Willie Reed, as Willie Louis was then known, was born in 1937 in Greenwood, Mississippi at the eastern edge of the Mississippi Delta. He was raised in Drew, Mississippi, by his grandparents who worked as sharecroppers. Reed received little formal education and worked in the cotton fields.
Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi in August 1955. He was a 14-year-old African-American from Chicago who was reportedly murdered for having reportedly flirted with and whistled at a 21-year-old white woman in a grocery store. The case and subsequent trial were "watershed moments in the civil rights movement, galvanizing public attention on the deep perils of being black in the Jim Crow South."
On the morning of Sunday, August 28, 1955, Reed, who was then 18 years old, was walking on a dirt road near Drew, Mississippi, when he saw a green-and-white Chevrolet pick-up drive past him with four white men in the front and three African-American men and an African-American youth seated with his back to the cab. Reed recognized two of the men in the front seat as Roy Bryant, the husband of the woman who Till had reportedly whistled at, and J.W. Milam, Bryant's half-brother.
Reed saw the truck pull into a plantation owned by Milam's brother and park in front of a barn. As he walked closer, he heard a boy inside the barn yelling, "Mama, save me!" He also heard the sounds of blows landing on a body and voices cursing and yelling, "Get down, you black bastard." Reed ran to the nearby house of Amanda Bradley and told her what he had seen and heard. Reed and another individual were sent to get water from a well near the barn. As they did, they heard the continuing sound of the beating until the cries became fainter and then stopped.
As Reed walked back toward the Bradley house, Milam emerged from the barn with a pistol at his side. Milam confronted Reed and asked if he had seen or heard anything. Reed told Milam that he had not. Reed returned to the Bradley house and watched from a window as the men in the barn loaded what appeared to be a body into the pick-up truck.
On August 31, 1955, Till's lynched body was discovered in the Tallahatchie River. The body showed signs that Till had been brutally beaten and shot in the head. Reed saw a photograph of Till in the newspaper and recognized him as the youth who he had seen hunkered down in the truck. Bryant and Milam were arrested for the murder, but Reed's grandfather warned Reed that he would be risking his safety if he spoke up. Louis was later approached by civil rights workers who persuaded him to testify in court. To ensure his safety, Reed went into hiding until the trial.
When Reed arrived at the courthouse to testify in the middle of September 1955, he was met by a "thicket of Klansmen massed outside the courthouse." Reed testified at the trial. He was shown a picture of Till and testified that it looked like the boy he had seen in the back of the truck. He also identified Milam and testified that he saw Milam come out of the barn to get a drink of water and then return to the barn. In his closing argument, the prosecutor reviewed Reed's testimony, noting that if Willie had been lying, the defense would have had needed 50 lawyers to discredit him. The prosecutor argued they couldn't do that "because Willie Reed was telling the truth." He finished by saying, "I don't know but what Willie Reed has more nerve than I have." Despite Reed's testimony and other evidence, Bryant and Milam were found not guilty after an hour of deliberation by an all-white jury.
In the aftermath of the trial, some suggested that Reed had not been a good witness, noting that he had given inconsistent accounts as to how far he was from Milam and whether he really recognized him. Even Till's mother later said that "Little Willie Reed" was "not a good witness." She added, "Willie Reed had a story, but he couldn't tell it. It was locked inside him. It would have taken education to put the key in the lock and turn it loose. Every word that was gotten from Willie had to be pulled out word by word. That's because Willie is 18 years old and has probably been to school only 3 years."
Others had a more positive reaction to Reed's testimony. The Jackson Daily News described his testimony as "the most damaging introduced thus far" and as having "electrified the court." The New York Times later wrote that Reed's testimony "made him a hero" of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. The Daily Worker published an article titled "The Shame of Our Nation" expressing outrage at the result but praising Reed and other witnesses as "heroes of the Negro people ... who stood up in court and in defiance of a white supremacist code fearlessly gave their testimony."
Historian David T. Beito said of Reed: "He was really the best eyewitness that they found. . . . [H]is act in some sense was the bravest act of them all. He had nothing to gain: he had no family ties to Emmett Till; he didn't know him. He was this 18-year-old kid who goes into this very hostile atmosphere."
After testifying in the Till case, Reed moved to Chicago and changed his name from Willie Reed to Willie Louis. He was employed as an orderly at Woodlawn Hospital and later at Jackson Park Hospital. In 1976, he was married to Juliet Louis, who was a nursing aide at Jackson Park. Louis remained silent about his role in the Emmett Till case. His wife did not even learn of his connection to the case until 1984.
In 2003, Louis was located and interviewed by Stanley Nelson, who later wrote a book and produced a documentary on the case. Nelson's documentary, The Murder of Emmett Till, was broadcast on PBS television in the United States and included an interview with Louis.
Thereafter, Louis met Till's mother and began speaking in public about the case. In 2004, he was interviewed on the CBS News television show 60 Minutes. During the interview on 60 Minutes, Louis explained his reasoning in deciding to testify: "I couldn't have walked away from that. Emmett was 14, probably had never been to Mississippi in his life, and he come to visit his grandfather and they killed him. I mean, that's not right."
