- Hi, I'm Hermene Hartman with N'digo Studio.

Today we're going to talk a bit of history.

The story of Emmett Till, widely known.

It represents a ugly part of American history.

That's For Real... Funding for this program was provided by Illinois Student Assistance Commission The Chicago Community Trust.

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Chicago.

Gold Coast and Downers Grove.

Commonwealth Edison City Colleges of Chicago.

Broadway in Chicago.

And Governors State University.

Young Till was a young boy, 14 years old, from Chicago, living with his mother, Mrs. Mamie Till.

He visited relatives in Money, Mississippi.

He was horrifically killed by White men, August 28th, 1955, 14 years old.

He was killed because he was accused of offending a White woman in the family's grocery store.

(somber music) - [Speaker] Emmett Till, 14, was kidnapped and killed, allegedly for wolf whistling at the wife of accused, Roy Bryant.

- [Speaker 1] It's not just that they discover his body and that he's been killed.

He has been brutally, brutally beaten.

- His murder, it was brutal.

It was torture.

It was terror.

His body was mutilated, and he was defaced.

His mother wanted the world to see what happened to her son.

Breaking news came from the Chicago Defender.

Jet magazine took a picture of Emmett in his casket at the funeral, and it went around the world.

It illustrated the horror of 1955.

White men were tried and found not guilty of the murder.

But in an interview in 1956, Look magazine gave them an exclusive interview for $4,000.

And they admitted that they had killed Emmett Till.

$42,000 in today's currency.

The Emmett Till story sparked anger in Black communities all around America.

- [Speaker 2] A boy, a 14-year-old boy, was killed brutally.

And one of our objectives here is that that boy in the picture you see there, does not die an inconspicuous death.

And that his face will be remembered and something will be done about it.

- Terrified young boys.

And today we're gonna talk about it.

We're gonna talk about the trauma that that murder caused and how it changed young boys and their perspective.

We're going to talk to three men who was that age of Emmett Till, of that generation, when it happened, and how they have carried that trauma all these years.

We talk to Mr. Wendell O'Neal, business executive.

We talk to Dr. Wayne Watson, a college educator, and Clarence Woods, an executive in human relations.

Wendell O'Neal, you lived not far from where the funeral was on Emmett Till.

Tell us what you recall from that time.

- My family had received the September 15 issue of Jet magazine.

And I had, along with my family, we had seen the photographs.

It hit me very hard and it shook me in a way that, I've never tried to put it into words, I just carried it with me.

My brothers, I had a brother who was two years older, and a brother who two years younger than I, and we would sometimes discuss the impact of it on us, but never in a detailed or in-depth fashion.

- What was your conversation with your older brothers?

- My older brother.

He felt that it was within his power, if he were there, he talked about what he would've done to the men, and he would've fought back, and all of that.

- How old were you?

- I was 10 years old.

We lived at 42nd and Cottage Grove.

The Rayner Funeral Home was at 41st and Cottage Grove.

When his remains were made available for public viewing, my mother and my sister went.

And my mother asked me if I wanted to.

I didn't want to go.

And my mother did.

My mother and my sister did see his remains.

And my sister and I talked about it a few weeks ago.

And she says she's never gotten it out of her mind.

The photographic - - [Hermene] Was enough.

- Presentation of it was enough for me.

- People brought their boys to see the body.

Why did that happen?

I never got that.

Why would you take your child to see something so horrific?

- Well I think it was, nothing like this had happened before.

- We'd never seen anything like this, that we knew of.

- That we knew of, or had not happened, and been presented nationally, and for the entire nation to see it.

Or, the world to see it.

The day that his remains were presented at Rayner Funeral Home.

We lived on the third floor.

As you looked out, as we looked out of our window, I have never, Cottage Grove, vehicular and pedestrian traffic were in gridlock.

- There were 100,000 people to see that body.

- That day.

And as a result, the funeral home was too small.

But the jam of people was so great that the funeral home couldn't handle it.

- So they took the body to the Roberts Taylor Church of God.

- Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ.

- At 41st and State Street.

- 40th and State, yes.

- Dr. Watson, you were 10 years old too.

And you talked about the monsters that you were afraid of.

Frankenstein.

- I was 10 years of age at that time.

