Whereas: Stories from the People’s House

To Make Democracy Live: The Legislative Legacy of Emmett Till

On April 29, 1955, the first Black Member of Congress elected from Michigan, Representative Charles Cole Diggs Jr., spoke to an outdoor audience of 12,000 in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, more than 800 miles south of his Detroit congressional district. In this all-Black town founded in 1887 by formerly enslaved African Americans, Diggs described his vision for change across the nation, holding onlookers “spellbound” in what the Chicago Defender called “a revival meeting about American democracy.”

In his address, Diggs urged listeners to register to vote to destroy the system of segregation that divided the South and to engage in the hard work of building a representative democracy. He recognized “the present uneasy times and seemingly insurmountable odds,” but promised that “if we keep up the fight to make democracy live, we will get the justice espoused by the Almighty God and the Constitution of the United States.”

By traveling to the South to speak to the citizens of Mound Bayou, Diggs continued a tradition that began in 1929, when Oscar Stanton De Priest, the first of three Black Representatives elected consecutively to the House from the First District of Illinois, visited several southern states. De Priest, Arthur Wergs Mitchell, and William Levi Dawson each represented a Chicago district with a Black-majority population and were eager to visit southern states to address Black audiences on the challenges facing African Americans across the nation.

In August 1955, another Black resident of Chicago, 14-year-old Emmett Till, traveled south to visit relatives in Greenwood, Mississippi. After an alleged dispute with a White woman, Till was brutally murdered and his mutilated body was thrown in the nearby Tallahatchie River. The subsequent trial and acquittal of the two White men accused of this crime became a national and international story.

On Capitol Hill, the lynching of Emmett Till quickly became central to the struggle to pass a civil rights bill in the 84th Congress (1955–1957), sparking a decade of legislative achievements on civil rights not seen since Reconstruction. In 1955, three Black Representatives served simultaneously in the House—Diggs, Dawson, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York—for the first time since 1891. Each was willing to turn their attention beyond the boundaries of their congressional district to embrace their larger national constituency of Black Americans everywhere—especially those living in the Jim Crow South.

Chicago’s Representatives Head South

The dispute that led to the murder of Emmett Till occurred in a grocery store in Money, Mississippi. The town had been named for former Confederate soldier Hernando De Soto Money, who served on Capitol Hill in both the House and Senate for 14 nonconsecutive Congresses between 1875 and 1911. Hernando Money was one of many across the South who worked to implement the system of Jim Crow segregation at the state and local level, depriving Black citizens of their civil and political rights for decades.

Systematically excluded from the ballot and under constant threat of violence, many southern African Americans migrated to northern states seeking a better life. In 1928, Oscar De Priest of Illinois, who had been born in Alabama and settled in Chicago, was elected to the House on the strength of Black voters in the city, many of whom had participated in the Great Migration.

As the first Black Member of Congress in nearly three decades, De Priest embraced his role as the only elected Black official in the federal government. De Priest made periodic visits to his native South during his six years in office. “I’m in Washington to serve my race,” De Priest declared in Memphis, Tennessee, only months after taking office. In the summer of 1929, he visited Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, as well as stops in Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. “I am going to continue my tours through the South, notwithstanding threats I have received,” he said. “I’m going to try to teach the colored people their rights under the constitution.”

In 1934, Democrat Arthur Mitchell defeated De Priest for Illinois’s First District seat. Mitchell also organized tours of the South to study the social and economic conditions of African-American communities. In 1939, he visited nine southern states, returning to Washington ready to inform the House of the need to “render the proper aid, and to give the proper recognition to a group of its citizens who have always been loyal in every sense of the word.”

Mitchell’s successor, William Dawson, began his House career in the 1940s by backing bills to ban employment discrimination, lynching, and the poll tax. In 1949, Dawson became the first Black Member to chair a standing House committee and in the early 1950s he regularly visited the South. On May 2, 1952, Dawson addressed an outdoor meeting in Mound Bayou, Mississippi—the first time a sitting Black Member of Congress had visited Mississippi since the nineteenth century. Black schools closed for the day so students could be among the 7,000 in attendance for what residents called “Dawson Day.” The following year Dawson traveled to Birmingham, Alabama; Columbia, South Carolina; and Atlanta, Georgia; making the case for voter registration to combat Jim Crow at each stop.

