"We're not here to entertain," said Kevin Wilson Jr., the playwright and director of The Emmett Till Story, which was presented at NC A&T University's Harrison Auditorium last night as part of the 50th anniversary activities commemorating the Woolworth's sit-ins. "We're here to send a message."
The play powerfully conveys the true story a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago too boisterous and full of teenage vitality to recognize the peculiar social code that meant in 1955 Mississippi that the slightest playfullness towards a white woman meant an almost death sentence to a black male because of the swaggering impunity in which white men operated.
Wilson's play doesn't shrink from honestly portraying the brutality of the Jim Crow caste system in the South, but he also skillfully teases out some themes that help us understand why this event -- unexceptional in many ways -- electrified the public conscience and galvanized the civil rights movement.
The story of Emmett Till's murder is set against the backdrop of mother Mamie Till's previous loss. We're told that her husband and Emmett's father, soldier Louis Till, was hung by a military tribunal in Italy in 1945 for raping a white woman under circumstances in which his guilt was far from certain. The mother and son's love are evident, Emmett's irrepressible nature ricocheting against Mamie's doting concern. She agonizes over whether to allow him to go down to Mississippi, but eventually relents.
By granting the mother the narrative voice, Wilson shows his audience that Mamie Till will bear witness.
Emmett, played by Tony Partridge, carries a photo of a white girl from Chicago in his pocket, and it's clear from the start that this memento is as dangerous as unexploded ordinance. His cousins both admonish him and egg him on, and he makes the fatal mistake of touching a white female storekeeper's hand and then whistling at her as she passes.
The play reminds us that whites in Mississippi held not just the power to exclude blacks from employment, housing and other fruits of citizenship, but to utterly rule their lives. We see Emmett and his cousins narrowly escape store owner Roy Bryant and his confederate, JW Milam, and sneak into a black juke joint. Word has traveled fast, and the bartender already knows of Till's transgression. The cousins leave, and Bryant and Milam soon make their own appearance at the juke joint, terrorizing its patrons and eventually extracting the information about Till's identity.
Like the proprietor of the juke joint, Till's great-uncle, Mose Wright, is powerless to defend his home against the white predators. The white men drag Till from his bed in the middle of the night. His aunt, Elizabeth Wright, begs the men to let him go.
The next scene vividly portrays how, in the context of white brutality and impunity, self-blame and humiliation reverberates through the black community in a paralyzing cycle. The black characters each give a monologue of wrenching lament, not the least Mamie Till.
"I blame myself," she says. "I knew I shouldn't have let him go down there so young and so fresh."
Elizabeth Wright reflects, "Poor Mose felt like less of a man.... Lord knows, he shouldn't have opened that door."
What follows is sickening and shameful. For the purposes of theatrical production, several months are hastily condensed into a brief sequence of scenes: The two white men brutally beat Till with a baseball bat, a wrench and kicks to the side. With Till beaten to unconsciousness, one fires a bullet into him, and they urinate on his corpse. An all-white jury acquits them, after which they admit their culpability to a reporter in return for a $4,000 payment.
"Is this the America we live in, where we live to die and die to live?" asks Mamie Till in one of many testimonials by the black characters.
During the funeral, the preacher urges the family not to cast blame among its members, but instead to look beyond to larger forces for an understanding of Emmett Till's death.
"Hatred is why he's here," the preacher says. "Racism is why he's here. Inequality is why he's here."
Their eloquence reminds the audience that Mamie Till insisted on holding an open-casket funeral so that all could see her son's face, mutilated beyond recognition. The infamous photo, published in the Chicago Defender, is projected onstage over the actors' heads. Mamie Till is reported to have said of her decision: "I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby."
Joseph McNeil, one of the four NC A&T University students, who boldly took seats at the Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro on Feb. 1, 1960 and insisted on being served, was in the audience sitting quietly near the front of the theater last night.
When McNeil and his three friends took action, Till was less than five years dead. The backdrop of Till's sensational murder both inflamed the conscience of those days and made it starkly clear what risks young black men took when they dared to challenge the white power structure.
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