And my father and my mother sat me down and they just wanted me to be aware of it.

And they showed me the picture in Jet, and talked with me about it.

That night, or the next day, my mother wanted me to go to the store.

And normally I would go to the store, just walk out, go to the store, no problem.

I was afraid.

I was fearful.

Looking at that picture, hearing what had happened.

- That he got killed in a grocery store.

- That, and I was being sent to a grocery store.

- Hmm.

- When I left the house, I ran around the, I grew up on 62nd and May in Inglewood.

Ran to the store, ran around the corner.

Because at that age, my biggest fear was Dracula and Wolfman.

That's what I was fearful of.

Emmett Till, the men who killed Emmett Till, after I saw the picture, after I heard the stories, I then became very fearful of White men.

That they would do something so horrific, so grotesque.

And that stayed with me from age 10, up to about probably age 14, maybe 16.

In terms of that fear.

I had a new fear.

My father and my coach in college, they taught me a sport called wrestling and martial arts.

It was not until I was about my junior year of high school that I feel strong enough, that I would not have to be fearful anymore.

When I was a junior in high school, that I could take on any man and any man who tried to approach me, I could handle.

- Clarence, you have a slightly different perspective.

You were living in Birmingham.

- Yes.

- As a child, 15 years old, very smart, ready to go away to college.

What happened?

- Well, first of all, you have to understand, I was next door to Mississippi.

I was in Alabama.

Had there not been the Black media, we probably would never have heard the story the way we heard it.

- White media did not call Emmett Till's name.

We're talking major White media.

He was the boy from Chicago who was slain.

Not murdered, not killed, but slain.

- And a boy who had violated a law, as it was understood for all of us in the south.

- The Jim Crow law.

- [Clarence] The Jim Crow law.

And so had it not been for the Birmingham Mirror or the Birmingham Daily World, or the Birmingham Times, or Jet, we probably would've heard about it long after.

- What was happening in Birmingham at that time?

- Well, you have to understand, I grew up in a city where Black's homes were being bombed.

Little Black girls were bombed in the church at 16th Street.

Remember that?

Those of us who rode the bus rode on the back of the bus?

Remember that when you went to a store, you could not try on clothes.

And so the clothes you bought, or your parents bought for you, were brought home and given to you, and you hoped like hell the sizes were right.

Blacks worked for Whites.

They were the help.

The coal mines and the steel plants were there.

- Domestic workers.

- Domestic workers.

I was very fortunate.

I grew up in a home with professionals.

My father owned five drugstores.

My mother was a teacher.

My grandfather had been a principal.

But even they had the fear.

When I left home, it was always, "Be careful how you spoke with, to and back to White people."

Remember that I went, drove through Bessemer, Alabama, to the drive-in theater.

Everything was segregated.

On Fridays, I could be assured, that on the drugstore in Hilton, which was a part of Birmingham, the Klan was going to burn the cross.

And I was going to see that cross, so I understood it.

And I was told that regularly.

My grandfather lived 60 miles from Birmingham.

We went to visit.

He was 11 miles from Mississippi.

My mother would always tell me when my little cousins would say, "Let's go to the drugstore."

I knew that I could take probably two steps in.

I couldn't walk in the back of the store.

I couldn't choose my own candy.

I had to say what I wanted and point.

Those of us in the south were living a different life, understanding a different way of behavior.

And so I'm sure that what Emmett's cousins who lived there saw, was he was violating a rule, if he did what he was accused of doing.

But remember, Emmett had no idea.

- None.

- [Clarence] None whatsoever.

When he got off the bus or the train in Mississippi, regardless of what your parents told you.

And you were told not to look, not to touch, not to see.

But you were a little boy.

- You were ready for college.

You were going to Fisk University.

- I was going to Fisk that year.

- And your father said, "No."

- [Clarence] No.

- [Hermene] Why?

- Because I was too young.

- He was fearful.

- He held me back for six months before I could go.

But during those six months, remember, he was telling me everything that he thought I did not know I was not ready for, so that I could get ready to go.

- He's not talking academically.

He's talking socially, cultural mores.

You, Black boy can do this, cannot do that.

- You can go up the street to visit a family friend.

But this is how you go.

And if you're stopped, this is how you act.

