SCENE ONE
(Later that evening: the family is relaxed on the couch, watching TV).
JUNIOR: Dad and mom, thank you so much. By the time this essay is finished, my teacher will be calling me professor.
MOM: Glad to help but do not ever take any Arithmetic problems to your father. He is a total dunce when it comes to numbers. Is it not interesting to see how a man who is so courageous and so knowledgeable can at the same time be so scared of numbers? Your father suffers from ‘arithmophobia.’ (Everyone laughs).
JUNIOR: We just finished with 1954. Did anything else happen in that decade?
MOM: Are you kidding me? That was the decade of everything. It set the stage for an exciting future. Without the remarkable events of that decade, we would still be entering buildings from the back, standing at the back of the bus, drinking from Negroes-only Water Fountains, and bowing our heads, waiting for White people to pass on the sidewalk.
JUNIOR: Whaaaat!!! I cannot even picture that!!!
MOM: Yes, seriously. People died. People made enormous sacrifices. People went to jail to make it possible for us to obtain even the simplest rights such as those bestowed on dogs—the right to exist, the request for a level playing field. Know this—the way to the top, the way to respectability is education. When you open your mouth to speak, you must express yourself with good grammar. People will pay attention when you present yourself well. You must take yourself seriously for society to take you seriously.
Because we have been held back for so long, first by slavery and then by Jim Crow and then by institutional racism and Zip Codes, we are therefore starting from behind. However, nothing says we cannot catch up, but it will not happen overnight. The walk, the work to get to the top, is complex, but diligence will take us there as a people.
See what the Jews have done for themselves. Let us imitate them. When was the last time a Jew came to mow your lawn or fix your appliances or clean your house or get your garbage? He owns the company that makes the trucks the sanitation worker uses. He owns the company that manufactures the mower that the lawnmower uses and the appliances that someone else is coming to fix. He is at the top of the food chain.
Listen to what Alexander Fleming, the man who accidentally discovered Penicillin had to say— “One sometimes finds what one is not looking for. When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly did not plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic or bacteria killer. But that was exactly what I did.” As you can see, son, providence works for those who are prepared. We must be ready as a people.
JUNIOR: (Head bowed). I understand, mama, but what is Jim Crow?
MOM: After slavery ended, suddenly, Slave owners did not have people to work in their farms as they were unwilling to pay even though Slave owners received compensation from the United States government for the loss of their properties (Slaves). And so, they cleverly produced a set of laws to keep Black people from being free. For example, they could not stay in the same hotels, attend the same schools, or share a bus except, of course, if they had to sit or stand in the back and be prepared to give up their seat to a White passenger who met you on the bus.
The cruelest parts of these laws were the vagrancy laws. These laws put the lives of Black men in perpetual jeopardy. A Black man walking to the store to buy groceries could just end up in jail. The jails, in turn, sent them back to work for the farmers who were their former slave owners. It was a continuation of slavery by other means. Vagrancy laws caused further dislocations in Black communities and resulted in mass migration up North.
Jim Crow laws defined what a Black man could do, what properties he could purchase, and where he could live. According to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it was a new kind of hell for the Black man—“Free, but everywhere, in chains.”
JUNIOR: Were freed slaves ever compensated for lost wages?
DAD: No. Rumor had it that a Union Army General who tried to enlist slaves to fight on the side of the Union Army had promised them forty acres of land and a Mule. He did not have the power to do what he promised. There was no law to back it up. It was a promise that he could not keep.
Jim Crow is still alive today. We as a people must be mindful of this and learn to navigate the landmines. Laws are laws, but a people’s mindset gives the law the power to be the law.
