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The murder of emmett till.

The murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 brought nationwide attention to the racial violence and injustice prevalent in Mississippi. While visiting his relatives in Mississippi, Till went to the Bryant store with his cousins, and may have whistled at Carolyn Bryant. Her husband, Roy Bryant, and brother-in-law, J.W. Milam, kidnapped and brutally murdered Till, dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River. The newspaper coverage and murder trial galvanized a generation of young African Americans to join the Civil Rights Movement out of fear that such an incident could happen to friends, family, or even themselves. Many interviewees in the Civil Rights History Project remember how this case deeply affected their lives.

Two of Emmett Till’s cousins, Wheeler Parker and Simeon Wright , witnessed Till’s kidnapping on the night of August 28, 1955 at the home of Moses Wright. They both describe their family’s background in Mississippi and Chicago, the incident at Bryant’s store, and the terror they felt when Bryant and Milan entered their home and took Till. Parker describes the funeral in Chicago, which drew thousands of people: “The solemn atmosphere there, you know, it’s just – it’s just unbelievable, I guess you could say. The air was filled with just, I guess, unbelief and how could it happen to a kid? People just felt helpless.”

Two journalists, Moses Newson and Simeon Booker , were assigned to cover the murder for the Tri-State Defender and JET , respectively. Booker attended the funeral with photographer David Jackson, who took the famous image of Till in the coffin. In this joint interview, Booker explains: “ JET’s circulation just took off when they ran the picture. They had to reprint, the first time they ever reprinted JET magazine. And there was a lot of interest in that case. And the entire black community was becoming aware of the need to do something about it.” The two journalists also covered the trial and were instrumental in helping to find some key witnesses. Bryant and Milam were acquitted, however, which outraged the African American community nationwide.

African American children and teenagers, particularly those in the South, were shocked by the photographs in JET and the outcome of the trial. Sisters Joyce and Dorie Ladner , who grew up in Mississippi, remember keeping a scrapbook of every article about Till and their fear that their brothers could be killed too. Dorie Ladner was inspired to learn more about the law after Bryant and Milam were acquitted: “That’s where the light bulb went off: Why aren’t they being punished?  And that’s when I went on my quest to try to understand the whole legal system and equal rights and justice under the law.” Joyce Ladner discusses how she coined the term, “Emmett Till Generation,” which she uses to describe the African American baby boomers in the South who were inspired by Till’s murder to join a burgeoning movement of mass meetings, sit-ins, and marches to demand their equal treatment under the law.

Cleveland Sellers was 11 years old when he learned about Emmett Till through JET . He remembers, “I was devastated by the fact that Emmett could have been me or any other black kid around that same age. And so, I related to that very quickly. And we had discussions in our class about Emmett Till. I had a cover of the JET , took it to school. Some other students had the same thing. And so, we had rational discussions about it. And, you know, the question comes up: How do you address that? And I think, for us, it was projected out, that that would be our destiny to try to find remedies to a society that would allow that to happen, would condone that, and would actually free those who were responsible for that murder. And I think that that was a way in which we actually got away from revenge and hatred and those kinds of things. We talked about how we were going to use Emmett Till to build on, that we would rectify in our work and in our effort the dastardly tragedy that happened to Emmett Till.”

The Library of Congress holds many other online collection items related to Emmett Till, including photographs of him, his family, his funeral, and the murder trial; federal resolutions and bills including the  Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2007; a press release issued by the NAACP the day after Till’s body was found; and a telegram from Paul Robeson expressing his outrage at the acquittal of Till’s murderers.

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Emmett Till

By: History.com Editors

Updated: October 12, 2023 | Original: December 2, 2009

Emmett Till, a 14-year old Black youth, was murdered in August 1955 in a racist attack that shocked the nation and provided a catalyst for the emerging civil rights movement . A Chicago native, Till was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, when he was accused of harassing a local white woman. Several days later, relatives of the woman abducted Till, brutally beating and killing him before disposing of his body in a nearby river. Till’s devastated mother insisted on a public, open-casket funeral for her son to shed light on the violence inflicted on Black people in the South. Till’s murderers were acquitted, but his death galvanized civil rights activists nationwide.

Early Years

Emmett Louis Till was born on July 25, 1941 in Chicago, Illinois, the only child of Louis and Mamie Till. Till never knew his father, a private in the United States Army during World War II .

Emmett Till’s mother was by all accounts an extraordinary woman. While raising Emmett Till as a single mother, she worked long hours for the Air Force as a clerk in charge of secret and confidential files.

With his mother often working more than 12-hour days, Till took on his full share of domestic responsibilities from a very young age. His mother recalls, “Emmett had all the house responsibility. I mean everything was really on his shoulders, and Emmett took it upon himself. He told me if I would work, and make the money, he would take care of everything else. He cleaned, and he cooked quite a bit. And he even took over the laundry.”

Carolyn Bryant

In August 1955, Till’s great uncle Moses Wright came up from Mississippi to visit the family in Chicago. At the end of his stay, Wright was planning to take Till’s cousin, Wheeler Parker, back to Mississippi with him to visit relatives down South. When Till learned of these plans he begged his mother to let him go along.

Three days after arriving in Money, Mississippi, on August 24, 1955, Emmett Till and a group of teenagers entered Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market to buy refreshments after a long day picking cotton in the hot afternoon sun. What exactly transpired inside the grocery store that afternoon will never be known.

Till purchased bubble gum, and some of the kids with him would later report that he either whistled at, flirted with, or touched the hand of the store’s white female clerk Carolyn Bryant, the owner's wife.

Four days later, at approximately 2:30 in the morning on August 28, 1955, Roy Bryant, Carolyn’s husband, and his half-brother J.W. Milam kidnapped Till from Moses Wright’s home. They then beat the teenager brutally, dragged him to the bank of the Tallahatchie River, shot him in the head, tied him with barbed wire to a large metal fan and shoved his mutilated body into the water.

Did you know? In 2009, the original glass-topped casket that Emmett Till was buried in was acquired by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Body and Open-Casket Funeral

Till’s body was shipped to Chicago, where his mother opted to have an open-casket funeral with Till’s body on display for five days. Thousands of people came to the Roberts Temple Church of God to see the evidence of this brutal hate crime.

Till’s mother said that, despite the enormous pain it caused her to see her son’s dead body on display, she opted for an open-casket funeral to “let the world see what has happened, because there is no way I could describe this. And I needed somebody to help me tell what it was like.”

In the weeks that passed between Till’s burial and the murder and kidnapping trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, two Black publications, Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender , published graphic images of Till’s corpse. By the time the trial commenced on September 19, Emmett Till’s murder had become a source of outrage and indignation throughout much of the country.

How Emmett Till’s Murder Galvanized the Civil Rights Movement

The alleged motive behind Emmett Till's 1955 lynching may have been based on a lie, but the brutal crime inspired a new wave of activism.

Same Date, 8 Years Apart: From Emmett Till’s Murder to ‘I Have a Dream,’ in Photos

Eight years to the day after Till’s death, some 250,000 people gathered in the nation’s capital for the iconic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

The Unsolved Mystery of the First People Killed During the Civil Rights Movement

Law enforcement knew who killed Harry and Harriette Moore on Christmas in 1951. So why wasn’t justice served?

Trial and Acquittal

Because Black people and women were barred from serving jury duty, Bryant and Milam were tried before an all-white, all-male jury. In an act of extraordinary bravery, Moses Wright took the stand and identified Bryant and Milam as Till’s kidnappers and killers. At the time, it was almost unheard of for Black people to openly accuse whites in court, and by doing so Wright put his own life in grave danger.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of the defendants’ guilt and widespread pleas for justice from outside Mississippi, on September 23 the panel of white male jurors acquitted Bryant and Milam of all charges. Their deliberations lasted a mere 67 minutes.

Only a few months later, in January 1956, Bryant and Milam admitted to committing the crime. Protected by double jeopardy laws, they told the whole story of how they kidnapped and killed Emmett Till to Look magazine for $4,000.

Coming only one year after the Supreme Court ‘s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education mandated the end of racial segregation in public schools, Till’s death provided an important catalyst for the American civil rights movement.

Emmett Till Film and Legacy

In 2007, over 50 years after the murder, the woman who claimed Till harassed her recanted parts of her account. Speaking to a historian, the 72-year-old Carolyn Bryant Donham admitted Till hadn’t grabbed her. “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him,” she told Timothy B. Tyson, who was writing a book about the case. The revelations weren’t made public until 2017, when the book was released.

In 2018, following Donham’s admission, the Justice Department opened a new inquiry into the case. And in 2022, an arrest warrant for Carolyn Bryant Donham was discovered in the files of a Mississippi courthouse basement. Till’s family members have demanded that the warrant, dated to 1955, should finally be served. Donham died in 2023.

In 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act , which makes lynching, kidnapping and other acts a federal hate crime. Civil rights supporters had been pushing for such an act for more than a century, since the days of the anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells . In July 2023, Biden signed a proclamation to establish a national monument, the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument, across three sites in Illinois and Mississippi.

A film about Emmett Till and his family, entitled Till , premiered in 2022. The film was directed by Chinonye Chukwu and written by Chukwu, Michael Reilly and Keith A. Beauchamp. (Beauchamp also produced the 2005 documentary, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till .)

HISTORY Vault: Voices of Civil Rights

A look at one of the defining social movements in U.S. history, told through the personal stories of men, women and children who lived through it.

The Murder of Emmett Till. Library of Congress . Emmett Till. FBI . Emmett Till's family seeks the arrest of a woman after a 1955 warrant is found. NPR . Biden signs bill named after Emmett Till making lynching a hate crime. NBC News .

Biden signs bill to establish Emmett Till monument. AP News H.R.55 - Emmett Till Antilynching Act. Congress.gov .

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• HISTORY & CULTURE

How Emmett Till’s murder catalyzed the U.S. civil rights movement

A new film, Till, documents the decades-long pursuit of justice for the 14-year-old, whose 1955 killing galvanized a generation of activists.

On August 31, 1955, the mutilated body of 14-year-old Emmett Till was found floating in the Tallahatchie River.

Beaten and murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman, the teen was one of many Black men, women, and children who were lynched without recourse in the century after the Civil War. Till’s story woke the nation up to the violent reality of being Black in America.

His legacy endures today—thanks in part to his mother, Mamie Elizabeth Till, who showed the world the brutality of her son’s murder and fought tirelessly for justice. Although Emmett’s killers were never convicted, his name and face are still evoked in the ongoing struggle for equality. Their story is told in the new film Till .

This is how Emmett Till’s murder, and his fearless mother, helped ignite the American civil rights movement.

Who was Emmett Till and what happened to him?

Emmett “Bobo” Louis Till was just 14 years old when he was murdered. Family remember him as a fun loving, gentle person who loved practical jokes and making others laugh.

But Till grew up in a time when most public spaces were segregated and marriage between races was illegal. Black people were taught to speak to white people with their eyes turned to the ground and to address them with honorifics. Violations were often answered with beatings and other uses of force.

Raised in Chicago, Till was visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta in the summer of 1955. On the evening of August 24, Till went with some cousins to the Bryant Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Mississippi.

( What were Jim Crow laws ?)

Carolyn Bryant Donham, the store owner’s wife, was tending the store that evening. Despite Bryant Donham’s later claims that Till repeatedly grabbed and harassed her in the store, court documents show Till paid two cents for bubble gum and left without incident. When Bryant Donham left the store, Till whistled— his cousins say it wasn’t directed at her, but knew this would cause trouble and drove away.

Over the next three days , Bryant Donham’s husband Roy terrorized two other Black teenagers mistaken for Till: one in the Bryant store, and another walking in the road, who was thrown in the back of Bryant’s van before he was released.

On August 28 at 2:30 a.m., Bryant, his brother J.W. Milam, and at least one other person went to the Wright home looking for the boy who had “done the talking” at the grocery store. They woke Till up and ordered him to get dressed, threatening his relatives and refusing their offer of payment in exchange for letting Till go.

( A new trail marks some of the most significant landmarks of the civil rights movement .)

The next day, Leflore County Sheriff’s Department arrested both Bryant and Milam and charged them with kidnapping. They admitted to taking Till but claimed they released him.

Two days later, Till’s naked body was found floating in the Tallahatchie River with a 75-pound cotton gin fan tied to his neck with barbed wire. His face was disfigured nearly beyond recognition.  

Bryant and Milam were indicted on charges of murder.

What happened to Emmett Till’s killers?

In September 1955, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant were tried for murder before a jury of all white men in a Tallahatchie County court. A Black teen named Willy Reed risked his life to testify that he saw the men drive Till to a farm where Reed heard them beat Till mercilessly in the barn.

The jury acquitted Milam and Bryant after deliberating for only 67 minutes. One juror told a reporter they wouldn’t have taken so long if they hadn’t “stopped to drink pop.” In November, the brothers also escaped kidnapping charges.

The men later confessed in a story they sold to Look magazine that they took Till to the Tallahatchie River, where they shot him in the head and pushed his body into the water.

No one else was ever indicted or prosecuted for involvement in Till’s kidnapping or murder.  

How did Emmett Till’s murder catalyze the civil rights movement?

When Mamie Till learned her son was kidnapped, she gathered her family and called up newspapers the same day. By the next morning, she had gotten the NAACP and local and state politicians involved. This early publicity proved critical.

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Her son’s casket arrived in Chicago locked with the seal of the state of Mississippi, but Mamie Till fought for the undertaker to open it. Once she saw her son, she made a monumental decision to have an open casket funeral. She famously told the funeral director: “Let the people see what I’ve seen.”

( Who was Medgar Evers ?)

Tens of thousands of people came to see Emmett Till’s body. Jet magazine photographer David Jackson was among them, taking the photo of Till in his coffin that brought America face-to-face with the murder. Jackson, along with journalists Simeon Booker from Jet and Moses Newson of the Tri-State Defender , made the case national news.

Till’s horrific murder inspired what was later dubbed the “Emmett Till Generation” of Southern Black youth who joined meetings, sit-ins, and marches to demand their equal treatment under the law.

It also inspired the leaders of the movement. One hundred days after Till’s murder, Rosa Parks sat in the front of a Montgomery bus and refused to get up as it filled with white passengers, violating Alabama’s bus segregation laws. Reverend Jesse Jackson said in 1988 that Rosa “thought about going to the back of the bus. But then she thought about Emmett Till and she couldn’t do it.”

( How Martin Luther King, Jr.’s view on human rights inspires us today .)

Martin Luther King, Jr. , one of the most prominent leaders of the civil rights movement, also invoked Till’s case in several speeches. He delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the anniversary of Till’s murder at the 1963 March on Washington.

What is Till’s legacy today?

David Jackson’s powerful photograph of Emmett Till’s disfigured body continues to resonate: It has been linked with videos of Rodney King’s beating in 1991, Philando Castile’s fatal shooting at a traffic stop in 2016, George Floyd ’s murder in 2020, and countless other racial injustices that have occurred in the decades since Till’s murder.

The racism that led to Till’s killing is still very much alive today, as hate groups have more than doubled in the last two decades.The memorial sign that marks where Till’s body was pulled from the river was riddled with bullet holes and had to be replaced with one covered in bullet proof glass.

( The struggle for voting rights continue decades after the March on Washington .)

Today, there’s still a push to bring charges against Carolyn Bryant Donham, one of the last living people connected to the case. In 2017, Duke University historian Timothy B. Tyson released a book in which Bryant Donham allegedly admitted lying about her interaction in the store with Till. But in December 2021, the Department of Justice announced   it closed its investigation after it was unable to confirm that she had recanted her statement. In August 2022, a Mississippi grand jury also declined to indict Bryant Donham, now in her 80s.