This is what you're going to be doing.

I had gone to stores all of my life at Birmingham.

- Did you become fearful?

- Oh, of course.

I was very fearful.

- You had relatives here?

- I had relatives in Chicago.

I lived not far from, in the summer.

- Yes.

- Not far from where you lived, on Cottage Grove.

- Yes.

- But I could not take any of the behavior back to Birmingham that I was doing in Chicago.

- Did you bring any of the Birmingham behavior to Chicago?

- Of course.

Of course.

In Birmingham, I got a chance to go to the zoo, or to the State Fair one day.

- The Negro Day?

- Well, I wish it had been a Negro Day.

It was a Colored Day.

- The Colored Day.

- I went to Colored Day to the fair.

When I got to Chicago, I could go to Riverview.

I could go to the zoo.

I could go to the parks.

- Another sense of freedom.

- Another sense of freedom.

But when I got off the train in Birmingham for school in September, all of that ended.

And I am well reminded, that all of that did not exist for Emmett.

Emmett could not do any of that in Mississippi.

- So, Mrs. Till called me.

I was publishing N'digo at that time.

And she said, "I want you to come talk to me, because I wanna tell you how Emmett should be remembered."

I did not do the story.

I couldn't.

It was just too much.

My editor, the late David Smallwood, went and met with her, and fell in love with her.

This woman was just something.

Here's what she told us.

She said, "Emmett stuttered."

He was a stutterer.

- She was, yes.

- And he was trying to say her name, but he stuttered.

That was misinterpreted.

She always said that.

She says he was trying to say something.

I think he was trying to say, "You're beautiful.

I think you're beautiful."

It was just totally outta context.

Remember, how did this murder, tragic, horrific, affect your perception of White people?

- You know.. - Your Dracula went away.

- My Dracula went away.

And my fear went away.

And I went from being fearful to fearless, you might say.

And that fearless took on a very strategic approach when I went to Northwestern University.

- Because you were a wrestler.

Your father had taught you how to defend.

- My father taught me how to defend.

- And you became a champion.

- I went to the final Olympic tryouts.

And ended up doing a number of different things.

I could defend myself.

But it took a different, I applied a different strategy.

And that is education became my strategy for combating, not per se the White man, - The ignorance, - But the racism.

'Cause what it was, those White men were just a manifestation of the larger racist system that we have throughout our country, from our financial institutions, our legal institution, our educational institutions.

And what I realized at Northwestern, from both the formal and informal education I got at Northwestern, was to combat it.

I needed to go into education and challenge the educational system, the values, the curricula, and make sure that it, what a guy called Carter G. Woodson said, became a reality.

- "The Mis-Education of the Negro."

- Carter G. Woodson, "The Mis-Education of the Negro."

- From education, you became an educator, President of Kennedy-King.

- Chancellor City Colleges, - President of- - Right.

- Chicago State.

And my whole, - This was your fight.

- That that was my fight.

And two things.

One is, Carter G. Woodson's quote became my imprimatur.

And that is, if you control a man's mind, you don't have to tell him to go to the back door.

- He'll find it.

- His very nature.

And I'm just summarizing the quote.

His very nature will take him there if you control his mind.

And it was my job throughout my entire career to make sure that very few Blacks ever went to the back door again.

- Wendell, has this fear changed?

Has the fear of Black men changed?

Has the fear of Black boys changed, these many years later?

- Oh, I think it has.

I think what we experienced was because of the currency.

We were alive at the time.

We are not, we didn't see a movie about it later.

We were alive at the time.

And in my case, I was very close to it.

- That was not the church you attended, but it was the church down the street from where you lived.

- It was an affiliated church.

I was raised in the Church of God in Christ, and Robert's Temple was the mother church of the Churches of God in Christ in Illinois.

It is interesting that the church is getting a lot of notoriety, even the President declaring it and two other sites as national landmarks based upon the Emmett Till story.

What's interesting about that is that no one mentions that it was a secondary site for the displaying of his remains.

No one mentions Rayner Funeral Home.

- We have three declared national landmarks of Emmett Till as a murder.

Three, not one, three.

How should we remember Emmett Till?

- Let me add to that because I think it's, how should we remember the events of that era?

- Yes.

- That continue to plague us in multiple ways.