“A Lynching of the Statue of Liberty”

Diggs’s visit to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, in the spring of 1955 to rally support for voting rights carried on the tradition of his predecessors. Diggs made his next trip to Mississippi just a few months later to accompany Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley, at the September trial of her son’s accused murderers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam. As the sole federal official present in the Tallahatchie County courthouse in the town of Sumner, Diggs felt welcomed by the local Black community, who appreciated that he was “a representative in the Federal Government—one of their own—and he was on the scene with them.” He joined the NAACP in calling for a federal investigation of the crime, especially when the fate of the defendants was placed in the hands of an all-White jury. Because the defendants had been charged with state crimes, the U.S. Department of Justice declined to intervene.

During the trial, Diggs used his status as a Member of Congress to secure better seating arrangements for Black reporters in the courtroom, who were segregated from their White counterparts. Diggs also worked with Representative Dawson to assist the witnesses who agreed to testify against Bryant and Milam and were forced to flee Mississippi for their own safety. For his part, Dawson provided financial support behind the scenes. When Till’s mother wanted to bring her son’s body back to Chicago, Dawson intervened to halt Till’s burial in Mississippi and helped cover costs of transporting his remains.

Both Diggs and Dawson attended the September 3 funeral in Chicago. Till’s mother decided to have an open casket so that the public could see the terrible violence inflicted on her son’s body. In September, images from the funeral were published in several Black-owned publications, including Jet magazine, the Chicago Defender, and The American Negro: A Magazine of Protest, which was edited and published by future Representative Gus Savage of Illinois, who held a Chicago House seat from 1981 to 1993.

On September 23, the jury acquitted Milam and Bryant on all charges. The defense, led by attorney John W. Whitten—the cousin of Mississippi Representative Jamie Lloyd Whitten—asserted that the body found in the river was not Emmett Till. Diggs called the defense’s argument “strictly fictional and sheer nonsense,” and described the trial as “so filled with perjury, illegal and unethical practices of withholding evidence that undoubtedly a democratic nation could not imagine happening in its halls of justice.” The verdict inspired several weeks of protest in cities across the country.

Representative Powell had been traveling in Africa and Europe during the trial. When he returned to the United States in October, the Harlem Representative noted that the events in Mississippi undermined the reputation of United States as the standard bearer of democracy around the world. According to Powell, Till’s murder was, in effect, “a lynching of the Statue of Liberty.”

In October, two months after the House had adjourned in August, Powell appeared in Manhattan before a crowd of 20,000 to protest the verdict. He called for a boycott of everything “made in Mississippi,” hoping to punish the state with economic sanctions so long as it allowed lynchings to continue with impunity. Powell also demanded President Dwight D. Eisenhower call a special session of Congress to immediately take up civil rights legislation.

Both Powell and Diggs threatened to challenge the right of Mississippi’s all-White delegation to their seats in the House, insisting they were only elected because of the exclusion of Black voters from the polls. Speaking at a rally in Detroit that October, Diggs denounced the verdict and the ongoing threat of violence facing African Americans, adding that he would push the House to pass civil rights legislation in the new year. “It is obvious that although I was elected from Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, I also represent every Negro in Mississippi,” Diggs said. Along with his House colleagues Dawson and Powell, Diggs noted that “we represent 15 million Negroes. We intend to do just that.”

“A Year Loaded with Political Dynamite”

When the House reconvened on January 3, 1956, the Chicago Tribune forecasted “a year loaded with political dynamite” on Capitol Hill. Republican Gordon Canfield of New Jersey, a longtime civil rights advocate in the House, was the first of several Members to introduce a federal antilynching bill following Till’s murder. Since January 20, 1900, when Representative George H. White of North Carolina introduced the first federal antilynching bill, several attempts had been made to enable the federal government to intervene without success.

In January, Diggs spoke on the House Floor to urge his colleagues to empower the U.S. Attorney General to “intervene in those cases where individual states refuse to provide equal protection of the law to all citizens.” By March, 26 Representatives—including Diggs and Powell—described by one reporter as the bipartisan “House civil rights bloc” met to coordinate strategy. They appointed a delegation of six Members, led by Republican Hugh Doggett Scott Jr. of Pennsylvania and Democrat Edna Flannery Kelly of New York, to meet with the U.S. Department of Justice, House Judiciary Chair Emanuel Celler of New York, and Thomas Joseph Lane of Massachusetts, the chair of the Judiciary subcommittee on civil rights bills, to discuss how to pass legislation before the end of the session. By June, the House Rules Committee had held a hearing on H.R. 627, which created a national commission to investigate civil rights violations and a new civil rights division within the Justice Department, as well as empowered the U.S. Attorney General to bring civil suits in federal courts to protect individual rights.

