Context-1955

Emmett Till was not the only African American lynched in Mississippi; sadly, he was one of many who were brutally murdered in the Magnolia State. He was one of hundreds lost to lynching in Mississippi alone, and thousands across the Southeast. Many of those murders happened between 1865 and 1955.

But the August 1955 death of this 14-year-old from Chicago forced America to take notice. More to the point, his mother, Mamie Bradley (later Mamie Till Mobley) made sure that the nation couldn’t ignore what had happened to her son.

The young Black teenager took a dare from friends to talk to Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who worked the counter at her husband’s convenience store. Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes that no one will ever know for sure what happened when Till went into that store. But whatever the specifics of Till’s encounter with Bryant were, white vengeance came swiftly.

Three nights later, Roy Bryant—Carolyn’s husband—and his half-brother J.W. Milam appeared at the door of the home of Mose Wright, the uncle with whom Till was staying during his visit from Illinois. Armed, they demanded that the 64-year-old Wright surrender the boy, saying that if he didn’t, “You’ll never live to be 65.”

The men led the boy out of the house and drove west on gravel roads with the headlights off. Several days later, a fisherman found Till’s body, grossly disfigured from torture, in the Tallahatchie River.

Ultimately, the men were acquitted of murder and kidnapping by an all-white jury after only an hour of deliberation. Bryant and Milam promptly sold their story—and their confession—for $4,000.

Montgomery attorney Bryan Stevenson adds perspective: “It’s not just that they discover his body and that he’s been killed. He has been brutally, brutally beaten. … It takes a lot of hatred and a lot of rage to do the kind of violence that was done to Emmett Till.”

The funeral was widely publicized and attended by the national press. Stevenson calls the decision of Till’s mother to have a funeral with an open casket for her son a “really unorthodox choice” that was strategically important. “She wanted civil rights leaders and political leaders to see what they did to her child. She invited David Jackson of Jet magazine (a publication that was primarily produced and distributed to the African American community) to take pictures of this child’s battered body, and these images were widely circulated.”

The images were “really, really challenging … his face was grotesque,” Stevenson says. “You could see eyes but you couldn’t really distinguish all of his facial features. That’s how much violence he had been subjected to.”

The images had the desired effect, as mainstream publications such as Look and Life began writing about this issue. “It became an issue that elected officials were being questioned about,” Stevenson says. “These images made it impossible for white families in other parts of the country to stay indifferent, to stay neutral.”

Till’s murder sparked international outrage and, according to many scholars, helped catalyze the modern civil rights movement.

Said Till’s mother: “If it can further the cause of freedom, then I will say that he died a hero.”

Sources

Bryan Stevenson in YouTube video “The Body of Emmett Till”

Henry Lous Gates Jr., Life Upon These Shores: Looking At African American History 1513-2008, 1st ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 327-328.