Emmett was born in East Point, Louisiana, as one of nine boys and four girls. His father was Joe Wells and his mother Ida Flanagan Wells, who died when Emmett was an infant. He grew up in a log house. "You could see daylight through the logs, through the ceiling and through the wooden floor," he recalls. He walked three miles to the family's church, New Jerusalem, where a school for African-American children was located. His father worked as a sharecropper, and was often cheated at "settling time," when white landowners paid workers for their share of the crop. Some years his father made only ten dollars at settling time. Emmett ended his school at "about sixteen or seventeen," he says. He went into the U.S. Army in 1943, and sailed into the Pacific on the New Amsterdam, landing in Wellington, New Zealand.