English Common Lit Emmett Till Ms. Mulligan

Emmett Louis Till (1941-1955) was a fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago who was lynched in Mississippi after reportedly flirting with a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. "Lynching" refers to killing someone for an alleged offense with or without a legal trial, and the act is often linked to angry mobs and race. The injustice of his murder inspired many in the Civil Rights Movement. In a book published in 2017, Bryant said she made up her original accusations, sparking further discussion around Till’s death and legacy.

 As you read, note the racial climate of the South in which Emmett Till was killed.
The murder of Emmett Till is a crime that continues to resonate1 with people around the world because of its brutality, and the fact that no one has ever been brought to justice for his killing. There have been varied accounts of what provoked his killers to act but, ultimately, the fact remains that the young boy was kidnapped, tortured and murdered for no other reason than the color of his skin.  


Emmett Till grew up in a middle-class, predominantly black neighborhood in Chicago, raised by his mother, Mamie Till. His great uncle Mose Wright traveled up from Mississippi to Chicago, in the summer of 1955, to visit Emmett and his mother. When Wright returned to the south, Emmett begged his mother to let him tag along, to visit the rest of the family. She relented,2 but sent him with a warning: Mississippi is very different from Chicago – make sure to behave yourself around the white people down there. Emmett agreed he would. He was 14 years old.
FLIRTING WITH DANGER
He arrived in his uncle’s hometown, Money, Mississippi, in late August. On the evening of August 24th, Emmett and several cousins stopped into a local store to buy candy, where they encountered a young white woman named Carolyn Bryant. She and her husband, Roy Bryant, owned the store. Earlier in the week, Emmett had bragged to his cousins about the white girls he’d dated at school in Chicago, so they dared him to say something to Carolyn as she sat behind the counter.

Emmett entered the store alone. Accounts have varied as to what Emmett did or said to her. For a long time, it was believed that he may have wolf-whistled, touched her hand, or asked her on a date. However, in an interview from 2007, Carolyn Bryant said “nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him,” and she confessed that she made up her claims that he had made a physical advance on her.3 Carolyn said that she did not remember what else happened that night, but it is known that she responded to Emmett Till by running outside to retrieve a pistol from her car. When the boys saw the gun, they ran away from the store to avoid more trouble.

THE MURDER
[5]Roy Bryant heard about the incident a few days later and began questioning black men around town to find out who had done it. He eventually traced it back to Emmett. Bryant and a friend, J. W. Milam, broke into Mose Wright’s house in the early morning hours of August 28, 1955, and demanded to know who had “harassed” his wife. They threatened to shoot Emmett, told him to get dressed, and led him outside to their pickup truck.

Bryant, Milam and several other men — both black and white — drove out of town, stopping twice to beat Emmett severely. Later that morning, Emmett’s Uncle Mose called the authorities and reported Bryant and Milam for kidnapping. They were arrested shortly thereafter, and Emmett was presumed still missing.


Three days after the abduction,4 a fisherman discovered Emmett’s body in the water of the Tallahatchie River. The corpse was so disfigured5 from the beatings and from being in the water so long that the only way it could be identified was by a ring on Emmett’s finger, bearing his initials.

THE FUNERAL

When Mamie Till found out about the murder, she insisted that the body be sent back to Chicago immediately, whatever the cost. When she saw Emmett’s mutilated6 face and body, she also insisted they hold an open-casket funeral, so everyone could see the worst effects of racism in the U.S.


Tens of thousands of people came to see Emmett and show their support for his mother. Newspapers across the country carried the story.
THE TRIAL
[10]Bryant and Milam stood trial for Emmett’s murder in late September, 1955. Lawyers for the defense argued that the body was too disfigured to be properly identified, and they claimed Emmett was probably still alive and simply had not turned up yet. Mose Wright testified against his nephew’s murderers, the first black man to testify against white men in the state of Mississippi.

The jury was made up of entirely white men. After listening to the facts of the case for five days, they deliberated7 for just 67 minutes before concluding that Bryant and Milam were not guilty. One juror said in an interview, “If we hadn’t stopped to drink pop,8 it wouldn’t have taken that long.”

Just one year later, in 1956, Bryant and Milam sold their story to Look magazine. In the interview they gave their account of the murder for the very first time (they did not speak during their trial). Because they were found not guilty, they could not be tried again in a court of law for the murder. They admitted to everything, including shooting him to death, and filled in many details from the story. According to their account in the interview, their original intent was to beat him up and leave him on a riverbank, just to teach him a lesson. But as they continued to beat him, Emmett called them names and insisted he was just as good as they were. Presumably out of anger, they drove to the edge of the Tallahatchie, shot Emmett in the head, tied a weight around his neck with barbed wire, and threw his body into the water.


Milam explained why he felt he had to kill Emmet: “‘Chicago boy,’ I said, ‘I’m tired of ‘em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. I’m going to make an example of you – just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.’” Throughout the interview, the two men never showed any sign of guilt or wrongdoing; in their minds they had done what was right to protect their families and their country – they were heroes. Mamie Till later confirmed that “they never regretted what they had done.… He said he would do the same thing over again, to whoever got in his way. I felt sorry for him.”
A SYMBOL FOR CIVIL RIGHTS
Reactions to the feature in Look shed light on the complex race issues facing the country in the 1950s. Letters to the editor flooded in, some congratulating the interviewer’s bravery. One preacher from Ohio wrote, “You are to be complimented for your willingness to stick your neck out in this manner for the sake of justice.”

[15]But others condemned the piece: “By this example of opinionated, baseless reporting, Look itself pays scant recognition to the traditions of American Justice it claims were ignored,” said one Mississippi reporter. Another writer defended Bryant and Milam, saying, “[They] did what had to be done, and their courage… is to be commended.9 To have followed any other course would have been unrealistic [and] cowardly.” Reactions like these across the South prompted people to understand the need for greater equality between blacks and whites.

Emmett Till’s murder became one of the most important catalysts10 of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. When Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in December of 1955, she said later she had been thinking of Emmett and the injustice he experienced. Her action sparked the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott, which brought the Civil Rights movement to the national stage.

Two years later, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which set up protections for black voters and established the Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department; federal officials could now get directly involved in cases where civil rights were being abridged. Later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended all forms of segregation11 in public places and banned employment discrimination.

Mamie Till, who passed away in 2003, understood the significance of Emmett’s death. She herself became actively involved in empowering black youth in Chicago. But the pain of her son’s murder never left her completely. “This is what really started the civil rights movement, that’s what everyone tells me. But I was not trying to start anything. I was just upset that my only child was gone, and so needlessly.”


Emmett Till was brutally murdered because of who he was. There is nothing that can explain or justify what happened to him. Even more disturbingly, there have been thousands of other African Americans who were also lynched, and many of their names have been erased from history. Because of the circumstances surrounding his death and Mamie Till's refusal to let his death be in vain, 12 his story has become one of the most well-known.