Despite Mamie Till’s best efforts, justice for Emmett Till remains elusive.

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Emmett Till's Death Inspired a Movement

The alleged teasing of white store clerk Carolyn Bryant by the 14 year-old African American Emmett Till led to his brutal murder at the hands of Bryant’s husband Roy and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, forcing the American public to grapple with the menace of violence in the Jim Crow South. According to court documents, Till, who was visiting family for the summer in Money, Mississippi, from Chicago, purchased two-cents worth of bubble gum from the Bryant Grocery store and said, “Bye, baby” over his shoulder to Carolyn Bryant as he exited the store.

That night Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam ran into Emmett’s uncle’s home where he was staying, dragged Till from his bed, beat him to the point of disfigurement, and shot him before tossing his body into the Tallahatchie River with a cotton-gin fan attached with barbed wire laced to his neck to weigh him down. Bryant and Milam maintained their innocence and would eventually be acquitted of the murder by an all-white, all male jury. They later sold their story for $4,000 to Look magazine – bragging about the murder as a form of Southern justice implemented to protect white womanhood.

For African Americans, the murder of Till was evidenceof the decades-old codes of violence exacted upon Black men and women for breaking the rules of white supremacy in the Deep South. Particularly for Black males, who found themselves under constant threat of attack or death for sexual advances towards white women – mostly imagined – Till’s murder reverberated a need for immediate change. Carolyn Bryant testified in court that Till had grabbed her hand, and after she pulled away, he followed her behind the counter, clasped her waist, and using vulgur language, told her that he had been with white women before. At 82, some 60 years later, Bryant, confessed to Duke University professor Timothy B. Tyson that she had lied about this entire event.

Token for membership in the Ku Klux Klan, Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Anonymous Gift.

Members of Citizens’ Councils (white supremacist civic organizations that used public policy and electoral power to reinforce Jim Crow), celebrated the acquittal, further threatening those who had testified against Bryant and Milam and members of the local NAACP. But rather than bending to the intimidation and psychic horror caused by the savage murder, Till’s family, along with national newspapers and civil rights organizations – including the NAACP used his death to strike a blow against racial injustice and terrorism.

A boycott of the Bryant Grocery caused its closure shortly after the trial , and the the Bryants and Milam moved to Texas. Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley insisted on an open-casket at his funeral services – which were attended by more than 50,000 people and chronicled by Jet magazine. The photo of Till with his mother earlier that year alongside Jet’s photo of his mutilated corpse horrified the nation and became a catalyst for the bourgeoning civil rights movement.

One hundred days after Till’s murder, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery city bus and was arrested for violating Alabama's bus segregation laws. Reverend Jesse Jackson told Vanity Fair (1988) that “Rosa said she thought about going to the back of the bus. But then she thought about Emmett Till and she couldn’t do it.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks at 16 St. Baptist Church, Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, © Estate of James Karales.

The Women's Democratic Council, under Jo Ann Robinson, called for a citywide bus boycott and asked a young, 26-year-old minister to help. His name was Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. King, was deeply impacted by Till’s abduction and murder, delivering a sermon just days after Bryant and Milam’s acquittal (“Pride Versus Humility: The Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican,” at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church), in which he lamented Till and the lack of moral piety among violent segregationists.

“The white men who lynch Negroes worship Christ. That jury in Mississippi, which a few days ago in the Emmett Till case, freed two white men from what might be considered one of the most brutal and inhuman crimes of the twentieth century, worships Christ. The perpetrators of many of the greatest evils in our society worship Christ. This trouble is that all people, like the Pharisee, go to church regularly, they pay their tithes and offerings, and observe religiously the various ceremonial requirements. The trouble with these people, however, is that they worship Christ emotionally and not morally. They cast his ethical and moral insights behind the gushing smoke of emotional adoration and ceremonial piety,” King said.

March on Washington--Marchers Gathering at the Lincoln Memorial After Walking from Washington Monument Grounds,  Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of James H. Wallace Jr., © Jim Wallace.

Dr. King would use the momentum of outrage to galvanize the nation against social and racial injustice, invoking Till’s murder when talking about “the evil of racial injustice” in several speeches, as well as “the crying voice of a little Emmett C. Till, screaming from the rushing waters in Mississippi” in a 1963 Mother’s Day sermon. Eight years later, on the anniversary of Emmett Till’s murder, Dr. King delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington.

Learn more about Till and the African American struggle for equal rights in our Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: Era of Segregation 1876-1968 exhibition.

One hundred days after Tills murder, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery city bus and was arrested for violating Alabama's bus segregation laws.

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This is the muddy backwoods Tallahatchie River, where a weighted body was found, alleged to be that of young Emmett Till.

I saw a hole, which I presumed was a bullet hole. And I could look through that hole and see daylight on the other side. And I wondered, was it necessary to shoot him?

Here is Money, Mississippi. The home of Roy Bryant. It was here that the Chicago Negro boy Emmett Till is alleged to have paid unwelcome attention to Roy Bryant's most attractive wife.

When white womens was on the streets, you had to get off of the street. That was a way of life. And all a white woman had to say was, that nigger looked at me or sassed me. So we're talking about a way of life that in this part of the country that was enforced by law.

This was the home of Moses Wright. It was from this shack the state alleges Emmett Till was taken by Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam.

House was as dark as a thousand midnights. You couldn't see. It was like a nightmare. I mean, someone come and stand over you with a pistol in one hand, a flashlight. He was 16 years old. It's a terrifying experience.

The Till case held the whole system up for inspection by the rest of the country and by the rest of the world. It was the beginning of the focusing on the problems between the races in the Deep South that culminated in the ultimate civil rights battles of the rest of the '50s and into the '60s.

I think Black people's reaction was so visceral, and I think it was probably more than anything else in terms of the mass civil rights movement, the spark that launched it. Everybody knew we were under attack. And that attack was symbolized by the attack on a 14-year-old boy.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

When one drives through the Loess Hills and looks out at the sweep of those fields below, flat as a pancake, as far as the eye can see, it's breathtaking. Those who have not been to the delta find themselves gasping at the sight as they come over the Loess Hills and see that expanse of flat agricultural land.

It was the summer of 1955 when Emmett Till arrived in Mississippi from Chicago. His family had worked cotton for generations. But this trip would be Emmett's introduction to the delta known as the most Southern place on Earth.

This is Mississippi. Today, a situation exists in Mississippi that is unlike the situation in most states in the nation. In some sections of the state, there is a preponderance of colored citizens. This situation has brought problems. It has created challenges. But most important of all, it has inspired a social system to meet the challenge. In every community in Mississippi, there is segregation of the races. Drinking fountains are segregated. Restrooms are segregated. The local theater is segregated.

You never in any way said anything that they didn't like. You didn't disagree with them on the whole. You just didn't do that. If a white person did something to you, you had no recourse at all. People disappeared. We don't know what happened to them. They just disappeared.

In the 75 years before Emmett Till set foot in Mississippi, more than 500 Black people had been lynched in the state. Most were men who had been accused of associating with white women.

Part of that culture was that the women were put on pedestals. And they were some sort of idealization of whatever it means to be woman or to be female. There was an almost irrational fear of Black men. As if every Black man was ready to attack or rape a white woman if you gave him a chance.

I can remember when my father died. Sammy, the Black man who worked for him, was saying, I threw my arms around his neck. And he pulled away from me. He could not have that physical show of affection of sharing grief or whatever. Black men did not touch white women.

Many white Southerners, perhaps most Deep South Southerners, had convinced themselves that Black people were relatively happy in their segregated relationships with white people. Most white people I think had convinced themselves that this was a defensible social system in which they lived.

I had a cousin that was living in Mississippi and was walking down the sidewalk down near downtown in Tunica. And didn't get off the sidewalk, and the man slapped him and knocked him off the sidewalk. And he got up. Instead of killing the white man like he wanted, he just started walking and never stopped until he got to Memphis and never stopped until he got up to Chicago.

Hundreds of thousands of Black people fled Mississippi for Chicago in the years between the world wars. One-way train fare of $11.10 took them to a different world. Neighborhoods and schools were segregated. But the city offered a kind of freedom Black Mississippians could only dream about.

Chicago was a land of promise. And they thought that milk and honey was everywhere. And so it was a lot of excitement leaving the South, leaving the cotton fields. You could hold your head up in Chicago.

Mamie Carthan arrived in Chicago at the age of two. An only child, young Mamie was the hope of her family of former sharecroppers. She graduated from high school at the top of her class and became one of the first Black women in town to hold a civil service job. In 1940, Mamie married soldier Louis Till. And one year later, their son Emmett was born.

In 1945, Mamie got word that Private Till had died in Europe. All she received of his possessions was a signet ring inscribed with his initials, L.T. Emmett, her only child, was four years old. A childhood case of polio left him with a stutter. But by the time he was a teenager, Emmett Till had grown into a cocky, self-assured boy who loved to be the center of attention.

When we first met, we were in gym in Mr. Long's gym period. I remember Emmett raising his shirt up to about his navel and start making his belly roll. Just waves of fat rolling, and it just broke us up. I mean, the whole gym went crazy. He was that kind of kid.

Anything going on, he's in the middle of all of it. And he just loved to play ball. He just loved jokes. He would pay people to tell him jokes. If there was a group there, Emmett was in front. And he was the lively one. He was the one that everybody looked to. Natural born leader.

In June of 1955, Black Chicago swung to a new kind of music called rock and roll. A Supreme Court decision had struck down school segregation the year before. Emmett finished seventh grade, and in July, he turned 14.

I knew Emmett Till. We went to grammar school together. And Emmett was a fun young man. Just like any other young teenager. The boys wore polyester pants, crepe sole shoes. I would wear flared skirts with the crinoline underneath. You must have the crinoline. And we were doing the bop. That's the bebop. And we just danced and had fun. And we were just all good friends.

In August, Emmett's great uncle, Moses Wright, visited Chicago and invited Emmett and his cousin Wheeler home to Mississippi. Before she let them go, Mamie schooled the boys on the ways of the South.

I let them know that Mississippi was not Chicago. And when you go to Mississippi, you're living by an entirely different set of rules. It is yes, ma'am, and no, ma'am. Yes, sir, and no, sir. And Beau, if you see a white woman coming down the street, you get off the sidewalk and drop your head. Don't even look at her.

The concern for Emmett was that he could be with his fun-loving, free-spirited way of living, he could get in trouble. He could have a lot of problems. He was 14, but he just turned 14. He was just 13 a few weeks before we went down there.

He thought I was exaggerating. Which I was. I was trying to exaggerate. If I could go high enough, things could see-- soak into his head that you have to be very careful.

As Emmett packed his bags, Mississippi was set to explode. Two Black men had recently been killed for registering Black voters. And a push to implement the new law on school desegregation had whites from the delta to the statehouse spitting fire.

You are not going to permit the NAACP to take over your schools.

You are not going to permit the NAACP to control your state.

It was argued in coffee shops all over the Deep South that if we give on this, then we will start giving on everything else. And the first thing you know, we won't have a segregated society. And Black people will be taking over in this part of the country.

We are not going to--

A lot of the leadership was going around, making outrageous threats and claiming they weren't going to obey the law and that sort of thing. Consequences was that almost anything could happen to anybody at any time down there.

On August 19th, Mamie gave Emmett the ring that had belonged to his father. The next morning, Emmett and his mother grabbed his bags and rushed off to the 63rd Street Station.

He was running up the steps to try to make it to the train. And I said Emmett, Beau-- I called him Beau-- I said, where are you going? You haven't kissed me goodbye. And how do I know I'll ever see you again? And he looked at me and he said, oh, Mama. He scolded me for saying something like that.

But he turned around, he came back. And he kissed me goodbye. And he said, here, take this. He pulled his watch off and gave it to me. He said, I won't need this where I'm going. I said, what about your ring? He said, oh, I'm going to show it off to the fellas. And with that, he was up the steps and on his way to get on the train.

[TRAIN HORN]

Emmett rode the Illinois Central 16 hours out of Chicago to the Mississippi Delta.

We went to South near the beginning of cotton picking time. Late August. And we picked cotton for half a day. And we would go swimming, run the snakes out of the river. We had a lot of fun.

Emmett's family lived on the outskirts of Money, a whistlestop town in the heart of delta cotton country.

The town of Money was one street with maybe five or six stores. But that's all. Just one street. Wasn't much. Wasn't really a town.

At one end of Money was Bryant's grocery, which made a business of selling candy to Black kids and provisions to field hands from nearby plantations. Roy Bryant, a 24-year-old ex-soldier, and his wife Carolyn owned the grocery and not much else. The Bryants lived with their two boys in cramped rooms behind the store. Roy's half-brother, J.W. Milam, helped out around the grocery. The 235-pound Milam was a hard drinking man with a reputation for being tough on anyone who got in his way.

On a steamy Wednesday afternoon, Emmett and seven other teenagers piled into Moses Wright's old ford and headed to Bryant's grocery.

The day that we went to the store in Money, we were picking cotton first half of the day. And the second half because it was so hot. My uncle drove the car and we took off to Money to get some refreshments. Just general things you buy in a store.

Roy Bryant was out of town, leaving his wife Carolyn alone behind the counter when Emmett and his cousins pulled up. Other customers were sitting outside, talking and playing checkers in the cool of the shade. One or two at a time, the boys drifted into the store and back out again with a cold drink or a piece of candy.

Then, Emmett went in and bought $0.02 worth of bubble gum. According to witnesses, on his way out of the store, Emmett turned to Carolyn Bryant and whistled. She stormed out.

We all got scared. And someone said she's going to get a pistol. That's when we became afraid. They said she's going to the car to get a pistol. And as she went to the car, we all jumped in my uncle's car. We're going pretty fast and dust is flying behind us. And of course, Emmett Till begged us not to tell our grandfather what took place. And we didn't. This was on a Wednesday, and we didn't tell him what had taken place. So Wednesday went by, Thursday went by. Nothing. Friday, we forgot about it.

Sunday morning, about 2:30, I heard a voice at the door. And they said, this is Mr. Bryant. And said they wanted the boy that did the talk at Money. And when I opened the door, there was a man standing with a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other.

It was like a nightmare. I mean, someone come and stand over you with a pistol in one hand, a flashlight. He was 16 years old. It's a terrifying experience. Very terrifying.

And so we marched all around these two rooms. And I found the boy in his bedroom in the bed with my baby boy. And they told him to get up and put his clothes on.

Moses Wright pleaded with the two men. He's only 14, and he's from up North. Why not give the boy a whipping, Wright begged, and leave it at that?

The two in the next room, cousin and uncle, they never woke up. My Uncle Sammy did wake up, but they told him to go back to sleep. He's 12 years old. And I just said, hey, I'm fixing to die.

J.W. Milam turned to Mose Wright. How old are you, preacher? He asked. 64, Wright replied. You make any trouble, you'll never live to be 65.

Near to the car, they asked a question, it this the right one? And I heard a boy say, yes. And they drove off toward Money with him.

Nobody talked to anybody. The house was as dark as a thousand midnighds. You couldn't see. And when they left, I was still afraid. And so I'm waiting for them to come back. That was at Sunday morning. Early Sunday morning.

I was playing beside the road. And I saw Mr. Milam's truck coming by, and it had a cover over the door we called a tarpaulin. And I heard somebody hollered on the truck.

