Video Segment

Eyes on the Prize, Volume 162, Chapter 2

Table of Contents

Summary
Questions for Discussion
Activities
Keywords
Profiles
Organizations
Maps
Graphs
Primary Documents

Summary

In August 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till took a train ride from Chicago, his hometown, to Mississippi, where his granduncle, Mose Wright, lived. Emmett was unfamiliar with the rules of the South, and it is alleged that when some friends challenged him to say "Bye, Baby" to a white female store owner, he decided to take the dare. Four days later, Emmett was abducted and murdered. His body was found in the Tallahatchie River with a seventy-five-pound cotton gin around his neck. Two white men were accused of the murder, but an all-white jury found them not guilty.

Questions for Discussion

1. Give specific examples of how life in the 1950s was different for African Americans in the South than for those in the North. How was it the same?
2. Describe the atmosphere in the courtroom where the trial took place. Was it possible for evidence to be heard impartially? Why or why not?
3. What did it take for Mose Wright to stand alone and point out the two men who had taken Emmett Till from his home? Could you have done the same?
   
4. What difference might an integrated jury have made?
   
5. What role did the Black press play in publicizing the Till murder?
   
6. How would you have felt as a teenager back then if you had read about the Till murder in the newspaper?

Activities

Role-play the Till trial. Have students act out the roles of the defendants, Till's mother, the judge, and the Black press corps. Have the class write news reports of the Till incident:

1. general articles on the murder and the trial
2. a sidebar portrait of one or more of the participants
3. an editorial
4. a political cartoon.

Take students to a courtroom to see how the court system operates or how a trial is run. Later, conduct a classroom discussion of students' observations.

Keywords

• segregation
• Jim Crow
• lynching
• Brown v. Board of Education

Online Profiles

• Medgar Evers
• James Hicks
• Ida B. Wells (anti-lynching)

Note: Frederick Douglass, Daisy Bates, W.E.B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, and Ida B. Wells were all Black journalists, editors, or publishers.

Organization Descriptions

• Ku Klux Klan
• National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Maps

• United States. In 1950, the population of the United States was 134,941,622 White and 15,042,692 Black.
• Mississippi. Capital: Jackson. Population in 1950: 1,188,632 White, 986,494 Black. Principal Goods and Crops: apparel, food, lumber and wood products; cotton, corn, peanuts, oats and pecans.

Graphs

• High School Graduates
• School Desegregation
• Family Income
• 1950 Gallup Poll
• Per-Pupil Expenditures

Primary Documents

• White supremacy poster
• Chicago Defender Headline

Bibliography

See Eyes on the Prize Bibliography

 

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