The death of Emmett Till
28 August 1955
While visiting family in
Money, Mississippi, 14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago,
is brutally murdered for flirting with a white woman four days earlier. His assailants–the
white woman’s husband and her brother–made Emmett carry a 75-pound cotton-gin
fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to take off his
clothes. The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot
him in the head, and then threw his body, tied to the cotton-gin fan with
barbed wire, into the river.
Till grew up in a
working-class neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, and though he had
attended a segregated elementary school, he was not prepared for the level of
segregation he encountered in Mississippi. His mother warned him to take care
because of his race, but Emmett enjoyed pulling pranks. On August 24, while
standing with his cousins and some friends outside a country store in Money,
Emmett bragged that his girlfriend back home was white. Emmett’s African
American companions, disbelieving him, dared Emmett to ask the white woman
sitting behind the store counter for a date. He went in, bought some candy, and
on the way out was heard saying, “Bye, baby” to the woman. There were no
witnesses in the store, but Carolyn Bryant–the woman behind the counter–claimed
that he grabbed her, made lewd advances, and then wolf-whistled at her as he
sauntered out.
Roy Bryant, the proprietor of
the store and the woman’s husband, returned from a business trip a few days
later and found out how Emmett had spoken to his wife. Enraged, he went to the
home of Till’s great uncle, Mose Wright, with his brother-in-law J.W. Milam in
the early morning hours of August 28. The pair demanded to see the boy. Despite
pleas from Wright, they forced Emmett into their car. After driving around in
the Memphis night, and perhaps beating Till in a toolhouse behind Milam’s
residence, they drove him down to the Tallahatchie River.
Three days later, his corpse
was recovered but was so disfigured that Mose Wright could only identify it by
an initialed ring. Authorities wanted to bury the body quickly, but Till’s
mother, Mamie Bradley, requested it be sent back to Chicago. After seeing the
mutilated remains, she decided to have an open-casket funeral so that all the
world could see what racist murderers had done to her only son. Jet, an African
American weekly magazine, published a photo of Emmett’s corpse, and soon the
mainstream media picked up on the story.
Less than two weeks after
Emmett’s body was buried, Milam and Bryant went on trial in a segregated
courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi. There were few witnesses besides Mose
Wright, who positively identified the defendants as Emmett’s killers. On September
23, the all-white jury deliberated for less than an hour before issuing a
verdict of “not guilty,” explaining that they believed the state had failed to
prove the identity of the body. Many people around the country were outraged by
the decision and also by the state’s decision not to indict Milam and Bryant on
the separate charge of kidnapping.
The Emmett Till murder trial
brought to light the brutality of Jim Crow segregation in the South and was an
early impetus of the African American civil rights movement.
From:
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-death-of-emmett-till
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