I could hear all this beating and I could hear this beating and I could hear this crying and crying and beating. And I'm saying to myself, they beating somebody up there.

I heard he was dead even before I got to the barn. I passed. They still would be in there. They still would be in that area.

Milam came out. So he said, did you hear anything? I saw him. He had khaki pants on. He had a green island shirt and a 45 on his side. So I said, no. I said, I ain't heard anything. I said anything.

I was coming through there that morning. Too Tight was out there washing the truck out. Out washing J.W. Milam's truck out. I said, what all the blood come from? He laughed. The boy laughed, that's what he did. He said, there's a shoe here. There's one of his shoes here. I said, who? That's the way I said it. I said, who? Emmett Till's shoe.

In Chicago, a desperate Mamie Till notified the local newspapers of Emmett's disappearance. In Mississippi, the family alerted the Sheriff and then began to search for any sign of the boy along riverbanks and under bridges, where Black folks always look, Emmett's uncle said, when something like this happens.

The next day, Roy Bryant was arrested for kidnapping. J.W. Milam was at a store nearby in Mentor City, when the La Fleur County Sheriff caught up with him.

Said, J.W., I got a writ for you. He throwed his head up there like this. He spoke of it again and over again. He said, I got a writ for you. Is you going? Hell no. That's shit, you talking. No longer than two hours, the high sheriff come back.

The high sheriff come on in there and didn't even knock on no door or nothing. Walked in there. Said, J.W. Milam, I come at you. I'm going to carry you, dead or alive. You about to get ready to go. Yeah?

On August 31st, three days after Emmett Till had disappeared, a boy fishing in the Tallahatchie noticed a body caught on a gnarled root in muddy water. He informed Tallahatchie county sheriff, Clarence Strider.

My dad called me and asked me, do I have a boat in the river? And I told him I did. Then he said, well, we'll be down there in a little while. And he sent deputies down here to go with me. And we took the boat and went up the river. It was in a curve and a drift, and a foot was sticking up. And we tore into the drift and got to him and got him out. Then we carried him up to the other landing and put him in the hearse.

Emmett's body had been weighed down with a 75-pound cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. The boy was so badly beaten that Mose Wright could identify Emmett only by his father's ring. Mamie Till was in Chicago, surrounded by worried family and friends when she was told that her only child was dead.

Those words were like arrows sticking all over my body. My eyes were so full of tears until I couldn't see. And when I began to make the announcement that Emmett had been found and how he was found, the whole house began to scream and to cry. And that's when I realized that this was a load that I was going to have to carry. I wouldn't get any help carrying this load.

By the time Mamie received her son's body back in Chicago, two weeks after she had kissed him goodbye, Emmett's murder was front page news. His body was taken to a funeral home owned by AA Rayner, who had promised Mississippi authorities that he would keep the casket nailed shut. When Mamie Till asked him to open it up, Rayner refused.

I asked him, Mr. Rayner, do you have a hammer? I said I haven't signed anything, and I haven't made any promises. And if you can't open that box, I can.

We opened the casket. There was a terrible odor that came from the body, because the body had been in the water and began to deteriorate. Mr. Rayner was-- he told the mother, he said, if I was you, I wouldn't look at this body. But this body is in such a horrible condition. She said, Mr. Rayner, I want to see my son.

And I decided then that I would start at his feet and worked my way up. Maybe gathering strength as I went. I paused at his midsection, because I knew he would not want me looking at him. But I saw enough that I knew he was intact. I kept on up until I got to his chin. And then I was forced to deal with this face.

I saw that his tongue was choked out. I noticed that the right eye was lying on midway his cheek. I noticed that his nose had been broken like somebody took a meat chopper and chopped his nose in several places. As I kept looking, I saw a hole, which I presumed was a bullet hole. And I could look through that hole and see daylight on the other side.

And I wondered, was it necessary to shoot him? Mr. Rayner asked me, he said, do you want me to touch the body up? I said, no, Mr. Rayner. Let the people see what I've seen. I was just willing to bare it all. I think everybody needed to know what had happened to Emmett Till.

Mamie's decision would make her son's death a touchstone for a generation. At a church on the South Side of Chicago, Emmett Till's mutilated body would be on display for all to see.

It was on a Sunday afternoon. I won't ever forget it. It was a Sunday afternoon. The church was very calm. The line was very orderly.

I thought that pretty soon, the crowd would die down. It looked like all of Chicago was there.

Well, they brought their children with them because Emmett was 14 years old. And they wanted their younger kids to see what happened to Emmett. They were mad. They were angry. And as we were led into the church, my girlfriends and myself, we walked up to the casket. And it was covered with a glass. And we all looked down. This was our friend laying, looking like a monster. They said that about one in every five had to be assisted out of the building. They would just go into a faint.

I think Black people's reaction was so visceral. Everybody knew we were under attack. And that attack was symbolized by the attack on a 14-year-old boy.

As far as I was concerned, that wasn't him there. Yet at the same time, as confusing as it may sound, it was him. But I didn't accept it. In my mind, I kept saying, I'll see him again. And I guess to me, it didn't happen. But it did happen.

50,000 people in Chicago had seen Emmett Till's corpse with their own eyes. When the Black magazine Jet ran photos of the body, Black Americans across the country shuttered.

It was grotesque. I mean, it was just-- it blew my mind. I couldn't sleep at night. It was traumatic for me for months. I mean, it touched us all.

Mainstream newspapers and magazines spread the story of the 14-year-old Black boy who'd been brutally killed for whistling at a white woman.

It stunned white America. Most white Americans at that time were saying things such as the Emmett Till murder had happened back in slavery times. That these kinds of things were not of their generation. That they no longer happened in America. And this said to them clearly, hey, it's right here. It is now.

Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam admitted having taken Emmett Till but claimed they'd let him go. Now with the eyes of the nation turning to Mississippi, the state appointed a special prosecutor and filed charges.

Federal indictment is that they did willfully, unlawfully, feloniously and of their malice aforethought, kill and murder Emmett Till, a human being.

Scores of reporters descended on the delta. Television networks chartered a plane to send footage to New York for the nightly news. The Associated Press fielded queries from Paris, Copenhagen, Tokyo. The Till case had become a major international news story. Under the glare of the spotlight, white Mississippians began to close ranks. Local stores collected $10,000 in countertop jars for Bryant and Milam. Every lawyer in the county joined their defense team.

People of the socioeconomic level of the two defendants in this case were obviously looked down on by the more aristocratic whites. Almost with the same disdain that they looked down on Blacks. But they were still white folks. And when push came to shove, the white community rallied in support of them against a young Black person for whom they had even greater disdain.

The atmosphere among whites in Tallahatchie County and other-- the whole surrounding area was one of absolute scorn at the fact that these men were being put on trial for their lives. And the cynicism was usually couched in very crude jokes. One of them was, innit that just like a nigger to swim across the Tallahatchie River with a gin fan around his neck?

I can't understand how a civilized mother could put a dead body of a child on public display.

I'm almost convinced that the very beginning of this was by a communistic front.

Well, shall I tell you right now, if he gets justice, they'll turn him loose. If I was on the grand jury, that is what I would do.

Among African Americans, there was outright fear. Too Tight Collins, who worked for J.W. Milam and had been seen washing blood from Milam's truck, disappeared. The message to Black people was clear. Hide what you know. Hide even what you think, or face the consequences.

Young man, do you think these two men should be indicted?

I really don't know.

What do you mean you don't know?

I don't know.

Have you studied the case by reading the papers, perhaps?

And you don't know whether they should be indicted?

Thank you very much.

You're welcome.

On September 19th, less than three weeks after Emmett's body was found, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam's trial for murder opened in Sumner, Mississippi, which touted itself as a good place to raise a boy. The air in the courtroom, a reporter wrote, was as heavy and oppressive as the moss that hangs from the cypress trees.

In the courtroom, they recorded 118 degrees. And of course, there was no air conditioning. They had the ceiling fans that were only stirring the air up, making it hotter when it reached your body.

On the first day of the trial, presiding judge Curtis Swango named the jury all white men from Bryant and Milam's home county.

I remember looking at that jury. And even though I knew a good many of the men who were on the jury, and they looked mean to me. I would have hated to have gone up against any of those guys.

Tallahatchie county sheriff and plantation owner Clarence Strider was responsible for locating witnesses and gathering evidence against Bryant and Milam.

Sheriff Strider was a big, fat, plain-talking, obscene-talking sheriff you would expect to find in the South. His actions at the trial were more-- I think it was not so much to see justice of what was going on, but to be sure that his courtroom was totally segregated.

The man had laid it out that we got 22 seats over here for you white boys and we got four seats over here for you colored boys. We don't mix them down here. We ain't going to mix 'em and we don't intend to. And you ain't going to be with the white folks and the white folks ain't going to be with you. And y'all might be speaking, but ain't going to be no love nest between Black and white folks.

Strider consigned Black reporters and Detroit congressman Charles Diggs to a card table on the sidelines. Strider greeted them as he passed with a cheery hello, niggers.

We never having a trouble until some of our Southern niggers go up North and the NAACP talks to them and they come back home. If they will keep their nose and mouths out of our business, we will be able to do more. And we are enforcing the laws of Tallahatchie County and Mississippi.

The reaction of reporters from out of the South was one of just absolute amazement. They knew that there were strange things going on down in places like Sumner. But they did not know it would be quite like that. They were really surprised at what they found. At the same time, of course, they wrote about it with great relish, because it was a good story.

It had sex. It had murder. It had mystery.

When Mamie Till arrived, she had to make her way through an unsympathetic crowd gathered on the courthouse lawn.

What do you intend to do here today?

To answer any questions that the attorneys might ask me to answer to the best--

How do you think is it possible to be of help to them?

I don't know. I mean, just by answering every question that they ask me.

I see. Do you have any evidence bearing on this case?

I do know that this is my son.

Mamie Till testified that the body she had examined and buried was indeed her son. In their cross-examination, Bryant and Milam's attorneys peppered her with hostile questions and then presented the main argument for the defense. The corpse pulled from the Tallahatchie River was not Emmett Till.

They summed up by saying, isn't it true that you and the NAACP got your heads together and you came down here and with their help, you all dug up a body? And you have claimed that body to be your son. Isn't it true that your son is in Detroit, Michigan, with his grandfather right now?

With Sheriff Strider and courtroom sentiment clearly on the side of the defendants, reporters began their own desperate search for witnesses. Black people wasn't speaking out about the Emmett Till case at that particular time, because they knew that it could happen to them. The Blacks feared for their lives and for their family life. Because those white folks were for real. So it was just hush, hush, you know? So I was told to keep my mouth shut, and that's what I did.

Two days into the trial, reporters got a lead on a young sharecropper named Willie Reed who might be willing to talk.

I was in the cotton field and I was picking. I was picking cotton, picking cotton. And I looked across the field. There was about seven, eight people come across the field toward me, was white and Black coming their way. And then they begin to question me about this here. Did you see anything? So I told them what I saw.

Putting his life at risk, Willie Reed agreed to step forward.

When you walk in that courtroom and you know what you-- that you going to testify. Then you look at all these white folks, and everybody looking at you. And they got the frowns on their face and everything. You see them, they be looking at you, rolling their eyes looking at you. Yeah. Whites looking at you. It was something.

Reed spoke in a voice barely louder than a whisper. He'd seen Roy Bryant, J.W. Milam, and one other white man with Emmett Till early that Sunday morning and had heard the sounds of a beating coming from Milam's shed. After delivering his testimony, Reed was smuggled out of Mississippi. When he reached Chicago, he was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown.

The prosecution's best witness was Moses Wright, who had clearly seen the men who took Emmett Till from his home. Wright had been in hiding since the night of the kidnapping and had been threatened with death. But there in the searing heat of a delta courtroom, the 64-year-old sharecropper had his say.

One of the attorneys asked, do you know the man that came to your house that night to get Emmett Till out of your house?

Mose Wright stood and pointed first at Roy Bryant, then at J.W. Milam. Thar he, he said. Wright later claimed he could feel the blood boil in hundreds of white people in the courtroom. But he said, I had decided to tell it like it was.

That was a dramatic moment. That took an awful lot of courage for him to get up there and do what he did. I think he had decided that he was going to do it no matter what happened.

After he testified, Wright left his cotton blooming in the field, his old car, sitting at the station, and slipped onto the train to Chicago. He would never again live in Mississippi.

The trial drew to a close after only five days. In his summation, the lead defense attorney warned members of the jury that their ancestors would turn over in their graves if Bryant and Milam were found guilty. Every last Anglo-Saxon one of you, he said, has the courage to free these men.

As the jury retired, the Black people who were standing around the walls began to ease out of the door. I said, it's time for us to go. Congressman Diggs say, what, and miss the verdict? I said, Congressman, this is one verdict you don't want to be present to hear.

The crowd in the courtroom waited in the heat. Reporters overheard members of the jury laughing and joking in the jury room. In just over an hour, the jury returned.

In the Emmett Till murder trial, the all-white jury has acquitted the two white defendants accused of killing the 14-year-old Negro youth. The jury foreman said the deciding factor was the state's failure to prove the identity of the body pulled from the river near Sumner, Mississippi.

A juror later revealed that the jury had stalled to make it look good. They wouldn't have taken so long to return to the courtroom, he said, if they hadn't stopped to drink pop.

The verdict came in not guilty. You could hear guns firing. I mean, it was almost like a 4th of July celebration. Or it was almost as if the White Sox had won the pennant in the city of Chicago. It was just-- oh, it was a mess.

After the trial, Sheriff Clarence Strider told reporters, I hope the Chicago niggers and the NAACP are satisfied.

People are used to doing things normal around here. And they just tried to run the thing. They thought they could run over the judge and the sheriff and everybody over there. They thought that they could just take over. But they didn't.

How do you folks feel now that it's all over? Roy, how about you?

I'm just glad it's over with.

Mrs. Bryant?

How about you, Mrs. Milam?

Reports of the acquittal made front page headlines across the United States and set off an international firestorm. The life of a Negro in Mississippi, one European paper observed, is not worth a whistle. From Boston to Los Angeles, Black people packed meeting halls and spilled into the streets to hear Mamie Till tell her story.

And what I saw was a shame before God and man. And the way the jury chose to believe the ridiculous stories of the defense attorneys. I just can't go into detail to tell you the silly things, the stupid things that were brought up as probabilities. And they swallowed it like a fish swallows a hook. Just anything, just any excuse to acquit these two men.

Protected from further prosecution, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam sold their story to a reporter from Look Magazine for $4,000. Their account appeared just four months after the acquittal.

We took them, and we was just going to whip them. Scare some sense into 'em. Back of the house, there's toolshed. Two rooms about 12 feet square. We walked them in there and took turns smashing them across the head with the 45. First, my brother and then me.

We put him back in the truck. And we knew what we was going to do. There's a spot about a mile and a half from the bridge where the banks are steep. It was just the spot. I held up the gun. I fired, and the Chicago boy twisted around and caught it right in the ear. We tied the gin fan to his neck with barbed wire and rolled his body into 20 feet of muddy water.

For three hours that morning, we had a big old fire in the yard. Damn, if that nigger didn't have crepe sole shoes. You know how hard they are to burn?

If there were others involved, as Willie Reed and Mose Wright had testified under oath, Milam and Bryant did not name them. Mamie Till went to Washington to press the federal government to reopen the case. Despite thousands of letters protesting Mississippi's handling of the murder, President Dwight Eisenhower and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ruled out a federal investigation. Eisenhower didn't even answer Mamie Till's telegram.

