Emmett Till Murdered: A Crime That Ignites Civil Rights

Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta, was kidnapped from his great-uncle's home in the early hours of August 28, 1955, by two white men. Three days later, his mutilated body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, weighted down by a 70-pound cotton gin fan tied to his neck with barbed wire. His murder and the acquittal of his killers became one of the catalysts of the modern American civil rights movement. Till had allegedly violated the unwritten racial code of the Jim Crow South. On August 24, he entered Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Mississippi, and interacted with Carolyn Bryant, the 21-year-old white proprietor. Accounts of what happened vary: witnesses said he whistled at her, grabbed her hand, or spoke to her in a familiar way. Carolyn Bryant claimed he made verbal and physical advances. Decades later, she recanted key parts of her testimony. Whatever occurred in the store, it was enough for her husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam to arrive at the home of Till's great-uncle Moses Wright in the middle of the night. They took Till to a barn, beat him savagely, shot him in the head, and dumped his body in the river. When Till's body was recovered, it was so disfigured that Moses Wright could only identify his nephew by the initialed ring on his finger. Till's mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, made the extraordinary decision to hold an open-casket funeral in Chicago, insisting that the world see what had been done to her son. Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender published photographs of the body. Tens of thousands of mourners filed past the casket. Bryant and Milam were tried in September 1955 before an all-white jury in Sumner, Mississippi. The trial lasted five days. The jury deliberated for 67 minutes before returning a not-guilty verdict. One juror later said they would not have taken so long except they stopped to drink sodas. Months later, protected by double jeopardy laws, both men confessed to the killing in a paid interview with Look magazine. The photographs of Emmett Till's destroyed face, published across the nation and the world, mobilized a generation. Rosa Parks cited Till's murder as being on her mind when she refused to give up her bus seat three months later.