Till out of his great-uncle’s house, beat him with a pipe, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and dumped his body in the Talla - hatchie River. When Till’s mother chose to have an open casket at his funeral, Jet magazine published photos of his virtually unrecognizable corpse. The murderers’ acquittal by an all-white jury, in 67 minutes, was taken by African-Ameri- can families as a warning. When Cassius Clay Sr., a sign painter, saw the photos of Till, he showed them to his two sons. “This is what they do to us!” he told them. “I felt a deep kinship to him,” Ali would say of Till. “My father talked about it at night and dramatized the crime. I couldn’t get Em- mett out of my mind.” “The horror that Cassius experienced looking at the pictures of Till’s brutalized face in the pages of the black press,” David Remnick wrote in his biography of Ali, King of the World , “helped convince him of the lim - its of his possibilities as a black kid in the South.” At the same time that Till’s death was confirming Cassius Clay Sr.’s sense of injus- tice in Louisville, it was also confirming the long-held fears of Arthur Ashe Sr. in Rich- mond. Ashe, a single father whose wife, Mat - tie, had died four years earlier, was a stern, responsible maintenance man who watched over his two sons, Arthur Jr. and Johnnie, closely. Now his efforts were given a new sense of urgency. “My father tried hard to keep us out of harm’s way, and the possibility of harm was real,” Ashe would later say. “We all knew what had happened to Emmett Till, whose death in 1955 cast a shadow over my youth and that of virtually all black kids in Rich - mond.” Ashe Sr. believed that trouble lurked in all directions for young African-Americans in Richmond, and did his best to help his elder son navigate the all-powerful white world that surrounded him. Each day, Arthur Jr. was expected to return home 10 minutes after the final bell at school rang, and he was
The contrasting ways in which Arthur Ashe and Muhammad Ali were perceived in the culture in 1968 was evidenced by how they were perceived by the press. Photo by Spencer Henry
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