Part 1

1. In 1954, Willie Mays hit _________ homeruns. The following year, he hit 50. In the 1950s, Willie Mays was the most spectacular player in baseball.

2. We remember the 1950s through images, movies, advertisements and newsreels. In these Technicolor memories, the characters are all ________________. The ______ million blacks living in the United States almost never appear.

3. In 1952, the book, The Invisible Man, created an immediate sensation. Written by a young man named Ralph Ellison, the novel set the problems of _______ at the heart of the American character.

4. Starting at the beginning of the century and accelerated in the 40s and 50s, over ______ million

5. African Americans would leave the Southern states to settle in the great cites in the North and West, particularly ___________________.

6. Many were fleeing the injustice of the South. Many left because the picking jobs in the southern cotton fields were replaced by _____________________.

7. In the North, the growing factories and mills were desperate for _______________, no matter what the color.

8. In Chicago, there were many _______________ clubs.

9. Not being seen has been an advantage. We’ve been freer to invent forms in jazz, free to invent forms in speech and __________________.

Deep River

10. In summer of 1955, a ________-year-old boy from Chicago, named Emmett Till, decided to take a trip down south to Mississippi.

11. He traveled with a cousin, Wheeler Parker, who had grown up in the South and knew the danger of not obeying the laws of ______________________________________. Emmett Till and Wheeler Parker went to go stay with Parker’s grandfather, a sharecropper named Mose Wright.

12. The only store in the town of Money, Mississippi was Bryant’s grocery. Carolyn Bryant was ______________ in the store that day when Emmett Till walked in.

13. According to Bryant, Till ____________________ with her saying, “Don’t be afraid of me, baby. I’ve been with white girls before.”

14. Emmett may have said something of just whistled at Bryant. When Carolyn Bryant went to go get a _____________, the boys quickly left in their truck.

15. Bryant heard from his wife what happened and he called his ___________-brother, J.W. Milan, and told him a black boy had been fresh with his wife.

16. Sunday morning at 2:30, someone called at the door. When Mose Wright opened the door, there was a man standing there with a gun in one hand and a __________________ in the other.

17. A few days later, a boy fishing found Till’s body in the Tallahatchie River, snagged on a root. A ___________-pound cotton gin fan was tied to his neck with barbed wire.

18. His face and body were badly mutilated, but he was identified by the __________ on his finger.

19. To show the world what happened, Emmett’s mother displayed her son’s body in an open ______________________________.

20. Outside of the town of Sumner, Mississippi, was a sign that said “A Good Place to Raise a ________________________.”

21. The reporters who had come down from the North were told not to hang around in Sumner at night, because otherwise they were going to get picked up and possibly __________________ by the townsfolk.

22. Sheriff Clarence H.C. Strider was furious to learn that he had to seat black reporters in the courtroom. Strider sat the black reporters around a small table, jagged with splinters. He also put Till’s mother there and a man who had come to monitor the fairness of the trial, Charles Diggs, a _____________________________________ from Detroit.

23. The trial started on August 18, and even though 63% of Tallahatchie County was black, every juror was _________________________.

24. The case for the prosecution was solid; every detail of the murder, included the gin fan, was presented in court. The man who collected much of the ____________________ was a fearless NAACP representative, named Medgar Evers.

25. The key _______________________ was Mose Wright.

26. When the defense gave its closing argument, one of the last things they said was, “I know that every last Anglo-Saxon one of you will have the courage to bring back a verdict of not-guilty and set these men __________________.”

27. Only 67 minutes after they left the courtroom, the jury returned with their decision – ____________________________.

28. Two months after the trial, a journalist, named William Bradford Huey, paid Bryant and Milan $____________ to tell him the real story. Since they cannot be tried twice for the same crime, they agreed.

29. They said they didn’t plan to kill the boy, but with the way he reacted toward them, they felt they had no choice. They brutalized him because he would not say he was _______________ of them because they were white people.

30. In Sumner, a young reporter for NBC radio, John Chancellor, was rushed by a group of whites, which were furious at how the Northern _____________________ had portrayed their town.