Emmett Till

Emmett Louis "Bobo" Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was an African-American youth native to Chicago, Illinois whose brutal murder in Mississippi was one of the key events leading up to the American Civil Rights Movement. He was the son of Mamie Carthan and Louis Till. Mamie largely raised the boy on her own; she and Louis had separated in 1942. His father was drafted into the United States Army because of World War II in 1943, and was executed by the U.S. Army for raping two Italian women and murdering a third.

In 1955, when Emmett was 14 years old, he was sent for a summer stay with family in Mississippi. He arrived in Money, Mississippi on August 21, and went to stay with his great uncle, Moses Wright. A few days later on the 24th, he joined some other teenagers as they went to Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market to get some refreshments. They were children of sharecroppers and had been picking cotton all day. The market was owned by Roy Bryant and Carolyn Bryant, who mostly catered to this sharecropper population. While in the store, Emmett reportedly whistled at Carolyn and/or made a romantic proposition of her, an action that angered her husband.

At about 2:30 AM on August 28, Roy Bryant and his half brother, J.W. Milam, kidnapped Emmett from his uncle's house in Money, Mississippi. They brutally beat him and then shot him with a .45 caliber pistol before tying a heavy fan to the body with barbed wire in order to weigh it down. An eye was also gouged out. Milam and Bryant were soon under suspicion in the boy's disappearance, and were arrested on the 29th. The body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River three days later on August 31.

Mamie brought the body back to Chicago. A funeral home director asked her if she would like the body to be cleaned up for viewing, but she declined. She wanted people to see how badly the boy's body had been disfigured in the incident. Press photographers took pictures and circulated them around the country, drawing intense reaction by the public. Some reports indicate that up to 50,000 people filed through the funeral home to view the body. The photograph of Emmett Till's mutilated corpse energized the nascent civil rights movement when they appeared in Jet Magazine.

As Emmett was buried on September 6 in Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois, Bryant and Milam were indicted in Mississippi by a grand jury in the killing. On the 19th, the trial began, involving unprecedented cooperation between local law enforcement, the NAACP, and local reporters. However, the investigation was less than thorough, and when the all-white jury came back from deliberations on September 23 after just 67 minutes, the two defendants were acquitted. (One jury member said they took a "soda break" to stretch the time to over an hour.) The acquittal outraged people throughout the United States and Europe. Stories about the trial had been carried in countries such as France, Germany, and Belgium.

In a 1956 article in Look magazine, J.W. Milam admitted that he and his brother had killed Till. They claimed that when they intially took Till into their custody, their intention was to pistol-whip him and threaten to throw him off of a cliff in order to scare him into line. However, they claimed that regardless of what they did to him, he never showed any fear of them, never seemed to believe they would really kill him, and maintained a completely unrepentant, insolent and defiant attitude toward them concerning his actions. Thus, they felt they were left with no choice but to fully make an example of him.

A year later, the magazine returned to the story, indicating that Milam and Bryant had been shunned by the community, and that their stores were then closed due to lack of business.

Milam died in 1980, Bryant in 1990. Mamie (as Mamie Till Mobley) outlived them, dying at age 81 on January 6, 2003.

On May 10, 2004, the United States Department of Justice announced that it was reopening the case, an action the NAACP had been calling for. Although the federal statute of limitations from 1955 has expired, the charges can appear in the state court. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and officials in Mississippi would also be involved in the investigation. A documentary assembled by filmmaker Keith Beauchamp apparently led to the renewed interest. Another documentary by Stanley Nelson had aired on PBS in 2003. Research from those films indicated that as many 10 people may have been involved in the killing.

The James Baldwin play "Blues for Mister Charlie" is loosly based on the Emmett Till case.

See also

• Eyes on the Prize

External links

• Early Civil Rights Struggles: The Murder of Emmett Till
• Crime Library: Mississippi Madness: The Story of Emmett Till
• NPR pieces on the Emmett Till murder

References

• The Murder of Emmett Till. American Experience. Accessed May 10, 2004.
• Maria Newman (May 10, 2004). U.S. to Reopen Investigation of Emmett Till's Murder in 1955. The New York Times. Accessed May 10, 2004.