No one ever did time for the killing of the 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago. But his murder and the trial and acquittal of his killers sent a powerful message. If change was going to come, people would have to put themselves on the line. Contributions to civil rights groups soared. And 100 days after the death of Emmett Till, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person, and the Montgomery bus boycott began.

When people saw what had happened to my son, men stood up who had never stood up before. People became vocal who had never vocalized before. Emmett's death was the opening of the civil rights movement. He was the sacrificial lamb of the movement.

I do believe that nationally or at least across the South, the Emmett Till trial and the result of that trial somehow spurred the Civil Rights Movement. As if this was the last straw or maybe it was the spark.

People were thoroughly disgusted at what happened in that situation. And it made an awful lot of people realize that they themselves had to get involved and do something. It was just a magnificent reaction to a very ugly thing that had taken place in this country.

Please note that this video contains dehumanizing language.  We have chosen to include it in order to honestly communicate the harmful language of the time; however, dehumanizing language should not be spoken aloud during class.

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• Civil Rights

Emmett Till’s Death Could Easily Have Been Forgotten. Here’s How It Became a Civil Rights Turning Point Instead

T here are many startling things about the Emmett Till case . But, 63 years after his death, perhaps the most startling of all is the fact that Americans know his name, even recognize his face.

Back in the summer of 1955, when J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant savagely beat the 14-year-old Chicago kid, shot him in the head, weighted his body down and dumped it in the Tallahatchie River, they thought that was the end of it.

Till had whistled at Bryant’s wife Carolyn, or spoken suggestively to her, or laid hands on her — the story kept changing. It was the classic Southern tale of a black male accused of violating the region’s taboo against interracial intimacy. Literally thousands of African American men were lynched under such accusations.

The civil rights leader Aaron Henry once remarked that the most surprising thing about the Till story was not its horror but the fact that white people even noticed. After all, black boys had been lynched for decades with impunity. African American bodies were not supposed to reemerge, and they certainly were not supposed to stir national and even international outrage.

But this one did. Killing Till and dumping his body did not end the story, quite the contrary. Thirty-eight articles in TIME magazine have discussed Emmett Till since 1955. Daily newspaper databases reveal even more extensive coverage. In the New York Times alone Till appears in 600 articles.

Most of the Till coverage came in the first six months: The discovery of the body; the deeply emotional funeral in Chicago (to which 100,000 South Siders came to pay their last respects); the indictments and trial, when nationally famous reporters swarmed tiny Sumner, Miss., and television cameras caught the scene outside the courthouse. Day after day, Till was headline news.

But then the story disappeared. There were few articles in the press commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Till slaying, even fewer on the 25th. Early histories of the Civil Rights Movement barely mentioned him.

More accurately, the Till story became segregated, living on among African Americans, not whites.

Young black activists, who sometimes referred to themselves as “the Emmett Till Generation,” carried his memory into their struggles of the ’60s. John Lewis, Anne Moody and Muhammad Ali all recalled their shock at seeing Till’s funeral photos in Jet magazine, Emmett in his coffin, his face a grizzly ruin. They recalled too how the story gave them grim determination to change things. The photos became part of “Jim Crow wisdom,” visual lessons parents gave children about growing up African American.

Seared though they were into the memory of the Till Generation, very few whites saw those pictures. No mainstream newspapers or magazines published them in 1955, or for three decades thereafter.

That changed in 1987 when the photos reemerged, most prominently in the popular documentary Eyes on the Prize , which began its history of the Civil Rights Movement with Emmett Till. Rather than avoid Till’s face, Eyes on the Prize lingered on it. Only then did the truism that Emmett Till’s martyrdom launched the Freedom Struggle start to take hold among whites.

What about the Till story today? Look more closely at those 600 Times articles focused on Emmett Till. One-third of them appeared in the last five years, and it is roughly the same for other newspapers and magazines. Histories, novels, television reports, news stories, websites, on-line publications, historical markers, scholarly essays, documentaries—all have come with growing frequency this century.

Current events brought Emmett Till’s name back. Oprah Winfrey called the Till memorial in Washington’s new African American History Museum “profound,” and added that Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Laquan MacDonald gave us “a new Emmett Till every week.” A few months later, LeBron James held a press conference when someone painted an ethnic slur on his front gate. The first thing James talked about was Mamie Till Bradley’s refusal to be silent in the face of her son’s murder. Then late last year, Dave Chappelle ended his comedy special by discussing Carolyn Bryant’s confession that Emmett Till did nothing to deserve his fate.

This year alone, Emmett Till was in the headlines again when someone shot up the historical marker where his body was dumped, then again when Carolyn Bryant recanted her recantation that she lied about Till back in 1955, and again when the FBI announced it would reopen the case.

Why so much attention to a story once mostly forgotten? Because it speaks to our growing awareness that racism is on the rise, that it did not disappear with slavery or Jim Crow, that we never became a “post-racial” society.

Till’s is a story we can grasp, not of unnamed millions but of a single knowable martyr to racial hatred. The sadism of his killers, the horrific beating they inflicted on the boy still shock us today. The Till case also reminds us of our long history of racism in criminal justice, from policing all the way through trial and incarceration. His fate reminds us too that white supremacy was never just a set of ideas and opinions, but a charter for violence inflicted on living bodies.

Above all, the face of Emmett Till embodies America’s tragic racial history, the good-looking lad smiling on Christmas Day, that same innocent face smashed to a hideous death mask on the long lonely Mississippi night of his murder.

Racism is the shape-shifting demon that America wrestles once again. Lies proliferate about minorities, the kind that got young Emmett Till lynched. So we continue to retell his story, to probe its meanings, to expose and explain what happened. Just as Anne Frank became the young martyr whose story helps us grasp Nazi horror, so Emmett Till’s is the face that reveals white supremacist depravity. His ghost haunts us because his murder exposes racism’s bloodthirsty heart.

And so, 63 years later, we know his face, we know his name. In his lynching lies shame, in remembering it lies hope.

Elliott Gorn is Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. He is author of Let the People See: The Story of Emmett Till available now from Oxford University Press.

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'Let The People See': It Took Courage To Keep Emmett Till's Memory Alive

Maureen Corrigan

Let the People See

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"Let the people see what they did to my boy." Those were the words spoken by Emmett Till's mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, after viewing the brutalized body of her son.

During his night of torture near the Delta town of Money, Miss., 14-year-old Till's right eye had been dislodged from its socket, his tongue choked out of his mouth, the back of his skull crushed and his head penetrated by a bullet. At the insistence of his family, Till's body was shipped back home for burial in Chicago, and Till-Mobley specifically called for an open casket.

Day and night over Labor Day weekend in 1955, over 100,000 mourners, almost all of them African-American, filed past that open casket, which lay in state in a South Side church.

Before the funeral service, a staff photographer from Jet magazine was permitted to photograph Till's body, and those images were disseminated to other African-American magazines and newspapers, including The Chicago Defender.

But, as historian Elliott J. Gorn tells us in his new book on the Till case, the mainstream press didn't reprint those photographs, and of course, they were too graphic for television:

Years later, many white Americans remembered — falsely remembered — the epiphany of Till's ruined face in 1955. [But] few white people saw the photos until thirty years later when the documentary Eyes on the Prize opened with the Emmett Till story. Only then did [his mother's] words, "Let the people see what they did to my boy" begin to be fully realized.

Gorn's book is called Let the People See ; like Timothy B. Tyson's 2017 book, The Blood of Emmett Till , it builds on new evidence discovered by the FBI in 2005 to present a detailed reconstruction of Till's kidnapping and killing in Mississippi, in retaliation for allegedly having whistled at a white woman named Carolyn Bryant.

Emmett Till and the Impact of Images

Gorn also dives deep into a legal analysis of the transcripts of the trial in the town of Sumner, Miss., in which Bryant's husband and his half-brother were tried for Till's murder. Both men were quickly acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury.

But what's most interesting about Gorn's book is his final section, called "Memory," in which he traces how Till's story, which seems so well-known today, came very close to "pass[ing] into oblivion." Gorn points out that in the two years following Till's murder, more than 3,000 articles about him were published. Then, "the whole of the 1960s brought only three hundred articles. In the 1970s, fewer than fifty stories appeared."

A Brutal Lynching And A Possible Confession, Decades Later

Just as disturbing is the fact that some of those stories, including one written in 1956 by William Faulkner for Harper's Magazine , relied on a paid interview with the two alleged killers that had been published in Look magazin e. That Look story characterized Till as a defiant sexual aggressor. Going forward, Gorn says, the 10th and 25th anniversaries of Till's murder mostly passed unobserved, even in the black press.

It was the rise of African-American studies that helped recover Till's story, along with the widespread popularity of the 1977 TV miniseries, Roots , which proved there was a mainstream market for black history. In 1985, a Chicago reporter named Rich Samuels produced a half-hour documentary on the Till case, segments of which were later broadcast on NBC's Today show.

Emmett Till's Cousin On Reopening Of Case: 'An Opportunity For The Truth To Be Told'

"For the first time in mainstream media," Gorn writes, "whites saw the photograph [of Emmett Till in his coffin]." As the image appeared on the screen, viewers heard the voice of writer James Baldwin who said, "It was myself in that coffin, it was my brothers in that coffin ... I can't describe it so precisely, because it had been so mutilated, it had been so violated. It was him but it was all of us."

Let the People See is a timely book about the fragility of collective memory and about the courage and persistence of journalists — particularly black journalists — some of whom risked their lives in 1955 to get the facts of the Till story before the public. Most of all though, Let the People See is a vivid reminder of just how easy it is for people not to see things they'd rather not see.

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The Lynching of Emmett Till by Christopher Metress LAST REVIEWED: 03 July 2023 LAST MODIFIED: 28 June 2016 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190280024-0028

In August 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till left his home in Chicago to visit his extended southern family in Money, Mississippi. The beginning of his stay went well, but on 24 August, barely a week into his visit, Till and group of friends visited Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market. The exact details of what happened remain cloudy, but at some point Till entered the store and interacted with Carolyn Bryant, a white woman and the wife of the store’s owner. It quickly became apparent that something had gone dreadfully wrong, and Till’s friends rushed him from the store as Bryant went to her car to get a gun. For three days, nothing more happened, but then Carolyn’s husband, Roy Bryant, and Roy’s stepbrother, J. W. Milam, struck out in the dead of night for the home of Till’s great-uncle, Moses Wright. The two white men forced Till from the house, and he was never seen alive again. Three days later, Till’s bloated and disfigured corpse surfaced downstream in the Tallahatchie River, and Bryant and Milam were arrested for murder. When Till’s body was returned to Chicago in a sealed casket, his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, demanded that it be opened, insisting as well on an open casket funeral. That viewing, lasting several days and drawing tens of thousands of mourners, shocked the nation, and when Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender published photographs of Till’s maimed face, the upcoming trial of young Till’s murderers became an international media event, with more than seventy newspapers and magazines sending reporters to Mississippi. Against all reasonable evidence, but not unexpectedly, the all-white, all-male jury acquitted Bryant and Milam, after deliberating for barely an hour. African American newspapers and magazines, joined by a chorus of support from the mainstream press and liberal political organizations, called for national protests and boycotts throughout the South, while an apologist southern press grew increasingly defensive. Tensions grew worse when, a few months later, Bryant and Milam, safe from further prosecution, sold their confession to a Look magazine reporter. For many historians of the civil rights movement, the lynching of Emmett Till and the brazen acquittal of his murderers, predating the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott by just a few months, helped to ignite the black freedom struggle on the 1950s and 1960s.

Although Till’s lynching was a major news event in its day, scholars were slow to assess its impact. Few of the central works on African American history in the 1960s and 1970s mention the case, and it is all but ignored in early assessments of the civil rights movement. In fact, the only substantial history of the lynching produced during this period was Whitaker 1963 , a master’s thesis that remains a valuable and oft-cited resource. It was not until the mid-1980s that the lynching reemerged as a seminal moment in civil rights history. Although Simpson 1981 appeared early in the decade and called for a reassessment of a “forgotten” civil rights case, the turn begins not with a scholarly book or popular history, but with a brief fifteen-minute segment in the opening episode of the influential documentary Eyes on the Prize ( Hampton 1987 ). Aired in January 1987, the episode situates the African American response to Till’s lynching as the heroic “first step” needed in response to the Brown v. Board of Education case, highlighting the courage of Till’s mother and his great-uncle Moses Wright. Perhaps more important, however, was the documentary’s decision to show the famous casket photos published in Jet and the Chicago Defender , giving white America is first access to those influential images. Within a year, Whitfield 1988 , the first full-length study of the events, was published, providing the most thorough retelling of Till’s murder and trial in twenty-five years. Whitfield also established an important scholarly precedent, insisting that any understanding of the lynching must address its literary legacy in poetry, song, fiction, and drama. Hudson-Weems 1994 builds on the author’s 1988 dissertation, and unlike Whitfield, much of her work is based on extensive interviews, making it a different kind of resource. Hudson-Weems is most notable for being the first to interpret Till’s lynching as the spark to the modern civil rights movement, an influential idea. Metress 2002 appeared a time of renewed interest in Till, providing an anthology of primary documents that not only recovered the extensive and combative press coverage, but also reintroduced some of the unresolved controversies about the lynching—controversies that had largely been forgotten but would soon reemerge. Renewed scholarly interest was matched by renewed public interest, leading to new documentaries and the development of important websites, such as PBS’s American Experience : The Murder of Emmett Till and Devery Anderson’s Emmett Till Murder . Scholarship on the case culminated with Anderson 2015 , which is certain to remain the definitive history of the case for decades to come.

American Experience: The Murder of Emmett Till .

Companion website to the documentary film directed by Stanley Nelson (see Nelson 2004 , cited under Documentaries ). With solid background material on race relations, lynching, sharecropping, and segregation, the site is an excellent introduction for undergraduates, preparing them to understand the context for Till’s lynching. Also provides a valuable timeline and links to primary sources, including a transcript of the film.

Anderson, Devery. Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement . Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2015.

The definitive work about the lynching. A magisterial history that combs every known resource to determine not only the facts of the case, but also its enduring legacy. Valuable in countless ways, but none more so than in its judicious weighing of evidence to sift through the distortions and mistruths that have long plagued historical understanding.

Emmett Till Murder .

A website built around Anderson 2015 . Valuable for providing a comprehensive “who’s who” of those involved in the case, as well as transcriptions of some of the most important primary sources, including early investigative works by Huie, Adams, Dixon, and Hicks. A helpful next step for those just learning about the story.

Hampton, Henry, prod. Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years . PBS Video, 1987.

There is an influential fifteen-minute segment on Till in the opening episode (“Awakenings: 1954–1955”) of this landmark documentary series, which first aired on 21 January 1987. By contextualizing Till’s murder as the “first step” in the civil rights movement, and signaling out Moses Wright and Mamie Till-Mobley as heroic figures paving the way for Rosa Parks, the episode did more than any other source to reignite interest in this case.

Hudson-Weems, Clenora. Emmett Till: The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement . Troy, NY: Bedford, 1994.

Based on a 1988 dissertation, makes the then-not-yet-widely embraced claim that Till’s lynching sparked the civil rights movement. Along with Whitfield, one of the first to draw attention to the case’s literary legacy, and valuable as well for extensive author interviews with Till’s mother and cousins.

Metress, Christopher, ed. The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative . Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002.

Anthology of more than one hundred documents. Starting with the press coverage of the kidnapping and trial, and providing generous selections from the most important investigative journalists, concludes with excerpts from memoirists and poets who have helped to position the lynching in our historical and literary memory.

