Emmett Till was born on July 25th, 1941 into a middle-class black community in Chicago, Illinois. He liked the attention and was a prankster, as well as an industrious young boy. At the age of 14, he went to visit his relatives in Mississippi for the summer. His mother, knowing how he is, advised him to be careful as his actions could be interpreted differently by the Southern whites as opposed to the Northern ones.
On August 24th, 1955 in rural Mississippi, Till and some of his friends were goofing around and they dared Till to go talk with the cashier in Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market. There are many conspiracies as to what happened in the market, but the cashier, a woman named Carolyn, claimed that Till had whistled at her, grabbed her and made lewd advances towards her as he left the store. Word got around and Bryant’s husband who was out of town caught word and was furious. Roy Bryant, Carolyn’s husband, and his brother in law went to Till’s uncle’s house and kidnapped him in the night. Three days later, his lifeless and mangled body was found hanging from a metal fan over the Tallahatchie River. The two men had gouged out his eyes, dragged him from their car and even shot him; they essentially had beaten him to unrecognition. He was so unrecognizable that the only way that he was able to be identified as Emmett Till was by a ring he was wearing that his uncle had said looked familiar.
Till’s mother decided to have the body shipped back to Illinois to have an open casket ceremony to display the vile hate crime that occurred. She could not explain what happened to her sweet, innocent boy respectively. Both Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, the brother in law, were put on trial for the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till. During this time period, African-Americans and Caucasian women were unable to be on juries, so the jury for Till’s trial was constructed of an all-white, all male population. Using 67 minutes to deliberate, the jury came to the conclusion to acquit the men of the hate crime. In January 1956, five months after the incident, the men disclosed that they had committed the crime against Emmett Till, but due to double jeopardy laws, they would not be able to be tried again for that crime.
This horrendous act committed against Emmett Till was essentially the pivotal spark in the civil rights movement, as some would say. And what is shocking about all of this is that Carolyn Bryant, who had originally told her husband what had “happened”, recanted her testimony and admitted that Till had never touched, harassed or threatened her in any way. The unnecessary murder of Emmett Till is something that we must remember as a society. As a society in 2019, we must remember Emmett Till and his story. His story must not go forgotten and his name must be remembered. We must not allow for white supremacists to continue these hateful acts, and we must actively fight against these types of bigots.
HCXO,
Angela