In July 2013, Louis died of intestinal bleeding at age 76 in Oak Lawn, Illinois.
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Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893 – March 21, 1955) was an American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for almost a quarter of a century and directed a broad program of legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist. He graduated in 1916 from Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), a historically black college.
In 1918, he joined the small national staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in New York at the invitation of James Weldon Johnson. He acted as Johnson's assistant national secretary and traveled to the South to investigate. White later succeeded Johnson as the head of the NAACP, leading the organization from 1931 to 1955.
White oversaw the plans and organizational structure of the fight against public segregation. He worked with President Truman on desegregating the armed forces after the Second World War and gave him a draft for the Executive Order to implement this. Under White's leadership, the NAACP set up the Legal Defense Fund, which raised numerous legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement, and achieved many successes. Among these was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which determined that segregated education was inherently unequal. White also quintupled NAACP membership to nearly 500,000.
Through his cultural interests and his close friendships with white literary power brokers Carl Van Vechten and Alfred A. Knopf, White was one of the founders of the "New Negro" cultural flowering. Popularly known as the "Harlem Renaissance", the period was one of intense literary and artistic production. Harlem became the center of black American intellectual and artistic life. It attracted creative people from across the nation, as did New York City in general.
White was the author of critically acclaimed novels: Fire in the Flint (1924) and Flight (1926). His non-fiction book Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929) was a study of lynching. Additional books were A Rising Wind (1945), his autobiography A Man Called White (1948), and How Far the Promised Land (1955). Unfinished at his death was Blackjack, a novel on Harlem life and the career of an African-American boxer.
Zaki, Sherif
Sherif Zaki (b. November 24, 1955, Alexandria, Egypt - d. November 21, 2021, Atlanta, Georgia, United States). A pathologist who as America's chief infectious disease detective helped identify the Covid-19, Ebola, West Nile and Zika viruses along with the severe acute respiratory syndrome -- SARS.
Sherif Ramzy Zaki was born on November 24, 1955, in Alexandria, Egypt. He spent his first six years in Chapel Hill, N.C., where his father, Ramzy Zaki, was attending graduate school. He later lived in the Caribbean, the Middle East and Europe, where his father worked for the United Nations’ International Labor Organization. His mother, Dalal (Elba) Zaki, was a teacher.
Zaki graduated second in his class of 800 from the Alexandria Medical School in Egypt in 1978. But he was less interested in practicing medicine than in unraveling mysteries, which had been an obsession of his ever since he was captivated by the novels of the British author Enid Blyton as a child. Zaki's obsession with solving puzzles and resolving mysteries was at the heart of his work at the C.D.C
Zaki earned a master’s in pathology from Alexandria University. But since autopsies were not permitted in Egypt for religious reasons, he did his residency in anatomic pathology at Emory University in Atlanta, where he also received a doctorate in experimental pathology.
Zaki then went to work at the C.D.C. and became a naturalized American citizen. Zaki joined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1988 and became chief of the agency’s infectious diseases pathology branch in the early 1990s.
Zaki and his team made strides in distinguishing rare diseases and their mutations and determining what made some of them, like SARS and Ebola, so contagious and lethal. To do so they applied a process called immunohistochemistry, which allows researchers to identify foreign pathogens by staining cells and observing them through electron microscopes capable of magnifying bacteria and viruses 740,000 times.
In 2001, after the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, Zaki determined that a number of people who had come into contact with letters containing a white powder had died from anthrax after their skin was exposed to the bacteria, or after inhaling it.
Zaki and his team helped identify a deadly outbreak of hantavirus in the Navajo Nation in 1993. That discovery spurred the expansion of the infectious diseases pathology branch. The expanded branch subsequently discovered a previously unidentified bacterial illness called leptospirosis in Nicaragua; and the mosquito-borne Zika virus in the brain tissue of babies in Brazil, establishing that it could be transmitted during pregnancy.
Zaki headed the agency’s Unexplained Deaths Project, a squad of detectives of last resort responsible for delving into the causes of the 700 or so baffling fatalities from disease that occur in the United States every year.
After four people who received organ transplants in Massachusetts and Rhode Island developed a viral infection and three of them died, Dr. Zaki and his colleagues pinpointed the cause as lymphocytic choriomeningitis, a rare rodent-borne virus. It turned out that the organ donor’s daughter had a pet hamster.
In 2005, a few days after complaining to his pediatrician of a fever, a headache and an itchy scalp, a 10-year-old Mississippi boy became so agitated that he bit a relative. After the boy was hospitalized, tests were inconclusive, but he died two weeks later.
About a week after that, Zaki’s team detected rabies virus in the boy’s body. They learned from follow-up interviews that dead bats had been discovered in the boy’s home, and that he had found a live bat in his bedroom.
Zaki married Nadia Abougad. They had two children, a daughter, Yasmin, and a son, Samy.
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