by Leslie Lytle, Messenger Staff Writer

“If it’s divisive to you, if it’s igniting to you, there is a lot of power there that can be used for good,” said Jessie Jaynes-Diming, founding member of the Emmett Till Memorial Commission, when asked how she responded to people who claimed her work caused rancor, anger and divisiveness by shining a spotlight on the 1955 torture and murder of the 14-year-old black youth Emmett Till. “I meet [the divisiveness] head on. It gives me an opportunity to talk to you,” Jaynes-Diming insisted. Sept. 18 at Convocation Hall, Jaynes-Diming and Patrick Weems, co-founder and director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, joined in a conversation about the resistance the Center has encountered and how a courthouse slated to be condemned led to the Center’s founding. “If you would have told me 20 years ago I’d be sitting in Sewanee, I would have said, ‘you’re crazy,’” acknowledged Jaynes-Diming, a member of the founding commission of nine Blacks and nine whites. Suspicion and hostility governed early meetings. “Emmett has become a symbol, but it’s important to remember him as a child,” Weems said. Emmett liked to ride his bike and would pay people to tell him jokes. Jaynes-Diming and Weems’ observations circumscribe the extremity of the events occurring in Money, Mississippi, on the days leading up to and following Emmett Till’s murder on Aug.28, 1955.

Jaynes-Diming recounted the story of Emmett Till’s last days. Raised in Chicago, Emmett persuaded his mother to let him visit her family in Money that summer. One evening in late August, Emmett and his cousins stopped off at a local store. Emmett was slow to come out and his older cousin Wheeler started to go in after him. Emmett left the store followed by a white woman, Carolyn Bryant whose family owned the business. Emmett wolf whistled. “It was a compliment,” Jaynes-Diming said. “That compliment cost him his life.” Wheeler was older, and knew, “this was not good.” The cousins sped away in their car. Three days later, Bryant’s husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam abducted Emmett from his uncle’s home. The family never saw him alive again. His body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River and slated for burial in an unmarked grave. His mother Mamie Till-Mobley intervened. Emmett’s body was sent home. “The casket left Mississippi with a seal on it that it was not to be opened, that it was against Mississippi law,” Jaynes-Diming said. Mamie’s reaction according to Jaynes-Diming: “‘Give me a hammer and crowbar and I’ll open it.’” Mamie insisted on seeing her son. “She wanted to make sure it was her child,” Jaynes-Diming explained. “He was so disfigured, she almost could not identify him.” An open casket funeral followed, with Mamie determined to tell her son’s story.

Fast forward 50 years. Jerome Little, among the first black officials in Tallahatchie County, found himself in the role of supervisor for the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner, Miss., a building slated to be condemned. Little turned to the legislature for help and met a senator who as a young journalist had covered the Emmett Till murder trial where Bryant and Milam were acquitted by an all-white male jury at the Sumner courthouse. Not long after the trial, the two men confessed, protected from retrial by the Fifth Amendment’s double-jeopardy clause. “Jerome had no idea about the significance of the courthouse or the Emmett Till story at all,” Jaynes-Diming said. “Emmett’s death was used to weaponize and to scare black families into submission and into not talking about it.” Jerome Little made it his personal mission to change that. “Folks didn’t trust each other,” Wheems said of the commission with nine black and nine white members assembled by Little. The challenge was “How do you break the silence?” The restored courthouse and neighboring Emmett Till Interpretive Center embrace that challenge along with the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center Museum in Glendora located in the building that once held the gin from which Till’s killers took the fan and wire used to weigh down his body in the Tallahatchie River. The Tallahatchie Civil Rights Driving Tour tells Emmett Till’s story by visiting landmark sites such as the Bryant grocery and location where Emmett Till’s body was pulled from the river. But the Emmett Till Memory Project’s journey has not been an easy one.

“By 2015 we had restored the courthouse. Our work began to merge out of this reconciliation piece into being able to steward sacred sites and to try to shift culture,” Wheems said. The historical marker where Emmett Till’s body was pulled from the river was shot at, replaced; after the Obama election, thrown in the river, replaced; shot at again, 315 times, replaced. “We didn’t have the money to keep replacing the sign,” Wheems said. The fourth sign was shot at and a photo circulated of students from the University of Mississippi posing in front of the sign with guns. A bulletproof sign now marks the site.

The Memorial Project is negotiating to buy the barn where Emmett Till was tortured and murdered from a dentist who bought the property in the 1990s and initially refused to even discuss selling it; he had no idea of the place’s significance. The Bryant grocery is “totally in ruins with trees growing in the middle of the store,” Wheems said. “Our plan is to acquire land across the street to move the conversation forward.” The family offered to sell the grocery for an outrageous $4 million. The nearly a dozen historically significant sites are about 20 miles from each other and spread out over several counties. “How do you change the physical and cultural landscape of Mississippi and thereby the nation?” Wheems asked. “How do we have a shared collective history so we can have a shared future moving forward?”

The Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation sponsored the Emmett Till program in conjunction with a series titled “Until It Is Faced.” “The [series title] is drawn from a quotation from [black author] James Baldwin in 1962,” said Roberson Project Director Woody Register. “Baldwin, in his typical style said, ‘Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.’”