Henry Pettigrew was 12 years old on the day his friend Emmett Till’s body was laid out, in a dark suit and a white shirt, for all Chicago to see.
It was a sunny day, Pettigrew remembers, and he joined the line of thousands outside Roberts Temple at 40th and State streets on the South Side, waiting his turn to file past the casket.
He and Emmett had met in Sunday school, and even though Emmett was a little older, they discovered a lot in common. Both were bashful boys. Both liked to read. Both sang in the church choir, though neither sang well. They liked to tease each other, like about whose feet were big and whose weren’t. They both stuttered.
“As I approached the casket,” Pettigrew remembers of that day in September 1955, “I remember looking at him. I remember the preacher was preaching and the choir was singing and I remember how gross his face looked. It was swollen. It was like a monster movie. I stood there a little bit and stared at him in hopes that I could recognize something. And I couldn’t. I remember crying and walking away. And I remember thinking: It could have been me.”
Pettigrew is 77 now. He lives in Michigan City, Ind. I called him because on Feb. 26 the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which would make lynching a federal hate crime. I wondered what the law — which passed after a century of failed efforts — might mean to a man who remembers the boy it’s named for.
I knew about Pettigrew because he wrote me a couple of years ago after I wrote about Till.
“I went to visit his grave today at Lot 218,” he emailed. “I was 12-and-a-half years old when he was murdered. His death was my introduction to the horrors associated with racism … I have missed him all of my life.”
Till’s life and death come close to legend now. In August 1955, at the age of 14, he left his Chicago home to visit relatives in Mississippi. In a grocery there, or so the story went, he whistled at a white woman. In retaliation, white men later beat and shot him, tied him to a metal fan and dumped him in the Tallahatchie River.
Pettigrew remembers when he first heard the story. It was just after it happened. He was at church. The adults were talking, the kids eavesdropping. The story didn’t make sense.
“What I heard was that he whistled at a white woman,” Pettigrew remembers. “I can’t even imagine. He and I, we claimed we didn’t like girls. And we weren’t that bold to think that we could whistle at anybody, especially a woman, let alone the color.”
A long time later, the story fell apart. The woman in question acknowledged the whistle never happened. The two men acquitted of the crime eventually confessed. But Till’s murder, in addition to helping ignite the civil rights movement, changed his friend Henry.
Until Till was killed, Pettigrew says, he didn’t think a lot about skin color.
“Up until then,” he says, “I looked at myself as being very open to folks, regardless of their color and status.”
After Till’s murder, he says, “for a while, I just thought that being white was the worst thing you could be.”
But he had a white teacher, a Ms. Goldich, who gave him faith that “not everyone white is terrible.” He became a Chicago police officer and felt fairly treated. After he retired, he became a substance abuse counselor. He has always been comfortable with his white coworkers.
Still, the memory of Emmett’s death travels with him. When he was a police officer, Emmett would come to mind whenever he arrested a white person.
“I was always wondering if that relationship would deteriorate,” he says, “if someone would feel justified killing me.”
A while back, when he was dating a white woman — “she passed away last year” — he’d sometimes think of what happened to Emmett. He never told her about his fears.
A few years ago, Pettigrew began an annual visit to Emmett’s grave at Burr Oak Cemetery southwest of Chicago. He worried when he heard about bodies at the cemetery being exhumed and graves resold. He was relieved to find Emmett’s spot intact, so now he goes just to tidy up a bit, trim the weeds around the pictures, pay his respects.
Some people say the new Emmett Till antilynching law comes far too late to mean anything. Pettigrew disagrees.
“We’ve lately been going in the wrong direction, not only politically but socially,” he says. “This law is refreshing our memory of what our history looks like. It places value on history, so we don’t repeat it.”
———
ABOUT THE WRITER
Mary Schmich is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune and winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
———
©2020 Chicago Tribune
Visit the Chicago Tribune at www.chicagotribune.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.