Simpson, William M. “Reflections on a Murder: The Emmett Till Case.” In Southern Miscellany: Essays in Honor of Glover Moore . Edited by Frank Allen Dennis, 177–200. University Press of Mississippi, 1981.

Early scholarly assessment of the case. Noting that “most have forgotten the trial held in Sumner during a muggy week in September 1955” (p. 199), Simpson calls for historians to reexamine how the “activist energies” triggered by the case may have inspired the civil right movement.

Whitaker, Hugh Stephen. “A Case Study of Southern Justice: The Emmett Till Case.” MA diss., Florida State University, 1963.

Crucial first scholarly attempt to assess the case. Author interviewed many key white Mississippi participants in the case, and had access to the trial transcript, making this thesis the sole source for all trial quotations until the transcript was rediscovered in 2004. Essential reading for understanding how later scholars will grapple with the case.

Whitfield, Stephen J. A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till . New York: Free Press, 1988.

The first book-length study, this influential work set the direction for much to follow, situating the lynching within the context of the early civil rights movement and probing the enduring effects of the murder in our racial and literary imagination. Best place to get an initial overview.

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Emmett till.

NAACP Records, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Emmett Louis Till (nicknamed “Bobo”), was born on July 25, 1941 to Mamie (née Carthan) Till-Mobley and Louis Till at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. The Cook County Hospital was one of the only local facilities providing medical care to African Americans. Till’s birth was difficult, leaving him with facial scars. Doctors also initially believed that he would be permanently disabled, but he began walking at 11 months.   

The Tills initially resided in Argo-Summit, a town outside of Chicago, where Mamie Till-Mobley’s family settled after moving from Mississippi as part of the Great Migration. This exodus of African Americans out of the South was ignited by long-standing racist violence and widespread economic, social, and political disparities between Black and White people. Louis worked at the Argo Corn Products Company, one of the primary employers of African American men in the town, including Mrs. Till-Mobley’s father, John Carthan.   

Emmett’s parents separated when he was a toddler, and he and his mother remained in Argo-Summit. While in the first grade, he contracted polio, which left him with a stutter and weak ankles for which he was required to wear special shoes. Despite his physical disabilities, Emmett was known as a fun-loving jokester.  

In the early 1950s, after briefly living in Detroit, Michigan, Emmett and his mother moved to Chicago where they resided in a home owned by his maternal grandmother, Alma Spearman. The home was located on St. Lawrence Avenue where it still stands today, designated a Chicago Landmark in 2021. Mother and son occupied the three-bedroom apartment on the second floor with other relatives living on the first floor. To help his working mother, Emmett took on various household duties, including cleaning, laundry, and some cooking.  

In the summer of 1955, while on vacation from school, Emmett’s great-aunt Elizabeth Wright and her husband Moses (Mose) invited him to visit them. The Wrights lived outside the town of Money, LeFlore County, Mississippi. In August, after receiving reluctant permission from his mother, Emmett traveled by train down South with his great-uncle (Mose) Wright and Wright’s grandson, Wheeler Parker, Jr. His visit would come to a tragic end.  

Death and Injustice 

In retaliation for the perceived breach of racial customs, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam drove to the home of Mose Wright to find Emmett on Sunday, August 28 around 2:00 am. After waking the “Preacher,” as Mose Wright was called, Bryant asked for “that boy who did the talking down at Money.” Bryant and Milam entered the Wright home and confronted Emmett, who was ordered to get dressed. Mose and his wife, Elizabeth protested, begging them not to take Till, offering “whatever you want to charge if you will just release him.” Their pleas were ignored, and Milam threatened to kill Wright if he were to tell on him and Bryant.   

Milam and Bryant put Emmett in the pickup truck and drove off. They spent the night torturing Emmett before killing him and dumping his body in the river.  

Despite the death threat that Mose Wright had received, he alerted the Leflore County sheriff later that day after Emmett failed to return. Milam and Bryant were quickly taken into custody. Both gave statements that they had kidnapped Emmett from Wright’s home but claimed to have let him go.  

Three days later, on August 31, a body was observed floating in the Tallahatchie River near Graball Landing . Mose Wright identified the recovered body as that of Emmett. The severely mutilated and decomposing body was identified only by a ring on the hand inscribed with the date May 25, 1943, and the initials “LT.” The ring had belonged to Emmett’s father, and his mother had given Emmett special permission to wear it during his trip so he could show friends and family.  

The sheriff ordered that Emmett’s body be promptly buried, but before it could be, Mamie Till-Mobley was alerted and insisted that his body be returned to Chicago. She then held a public viewing and open-casket funeral for Emmett at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ from September 3-6. Crowds of thousands came. Pictures of Emmett’s mutilated body also appeared in Jet , an African American weekly magazine. The nation, and even the world, could no longer ignore the deadly impact of racism and violence.  

Later that month, a trial for Emmett’s kidnappers and murderers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, was held in Sumner, Mississippi, at the Tallahatchie County Courthouse . The trial was a media sensation. Although there appeared to be overwhelming evidence of Bryant’s and Milam’s guilt, the two men were acquitted by an all male, all White jury. Later, they confessed to kidnapping and murdering Till in a magazine article, but double jeopardy prevented them from being retried. 

In 2008, the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act was signed into law It allows for the investigation and prosecution in cold cases related to civil rights murders that occurred before 1979.   

"Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me."

“Rites Held For Slain Boy; Blast Wrong Identity Claim.” Chicago Sun-Times , September 4, 1955.  

Till Mobley, Mamie and Christopher Bensen. The Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America . One World/Ballantine Books, 2003. 

Tyson, Timothy B. The Blood of Emmett Till . New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.  

Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument , Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site

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What was Emmett Till accused of?

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Who was Emmett Till?

Emmett Till was a 14-year-old Black teenager who was abducted, beaten, and lynched by two white men in 1955. His murder galvanized the emerging civil rights movement in the United States.

On August 24, 1955, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, both white men, claimed to have observed Emmett Till speaking and flirting with Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who was a cashier at a local grocery store in Money, Mississippi. Roy Bryant was the cashier’s husband, and Milam was his half brother. Till did not recount the alleged cashier interaction to his great-uncle, whom he was staying with at the time. 

In the early morning hours of August 28, 1955, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam invaded Emmett Till’s great-uncle’s home and abducted the boy at gunpoint. They then severely beat him and gouged out one of his eyes before taking him to the banks of the Tallahatchie River, where they killed him with a single gunshot to the head. Afterward they tied Till’s body to a large metal fan and dumped him into the river. His corpse, barely recognizable, was discovered in the river on August 31. 

Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, the white men who killed Emmett Till, were arrested on August 29, 1955. They stood trial for Till’s murder in September of that year. The all-white, all-male jury deliberated for about an hour before acquitting Bryant and Milam of all charges.

In 2004 the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI reopened the investigation to identify potential co-conspirators. While no criminal charges were filed then, the case was again reopened after Carolyn Bryant Donham, ex-wife of Roy Bryant and the catalyst for Till’s murder, was quoted in a 2017 book as recanting her testimony that the boy had made advances on her. She subsequently told the FBI that she had not recanted, and in 2021 the case was again closed without any new charges.

News of Emmett Till’s murder was widely circulated throughout the Black community in the months after his death. Tens of thousands of Black Americans attended his open-casket funeral in September 1955, and images of his mutilated body were printed in  Jet  magazine and the  Chicago Defender , both influential Black-centric publications. These images came to symbolize widespread state-sponsored anti-Black violence at the hands of white people. Till’s murder became a rallying point for the civil rights movement that followed. Learn more.  

Emmett Till (born July 25, 1941, Chicago, Illinois , U.S.—died August 28, 1955, Money, Mississippi) was an African American teenager whose murder catalyzed the emerging civil rights movement .

Till was born to working-class parents on the South Side of Chicago . When he was barely 14 years old, Till took a trip to rural Mississippi to spend the summer with relatives. His mother, Mamie Till , knew Emmett to be a jokester accustomed to being the centre of attention, and she warned him that whites in the South could react violently to behaviour that was tolerated in the North. This animosity was exacerbated by the U.S. Supreme Court ’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka , which overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that had allowed racial segregation in public facilities.

Till arrived in Money, Mississippi, on August 21, 1955. He stayed with his great-uncle, Moses Wright, who was a sharecropper, and he spent his days helping with the cotton harvest. On August 24, Till and a group of other teens went to a local grocery store after a day of working in the fields. Accounts of what transpired thereafter vary. Some witnesses stated that one of the other boys dared Till to talk to the store’s cashier, Carolyn Bryant, a white woman. It was reported that Till then whistled at, touched the hand or waist of, or flirted with the woman as he was leaving the store. Whatever the truth, Till did not mention the incident to his great-uncle. In the early morning hours of August 28, Roy Bryant, the cashier’s husband, and J.W. Milam, Bryant’s half brother, forced their way into Wright’s home and abducted Till at gunpoint. Bryant and Milam severely beat the boy, gouging out one of his eyes. They then took him to the banks of the Tallahatchie River , where they killed him with a single gunshot to the head. The two men tied the teen’s body to a large metal fan with a length of barbed wire before dumping the corpse into the river.

Wright reported the kidnapping to the police, and Bryant and Milam were arrested the following day. On August 31, 1955, Till’s corpse was discovered in the river. His face was unrecognizable as a result of the assault, and positive identification was possible only because Till was wearing a monogrammed ring that had belonged to his father. On September 2, less than two weeks after Till had embarked on his journey south, the train bearing his remains arrived in Chicago. Mamie Till kept her son’s casket open, choosing to reveal to the tens of thousands who attended the funeral the brutality that had been visited on her son. The appalling images of Till’s body in the casket appeared in the pages of Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender , and his murder became a rallying point for the civil rights movement .

The trial of Till’s killers began on September 19, 1955, and from the witness stand Wright identified the men who had kidnapped Till. After four days of testimony and a little more than an hour of deliberation, an all-white, all-male jury (at the time, Blacks and women were not allowed to serve as jurors in Mississippi) acquitted Bryant and Milam of all charges. Protected from further prosecution by double jeopardy statutes, the pair was paid for the story and interviewed by their lawyer and a journalist in a 1956 article for Look magazine in which they related the circumstances of Till’s kidnapping and murder. Mamie Till (Mamie Till-Mobley after she remarried in 1957) would dedicate the rest of her life to promoting civil rights and trying to achieve some measure of justice for her son.

In 2004 the Federal Bureau of Investigation reopened the case. Although Bryant and Milam were long dead, agents sought to obtain a conclusive account of Till’s final hours. The three-year investigation, during which Till’s body was exhumed for a complete autopsy, did not lead to the filing of criminal charges, but it did uncover a deathbed confession by Milam’s brother Leslie, who admitted his own involvement in the kidnapping and murder. After the exhumation, Till’s body was reburied in a new casket, and the original one was placed in storage at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois, pending the creation of a planned memorial on the site. In 2009 a scandal involving the reselling of grave plots led police to investigate the cemetery, and they discovered Till’s original casket rusting and abandoned in a work shed on the outskirts of the property. Later that year the casket was donated to the Smithsonian ’s National Museum of African American History and Culture .

Emmett Till

The brutal abduction and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till on August 28, 1955, galvanized the emerging civil rights movement.

(1941-1955)

Mother and Father

Open-casket funeral, photos of till’s body, murder trial, impact on civil rights, painting and the whitney biennial, documentaries and movies, who was emmett till.

Emmett Till was born in Chicago and grew up in a middle-class Black neighborhood. Till was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, in 1955 when the fourteen-year-old was accused of whistling at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who was a cashier at a grocery store.

Four days later, Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J.W. Milam kidnapped Till, beat him and shot him in the head. The men were tried for murder, but an all-white, male jury acquitted them.

Till's murder and open casket funeral galvanized the emerging civil rights movement . More than six decades later, in January 2017, Timothy Tyson, author of The Blood of Emmett Till and a senior research scholar at Duke University, revealed that in a 2007 interview Carolyn admitted to him that she had lied about Till making advances toward her.

In 2018, the Justice Department said that it had received “new information” about Till’s death, and the FBI reopened an investigation into his murder.

Till was the only child of Louis and Mamie Till. Till's mother was, by all accounts, an extraordinary woman. Defying the social constraints and discrimination she faced as an African American woman growing up in the 1920s and '30s, Mamie excelled both academically and professionally.

She was only the fourth Black student to graduate from suburban Chicago's predominantly white Argo Community High School, and the first Black student to make the school's "A" Honor Roll. While raising Till as a single mother, she worked long hours for the Air Force as a clerk in charge of confidential files.

Till never knew his father, a private in the United States Army during World War II . Till was born in 1941; his parents separated in 1942. Three years later, Mamie received word from the Army that Louis had been executed for "willful misconduct" while serving in Italy.

Till, who went by the nickname Bobo, was born on July 25, 1941, in Chicago. He grew up in a thriving, middle-class Black neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. The neighborhood was a haven for Black-owned businesses, and the streets he roamed as a child were lined with Black-owned insurance companies, pharmacies and beauty salons as well as nightclubs that drew the likes of Duke Ellington and Sarah Vaughan .

Those who knew Till best described him as a responsible, funny and infectiously high-spirited child. He was stricken with polio at the age of 5. He managed to make a full recovery, save a slight stutter that remained with him for the rest of his life.

With his mother often working more than 12-hour days, Till took on his full share of domestic responsibilities from a very young age. "Emmett had all the house responsibility," his mother later recalled. "I mean everything was really on his shoulders, and Emmett took it upon himself. He told me if I would work, and make the money, he would take care of everything else. He cleaned, and he cooked quite a bit. And he even took over the laundry."

Till attended the all-Black McCosh Grammar School. His classmate and childhood pal, Richard Heard, later recalled, "Emmett was a funny guy all the time. He had a suitcase of jokes that he liked to tell. He loved to make people laugh. He was a chubby kid; most of the guys were skinny, but he didn't let that stand in his way. He made a lot of friends at McCosh."

In August 1955, Till's great uncle, Moses Wright, came up from Mississippi to visit the family in Chicago. At the end of his stay, Wright was planning to take Till's cousin, Wheeler Parker, back to Mississippi with him to visit relatives down South, and when Till, who was just 14 years old at the time, learned of these plans, he begged his mother to let him go along.

Initially, Till's mother was opposed to the idea. She wanted to take a road trip to Omaha, Nebraska, and tried to convince her son to join her with the promise of open-road driving lessons.

But Till desperately wanted to spend time with his cousins in Mississippi, and in a fateful decision that would have grave impact on their lives and the course of American history, Till's mother relented and let him go.

On August 28, 1955, Till was murdered for being accused of offending a white woman working in her family’s grocery store.

On August 19, 1955—the day before Till left his home in Chicago with his uncle and cousin for Mississippi—Mamie Till gave her son his late father's signet ring, engraved with the initials "L.T."

The next day she drove her son to the 63rd Street station in Chicago. They kissed goodbye, and Till boarded a southbound train headed for Mississippi. It was the last time they ever saw each other.

Three days after arriving in Money, Mississippi — on August 24, 1955 — Till and a group of teenagers entered Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market to buy refreshments after a long day picking cotton in the hot afternoon sun.

What exactly transpired inside the grocery store that afternoon will never be known. Till purchased bubble gum, and in later accounts he was accused of either whistling at, flirting with or touching the hand of the store's white female clerk—and wife of the owner—Carolyn Bryant.

