They had to put a rope around Emmett Till’s neck to lift his 1,000-pound statue into place.
The scene spooked Willie Williams.
He said he asked the crew getting everything ready the day before Friday’s unveiling whether they could lift the statue up by its waist instead. It felt to Williams as if they were lynching Emmett again.
“It threw me off when they lifted him up,” said Williams, who retired after 30 years of full-time employment with the city of Greenwood but still works part-time for its curbside recycling program.
There were other chills Friday for the hundreds of people — mostly Black but enough whites to reflect another small sign of racial progress — who turned out to see the first and only statue in the world dedicated to the accidental civil rights martyr. But those were chills brought out by other kinds of emotions — joy, satisfaction, hope.
As I headed toward the ceremony, I was uncertain what the mood might be.
Emmett Till’s murder in 1955 is tough to stomach. Although there are conflicting accounts as to how fresh he was with Carolyn Bryant at the store in Money, there’s no room for interpretation about how inhumanely he was treated as a result of breaking the taboo that Black men — or in this case a precocious 14-year-old — didn’t mess with white women in the Deep South. It was barbed wire, not a rope that was tied around his neck, and his body was already lifeless when it was thrown into the river and not hung from a tree, but it was a lynching in every way.
Friday could have been a day of racial recrimination, a time to resurrect decades of grievances, hurts and injustices, and use Emmett as the catalyst for unleashing pent-up anger.
But there was little to none of that. The mood was one of celebration. The first song I heard as I approached Rail Spike Park — the Motown classic “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” — was a tipoff for what was in store.
Greenwood High’s band played a marching tune, a nimble young woman danced around the still-cloaked statue and the speakers — Black and white — hit most of the right notes. They talked about unity, about honestly remembering the past, including its darkest moments, about recognizing the dignity of all people, about working together to make this community and this state a better place.
The Emmett Till statue is largely a Black achievement. There is no mistaking that. Its $150,000 funding by the state was accomplished because longtime state Sen. David Jordan pushed for it. The majority black Leflore County Board of Supervisors, with Reginald Moore taking the lead, and the majority black Greenwood City Council got behind the project, spending 18 months seeing it through.
But there was some white involvement, too, most notably the artist’s hands that sculpted the 9-foot bronze, showing Emmett in a cheerful pose — not in that bloated, tortured, lifeless one that became so famous because of its testimony to the cruelties of segregation.
I hope other whites in this community will see the Emmett Till statue not as a reminder of an episode they wish would be forgotten, but rather as a talisman for greater racial understanding.
Had they been standing by my side as the statue was unveiled and seen that sea of people spontaneously drawn to it, they might better understand why Emmett Till is such an important figure in the experience of African Americans in this community and elsewhere.
His death was a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement. When Rosa Parks less than four months later refused to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery, Alabama, bus, she said it was because of Emmett Till. From there, the movement cascaded, including grand acts of bravery, a fair amount of bloodshed and steady legal and social pressure until America decided it would no longer tolerate a racial caste system that betrayed the founding ideals of this nation.
My initial observation is there is no single reaction to seeing Emmett on that pedestal, his fingers touching the brim of his hat, unsure whether he’s just putting it on or getting ready to take it off.
His statue can be a reminder of the sins of the past. It can be a beacon of hope for the future. It can be something that is hard to put into words.
As the statue lay Thursday prone in a trailer, waiting to be erected, Willie Williams looked down on it and had to take a step back. The 55-year-old Black man had heard about Emmett Till all of his life, but he said it felt like he was meeting him for the first time.
“I wanted to say to him, ‘I’m sorry about what happened. I’m really sorry,’” Williams recalled.
That conversation may still happen. As Williams loaded up to leave, he said he’d be coming back for another visit, just him and Emmett.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