MOM: Let me honey—you see, after the landmark decision of Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka of 1954, White folks were enraged, especially across the South. And then, here comes this delicate boy. He was about your age at the time of his gruesome death at the hands of two White men in Money, Mississippi. His name was Emmett Till. His killing had a profound effect on Cassius Clay as it did on every Black teenager across the United States. It is hard to get over the brutality of that gruesomeness. What happened to Emmett Till was a big blot on humanity. But, in retrospect, it was the primary catalyst for the rejuvenated Civil Rights movement of the fifties, which helped make many things possible for Black people in the United States even though the NAACP had been founded in 1909 by W.E.B. Dubois and others. It was a blood sacrifice.
DAD: All thanks to Mamie Till, Emmett’s mother, that courageous woman from Chicago who made the hard decision to have an open casket—for the world to see the raw brutality of man to man.
CURTAIN
SCENE TWO
DAD: Emmett Till went to Money, Mississippi, to see his cousins. He was visiting from the Southside of Chicago. He was a boisterous young man, full of life, flashy dresser, handsome to boot. There must have been something exceptional about these two young men, Cassius Clay and Emmett Till. They were both Black. They were about the same age. These two young men would have a profound effect on the history of the United States in their two diverse ways. Wowww!!! I am about to cry. (Dad and mom are locked in an embrace, and they both begin to cry, yet again).
Frozen set.
Enter Cassius Marcellus Clay Sr., his wife, Grady, and young Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.
CASSIUS MARCELLUS CLAY SR.: Hey son, I need to share some information with you. You need to know this as a young Black teen in America. You are different, and because you are different, people will treat you differently. The law will treat you differently also. I need you to listen and pay attention. A little older than yourself, a Black boy, Emmett Till, was murdered in a gruesome manner by two White men in Money, Mississippi, recently. His only crime was that he was Black, nothing more and nothing less. A White woman accused him of whistling at her. For this “heavy crime,” he was severely mutilated, tied with barbed wire, shot in the head, and thrown into a river with a weight tied around his neck. The authorities wanted to bury the body in a hurry, but his mother would have none of it. She took his corpse back to bury in his hometown. He was her only child. He had been on vacation to see his cousins in Mississippi. A woman mourning her only child, badly mutilated in an open casket, is not a pretty picture for America. It is causing anger across the United States and around the world. America will never recover from this monstrous event. The world will tell this story for a long time, and every time the story is told, everyone will pay attention. Son, you need to pay attention.
Frozen set
(Moses Wright, Emmet Till’s uncle, is visiting Chicago, Illinois).
MOSES: Hey Mamie, I will be returning to Mississippi in three days.
MAMIE: We have all had a wonderful time having you around.
EMMETT LOUISE TILL: Mom, can I visit with my cousins? Can I go with my uncle?
MAMIE: I was hoping you would like to come with me on a road trip to Omaha. It would be an opportunity for you to learn to drive in an open country.
EMMETT: Mom, I would like to see my cousins in Mississippi. Please, mom.
MAMIE TILL: Okay then.
(The next day, Mamie drove Emmett to the train station. She had brought out his late father’s ring and put it on his finger). It had the initials—LT. She kissed him goodbye.
DAD: That was the last time Mamie was going to see her only child. That ring she put on his finger turned out to be crucial as it turned out to be the only means by which Emmett Till would be identified. Mamie Till died in 2003 of heart failure. She lived a grateful life, a fulfilled life, a thankful life, knowing that the blood of her son spoke loudly for Black America
Frozen set: Spotlight on individuals.
MARTIN LUTHER KING: Emmett Till’s murder was one of the most inhuman, and most brutal crimes of the 20th Century. Think about the crying voice of a little Emmett Till, screaming from the rushing waters in Mississippi.
ROSA PARKS: I thought about Emmett Till, and I could not go back to the back of the bus.
THURGOOD MARSHALL: Where you see wrong, inequality, or injustice, you must speak out because this is your country. In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute. None of us got where we are by pulling ourselves by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody—a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony, or a few nuns—bent down and helped us pick up our boots.
(Cassius Clay had his head bowed. He was too shocked, too hurt to say anything. He had tears rolling down his face).