Four days later, at approximately 2:30 a.m., Roy Bryant, Carolyn's husband, and his half brother J.W. Milam kidnapped Till from Moses Wright's home. They then beat the teenager brutally, dragged him to the bank of the Tallahatchie River, shot him in the head, tied him with barbed wire to a large metal fan and shoved his mutilated body into the water.

One World 'Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America' by Mamie Till-Mobley

Moses Wright reported Till's disappearance to the local authorities, and three days later, his corpse was pulled out of the river. Till's face was mutilated beyond recognition, and Wright only managed to positively identify him by the ring on his finger, engraved with his father's initials—"L.T."

“It never occurred to me that Bobo would be killed for whistling at a white woman.” — Simeon Wright, Emmett Till's cousin

“It would appear that the state of Mississippi has decided to maintain white supremacy by murdering children.” — Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP

Till's body was shipped to Chicago, where his mother opted to have an open-casket funeral with Till's body on display for five days. Thousands of people came to the Roberts Temple Church of God to see the evidence of this brutal hate crime.

Till's mother said that, despite the enormous pain it caused her to see her son's dead body on display, she opted for an open-casket funeral in an effort to "let the world see what has happened, because there is no way I could describe this. And I needed somebody to help me tell what it was like."

"With his body water-soaked and defaced, most people would have kept the casket covered. [His mother] let the body be exposed. More than 100,000 people saw his body lying in that casket here in Chicago. That must have been at that time the largest single civil rights demonstration in American history." — Jesse Jackson

Till’s casket is now on display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

In the weeks that passed between Till's burial and the murder and kidnapping trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, two Black publications, Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender , published graphic photos of Till's corpse.

By the time the 1955 trial for Till's killing began, his murder had become a source of outrage and indignation throughout the country.

The trial against Till's killers began on September 19, 1955. Because Black people and women were barred from serving jury duty, Bryant and Milam were tried before an all-white, all-male jury.

In an act of extraordinary bravery, Moses Wright took the stand and identified Bryant and Milam as Till's kidnappers and killers. At the time, it was almost unheard of for Black people to openly accuse white people in court. By doing so, Wright put his own life in grave danger.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of the defendants' guilt and widespread pleas for justice from outside Mississippi, on September 23, the panel of white male jurors acquitted Bryant and Milam of all charges. Their deliberations lasted a mere 67 minutes.

In January 1956, Roy Bryant, the husband of Till’s accuser Carolyn, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, admitted to committing the murder of Till. Protected by double jeopardy laws, they told the whole story of how they kidnapped and killed Till to Look magazine for $4,000.

"J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant died with Emmett Till's blood on their hands," Simeon Wright, Till's cousin and an eyewitness to his kidnapping (he was with Till the night he was kidnapped by Milam and Bryant), later stated. "And it looks like everyone else who was involved is going to do the same. They had a chance to come clean. They will die with Emmett Till's blood on their hands."

"I thought about Emmett Till, and I couldn't go back [to the back of the bus]." — Rosa Parks

Coming only one year after the Supreme Court 's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education mandated the end of racial segregation in public schools, Till's death provided an important catalyst for the American civil rights movement.

One hundred days after Till's murder, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama city bus, sparking the yearlong Montgomery Bus Boycott . Nine years later, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 , outlawing many forms of racial discrimination and segregation. In 1965, the Voting Rights Act , outlawing discriminatory voting practices, was passed.

[Emmett Till's murder was] one of the most brutal and inhuman crimes of the 20th century. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Though she never stopped feeling the pain of her son's death, Mamie Till (who died of heart failure in 2003) also recognized that what happened to her son helped open Americans' eyes to the racial hatred plaguing the country, and in doing so helped spark a massive protest movement for racial equality and justice.

"People really didn't know that things this horrible could take place," Mamie Till said in an interview with Devery S. Anderson, author of Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement , in December 1996. "And the fact that it happened to a child, that make all the difference in the world."

In a 2007 interview, Till’s accuser, Carolyn Bryant Donham (she had divorced and remarried), admitted that she had lied about Till making advances toward her.

“That part’s not true,” she told Timothy Tyson, a senior researcher at Duke University. The interview was reported in a 2017 Vanity Fair article upon the publishing of Tyson’s book, The Blood of Emmett Till .

Bryant Donham also told Tyson, “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him," and admitted she “felt tender sorrow” for his mother.

In the summer of 2018, the Justice Department reportedly reopened the investigation into Till's death with the "discovery of new information."

It was unclear whether the government would bring forth new charges, though recent federal efforts to reexamine racially motivated crimes from the past had occasionally produced results, including the 2010 conviction of a former Alabama state trooper charged with killing activist Jimmie Lee Jackson in 1965.

A painting of Till’s casket by white artist Dana Schutz stirred up controversy after it was included at the 2017 Whitney Biennial. The African American artist Parker Bright positioned himself in front of the work in a t-shirt with the words “Black Death Spectacle” printed on the back. He was joined by other protestors, including British-born Black artist Hannah Black.

“The subject matter is not Schutz’s. White free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights. The painting must go,” Black wrote in a Facebook message signed by 30 other artists identified as nonwhite.

Decades after Till’s death, several documentaries and movies have been produced about his life and death. Among the most well-known are the 2003 PBS investigatory documentary The Murder of Emmett Till and the 2005 documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till by civil rights filmmaker Keith A. Beauchamp.

Upcoming productions include Till, directed by Grey’s Anatomy star Jesse Williams and based on a screenplay by Beauchamp and Michael Reilly; The Face of Emmett Till ; and an HBO miniseries produced by Jay-Z , Will Smith and Aaron Kaplan.

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A Grocery, a Barn, a Bridge: Returning to the Scenes of a Hate Crime

How we’re using immersive video technology to witness sites of racial violence.

By Veda Shastri

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Last August, I was struck by a news article reporting that a historical marker near Glendora, Miss., honoring Emmett Till had repeatedly been vandalized. Erected in 2007 at the spot on the Tallahatchie River where the 14-year-old Emmett’s body was recovered after his brutal lynching in the summer of 1955, it was first replaced in 2008, after someone tore it down. Then, over several years, more than 100 rounds of bullets were fired into it. In June 2018, it was replaced a second time — and by July it had been marred by bullets yet again.

Thinking about the juxtaposition of the vandalism with the historical significance of Emmett’s murder — which shook America and profoundly shaped the civil rights movement, spurring Rosa Parks to refuse to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., three months later — I became interested in how the local community felt about Emmett Till and how he was remembered in the Mississippi Delta region.

As a video journalist on The Times’s Immersive desk, I am constantly looking for new ways to tell deeply reported stories through the emerging mediums of VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality). So I teamed up with Lauretta Charlton, The Times’s Race/Related editor, and Audra D.S. Burch, a national enterprise correspondent, to explore the issue of cultural reckoning over public memory. We soon learned that in recent years local Delta residents had been fighting to preserve Emmett’s legacy. Many were focused on the future of Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market in Money, Miss., where Emmett’s encounter with the white shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant led to his kidnapping and killing by her husband, Roy Bryant, and Roy’s half brother, J.W. Milam. While groups have fought for years to restore the building — now a ruin — they have not been able to reach a deal with the owners, whose father served as a juror in the murder trial.

But there are several other sites with physical structures related to the case, including the barn in Drew, Miss., where Emmett was beaten and tortured, and the bridge in Glendora from which his body is believed to have been thrown into the river. As Audra described it to me, Emmett’s kidnapping and lynching “unfolded in a terror trail across three towns in three counties.”

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His Name Was Emmett Till

In 1955, just past daybreak, a Chevrolet truck pulled up to an unmarked building. A 14-year-old child was in the back.

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This article was published online on July 22, 2021.

T he dentist was a few minutes late, so I waited by the barn, listening to a northern mockingbird in the cypress trees. His tires kicked up dust when he turned off Drew Ruleville Road and headed across the bayou toward his house. He got out of his truck still wearing his scrubs and, with a smile, extended his hand: “Jeff Andrews.”

The gravel crunched under his feet as he walked to the barn, which is long and narrow with sliding doors in the middle. Its walls are made of cypress boards, weathered gray, and it overlooks a swimming pool behind a white columned house. Jeff Andrews rolled up the garage door he’d installed.

Our eyes adjusted to the darkness of the barn where Emmett Till was tortured by a group of grown men. Christmas decorations leaned against one wall. Within reach sat a lawn mower and a Johnson 9.9-horsepower outboard motor. Dirt covered the spot where Till was beaten, and where investigators believe he was killed. Andrews thinks he was strung from the ceiling, to make the beating easier. The truth is, nobody knows exactly what happened in the barn, and any evidence is long gone. Andrews pointed to the central rafter.

“That right there is where he was hung at.”

Emmett Till was killed early on the morning of August 28, 1955, one month and three days after his 14th birthday. His mother’s decision to show his body in an open casket, to allow Jet magazine to publish photos—“Let the world see what I’ve seen,” she said—became a call to action. Three months after his murder, Rosa Parks kept her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, and she later told Mamie Till that she’d been thinking of Emmett when she refused to move. Almost 60 years later, after Trayvon Martin was killed, Oprah Winfrey channeled the thoughts of many Americans in evoking the memory and the warning of Emmett Till.

Read: How The Blood of Emmett Till still stains America today

But the way Till’s name exists in the firmament of American history stands in opposition to the gaps in what we know about his killing. No one knows, for instance, how many people were involved. Most historians think at least seven were present. Only two were tried: half brothers J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant. Another half brother, Leslie Milam, was there that night too. He lived in an old white farmhouse a few dozen steps from the barn, next to where Jeff Andrews’s house now stands.

In 1955 an all-white, all-male jury, encouraged by the defense to do their duty as “Anglo-Saxons,” acquitted J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant. Because the defendants couldn’t be tried again, they got paid to make a confession to a national magazine—a heavily fictionalized account stage-managed by their lawyers—and Leslie Milam and his barn were written out of the story. Ask most people where Till died and they’ll say Money, Mississippi, the town where Till whistled at Bryant’s wife outside the family’s store. An Equal Justice Initiative monument in Montgomery says Money. Wikipedia does too. The Library of Congress website skips over the barn, which is just outside the town of Drew, about 45 minutes from the store.

I learned about the barn last year and have since made repeated visits, alone and with groups, once with members of Till’s family. Over and over, I drove from my home in the Mississippi hill country back into the gothic flatland where I was born. The barn’s existence conjures a complex set of reactions: It is a mourning bench for Black Americans, an unwelcome mirror for white Americans. It both repels and demands attention.

During one of my visits, Patrick Weems sat next to me as I navigated the backroads near Drew. A young, white Mississippian, Weems co-founded the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in nearby Sumner, to commemorate the places where Till spent the last days of his life. Weems is now working with Wheeler Parker, Till’s cousin and the last living eyewitness to the kidnapping, to create a series of monuments in Chicago, where Till grew up, and in Mississippi, where he died, with the hope that they might one day form a new national park . That’s why the barn matters now. There’s money, energy, urgency bearing down on the dentist and the long cypress building overlooking his pool, which is made somehow more menacing by the way it just sits there, unmemorialized.

One afternoon Weems and I were a little lost, surrounded by an endless landscape of soybeans and corn. I made a wide right turn around a cornfield and there it was, ordinary and freighted, hunkered in the flat, hot sun.

“Here we are,” Weems said. “Ground zero.”

Wheeler Parker made that same ride not long ago. He looked out the window of a bus at overflowing rivers and submerged farmland. It would not stop raining. The flood, perhaps mercifully, prevented the bus from reaching the barn. Parker sat quietly while Weems and a group of architects and planners—part of a team charged with imagining the memorials—got out and stared across the unruly bayou at the barn.

When everyone climbed back on the bus, the air felt somber. Parker didn’t say much. He thinks about Till every single day, and not as a symbol or a part of American history. Parker was Till’s cousin, yes, but also his best friend. They rode bikes together. Parker is 82 years old now and wants to see a memorial to Till built before he dies. Over and over, he told the people on the bus how much things had changed in Mississippi, so many times that it sounded like the person he was trying most to convince was himself. Maybe that’s why he keeps coming back here to tell this story, because he knows that all the changes he’s seen remain fragile.

For white Mississippians like Jeff Andrews and me, it’s possible to grow up rarely, if ever, hearing Emmett Till’s name. Slipping free of the generational guilt and shame of this particular murder—a proxy for so many acts of violence and cruelty, large and small—remains a central part of a white child’s education in the Delta, where a system of private schools arose in response to integration. “Seg academies,” they’re called. A Mississippi-history textbook taught at one in the early 1990s didn’t mention Till at all. A newer textbook contains 70 words on Till, calling him a “man” and telling the story of his killing through the lens of the damage that two evil men, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, did to all the good white folks. Half the passage is about how the segregationist governor was a “moderating force” in a time when media coverage of Till’s murder “painted a poor picture of Mississippi and its white citizens.” This textbook is still in use.

Jeff Andrews says he doesn’t feel personally connected to Till’s death. He didn’t know the history of his barn when he bought the property back in 1992, but now he understands its importance, and the emotional power it holds for the Till family members he welcomes on his land. Most everyone, from his patients to national civil-rights scholars, likes and respects Andrews. He winces a little when he sees people noticing his Christmas decorations. “I hate to have to show people this,” he says, “because I got so much shit in here.”

After he showed it to me, we found a place to sit in the shade by his pool. I kept looking back at the barn. He knew what I was doing.

“We don’t think about it,” Andrews said. “It’s in the past.”

Out by the barn, his yellow lab, Dixie, rolled in the hot grass near the corn.

Emmett Till had looked forward to his trip south from the moment his mother gave him permission to go. He was too young to understand that he was arriving in a place with a violent history just as that place was dying. For two centuries cotton had been as central to the global marketplace as oil is today, fueling commerce and war and suffering. But by 1955 the cotton economy, and the caste system sustained by it, was in a downward spiral.

A year before Till traveled to Mississippi, the Supreme Court outlawed “separate but equal” in Brown v. Board of Education . Mississippi and other southern states refused to comply, so the Court issued another ruling saying that they had to desegregate the public schools. Cotton prices were stagnant. Banks were calling in loans. A drought set in. Small-time operators like Leslie Milam couldn’t afford to irrigate, so already thin crops just burned in the fields. Several years without a lynching in the state ended in May 1955 when a civil-rights activist and preacher named George Lee was murdered. On August 13, a voting-rights activist named Lamar Smith was killed in Brookhaven. Seven days later, Emmett Till and his older cousin Wheeler Parker left Chicago on a southbound train.

Parker told me he remembers how much Till bounced around the train, bothering people with his nervous energy. His mother, whose family had fled the Delta three decades earlier, had tried to prepare him for the unwritten but ironclad rules that would govern his time in Mississippi. Say “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am.” Don’t look white women in the eye. Be silent. Be invisible.

Mose Wright, who was in Chicago for a funeral, accompanied Parker, his grandson, and Till, his great-nephew, on the train. When they arrived in Mississippi, they drove back to Wright’s home on Dark Fear Road, east of Money. His own youngest child, Simeon, was two years younger than Till. A few days later, the boys went to Bryant’s Grocery. That’s where Till whistled at Carolyn Bryant, a 21-year-old white woman the press described as beautiful.

Simeon and Parker were standing right there when he whistled. They both knew immediately that there would be trouble. Parker later told me that Till saw the fear in his cousins’ eyes and he got scared too. Till begged them not to tell Mose what he’d done. For the rest of his life, Simeon regretted not saying anything.

