Emmett Till
Emmett Till was born on this date in 1941. He was a Black boy whose murder is still a graphic reminder of the volume of 20th-century white-America hatred of Black people.
Emmett Louis "Bobo" Till was from Chicago, Illinois, and was the son of Mamie Carthan and Louis Till. His parents separated in 1942, and Mamie largely raised him. His father was drafted into the United States Army to fight in World War II in 1943. He was accused of and executed by the U.S. Army for raping two Italian women and murdering a third.
In the summer of 1955, when Till was 14 years old, Till went to stay with his family in Mississippi. He arrived in Money, Mississippi, on August 21 and went to stay with his great uncle, Moses Wright.
On August 24, he joined other teenagers as they went to Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market for refreshments. They were children of sharecroppers and had been picking cotton all day. The market was owned by Roy and Carolyn Bryant, whose clientele comprised the local sharecropper population. While in the store, Till reportedly whistled at Carolyn or made a romantic proposition of her, which supposedly angered her husband. At about 2:30 AM on August 28, 1955, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, kidnapped Emmett from his uncle's house and murdered him.
They brutally beat him and then shot him with a .45 caliber pistol before tying a heavy fan to his neck with barbed wire 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 August 29. Emmett's body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River three days later, on the last day of August. Till’s mother brought his body back to Chicago. A funeral home director asked if she would like the body cleaned up for viewing, but she declined. She wanted people to see how badly the boy's body had been disfigured in the incident and chose to leave his coffin open.
Press photographers took pictures and circulated them around the country, drawing intense reactions from 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 20th-century African American Civil Rights movement when the story and photo appeared in Jet Magazine.
