A young African American boy brutally murdered at age 14!? How did it really happen and was it right to do so? Emmett Till grew up in South Chicago in a working-class neighborhood. Emmett had attended a segregated elementary school, however, he was not ready for the segregation that was about to happen when he moved to Mississippi. His mother had warned Till to not pull little pranks because of his race, but TIll fed into being a prankster. Every time someone would dare Emmett to pull a prank on an individual he would do so because he himself and his peers thought it was funny.
On August 24 a little prank would change Emmett Till’s life forever. He was at a country store in Mississippi with his African American friends. The friends roamed around the store looking at the things to purchase. One of Emmett’s friends dared him to ask a white woman sitting behind the store counter for a date simply because the friends disbelieved the fact that Emmett’s girlfriend back home was white. So Emmett did so, he went up to the cashier to buy some candy. After buying the candy he left the store saying “bye baby” to the white cashier after allegedly flirting with Carolyn Bryant, the white cashier for a minute before. Roy Bryant, the woman’s husband, returned from a business trip a few days later and heard how Emmett had allegedly spoken to his wife. Enraged, he went to the home of Till’s great uncle, Mr. Wright, with his friend Millam in the car in the morning of August 28.
He demanded to see Emmett Till. Despite the pleas and cries from the great uncle of Till, he was forced into Roy Bryant’s car. It would have been a whole different story today with technology and simply calling 911 after the incident. After apparently driving around in the night, and perhaps beating Till in a toolhouse they drove him down to the Tallahatchie River. Emmett was not seen for 3 full days later until his dead corpse was recovered by Till’s great uncle Mr. Wright in the Tallahatchie River. Mr. Wright could only recognize Emmet simply because of his initialed ring on one of his fingers. That just shows how brutally murdered Till was for simply not committing any crime of violence, just a funny prank on a white cashier at a county store.
At only age 14 Emmet was brutally murdered. The family of Till soon later had an opened casket during Emmett’s funeral to show the public the brutality of the murder and to show the world what the racist murders did to her only son. The acts of violence were truly horrendous in the murder including beating, eye-gouging, shooting Emmett in the head, and throwing him down the river on top of a cotton gin from the evidence brought forth during the trial that was about to happen.
Later after TIll’s body was buried Bryant and Milam went on trial in a segregated courthouse in Mississippi. The trial went on for only about an hour through deliberation and numerous points of evidence on Till’s side, however, the all-white jury issued a verdict of “not guilty.” They explained that they believed the state had failed to prove the identity of the body. Numerous were furious and outraged at the decision because it was clear that Roy Bryant was the killer. They were also outraged by the state’s decision not to indict Bryant and Milliam on the separate charge of kidnapping.
This act prompted outrage and activism amongst African Americans and numerous others from the terror Emmett experienced from not even committing a single crime. The shocking brutality of Till’s murder served to galvanize civil rights workers in Mississippi and beyond. The African Americans that would stand up for change amongst African American lynchings would be risking their own lives on it happening to themselves due to segregation and the Klu Klux Klan in full swing during Till’s murder. The Emmett Till murder trial brought light to the brutality of Jim Crow Segregation in the South and was an early momentum boost for the civil rights movement.
https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/articles-and-essays/murder-of-emmett-till/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emmett-Till
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-death-of-emmett-till
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjr6XLcCXgU
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