Southern state delegations mobilized against these efforts. In remarks in the Congressional Record, Elijah Lewis Forrester of Georgia claimed that if the accused men had killed Till, “there was certainly great provocation.” He added that “murders in Chicago are daily occurrences,” yet there was not a call for federal intervention in Illinois.

The Mississippi House delegation also defended their state and questioned the role of the federal government in the South. In June, Mississippi lawmakers testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, where Representative Whitten backed the integrity of the Mississippi justice system and insisted that the body found in the river was not Emmett Till. Mississippi Representative John Bell Williams denounced the proposal to increase the power of the Justice Department in civil rights matters, which he said would create a federal “police state.” The Supreme Court, Williams said, was trying to “abort the Constitution and take over the prerogatives of the States.” Each Member of the Mississippi delegation joined a group of 83 House Members who signed a statement read into the Record denouncing the civil rights bill on July 13.

On July 17, Diggs and Powell spoke on the House Floor to back the pending civil rights bill, demanding voting rights to fortify democracy in the South. Powell accepted that the bill was not perfect but emphasized that it “symbolizes the authority and willingness of the Federal Government to protect certain basic rights of the United States citizenship.” Diggs noted that jury duty was tied to voter registration, and no African Americans were on the jury during the Till murder trial. The bill passed the House on July 23, but the Senate did not take it up before the end of the session.

The bipartisan group of legislators advocating for civil rights legislation found more success in the 85th Congress (1957–1959). In debates and committee hearings in the House and Senate, the Till case remained a key part of the push for civil rights legislation on Capitol Hill. The resulting Civil Rights Act of 1957 included the main provisions of the 1956 bill that passed the House, including the proposal to expand the role of the U.S. Attorney General in civil rights cases and the creation of both a civil rights division in the Department of Justice and a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Although the law did not immediately reverse the system of Jim Crow segregation in the South, it was the first federal civil rights legislation passed since 1875. Within a decade the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 created a robust role for the federal government in protecting the civil and political rights of all Americans.

More than half a century later, Black lawmakers who had grown up in the 1950s, including Representative John Lewis of Georgia, often reflected on the significance of the murder of Emmett Till. Inspired by his memory, they eventually secured the passage of a federal antilynching law—a legislative victory more than 120 years in the making.

Sources: Congressional Record, House, 84th Cong., 2nd sess. (13 July 1956): 12760–12761; Congressional Record, House, 84th Cong., 2nd sess. (17 July 1956): 13176–13178, 13181–13182; Congressional Record, Extension of Remarks, 84th Cong., 2nd sess. (24 July 1956): A5819; H.R. 4004, 78th Cong. (1944); H.R. 228, 80th Cong. (1947); H.R. 230, 80th Cong. (1947); H.R. 383, 81st Cong. (1949); H.R. 7879, 84th Cong (1956); H.R. 627, 84th Cong. (1955); Hearings before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Poll Taxes, 78th Cong., 1st sess. (1943); Hearings before the House Committee on Rules, H.R. 627, 84th Cong., 2nd sess. (1956); Hearings before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Civil Rights Proposals, 84th Cong., 2nd sess. (1956); Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2015); Christopher Manning, William L. Dawson and the Limits of Black Electoral Leadership (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009); Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi (New York: Penguin Press, 2024); Afro-American (Baltimore, MD), 15 December 1934, 8 October 1955, 3 March 1956; Afro-American Red Star (Washington, DC), 31 January 2003; Atlanta Daily World, 6 November 1953, 17 November 1953, 3 May 1955; Baltimore Sun, 12 October 1955; Boston Globe, 25 September 1955; Call and Post (Cleveland, OH), 16 March 1939, 15 January 1955, 24 September 1955; Chicago Defender, 26 April 1952, 14 May 1955, 27 August 1955, 1 October 1955, 8 October 1955, 28 July 1956; Chicago Daily Tribune, 2 January 1956; Detroit Tribune, 1 October 1955; Journal and Guide (Norfolk, VA), 14 August 1937; Los Angeles Times, 24 July 1956; Memphis Triangle (TN), 27 July 1929; Michigan Chronicle (Detroit), 8 October 1955, 21 January 1956; New Journal and Guide (Norfolk, VA), 10 May 1952, 24 January 1953, 1 October 1955; New York Times, 12 October 1955, 13 July 1956, 28 August 2005; Pittsburgh Courier, 8 October 1955; Wall Street Journal, 15 March 1990; Washington Post, 16 July 1929, 12 January 1956, 3 November 2015; Washington Post Magazine, 27 February 2000.