Till and Simeon shared a small bed while Parker slept in another room. A few nights later Simeon woke up to Mose standing over them with Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, who held his pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other. Simeon’s mother begged the men not to take the boy, and offered what little money they had. The kidnappers became aggravated when Till, groggy and disoriented in the dark, insisted on putting his socks on . Simeon would never forget the look of fear on his cousin’s face.

Mose followed them outside. He heard what sounded like a woman’s voice saying they’d gotten the right kid, just before the men took Till and drove away. Mose stood outside staring down Dark Fear Road long after the dusty trail disappeared.

Simeon’s mother swore she wouldn’t sleep in that house another night, and she didn’t. She moved to her brother’s house that same day and from there went to Chicago, where she spent the rest of her life. A few days later, Simeon saw a sheriff’s deputy come to the field to find Mose. There was a whispered conversation he couldn’t hear and then he saw his father leave quietly. When Mose got home from identifying the body, he could only sit on the porch swing and grunt.

The old man agreed to testify, and when asked to identify J. W. Milam in court he pointed a finger and said in a booming voice, “There he is.” Some writers made him seem simple and country, quoting him as using the word thar , but Simeon said his father carefully enunciated the words: There. He. Is. After the trial, Mose joined his wife in Chicago and never returned to Dark Fear Road. Simeon came home to Mississippi for reunions but never lived in the Delta again. He wrote a book titled Simeon’s Story , in which he recounted that night and said he could never again hear the sound of an approaching car without thinking of 1955.

Not long before Simeon died, four years ago, he stood outside the abandoned and collapsing Bryant’s Grocery in Money with a group of Till scholars and activists. They headed to their cars. Next stop: the barn. One of them turned to Simeon, an old man by then, and asked if he wanted to come. He’d never been to the barn, not once in the 60 years that had passed since that night. Simeon shook his head.

“I’m not ready yet,” he said.

The barn’s history would have remained secret except for a single Mississippian. Early on the last morning of Emmett Till’s life, a Black 18-year-old named Willie Reed awoke and walked toward the town of Drew on the dirt road that still runs past the Andrews place.

Reed was heading to a nearby country store to get breakfast. He saw a green-and-white Chevrolet pickup truck turn onto the path that led up to the barn. Four white men sat shoulder to shoulder in the cab; in the back three Black men sat with a terrified Black child. The child was Emmett Till.

Reed heard Till screaming in the barn. At one point, he saw J. W. Milam take a break and walk with a gun on his hip to a nearby well. Milam drank some cool water, then went back inside and the beating continued. The screams turned to moans.

The men talked about taking Till to a hospital, but they’d beaten him too badly to be saved. So much about this murder remains unknown, but FBI investigators believe a single gunshot to the head ended Till’s life in the barn. The men threw cotton seeds on the floor to soak up the blood and took the body to the Tallahatchie River. They threw Till off a bridge; a cotton-gin fan tied to his neck pulled him down.

Willie Reed went to work the next day. By then word had spread, and people were starting to talk. His grandfather begged him to stay quiet and not create trouble for the family. Reed thought over and over about whether he should tell the truth about what he’d seen and heard.

A retired FBI agent named Dale Killinger knows more about the murder of Emmett Till than anyone else alive. Killinger was the lead agent when the FBI opened a federal investigation in 2004 , with the potential to finally bring charges against Carolyn Bryant for her presumed role in the murder.

I talked to Killinger on the phone one afternoon about the violence in the barn. The next time we spoke he told me that his wife had been sitting next to him during that graphic conversation, and when he’d hung up, she’d turned to him with a hollow look in her eyes and asked him why they’d done it. Even when people know generally what happened to Till, the specifics still leave them gasping.

“Rhea, don’t you understand?” he told her. “They were entertained by this.”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“They could’ve killed and tortured him anywhere they wanted to,” he told her. “They chose to take him to a barn where they could control the environment and do what they wanted. In my mind, they were entertaining themselves.”

He told me he’s imagined the sounds of that night over and over. He interviewed Leslie Milam’s widow before she died and found her evasive.

“Frances Milam was home,” he said. “She was in the house. You think she heard what was going on?”

Killinger laughed bitterly and answered his own question.“Hell yeah, she did,” he said. “It’s 1955 and you don’t have air-conditioning. So she admitted that they brought him to the farm in the middle of the night. That’s in the FBI report. So she was there and they were beating him and eventually somebody shot him in that barn in the head. You hear everything in Mississippi! You know? The windows are open. You have window screening—that’s all you have. You hear a car coming a mile away. You hear somebody getting beat in your barn! You hear a gunshot! Think about why they chose to go to that barn. They chose it because Leslie Milam controlled that space. And they could go in there and do what they wanted, how they wanted. And why would you do that? You could have taken him off in the woods and killed him if you wanted to, right? Dump the body anywhere. They went out of their way.”

The white Mississippians who lived around the barn responded to the killing like an organism fighting an infection. A new narrative took hold, about how the community of good white people was unfairly tarnished by the actions of a few monsters. In 1955, the editorial page of the Chicago Defender , the preeminent Black newspaper in the country, chronicled this self-absolution as it happened. “Most of the educated upper class white Mississippians are desperately trying to disassociate themselves from the lynchers,” the paper said, “trying to show that they are civilized and do not approve of such racial violence.”

Three months after Till’s death, according to records in the Sunflower County courthouse, Leslie Milam’s landlord, Ben Sturdivant, sold the property and threw him off the land. Last summer, his grandson Walker Sturdivant showed me into his office on the family’s sprawling farm. All around were the telltale signs of old Delta money: a chair from a fancy boarding school, a Union Planters Bank espresso cup, photographs from ski vacations. Walker’s dad was a respected, progressive politician, and the family had recently helped the Emmett Till Interpretive Center acquire land for a memorial site on the Tallahatchie River.

Before we talked, Walker had gone down to the courthouse to pull up the old rental agreements and land records so he’d have his facts straight. It’s all there, in red leather-bound books. “Immediately after it happened,” he said, “that’s when he exited from his relationship. Dad always said J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant both had been ostracized in the white community after what they had done. The people just decided: At least the code said you don’t do that to children.”

During the trial, people put up jars in stores around the Delta to raise money for Bryant and Milam, but once the pair got paid for the magazine confession, they were essentially exiled. Bryant lost his store because almost all his customers had been Black and nobody would shop there anymore. He moved around a lot, broke and shunned. J. W. Milam lived out his final years in a Black neighborhood, the only place he could afford. He kept getting in trouble—for writing bad checks, for assault, for using a stolen credit card.

Leslie Milam lived better than his brothers but only marginally so. Nineteen years after the murder, his wife called their minister, a Baptist preacher from Cleveland, Mississippi, named Macklyn Hubbell. She asked him to come to their home, on the outskirts of town. Milam wanted a moment of his time, a meeting first reported in Devery S. Anderson’s book Emmett Till . Hubbell drove over to the house, and Frances led him into a room where Milam was stretched out on the couch. “I remember exactly,” Hubbell, 90 years old and sharp, told me. “I remember approaching the couch where he was lying.”

The preacher pulled up a straight-backed chair.

Milam looked him right in the eye and began to speak.

“It was a confession between Leslie and me,” Hubbell said. “And I didn’t share it with anybody until Leslie was gone and Frances was gone. Because they are gone, I can tell you what Leslie said. I remember that he said he was involved in the killing of Emmett Till. He wanted to tell me, because he perceived me to be a man of God. He was releasing himself of guilt. He was belching out guilt.”

Hubbell listened and prayed, and then he left the small ranch house on a street surrounded by farmland. Milam died before sunrise. He’s buried in Drew, a few miles from the barn where he helped torture and kill a child.

One of the things Dale Killinger did when the FBI opened its case was go looking for Willie Reed, the man who as an 18-year-old had heard Till screaming in the barn. Reed had ignored the warnings of his grandfather and agreed to testify. He said later he couldn’t have lived with himself if he’d stayed quiet.

After the trial, mobs searched the Delta for the witnesses. Reed knew he needed to escape. He walked and ran six miles from his home outside Drew. A car waited at a rendezvous spot and carried him to Memphis, where for the first time in his life he boarded an airplane. U.S. Congressman Charles Diggs of Detroit flew with him as an escort. When they landed in Chicago, all Reed had were the clothes on his back plus a coat and an extra pair of pants.

He tried to start a new life in Chicago but suffered a breakdown. Eventually, he changed his name to Willie Louis and got a job at Jackson Park Hospital, where he met a woman named Juliet. They married and bought a home in the Englewood neighborhood, on the South Side. They both worked at the hospital for decades, she as a nurse and he as an orderly.

Juliet didn’t know about her husband’s old name until they’d been together for at least a decade. Then, in the 1980s, a journalist tracked him down. An aunt had given the reporter his address. Quickly realizing that she shouldn’t have done that, the aunt called Juliet to let her know what was about to happen.

“Do you know who Willie is?” she asked.

“He’s Willie!” Juliet said.

“He’s the boy that testified in the Emmett Till trial.”

That’s how Juliet learned about her husband’s previous life. Willie was angry at his aunt but told the reporter everything. Juliet listened. After that, he’d talk about Till occasionally, but only if someone asked. “He was trying to forget,” she says.

Sometimes Juliet would catch Willie lost in silence.

“What’s wrong?” she’d ask.

“I was just thinking about Emmett,” he’d reply, then fall silent once more. He told her that he was reliving Till’s screams.

Two more decades passed, and then Killinger called. He said that the United States needed Willie Louis to go back to Mississippi. Back to the barn, so he could walk agents through his old testimony and be ready to give it again. Louis invited Killinger to the house in Englewood, and Killinger promised to be by his side every moment. Only then did he agree.

The FBI bought Willie and Juliet plane tickets and flew them down South, into the Memphis airport. The next morning, Willie looked out on newly planted cotton fields as the men from the FBI drove him deeper into the Delta. Killinger wondered what he must have been thinking. Until the day his grandfather died, the old man had told anyone who’d listen that Willie should have kept his mouth shut. Willie had built a new life in Chicago, a respected quiet life, but the feeling of exile had never quite gone away.

They drove mostly in silence. After two hours, they turned onto Drew Ruleville Road and parked. Willie Louis became Willie Reed again. He stood on the empty grass where he’d once lived. His house was long gone, and so was the country store where he’d been headed when he saw the truck.

Louis moved slowly up the road, across the bayou and the dentist’s manicured lawn.

“I could hear screaming,” he said.

“Which part of the barn?” Killinger asked.

“On the right side,” he said.

Then Willie Louis got to the barn itself. Killinger watched him closely as he walked into a past reaching out to grab him, back into a life he’d left behind. Everything felt new and strange. The old man stood with his arms out, like someone who’d lost his balance, and he tried to make sense of then and now on this terrible piece of dirt.

Willie Louis died in 2013, and Simeon Wright died in 2017, leaving Wheeler Parker as the last surviving witness to the kidnapping. He’s working on a memoir. He wrote it in longhand and his wife, Marvel, typed it for him, at times weeping as she read things she hadn’t known, even after five decades of marriage.

Now a pastor, Parker met me this past spring in a Chicago suburb at a community center named for Till. It sits on a piece of land where he and Till used to play.

“Cowboys and Indians,” he said with a smile.

The community center is just feet from where his grandfather Mose Wright used to keep a vegetable garden after he testified in the trial. A painting of the store in Money hangs on the wall near portraits of Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama.

That week in 1955 was the defining moment in Parker’s life. He remembers riding the train south from Chicago with Till. He remembers hearing Till whistle at Carolyn Bryant, and he remembers the night when J. W. Milam shined a flashlight in his face.

“They came to me,” he said. “I was shaking like a leaf. Whole bed was shaking. I closed my eyes and said, ‘This is it.’ And I was praying. I said, ‘God if you just let me live, I will be doing right,’ because I thought of every evil little thing I’ve done wrong, you know? Oh, man, I was begging.”

He looked at me, and there was silence. It was 1955 again for just a moment.

I asked him how many people are alive who grew up with him and Till.

He started counting.

“Well, around here,” he said, and the names started coming: first his own brothers, then a local shoeshine man who used to play war games with them right where we were sitting. He kept rattling them off: Joanne, Mary Ellen, Louise, Lee. Nine or 10, he finally told me. He paused.

“Ms. Bryant’s gonna be 87 this year,” Parker said. “She’s five years older than I am. I’m 82 last week.”

In the decades after the murder, the old Bryant’s Grocery in Money became a strange underground tourist attraction, a place that offered truths about America, or maybe just satisfied some morbid curiosity. The family of one of the jurors bought the store and then let it collapse . Now the building is falling in on itself, overgrown with vines, ivy, and trees. In the owners’ desire for the store not to become a monument to a killing, it’s become something else: a monument to the desire, and ultimate failure, of white Mississippi to erase the stain of Till’s death.

Meanwhile, the barn vanished from the popular account of the murder, and then it faded from all but a few local memories, too. The land around it just kept on being plowed and planted and harvested. A local farmer named Reg Shurden and his family moved into the farmhouse next to the barn in the late 1950s. They didn’t stay long. Shurden’s wife didn’t like it and never really explained why.

“When my grandmother was still living, I didn’t realize that’s where Emmett Till had been killed,” Stafford Shurden says. “Now I wonder, did she hate it because she knew that happened?”

In the early 1960s, a couple from Missouri, the Buchanans, moved onto the farm with their two children. Their son, Bob, was a junior in high school then. He says his father didn’t know the history of the land when he bought it. The barn was just where they stored seed and farm equipment. But one day he was in there helping out when someone pointed.

“That’s where they tied up Emmett Till,” the man told him.

Buchanan says he didn’t think about it much after that. His family never discussed it, even among themselves. They just went on with their lives.

In the early 1980s, Bob’s mother rented the land near the barn to Reg Shurden’s nephew Steve. “Miss Buchanan was a sassy old little lady when I knew her,” Steve says. “The house was getting run-down then. She kept talking about how she was going to fix it up.”

He knew about the barn.

“We didn’t think about it,” he says. “I mean, it wasn’t anything to talk about.”

His cousin Stafford sat with us at a Drew lunch spot as we talked.

“As a kid, I didn’t know who Emmett Till was,” he said.

Mrs. Buchanan refused to leave even as the house deteriorated around her. Finally, sometime before 1985, she moved out and the place sat abandoned. High-school kids started going out there to drink. They would sit in the dark front room, with the big bay windows looking out on the cypress trees and the bayou, and either they didn’t know Emmett Till had died there or they didn’t care. I bet they didn’t know. That innocence was what their parents and grandparents had wanted. Sometimes the kids would go through Mrs. Buchanan’s drawers and find old farm bills and letters and paperwork. It was like she’d up and vanished one day.

Jeff Andrews loved the view across the bayou, and after Mrs. Buchanan died he begged Bob and his sister to sell him the property. He pestered them for close to a year until they relented. He’d lived in Drew for most of his life. He didn’t know he’d bought the barn where Emmett Till was killed. Nobody told him.

Around the time of the sale, on a spring Saturday night, the house caught fire. Instead of paying to have the debris removed, Andrews got a bulldozer and a crew to dig a big hole and push the ruins of Leslie Milam’s old home into the hole and cover it up with Mississippi dirt. He built a new house, and finally his father told him about the barn. Andrews never asked his dad why he hadn’t mentioned it sooner.

A group of FBI agents once asked Wheeler Parker what justice looked like to him. That’s a hard question. His cousin Simeon always wanted to see Carolyn Bryant behind bars. Parker told the agents he just wanted people to know the truth.

