Emmett Till

Emmett Till
Born	Emmett Louis Till July 25, 1941 Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Died	August 28, 1955 (aged 14) Money, Mississippi, U.S.
Cause of death	Lynching
Nationality	American
Known for	Catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement

Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement.

Early life

Emmett Till was born in 1941 in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Mamie Carthan (1921–2003) and Louis Till (1922–1945). Emmett's mother Mamie was born in the small Delta town of Webb, Mississippi. The Delta region encompasses the large, multi-county area of northwestern Mississippi in the watershed of the Mississippi River. Emmett's father was executed by the U.S. Army in 1945 for rape and murder committed while stationed in Italy during World War II.

Incident

On August 24, 1955, while visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, Emmett Till spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the white married proprietor of a small grocery store there. Several nights later, Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J.W. Milam went to Till's great-uncle's house and abducted the boy. They took him away and brutally murdered him, a fact that was later admitted by the killers in a magazine interview after their trial and acquittal.

Aftermath and impact

Till's body was discovered and retrieved from the Tallahatchie River three days later. His mother insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket to show the world the brutality of the killing. The open-casket funeral held by Mamie Till-Mobley exposed the world to more than 50,000 attendees and pictures of his mutilated body were published in black-oriented magazines and newspapers, rallying popular black support and white sympathy across the U.S.

The trial of Bryant and Milam attracted a vast amount of press attention. Their acquittal by an all-white jury sparked an international outcry and was a catalyst for the next phase of the Civil Rights Movement. In December 1955, just a few months after Till's death, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began.

Legacy

Emmett Till is often remembered as a symbol of the victims of racial violence and injustice in America. His death is frequently cited as a key event that energized the Civil Rights Movement. In 2007, the Emmett Till Memorial Commission was established in Tallahatchie County, and various educational programs and memorial structures have been created in his memory.

See also

• Civil Rights Movement
• African-American history
• Racial segregation in the United States