suffering from polio as an infant, she explains, Emmett had developed a speech impediment. His mother therefore taught him to whistle softly to himself before pronouncing complex consonants. Since he was ordering bubble gum in the store that day, Till Mobley says, she believes he was simply trying to speak clearly — and the intent of the whistle was entirely misconstrued by those with a racist agenda.

Till Mobley is especially disturbed by those who she believes bore false witness about the case. In the “Eyes on the Prize” account of the case, for example, a Chicago friend of Emmett’s named Curtis Jones describes how he was playing checkers on the porch of the store and heard Emmett say the words, “Bye, baby.”

“Curtis Jones,” says Till Mobley, with her husband nodding in the background, “had not yet even arrived in Mississippi yet. . . . Every statement he made about being on the scene was a falsehood.” (Till Mobley says that Jones subsequently admitted that he had taken the accounts of others and turned them into a first-person narrative, but his words in the documentary have become an established record of the event nonetheless.)

“There’s so much misinformation on this subject and that’s also the kind of thing that Hollywood wanted to do,” says co-author Barr. “That’s not right, and the truth should be protected.”

The precise truth, of course, is impossible to confirm.

“All of the people who were there that day have now died,” says Barr. “So we’ll never know exactly what happened. In our play, we’re just trying to say that there are many different possibilities.”

To his mother, of course, Emmett was a child, known to his family as “Bo,” before he was an icon. She talks at great, loving length about the homemade food at his 13th birthday party; his willingness to help with family chores and wash dishes; his gentle, naive spirit; the impossibility of his doing anything to upset any reasonable person in Mississippi; her memories of the last time she saw her son alive at the 63rd Street train station.

But it’s his childhood identity that leaves the strongest impression.

“Emmett controlled 64th and St. Lawrence. For a three-block stretch, this was his land. He knew every old person. He did grocery errands. He did lawns. He (shoveled) snow. He made $15 washing and painting a ladies’ hall, from the lower moulding down to the floor,” his mother recalls.

In the racist world of Money, Emmett’s friendliness may well have been his undoing.

“He thought I was exaggerating when I told him about situation in the South,” says Till Mobley. “He had all white teachers and was used to talking to anyone, black or white. He just didn’t understand what I was talking about.”

When asked to talk of the horrors of receiving the details of Emmett’s death from a relative, Till Mobley’s eyes become clouded with tears.

“It was awful. I was told about the barbed wire that was tied around his neck with the other end tied to a 100-pound fan. She told me how his face was so scarred that Mose Wright could only identify him by the ring he had on this finger.”

And then Till Mobley shifts in her chair and talks about where she found the strength to go to the trial in Money, withstand death threats, and get through the years that followed — she quickly became a public figure in the civil rights movement, head of the Emmett Till Foundation, and a well-known political speaker.

“As I was hearing about what happened to Emmett,” she says calmly, “something passed out of the left side of my head. I recognized it as a dove. This dove said it will guide me and tell me what to do. I could see its wings fluttering. That dove talked to me until we put Emmett in the ground. That dove told me that my boy will never be forgotten and that his death will not be vain.”

And that’s the point of this play.

“Emmett,” says his mother, “is the universal child.”