Emmet Till

On Aug. 20, 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year old Black youth from Chicago, arrived in Money, Mississippi by train with his cousin, 16-year old Wheeler Parker Jr., accompanying Till’s great uncle and Parker’s grandfather, Moses Wright, as he returned to the Mississippi Delta after a brief trip North. Four days later, Emmett, several cousins, and a few neighbor children drove into town to the Bryant Grocery and Meat Market, where 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant was working. Till entered the store and bought bubble gum, and when he left, Carolyn followed him to the door. Unfamiliar with Southern etiquette, he waved, said "goodbye" rather than "goodbye, ma'am," and, according to family members, gave a wolf-whistle toward the young white woman. Upset, she went toward a car, reportedly to get a gun according to trial testimony, and Till and his frightened companions sped away toward home. Three days later, at about 2 a.m., Carolyn Bryant’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, forced their way into the Wright home, pulled Till from bed at gunpoint, and took him away. Three days after that, his beaten, swollen, decomposing body was found in the Tallahatchie River by a young fisherman, weighted down with a 75-pound cotton gin fan. The murder became national and then international news after Till’s mother insisted on an open-casket funeral so the world could see what had been done to her son. Photographs of his battered face appeared in the Black press, and tens of thousands of mourners in Chicago passed his coffin over five days. Milam and Bryant, arrested soon after the abduction, went on trial for murder on Sept. 19, 1955, and an all-white jury acquitted them five days later. The killing became one of the most brutal crimes in American history, and the verdict came to be regarded as one of the nation’s great injustices.

Mims, Florida · United States