Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) Read Free

public issue, a political issue, one which set in motion the dynamic force that led ultimately to a generation of social and legal progress for this country. My story is more than all of that. It is the story of how I was able to pull myself back from the brink of desolation, and turn my life around by digging deep within my soul to pull hope from despair, joy from anguish, forgiveness from anger, love from hate. I want people to know about all of that and how they might gain some useful understanding for their own lives from my experience. But I also want people to know my Emmett, the way they might haveknown him had they met him so many years ago—as the driven, industrious, clever boy that he was at age fourteen. Forever fourteen.
    Thankfully, Emmett has helped to steer me in my lifelong odyssey. He does still. I often hear his voice guiding or chiding, the voice of a boy much older than his years. In fact, as I began discussions for this book, I sat down at my kitchen table, my workspace. As I sometimes do, I asked that a trifold picture frame of images of Emmett and me be taken down from atop the china hutch in my living room and placed on the table in front of me. I focused on my son while I considered this book. I scanned the pictures that portrayed a life from infancy through boyhood into adolescence. I prayed and asked for help in making this important decision. The result is in your hands. Now, only now, I can share the wisdom of my age. I am experienced, but not cynical. I’ve been disappointed by so many of the people I’ve trusted over the years, but still I am hopeful that we all can be better than we are. I’ve been brokenhearted, but I still maintain an oversized capacity for love.
    It is not that I dwell on the past. But the past shapes the way we are in the present and the way we will become what we are destined to become. It is only because I have finally understood the past, accepted it, embraced it, that I can fully live in the moment. And hardly a moment goes by when I don’t think about Emmett, and the lessons a son can teach a mother.

CHAPTER 1
     I will always remember the day Emmett was born. It was July 25, 1941. A Friday. But I’m getting a little ahead of my story, because this is not where it really begins. You see, my mother had brought me to the hospital on Wednesday. And the fact that it was my mother and not my husband who took me to the hospital to have a baby probably tells you just about everything you need to know about Louis Till. He was at work that day, I think. He worked at the Corn Products Refining Company in Argo, Illinois, where we lived, just outside Chicago. I guess you might call Argo a suburb, but it didn’t have anything at all in common with the big city, except for being close to it. It was a sleepy little town where whites called blacks by their first names and where blacks would never dare do the same thing. It was a place where most little black girls dropped out of school by age sixteen to get married and where I was considered an old maid because I had waited until I finished high school to marry Louis at age eighteen. That was just the year before. Argo was also a place where it seemed the greatest ambition of most black men, like my father and my husband, was to work for Corn Products, and the greatest ambition of their wives was to take care of things at home for their husbands. So it was with my mother, who did what my mother always seemed to be there to do. She took care of me, and on that Wednesday when she drove me to Cook County Hospital in Chicago, I really needed care. I was going into labor and I didn’t understand much about that except for this: those pains were
talking
to me. They were saying: “Any minute now, Mamie Till. Any minute, girl.”
    Now, Cook County was a public hospital and it was one place you were sure black folks could get treated. That’s not to say that we were treated well. The nurses decided right away that this was not an