Emmett Till took his first train ride in late August 1955 amid the steamy summer heat. The young, black, 14-year-old boy was excited to be there.
Till had come to visit family. His parents, Mamie and Louis, were back in Chicago. Before leaving, his mother reminded him, “Things would be different there.” But as young boys do, he didn’t give it too much thought, thinking surely he’d be fine.
On August 31, outside a grocery store in Money, Mississippi, Carolyn Bryant, a pretty white woman, was walking by when, according to her, Till whistled at her.
It was reported the entire street stopped in stunned silence when the woman accused the boy of whistling. Other black men around Till scolded the young man for looking at her, but no one had actually seen or directly witnessed Till whistling at anyone. Everyone stormed off.
Around 2:30 am the following day, Roy Bryant, the husband of Carolyn Bryant, and Roy’s half-brother J.W. Milam, abducted Till from his great-uncle’s home.
They dragged the young boy into a nearby barn on J.W.’s property and brutally beat him, pistol-whipped him, shot him in the head, and tied a heavy metal fan around his neck before dumping his body in the Tallahatchee River.
Subsequently, the local sheriff conducted an investigation, if a little half-assed. It didn’t take long for people to zero in on Roy or J.W. Neighbors, mostly black, reported hearing some screaming from the barn.
As horrific as this all was, the stunning development was after recovering the body politics ensued.
The State of Mississippi wasn’t blind to the substantial negative press surrounding the case in northern papers. The body was sealed in a casket, guarded by state police, and taped shut. The deal was the family could have the body back, but no one could open the casket during transport. State investigators, leaders, and prosecutors didn’t want anyone to see what was left of his tender face and body.
When the body arrived back in Chicago in what one investigator called, “The nicest casket they could find in all of Mississippi,” Till’s mother broke out in tears at the sight of her son.
The media firestorm grew when photos of her crying over her son appeared in Ebony Magazine. She bravely insisted the casket be open at the funeral so everyone could “…see what they’ve done to my little boy.”
The Emmett Till Murder Trial
Media from around the country descended on Sumner, Mississippi, where swarms of reporters packed into the small local courthouse.
The two alleged killers were, simply put, not very worried.
The jury unsurprisingly acquitted the suspects. The reasoning from the all-white, all-male, racially biased jury was that there wasn’t enough evidence.
In the courtroom that day, one man stood in the back, taking it all in:
The man in the back right of this photo, not smoking, with his hands on his hips, is Dan Wakefield. Then a young reporter who had just landed in New York from his home of Indianapolis, The Nation magazine sent Dan to cover the trial.
Dan was a client of mine for years until his death a few years ago. He was “the last surviving journalist” from the Till trial for many years. He quickly reminded me, “It’s never great being the last of anything.”
Dan had a robust career, as witnessed by the fact he has a New York Times obituary. He wrote dozens of books, screenplays, magazine stories, and probably millions of words in his long literary lifetime.
I asked him once, “What’s the thing that stands out most to you?”
His reply was instant: “The opening line of my piece on the Till trial in The Nation. It was the best sentence I ever wrote.”
Here’s the whole opening paragraph:
The crowds are gone and this Delta town is back to its silent, solid life that is based on cotton and the proposition that a whole race of men was created to pick it. Citizens who drink from the “Whites Only” fountain in the courthouse breathe much easier now that the two fair-skinned half brothers, ages twenty-four and thirty-six, have been acquitted of the murder of a fourteen-year-old Negro boy. The streets are quiet, Chicago is once more a mythical name, and everyone here “knows his place.”
That is one helluva opening line — and paragraph.
It’s hard to recognize just how much the Emmett Till trial rocked the nation. It is no accident that Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington 8 years to the day of Till’s murder. The murder of Emmett Till is the start of the civil rights movement in the US.
I harp on this a lot. But as an experiment, if you ask ChatGPT to write a story about the trial, you get this opening:
Money, Mississippi, August 1955 – The brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till has sent shockwaves across the nation, highlighting the deep-seated racial injustices in the United States. Till, an African American boy from Chicago, was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, when he was abducted, tortured, and killed by two white men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam.
I don’t know how to illustrate this point any further than these two paragraphs. Or the timidity with which ChatGPT describes his torture and killing as if it’s a checklist performed by the killers.
Dan cared a lot about words. He died before anyone knew what ChatGPT was and while he was interested in technology, he’d have no use for this particular technology. He’d loathe what this kind of detachment does to creativity and expression.
Dan was the one who told me never to use exclamation marks because “I’ll decide when I’m excited about something.” It was Dan who got me into seriously reviewing website accessibility after his eye surgeries. He helped me care more about every element expressed on a page — digital or paper.
Perhaps someday AI can write with the flourish and emotion warranted of a uniquely human experience, but I doubt it. Maybe Adobe or Canva will have some AI image generator that does the same. But I don’t think anyone, even the most optimistic AI-boosters, thinks we’ll ever achieve that level of force by some of the highest peaks of human creativity.
Words have purpose and influence. Dan knew this. I’ve discussed this before with John Adam’s long, 200-year reach into the future defending the arts, too.
I think about that and Dan a lot.
Dan was there, sweating it out with everyone else in the humid southern summer at a flashpoint of American history. He delivered words that are still worth reading 70 years later.
His writing was clear, and his thinking was poignant. As William Zisner rightly points out, “Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other.”
My hope for my students and whoever else is reading is that you recognize this. That you find that words matter and the work matter. That it inspires you to be a better creator, communicator, and thinker. That it empowers you to counteract the forces that make you think about taking the easy way or “letting the machine do the thinking.” That you never allow yourself to become stale, ordinary, or powerless to feel, create, communicate, and express.
Till’s killers later confessed in their old age to the murder. They were never re-tried due to double jeopardy laws and never served a day of punishment. Carolyn Bryant confessed years later that Till never whistled at her.
The barn where Emmett Till was murdered still stands today. A sign outside marking the incident was shot up so frequently that it was taken down. Actor Morgan Freeman paid to have a new one erected. The sign today is bulletproof.
None of this is anything that AI models seem keen to express.
Be humane.
