'For more than 50 years, I never spoke of Emmett': Till's cousin opens up in PBS documentary

On Aug. 27, 1955, Phyllis Smith of Downers Grove celebrated her 6th birthday with her parents, sister and the usual collection of aunties and uncles and cousins. Her favorite cousin, the 14-year-old fun-loving boy nicknamed “Bobo,” couldn't be there because he was visiting relatives in the Delta town of Money, Mississippi. His letter to his mother, assuring her that “I am having a fine time,” arrived just in time to be sort of a birthday gift for Smith.

The next day, Emmett “Bobo” Till was murdered.

“Bobo has gone to heaven. He died. You'll see him again in heaven,” Smith, 69, remembers two of her aunts explaining. “It was a blow. It left a hole that was never filled.”

The nation still grapples with Emmett Till's death, which immediately became, and remains, a pivotal moment in the history of race relations in the United States.

The black boy reportedly whistled at a white woman. Her husband and another man kidnapped Emmett from his great uncle's home in the middle of the night, beat him so badly that his right eye dislodged from its socket and the back of his skull was crushed, shot him in the head, used barbed wire to tie a 75-pound fan around the boy's neck and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River.

Mamie Till, the boy's mother and niece to Smith's dad, demanded that her son's brutalized body be displayed in an open casket. “Let the people see what they did to my boy,” she said.

“I'm pretty sure Carol (Smith's 8-year-old sister) and I were there, but we weren't allowed to walk up to the coffin,” says Smith, a retired teacher who now lives in Glen Ellyn.

“You and Carol are going to forget that Emmett Till is your cousin. We're not going to mention his name again,” said Sammy Smith, the girls' father. Fearing for their safety, he instilled “a code of silence” that lasted 60 years.

Phyllis Smith will talk about the pain, and her healing, as one of the people interviewed in a one-hour documentary titled “Unchained: Generational Trauma and Healing,” airing at 10 p.m. Thursday on WTTW Channel 11.

Smith's grandfather was brought to Downers Grove to be a janitor at the progressive Avery Coonley School and was allowed to buy a home in town for $1. Smith's dad worked in an automotive factory and did some janitorial work. Her mother, a college graduate, was a professional seamstress at a fancy dress shop.

“There were only two restaurants that would serve us when I was a child,” Smith says. “We were told to be peacemakers. But it took a toll on my emotions.”

She remembers taking circuitous walks home from school so that her white friend's father, who was a KKK member, wouldn't see them together.

She remembers the humiliation of having to empty her pockets in a popular hardware store because a clerk wrongly suspected her of stealing. When her father died unexpectedly when Smith was a teenager, the cemetery adhered to its policy against burying black people, until a white woman donated her plot.

Smith and her sister, the only black kids in Downers Grove North High School, saw prejudice and heard racial slurs, but they also had wonderful white friends. Elected president of her senior Class of 1967, Smith never dated and remembers going to her senior prom with an out-of-town family friend, who was black.

After graduating from Illinois State University, Smith took a job teaching fifth grade in Glendale Heights' Queen Bee School District 16.

Smith says her light complexion often confused people who thought she might be of European heritage. Many people didn't know she was black, let alone grew up with Emmett Till. She retired as a teacher in Wheaton-based Community Unit School District 200, before working from 2005 to 2012 at Trinity International University in Deerfield.

“For more than 50 years, I never spoke of Emmett,” Smith says. A Sunday school teacher at Christ Church of Oak Brook, Smith says her Christian faith helped her forgive his killers and appreciate what she calls “radical reconciliations,” where good emerges out of tragedy. Stories, such as Sunday's fatal police shooting of a black security guard in Robbins who was assumed to be the bad guy, remain all too frequent, Smith says. But she says those moments can't divide the nation.

“I don't go around pointing fingers. I go around looking for an embrace,” says Smith, who stresses that she speaks “the truth to whites and blacks” because of all the pain and frustration she went through with her cousin's brutal murder. The anger and frustration shouldn't divide Americans, she says. “We cannot separate from one another and solve the problems we need to solve,” Smith says.

She is driven to speak out against injustice by the memory of her cousin.

“I can't do anything for Emmett. The pain will always be there. But we can use this as a platform,” Smith says.

“We were very close. I can't look at his picture and not smile. He was a fun guy,” Smith says. “One thing I do know, he loved people. I think if he could come from the grave and say anything to us, he'd say, 'Use my death as a springboard for people to come together.'”