On August 28, 1955, a fourteen year old African-American boy from Chicago, Emmett Till, was kidnapped, brutally murdered and tossed into the Tallahatchie River for allegedly whistling at a white women in a lewd manner while visiting his relatives in Mississippi. Till’s murder would spark a wave of righteous indignation across the nation because of sheer brutality of the lynching and the young age of the victim and become the catalyst for what would become known as the Civil Rights movement.
The summer of 1955 was a hot one in the United States. Racial tensions were on the rise in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education which declared race-based segregation unconstitutional. Bitter and angry Southern whites vowed a campaign of “massive resistance” to counter the court’s orders to desegregate and other threats to what they perceived as their way of life. In the months before Till’s murder, Rev. George Lee and Lamar Smith were separately shot and killed in Mississippi after helping organize black voter-registration drives. It was against this backdrop that Mamie Till sent her only child to visit her relatives in Money, Mississippi, hoping to escape the boredom of another Chicago summer. Before he left for Mississippi, Mrs. Till urged her son to be careful and to watch how he behaved in front of white people there because Chicago and Mississippi were completely different. “Even though you think you’re perfectly within your right, for goodness sake take low,” she said, according to subsequently published accounts. “If necessary, get on your knees and beg apologies.”
Till arrived at his uncle Mose Wright’s home on August 21. Three days later, he and his two cousins, had skipped church where their uncle was preaching and instead headed to the local grocery store to buy some candy. The grocery store mostly served the local sharecropper population and was owned by a poor white couple, 24-year-old Roy Bryant and his 21-year-old wife Carolyn. Carolyn Bryant was alone in the front of the store that day; her sister-in-law was in the rear of the store watching children. What actually happened on August 21 is subject to multiple conflicting accounts but most claim that Till had whistled at Bryant or had engaged in some other lewd advance, something that was a serious taboo in the Jim Crowe South. Bryant stormed out of the store and warned she was going to get a pistol.
Till and his cousins immediately understood the gravity of the situation. They quickly fled the scene at the urging of some of the older men around town hoping to avoid any unwanted violence. Till refrained from telling his uncle what had happened, fearful that he might incur a reprimand and pleaded to return home to Chicago. A few days later, Roy Bryant and his half brother , J.W. Millam went to Mose Wright’s home, in the dead, of night, and abducted the terrified 14-year old at gun point. They marched Till to the back of their pick up truck and tied him up before driving off to an isolated barn where they proceeded to teach the young boy a deadly lesson. There they viciously beat Till as the boy begged for his mother. They poked out his eye, shot him in the head, and tied a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to his neck with barbed wire before tossing his body into the Tallahatchie River with no remorse for what they had done.
When Till’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie river, his mother could barely identify her son. Nevertheless, Mamie Till was determined that her only son would not die in vain. Mississippi officials pressured her to burry Emmett in Mississippi in a closed casket ceremony hoping to avoid a spectacle. Mamie Till ignored the pressure and brought Emmett Till’s badly disfigured body back to Chicago where she held an open casket funeral hoping to capture the nation’s attention and shine a spotlight on the deep racism and white supremacist violence directed at African-Americans in the South. The train carrying Till’s body was greeted by large crowds while over 200,000 people paid their respects during the four days of public viewings. Jet Magazine published an expose of photos of Till’s mangled body and his grieving mother at the funeral that went reverberated across the nation and around the world. These images would accelerate the civil rights movement and inspire African-American Americans to put life and limb at risk in pursuit of racial equality and justice. Less than six months later, an African-American woman in Montgomery Alabama named Rosa Parks was arrested and fined for refusing to give her bus seat to a white passenger. When asked why she refused to move Parks explained that she thought about going to the back of the bus but then she thought about Emmett Till and she couldn’t do it.
Within a day after Till’s disappearance, both Bryant and Millam were arrested but the chances of two white men being convicted of murdering an African-American boy in 1950s Mississippi were somewhere between slim and none. The two men were put on trial in September and battle lines were quickly drawn. Every lawyer in the county donated their services and $10,000 was collected from local businessmen in support of Bryant and Millam’s defense. Moreover, many whites showed up to watch the trial, bringing their children, picnic baskets and ice cream cones. Meanwhile, African American spectators were relegated to the back and looked on in fear. Neither Bryant nor Millam would be called to the stand to testify and they would eventually be acquitted by an all white male jury after only 67 minutes of deliberations. Jurors later admitted in interviews that although they knew Bryant and Milam were guilty of Till’s murder, they did not think imprisonment or the death penalty were appropriate punishments for white men who had killed a black man. After the verdict was read, Bryant and Millam defiantly walked out of the courtroom lit up cigars and kissed their wives in celebration.
Months later, the two men confessed to killing Till in an interview with Look magazine in exchange for $4,000, however, because of the precedent of double jeopardy in U.S. law, they were never tried again for the murder. In 2017, Carolyn Bryant recanted her testimony, admitting that Till had never touched, threatened or harassed her. “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him,” she said.
Tragedy and Farce 