without sleep, startled by nearly any sound, unable to eat, simply staring at our meals. Suddenly, in a few seconds of radio time it was over. My first son, whose birth had brought me so much joy that I jumped up in a hall outside the room where he was born and touched the ceiling – the child, the scholar, the preacher, the boy singing and smiling, the son – all of it was gone.” Reading so close to where he died humanized Martin Luther King Jr. in a way that almost nothing else could for me. This quote was purely a father grieving for his child, not the revolutionary movement leader that I had always read about in history books. 

After we left Memphis, our civil rights journey took us into Mississippi. Dr. Robert “Bob” Moses, organizer of the 1964 Mississippi voter registration campaign called Freedom Summer, reportedly said “When you’re in Mississippi, the rest of America doesn’t seem real. And when you’re in the rest of America, Mississippi doesn’t seem real.” This quote stuck in my head throughout our time in Mississippi, for even today, almost fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Mississippi feels like it is a place separate from the United States. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roy Bryant, Carolyn’s husband, and J. W. Milam, his half brother, kidnapped Till from his bed; the men brutally beat him and finally disposed of his body into the Tallahatchie River, where it was recovered three days later. 

          The trial for Emmett Till’s murder took place at the Sumner, Mississippi courthouse. It was a short trial. The jury deliberated for a mere hour and decided to acquit the men, causing widespread outrage at the racial flaws in the American justice system. Stephen Whitfield, author of A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till, described how Till’s murder and trial affected those that lived in the Mississippi, “the viciousness of the murder of Emmett Till spurred efforts to accelerate the tempo of civil rights advances for Southern blacks. The case therefore deserves analysis for its function in promoting the liquidation of legally enforced racial segregation after the 1950s. Scattered evidence also indicates the impact that both the murder of Till and the acquittal of the defendants exerted upon the Southern Negroes, some of whom matured into activists in the struggle against Southern racism in the 1960s.” 

          Today, the grocery store where Emmett Till allegedly wolf whistled at Carolyn Bryant stands in a state of complete disrepair. The wood rots, the windows are shattered, and the entire structure looks like it could collapse on itself. The area around it was quiet on the day we visited, with only the occasional car driving by and a distant whistle of a train. It probably has not changed much in the past sixty years, and you could never guess that this was the location where a little boy would commit a “crime” worthy of his murder. 

In contrast, the courthouse in Sumner has attempted to make progress from its history. We met with Patrick Weems, Dr. Cooley’s former student and the director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center that sits across from the courthouse. Inside the courthouse, the courtroom has been restored to the way it appeared in the 1950s to remind people not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Outside, on opposite corners, sit two monuments that express the different historical periods of the area. One of the monuments is a memorial to the Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War, and the other is a green Mississippi historical marker that describes the courthouse’s connection with the Emmett Till case. Although at first the Emmett Till marker sparked some controversy amongst the locals when it was dedicated, Weems said that after some thought and negotiation they have mostly accepted its place next to the courthouse. Hopefully with time the rest of Mississippi can begin to accept its own violent past.

The final stage of our civil rights journey brought us to Jackson, Mississippi. In Jackson, we visited Jackson State and Tougaloo College, the Mississippi Museum of Art, and the sign marker for Anne Moody’s Woolworth’s sit-in. All 

 

 

          Megar Evers returned to the United States from fighting in World War II and found that nothing had changed. “Despite fighting for his country as part of the Battle of Normandy,” the NAACP website notes, “Evers soon found that his skin color gave him no freedom when he and five friends were forced away at gunpoint from voting in a local election.” This discrimination caused Evers and many other black veterans to join the Civil Rights Movement in America. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

         When visiting his house, we could see the great lengths Evers and his wife Myrlie strived for to protect their family. Their house was the only one on the street to not have a front door. Their door was placed right next to the garage overhang, so his children could go directly from the car into the house. The children’s room was in the back corner of the house, and their beds were on the floor so that any bullets shot into the window would not hit them when they were sleeping. Medgar and Myrlie Evers’s bed was also placed on the floor to avoid possible attacks through the window.

          On the day of his murder, June 12, 1963, Evers had been working late with the NAACP. After arriving home, he got out of his car while carrying t-shirts that said “Jim Crow Must Go” and was shot in the back. Today, you can still see the path the bullet took after it passed through his body. The bullet went through the front window, through the wall that separated their kitchen and living room, ricocheted off the refrigerator, hit a toaster oven, and then lodged itself in a watermelon sitting on their kitchen counter. A neighbor took Evers to the hospital, but he soon died. We stood where his blood stains the concrete outside of his home – I do not believe there is a more powerful mark of the violence and oppression that African Americans faced than these blood stains that his wife tried, and failed, to scrub away.

          Before our class had traveled to the South, I had believed that I had a good understanding of civil rights history. Visiting the places where people, who were just as alive as I am today, struggled for basic human rights has made me completely rethink my views on the Civil Rights Movement. The glorified version that was presented to me in history books does not even skim the surface of the countless moments of fear and hope that the people felt. These particular sites - in St. Louis, Memphis, and Jackson – are marked forever with the literal and figurative blood of our nation’s civil rights warriors.