Emmett Till: Unfounded Accusations and Racially-Charged Murder
Born in 1941 in Chicago, Illinois, to a single mother who by all accounts was a hard-working and quite extraordinary woman, when Emmett Till was just 14 years old, he traveled to Money Mississippi to visit his great uncle Moses Wright.
What Happened to Emmett Till?
Three days after his arrival to Mississippi, on August 24th, 1955, Emmett and a group of teenagers entered Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market after a long and hot day of picking cotton. Emmett purchased some bubble gum, while some of his buddies later reported that he either whistled at, flirted with or touched the hand of Carolyn Bryant, the cashier and wife of business owner Roy Bryant.
Four days later, at 2:30 A.M. on August 28th, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam kidnapped Emmett from Wright’s home, beating the teenager without mercy. After they shot him in the head, they used barbed wire to tie Emmett’s mangled body to a large metal fan, dumping his lifeless body unceremoniously into the Tallahatchie River.
Emmett Till’s Open Casket
When Emmett’s unconsolable mother shipped her son’s body home to Chicago, she insisted on a five-day open casket viewing, in her words to “let the world see what has happened.” Two Black publications, Jet Magazine and the Chicago Defender, published graphic images of Emmett’s mangled corpse, igniting a tidal wave of outrage and indignation throughout a horrified nation.
At a time when Black people and women were barred from jury duty, Bryant and Milam were tried for murder before an all-white, all-male jury, and despite graphic testimony by Moses Wright—one of the earliest cases of a Black person openly accusing a white man in a court of law—despite overwhelming evidence of the defendants’ guilt, on September 23rd, the jurors acquitted Bryant and Milam after a mere 67 minutes of deliberation.
Admission of Guilt
A few months later, in return for a $4,000 payday from Look Magazine, Bryant and Milam openly admitted their guilt in the murder of Emmett Louis Till. Despite the blatant injustice of Emmett’s death and his white murderers’ escape from retribution.
Emmett’s death sparked an early ignition point in the American civil rights movement of the late 1950s and 60s, propelling leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X to the height of a nation’s shameful look at its white-inspired segregationist behavior.
50 years after Emmett’s wrongful murder, 72-year-old Carolyn Bryant Donham recanted parts of her testimony from her husband’s trial, admitting to author Timothy B. Tyson that:
“Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”
Carolyn Bryant Donham
Her confession that Emmett never grabbed or sexually harassed her remained dormant for another ten years, until the book’s eventual publication in 2017, making the death of Emmett Till, a tragic and early flash point, in a nation’s slow embrace of racial equality.