Jordan Bolker
News Editor
Driven by a simple passion to tell the story, author and professor Elliot Gorn, spoke to North Central students about his upcoming novel, “The Ghost of Emmett Till.”
Based on true events, Gorn took students back in time to August 28, 1955, a day that shocked the United States and subsequently led to one of the most important civil right movements in America. On that day, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American from Chicago, was taken from his uncle’s home in Mississippi by two white men and was beaten, tortured and killed after he supposedly flirted and whistled at a white woman.
“This is a difficult and painful subject,” said Gorn. “I’ve never lectured about this before.”
Gorn, a professor of American Urban History at Loyola University Chicago, has written several novels in the past such as biographies on famous Chicago criminal John Dillinger, American labor organizer Mother Jones and histories on American sports. His interest in Chicago history and important events were key inspirations for writing this new book.
Emmett Till’s murder coincidentally occurred just a year after the decision of Brown v. Board of Education of 1954, which eliminated segregation in schools and declared “separate is not equal” between Caucasian and African American races.
“However, this decision did not completely end disputes between the superior and the inferior,” said Gorn.
Indeed, Gorn was right. Three days before the murder, Till and some friends visited Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Miss., where he reported to have flirted and “wolf-whistled” at Carolyn Bryant, who ran the store with her husband Roy. Knowing that it was serious offense, Roy Bryant, along with his half-brother, J.W. Milam, tracked Till down to his uncle’s house where he was visiting and took him from his house, never to be seen again. A few days later, a fisherman spotted Till’s swollen body in the Tallahatchie River with a cotton gin fan tied about the neck with barbed wire.
“This wasn’t just a murder, but a lynching,” Gorn said. “This was a ‘white-on-black’ murder.”
A double-sealed casket, two pastors, and 100,000 people, were all in attendance for Till’s wake. Though the graphics were disturbing to most, Maime Carthan, Till’s mother, insisted on opening the casket for everyone to see and to “(show) the world what they did to (her) boy.” Another shocking event occurred with the arrest of Rosa Parks a few months later, who said that she was “thinking of Till” when she refused to give up her seat.
The trial against Bryant and Milam with an all-white, all-male jury lasted only four days with a “not guilty” verdict in the end. Reason being that the body could not be identified and even a theory that the NAACP planted the body in the river on purpose. A twist came into effect later on after the trial when Look magazine published confessions to the murder from Bryant and Milam in exchange for giving the men $4,000. Although neither man did time for the murder, both men were ostracized from the state.
“The closing statements of the attorneys were that if you didn’t convict them, you were inviting all kinds of criticism,” said Gorn.
Through all the success he gained through his previous works, Gorn is not expecting much from publishing this new novel expect that it’s out there for the public eye.
“I’m not hoping for anything from writing this,” said Gorn. “You can’t expect impact and hope every time you write something. I hope that people will find this interesting because not only is it a piece of history, especially for us in Chicago, but it also gives something for readers to think about when a case ends up like this.”
