A Time for Justice
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Video Transcript
It stands in a small southern cemetery,
the gravestone of a 26-year-old black American.
Jimmy was a symbol of something.
That guns and bullets cannot destroy ideas.
There are black cemeteries still hidden in the pine groves and swamp lands of the South,
reminders of 300 years of slavery and oppression, of forgotten gravestones, forgotten names.
By 1954, slavery had been dead in America for nearly a century.
But in that time, one type of tyranny had replaced another.
In the 1950s, the average income of an African American in Mississippi was $700 a year.
Denied the vote, they had been written out of the political system.
Denied an education, they had been left to do a white man's work at a black man's wages.
They're supreme, superior.
So that's what they're thinking.
And when you've been taught something so long,
whether it's right or not, you begin to feel like it's right.
In Money, Mississippi, in the summer of 1955,
a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago bought candy in a store.
On the way out, he said something to the owner's wife.
Emmett Till was visiting his cousin's grandfather,
a 64-year-old tenant farmer.
Moore. Moe's Wright had lived in Mississippi all his life and knew his place. It never
occurred to him that a young black boy would act differently.
A little African youngster, kind of mannish, didn't know the custom of the South, whispered
at a white lady, whistled at her. And that night, they went there and got him and took
and beat him up and killed him.
And put weights on him and put him in the river.
Emmett Till's funeral was held in Chicago.
At his mother's request, the coffin was left open
for the world to see what they had done to her son.
The trial for the murder took place
in the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in September, 1955.
An all-white jury was selected.
Blacks were confined to a separate corner of the room.
The murderers were identified,
and later admitted kidnapping and beating and killing Till.
But the white jury took just an hour to find Roy Bryant
and his half-brother J.W. Milam not guilty.
A few months after the Till trial,
Blacks met in Montgomery, Alabama's Holt Street Baptist Church
to protest their continued abuse.
They were especially angered at what had happened a few days before.
Rosa Parks, riding a city bus, had refused to give up her seat to a white man and had been arrested.
Black people had been arrested before, even shot for less offenses to the city's segregation ordinances.
But Rosa Parks was a well-known, respected figure in the black community,
and her arrest ignited indignation.
These guys that drove these black routes, they were white.
They would say,
Move back, move back, move back.
Get your black ass back there.
If you're sitting in the front of the bus,
