Emmett Till

Emmett Till (born July 25, 1941, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died August 28, 1955, Money, Mississippi) was an African American teenager whose murder catalyzed the emerging civil rights movement.

Till was born to working-class parents on the South Side of Chicago. When he was barely 14 years old, Till took a trip to rural Mississippi to spend the summer with relatives. His mother, Mamie Till, knew Emmett to be a jokester accustomed to being the centre of attention, and she warned him that whites in the South could react violently to behaviour that was tolerated in the North. This animosity was exacerbated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that had allowed racial segregation in public facilities.

Till arrived in Money, Mississippi, on August 21, 1955. He stayed with his great-uncle, Moses Wright, who was a sharecropper, and he spent his days helping with the cotton harvest. On August 24, Till and a group of other teens went to a local grocery store after a day of working in the fields. Accounts of what transpired thereafter vary. Some witnesses stated that one of the other boys dared Till to talk to the store’s cashier, Carolyn Bryant, a white woman. It was reported that Till then whistled at, touched the hand or waist of, or flirted with the woman as he was leaving the store. Whatever the truth, Till did not mention the incident to his great-uncle. In the early morning hours of August 28, Roy Bryant, the cashier’s husband, and J.W. Milam, Bryant’s half brother, forced their way into Wright’s home and abducted Till at gunpoint. Bryant and Milam severely beat the boy, gouging out one of his eyes. They then took him to the banks of the Tallahatchie River, where they killed him with a single gunshot to the head. The two men tied the teen’s body to a large metal fan with a length of barbed wire before dumping the corpse into the river.

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Wright reported the kidnapping to the police, and Bryant and Milam were arrested the following day. On August 31, 1955, Till’s corpse was discovered in the river. His face was unrecognizable as a result of the assault, and positive identification was possible only because Till was wearing a monogrammed ring that had belonged to his father. On September 2, less than two weeks after Till had embarked on his journey south, the train bearing his remains arrived in Chicago. Mamie Till kept her son’s casket open, choosing to reveal to the tens of thousands who attended the funeral the brutality that had been visited on her son. The appalling images of Till’s body in the casket appeared in the pages of Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender, and his murder became a rallying point for the civil rights movement.

The trial of Till’s killers began on September 19, 1955, and from the witness stand Wright identified the men who had kidnapped Till. After four days of testimony and a little more than an hour of deliberation, an all-white, all-male jury (at the time, Blacks and women were not allowed to serve as jurors in Mississippi) acquitted Bryant and Milam of all charges. Protected from further prosecution by double jeopardy statutes, the pair was paid for the story and interviewed by their lawyer and a journalist in a 1956 article for Look magazine in which they related the circumstances of Till’s kidnapping and murder. Mamie Till (Mamie Till-Mobley after she remarried in 1957) would dedicate the rest of her life to promoting civil rights and trying to achieve some measure of justice for her son.

In 2004 the Federal Bureau of Investigation reopened the case. Although Bryant and Milam were long dead, agents sought to obtain a conclusive account of Till’s final hours. The three-year investigation, during which Till’s body was exhumed for a complete autopsy, did not lead to the filing of criminal charges, but it did uncover a deathbed confession by Milam’s brother Leslie, who admitted his own involvement in the kidnapping and murder. After the exhumation, Till’s body was reburied in a new casket, and the original one was placed in storage at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois, pending the creation of a planned memorial on the site. In 2009 a scandal involving the reselling of grave plots led police to investigate the cemetery, and they discovered Till’s original casket rusting and abandoned in a work shed on the outskirts of the property. Later that year the casket was donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.