JUNIOR: What did President Dwight Eisenhower say about the murder of Emmett Till?
DAD: Nothing, even though Mamie Till wrote a letter to Eisenhower asking for help. It was however, commonplace at the time for J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI chief, to file reports attributing a protest over the lynching of a Black man to a ‘Ghost’ Communist Party. Jet magazine, a national Black magazine, carried the pictures of Emmett Till’s mutilated corpse while the mainstream press refused to broadcast the news. Notably, J. Edgar Hoover served as FBI Chief throughout the struggle, and he was pretty unhelpful. He served for 37 years until his death in 1972.
JUNIOR: Were his killers ever punished?
DAD: No. They were acquitted by an all-White jury as Black people were not allowed to serve jury duty at the time. One of the jurors bragged that the only reason it took a little longer than it did to acquit the two White men was that they had to take a break to get a drink. That was the impunity of those times, but we cannot pretend that it is no longer here with us. One year later, the two killers, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, JW Milam—gave an interview to a magazine called LOOK, in which they admitted to the killing of Emmett Till, and they got paid the sum of $4000 for it. However, they could not retry them because of double jeopardy laws. A person may not be tried for the same offense twice.
Enactment:
INTERVIEWER: I want the whole truth.
JW MILAM: Can I have the money first? (He gets $4000 and counts it). So, let me get this straight. If we tell you the truth now—we cannot be charged again?
INTERVIEWER: No court in the land can charge you for the same case twice. It is called double jeopardy.
ROY BRYANT: My wife told me that the nigger from Chicago roughed her up and grabbed her by the waist. I had to defend my honor as a man. We went to the preacher’s house at midnight and asked to have a conversation with the nigger. The preacher tried to be difficult. I asked the preacher—how old are you? He said sixty-four. And then, I asked the preacher, weaving my gun. Do you want to see your 65th birthday? The preacher said—“yes.” (Enactment) The preacher took me to the room where three boys lay in bed, and he pointed out the boy. I asked him to get up and follow us. When I asked him to put on his shoes and come with us, the damned nigger said he had to wear his socks first, and he kept us waiting. (Enactment: Emmet dresses up as they wait).
INTERVIEWER: So, what happened next?
MILAM: We drove around town for a while with the nigger in the back of the truck until we found a spot. All we wanted to do was scare him a little bit, but anytime I asked him if he thought he was better than us, he would reply: “Ain’t nobody better than anybody. We are all the same.” (Enactment). He got me so infuriated I had to shoot him in the head. He was a damned bold nigger. He never begged for his life. We tied a barbed wire to a gin and put the barbed wire around his neck, and pushed the nigger into the river.
A funeral dirge for Emmett Till:
(Singer). Emmett Till. He was fine. He was bubbly. He was chubby. He was lively. He had a smile that never went away. He was smart. He was confident. He had class. He could have grown up to be a lawyer. They did not give him a chance. He could have been an Astronaut. They did not give him a chance. He could have been an Entertainer. They did not give him a chance. He was witty. He was funny. His life was taken as His Sun rose from the East. His Sun was forced to set before it had a chance to go West. This world, this world, this world is like a rolling stone. This world is like a chain, a chain that snaps but does not break. This world is like a chain, a chain which snaps but does not break—O—Oh Emmm Oho Emmmm, Emmm! OohhhemmmOhooooEmm, Emmm, Emm, Emmm, Emmm, Emmm, Emmm, Emmm—why did you go away. Why, why why why—why did you go away?
MAMIE TILL: (Sobbing over her son’s open casket). See what they did to my boy.
Interlude
CURTAIN
PS:
Dear reader, if you are reading our serialization of 100 years & 5 Chronicles for the first time, scroll through Egogonewshub for Acts 1-4. Look out for Act 6 tomorrow. It will blow your mind.
Michael Ovienmhada.
Publisher, Editor-in-Chief,
Egogonewshub.com