Read: Vann R. Newkirk II on Emmett Till and the ghosts of the Mississippi Delta

Over the decades, evidence and facts had slowly vanished. The only copy of the trial transcript disappeared, and FBI agents had to track down a copy of a copy of a copy, which a source led them to at a private residence on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The ring Till had been wearing, which had belonged to his father, vanished. In the 1970s, the Sumner courthouse was renovated and old evidence was discarded . A lawyer in Sumner looked on the curb of the courthouse and saw the gin fan that had been used to sink Till’s body sitting with all sorts of meaningless trash bound for the dump. He took it as a trophy but soon threw it away.

A recording of Roy Bryant’s account of that night in 1955 exists. The tapes are either in Mississippi or in Los Angeles, where the United American Costume Company is based. That’s the company founded by John Wayne’s personal costumer, a native of Ruleville, Mississippi, named Luster Bayless. Decades ago, Bayless decided he wanted to make a movie about the Till murder and so he arranged an interview with Bryant. A microcassette recorder captured every word as Bryant drove around the Delta, re-creating the night of the murder; it is likely the only existing description of what happened inside the barn in the final hour of Till’s life. Bryant even posed for a Polaroid in front of the store. Other than FBI agents and a few random people, nobody has heard the recording.

These tapes contain something other than facts, although they contain lots of those, too. They contain the sound of Bryant’s voice, the way his laugh sounds when he recounts torturing a child, the way he drawls his vowels, the little details that let you know a human being did this terrible thing. Locals remember Bryant as an old man, blinded by a lifetime of welding, working at a store on Highway 49 in Ruleville, eight miles from the barn.

The researcher Bayless hired, a woman named Cecelia Lusk, told me she went to the libraries at Delta State and Ole Miss and was stunned. Stories about Till had been torn out of magazines in the archives. In both of the courthouses in Tallahatchie County, she said, she found the legal file folders for the case. They were empty. “Not one sheet of paper,” she said. “Someone had removed everything. There was absolutely not one piece of paper in those folders.”

This is the world of silence Killinger entered when he started asking questions around the Delta, trying to find Wheeler Parker’s idea of justice and maybe Simeon’s too. He went to Carolyn Bryant’s home to question her; when she dies, that interview will become public. He tracked down missing transcripts and uncovered new evidence. A forensic team searched Andrews’s barn but came up empty.

A central pillar in the 1955 defense of Milam and Bryant had been that the body Mamie Till buried was not, in fact, her son’s— that it was instead a body planted by the NAACP . One juror later told a reporter that he’d voted to acquit because the body had chest hair and everyone knew that Black men couldn’t grow chest hair until they were about 30. Killinger knew prosecutors would have to deal with that accusation if they were to bring charges against Carolyn Bryant, and so he had to ask the Till family for permission to bring up the body and conduct a DNA test.

The family held a small service, and then the diggers went to work. They removed the concrete vault and then the casket. After the casket came out, the vault crumbled. Emmett Till had been buried in a glass-top coffin, and the glass hadn’t broken. The assembled people gasped, according to Killinger, who was there. The embalmer, Woodrow “Champ” Jackson, a Black man from Tutwiler, Mississippi, had clearly done his work with care. Emmett Till looked just as he did when they put him in the grave. The FBI photos taken in 2005 looked almost exactly like the famous Jet pictures that helped spark the civil-rights movement.

Read: Why Ebony magazine’s archives were saved

Killinger presented his report and waited; he thought there was enough evidence for an indictment. But nothing happened. A local prosecutor tried—not hard enough, in Killinger’s opinion—to indict Carolyn Bryant for manslaughter, but a grand jury declined. That was 14 years ago. A reporter heard the news and found Simeon Wright at his local church. He said he knew he didn’t have many years left and now he knew he’d die without seeing Carolyn Bryant spend a minute behind bars. The members of the grand jury looked in the mirror, he said, and didn’t like what they saw.

I called Jeff Andrews a month or two after my first visit to the barn and asked if I could come back and talk. I explained that I felt compelled to do this story because one of the central conflicts for white Mississippians is whether to shine a bright light on the past or—

“—move on?” he said, finishing my thought.

That remains a fraught and divisive question for white Mississippians. Should you dig deep enough that you might come to hate a place you also love? When Andrews graduated from dental school, he and his wife visited a town in Alabama where a practice was for sale. They both liked the area and thought they could make a great living—and a great new life—there. But they both felt out of place. “It’s a long way from home,” Jeff’s wife said.

They moved back to Drew and have never left. Last year, Andrews went duck hunting 40 of 65 possible days. He drives a tractor in the early morning and late afternoon, working his soybean fields and listening to sports talk radio. He never got rich, but he’s built the kind of life he dreamed about. Andrews talks about the love he feels for the land around his home—not just the piece he owns, but all of it, a kind of spiritual homeland. His family arrived here by way of a New Deal program two generations ago. He still farms the original 40 acres that his grandfather farmed, about a mile from the barn.

Andrews and I talked on and off in the months that followed our first meeting. He seemed genuinely at ease. He told me it didn’t bother him to own the barn, or sleep near it, or grill while kids splashed in the pool in its shadow. I couldn’t understand how the knowledge of what had happened there wasn’t grinding away somewhere deep inside him. How a place that was the literal site of the torture and execution of a 14-year-old boy could be a place of such peace for him.

Finally, at his suggestion, I got in touch with a woman who’d written a book about her experiences communicating with the spirit of Emmett Till. She asked whether I’d talked to the Andrews family about the noises and lights. I said I had not. They’ve seen and felt things, she told me. A flash. A rush of movement. They’ve heard noises. The woman said Andrews’s wife talks to Till sometimes.

I asked Andrews about this, and he hemmed and hawed but eventually told me that his daughter believes Till’s spirit is on their land, that their home is haunted by the memory of the boy who died there. Let that idea sit for a moment: If ghosts aren’t real, which they’re not, and if these apparitions are the only way for deeply buried feelings to find the light of day, then the gap between what the Andrewses allow themselves to know and what they keep buried inside is the exact gap that memorials are designed to bridge. And so Jeff Andrews has a choice.

Money is being raised to buy the barn and turn it into a memorial, with the idea that it might one day become part of the national park Wheeler and Marvel Parker hope to create. The Parkers want the centerpiece of that project to be the Chicago church where Till’s funeral was held and where the world saw his open casket. That is the story of Mamie Till’s courage and strength, whereas the barn is a symbol of white violence and fear. The barn remains a mirror.

Andrews knows an offer is likely coming for his land and home, and he isn’t sure what he’s going to do.

Fourteen years ago, Tallahatchie County issued a formal apology for the acquittal of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam. The state installed a green historical marker outside the courthouse. Patrick Weems’s office is across the street from that sign, so he can literally point out his window at progress. But he can also point to the repeated vandalism of signs his organization has worked to erect. There was a marker at the Delta Inn, the hotel where jurors were sequestered and where, during the trial, a cross was burned just in case any of the jurors didn’t understand what their neighbors expected of them. That marker was taken down one night by vandals and has not been replaced. A sign was placed along the Tallahatchie River, where Till’s body was found, but someone threw it in the water. A replacement collected more than 100 bullet holes until, made illegible by the violence, it came down and was given to the Smithsonian. A third sign got shot a month after it went up . Three Ole Miss students posed before the sign with guns , and one posted the photo to Instagram. The current sign is bulletproof.

Little about this murder feels safely in the past. Wheeler Parker is alive. So is Carolyn Bryant. Many of the children and grandchildren of the killers and the jurors and the defense attorneys still live in the area. The barn is still just a barn. One man claims that the truck used to kidnap Till is rusting right now on a Glendora plantation. Two of the four men suspected of being in the cab of that truck back in 1955 went unnamed in public until Killinger’s FBI report was released . Till’s ring remains missing, and the legal files remain missing.

But J. W. Milam’s gun, which Willie Reed saw strapped to his hip and Wheeler Parker saw when the flashlight hit his face, isn’t one of the many pieces of this story that vanished without a trace. The FBI suspects that it didn’t vanish at all. When I first heard that the gun might still be in the Delta, I didn’t believe it. Then I got a local crop-duster pilot on the phone. Yes, he confirmed, he and his sister believe they own J. W. Milam’s military-issue pistol, as well as the holster. The siblings don’t really know what to do with the gun. Maybe, the pilot said, they could get local celebrity Morgan Freeman to buy it from them and donate it to a museum. The pilot explained that their father had gotten the gun from one of Milam’s attorneys, and upon their father’s death it passed down to them. Right now, he said, that gun is locked away in a safety-deposit box in a bank in Greenwood, Mississippi. It’s a model 1911-A1 .45-caliber semiautomatic, made by Ithaca, serial number 2102279. The gun still fires.

This spring, Wheeler Parker drove me around Argo, Illinois, southwest of Chicago, showing me the places where he grew up. He told me more about the group of old men who went to elementary school with Till all those decades ago. They were planning to gather on what would have been Till’s 80th birthday for a weekend celebration. Parker said the old guys sit around and tell stories about the place where they were born.

“Oh,” he said, “Mississippi is talked about all the time.”

He laughed.

“Behind the iron curtain,” he said.

He pulled over in front of an empty lot with houses on both sides. This little industrial suburb is where Emmett Till lived before he and Mamie moved to the South Side. The kids used to play across all these yards. An old fire hydrant is out front, and Parker looked at it closely. It’s the original. The fire hydrant remains but the home is long gone.

“Emmett Till’s house is right here,” he said, pointing to the empty grass. “And 7524, our house, was right next door here.”

They rode bikes together on this street. They told jokes and made plans. Till wanted to do whatever his older cousin Parker was doing. That’s why he asked his mom to let him go to Mississippi. Because Parker was going down to visit his grandparents. Till begged. Mamie said no at first but finally relented. Parker had to face Mamie when he got back to Chicago from the Delta. He still remembers how guilty he felt in her presence for surviving, and he will forever carry that guilt, and also the resolve it put in him.

He and Marvel are raising money for the memorials, to make sure that when they die, and the others who knew Emmett Till die, Till’s story will be remembered. They will continue telling his story for as long as they’re able. Because Till rode his bike on this street. Because the gun still fires, because the barn is still just a barn, because time is thin and fragile, because the dirt Jeff Andrews and I were taught to love is the exact same dirt Wheeler Parker was taught to fear.

This article appears in the September 2021 print edition with the headline “The Barn.”

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Emmett Till — Analysis Of Bob Dilan’s Song The Death Of Emmett Till

Analysis of Bob Dilan’s Song The Death of Emmett till

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Published: May 14, 2021

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How the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument Can Help Us Reckon With Racial Trauma

July 25 marked what would have been Emmett Till’s 84th birthday. It is also now the anniversary of President Joe Biden’s establishment of the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument.

To mark the occasion, the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund held a “Monuments & Justice” webinar that touched on the efforts to create the national monument. Panelists focused on the important role monuments and preservation can play in encouraging a national reckoning with and healing from America’s racial history.

The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument spans two states and three sites: Graball Landing in Glendora, Mississippi; the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi; and the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago. These locations represent where Till’s body was found along the Tallahatchie River, the courthouse where two white men were acquitted by an all-white jury of Till’s lynching, and the church that hosted his funeral — which included an open casket viewing, a horrifying reflection of the violence visited upon the child. The monument is managed by the National Park Service.

At the time of the designation last year, the White House said the monument “builds on the Biden-Harris Administration’s work to advance civil rights and racial justice, including through the President’s signing of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act that codified lynching as a federal hate crime. The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument is President Biden’s fourth new national monument, and reflects the Administration’s commitment to protecting places that help tell a more complete story of our nation’s history.”

Earlier this year, efforts to restore and preserve the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ — a site etched into the memory of so many due to the wrenching images from Till’s funeral there — began with efforts to return the sanctuary and exterior of the building to their original condition. Built in 1922, the church most recently had 1990s-era masonry that covered the original facade. The project will also include stabilization and rehabilitation efforts for the church.

“Last fall, the project team conducted preliminary investigation and opened parts of the facade, which revealed the existence of original masonry and windows,” a press release from the Action Fund stated earlier this year. “The full removal has revealed significant findings, confirming the condition of the original masonry and steel and wood windows and other character-defining features such as painted brick and crosses.” Restoration efforts are scheduled to begin this fall.

The project has received preservation funding from the Action Fund and its signature partner, the Mellon Foundation.

Dr. Marvel Parker, executive director of the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley Institute, said these monuments are about more than telling the story of Till’s death. They’re a place for remembering and celebrating his life, too.

Parker said Till-Mobley, on her deathbed, asked her and her husband, the Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., to continue making sure Emmett’s death wasn’t in vain. “In agreeing to do that, what has happened is not only have we been instrumental in preserving the legacy of Emmett Till, but we’re also preserving the legacy of Mamie Till-Mobley. Her heroism is what has caused us to understand and know the story of Emmett,” she said.

“By preserving, restoring and interpreting sites of African American achievement and resilience, the Action Fund is helping to ensure that future generations see, experience and have access to this history and these stories,” Dr. Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation, said during the webinar.

Despite the efforts of activists such as Till-Mobley, Dr. Justin Hopkins, a psychologist and founder of Hopkins Behavioral Health, likened the way the country has dealt with its history of racial violence to “societal PTSD.” In this heightened state, he said in the webinar, the memory of our country’s racial history and trauma are perceived as dangerous as the events themselves. “This is, in part, why white Americans and law enforcement so readily may fear Black skin, [and explains] the efforts to ban our books and curriculum,” he said. “Our trauma is being passed down from generation to generation unhealed. What’s at stake is just continued suffering. We can’t avoid what’s happening. We either deal with the truth or the truth will keep dealing with us.”

Hopkins says he learned from working with veterans that patients who experienced trauma were more likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder if they exhibit symptoms of avoidance.

“Being healed is wonderful, but the process of healing is disruptive. It’s uncomfortable. And it’s often painful,” he said. “To heal trauma, you have to confront your worst memories and experiences. You have to interact with your own anguish, which we understandably may want to avoid.”

Parker said PTSD is a condition her family knows literally and intimately. “That’s something my husband was victimized by for 50 years,” she said.

The Rev. Parker was Till’s cousin and is the last surviving witness to his abduction. He was 16 years old at the time. Parker said her husband lived in a state of denial for several decades, even after attending Till’s funeral. “He did not accept that that was Emmett’s body in the casket. He never cried. He never felt any sorrow because he rejected that that was him. He said, ‘I’m going to see him again,’” she said.

When Till’s body was exhumed in 2005, the Parkers left the country and went to Puerto Rico. When they returned, the reverend presided over Till’s graveside recommittal service. “It was the most difficult thing that I’ve seen him do [and] I’ve been married to him for 56 years now,” she said. Finally, the Rev. Parker has begun to process his trauma and even cry.

“At 84, he says, ‘I’m too old to be crying now,’ but it’s cathartic and it’s a healing process for him, but it has taken all of this time for him to begin to heal,” she said.

Hopkins said monuments such as the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument can provide a space for collective healing for those who are “brave enough to bear witness.”

Avoidance, he argued, is something that Americans have collectively practiced because it’s much easier than reckoning with reality. “This is where our monuments come in because when used to accurately depict the events of history, they can be our mirrors. They can give us a window into who we are. Nothing helps us understand the present like the past.”

This is a good time to tune into the sensations within your body, he said. Recognize the tightening of your muscles, the constricting of your stomach or any shortened breaths and “make meaning of it.”

He added: “I wonder if, at our sites, we can somehow invite people to just try to be present with what’s happening inside their bodies so that they can do the individual work that they need to do to confront their trauma and actually heal.”

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