How should we remember those?

And I think we have to say, we need to remember them.

We need to teach about them.

We need to remind people they did exist and that it was not that long ago.

- That's right.

- And we need to remind those institutions that did not work for us, that they have an obligation to work for us now, in that those kind of things don't happen again.

I'm very concerned when I see that we have a effort now to stop books from existing in libraries.

Those books won't tell the story of Emmett Till.

We have teachers and others who won't teach those stories.

Emmett Till won't be understood the way we know that story should be understood.

And so I think it is critical that we do something and say something about that so that we keep those things alive for us.

We have museums and institutions around the country for everybody.

We have in Birmingham and in Atlanta, some museums that tell the story of civil rights.

But where's the Civil Rights Museum on the south side of Chicago?

- Hmm.

- That tells a story of what was going on on the south side of Chicago - - At that time.

- When I did come to Chicago in the summer, my uncle took me for a ride.

And when we got to 63rd Street, he said, "Blacks will never live beyond here."

- Wendell, you've had a corporate, your career has been in corporate.

- [Wendell] Yes.

- Wayne, your career has been in education.

Your career has been in human relations.

We've all worked with White people.

- Yes.

- We've all maybe been the integrator, if you will.

Do we still have to act differently with White folks?

- One of the key principles that came outta the Dred Scott case in 1857 was a Black man has no right that a White man must recognize, or respect.

- No right to be recognized.

- I'm not, it's not a direct quote, but that's basically it.

- That's the sentence.

- A Black man does not have a right that a White man must respect.

Emmett Till thought he had a right.

And as Clarence stated, the right in the south, he could not just walk in that store the way he wanted to.

- He didn't know he couldn't.

- So they didn't respect it.

In terms of White people or the institutions, it must be, we must speak truth to power.

We must have the courage and the conviction that our grandparents and our parents had, who did a lot of fighting, who did a lot of fighting.

We must be willing to speak the truth.

Because my fear is the same as, and that is, we're about ready to lose it.

- So it's overt racism, covert racism.

- But it's also that I think we have to acknowledge the existence.

- Of racism.

- But we have to point to it every time we see it.

- That's right.

- Call it out.

- I think the danger is that we have become trained, - Complacent.

- Well, it's complacency.

But it's also that we have become trained in a way to not say anything about it because we have included it in a piece of how we get ahead.

- It's been avoidance.

- I think we have got to speak up.

We've got to say it.

We've got to point it out.

I think we've got to acknowledge it.

I mean, we live in a town, Chicago, where there we take great pride in talking about the existence of certain things.

How many Black millionaires, or whatever we've got.

Are we on the boards of directors of those institutions?

Are we on the boards of the banks and the boards of the hospitals?

Do hospitals give us a quality of care equal to the quality of care they're giving Whites?

And who do we have speaking up for us?

We need to speak up and say where we are still suffering discrimination, exclusion almost an extinction in ways, from being a part of the dynamics of our city and of our state.

We want to applaud certain things, when after all, it's too darned late to sit around and applaud what should have been there 20, 30 years ago.

We need to speak up on that.

- So the aftermath of Emmett Till is still existing?

- Very much.

- Absolutely.

- The aftermath is still existing.

And when they say you can't read this book, it's to ignore it.

It's to act like it didn't happen.

- Let me just say one thing on that.

We need to say, "We need to read the book."

But we also need to speak to some of those folk who said they were our allies and say, "Come on, get on this boat with us.

Let's do something about this."

Because the same, I wish all of those folk that are against what we are talking about lived in Florida, in Texas.

They don't.

They don't.

- So they could fight.

- They live in Illinois, they live in Michigan.

They live in some suburban communities very close to us.

- But we keep having, we went to Emmett Till, went to George Floyd, and we see our young boys, our young men still being murdered for sometimes, what is just totally innocence.

We see some men go to jail, stay in jail 30 years, 20 years, and then to find out they didn't commit the crime.

- They were innocent.

- They were innocent.

Wow.

Black men, you all have a tough time in this society and you still do, but we gotta correct it.

And I hope the fear's gone.

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Funding for this program was provided by The Chicago Community Trust Cine City Studios, Lamborghini, Chicago, Gold Coast and Downers Grove.

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