Emmett Louis "Bobo" Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was an African American boy from Chicago, Illinois, who was murdered at the age of 14 in Money, Mississippi, a small town in the state's Delta region, after reportedly whistling at a white woman. The murder of Emmett Till was noted as one of the leading events that motivated the American Civil Rights Movement. The main suspects were acquitted, but later admitted to the murder.
Till's mother insisted on a public funeral service, with an open casket so as to show the world the brutality of the killing: Till had been beaten and an eye gouged out, before he was shot through the head and thrown into the Tallahatchie River with a 70-pound cotton gin fan tied to his body with barbed wire. His body was in the river for three days before it was discovered and retrieved by two fishermen.
Till was buried in Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois. The murder case was officially reopened in May 2004; as part of the investigation, the body was exhumed in order to perform an autopsy. The body was reburied in a new casket, which is standard practice in cases of body exhumation, by the family in the same location later that week. In July 2009, while his gravesite appeared undisturbed, his original casket, in which his battered body was famously displayed years earlier, was found rusting in a run-down shack on the cemetery grounds. Till's family has since donated the original casket to the Smithsonian Institution.
Background
Emmett Till was the son of Mamie Carthan Till and Louis Till. Emmett's mother was born to John and Alma Carthan in the small Delta town of Webb, Mississippi ("the Delta" being the traditional name for the area of northwestern Mississippi at the confluence of the Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers). When he was two years old, his family moved to Illinois. Emmett's mother largely raised him on her own; she and Louis Till had separated in 1942. By the time of Emmett's death, she had married Lemorris Bradley. Emmett suffered from polio as a child, which left him with a persistent stutter. Emmett's father, Louis Till, was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943. While serving in Italy, he raped two women and killed a third. After his court martial, he was executed by the Army by hanging near Pisa in July 1945. Before Emmett Till's killing, the Till family knew none of this, having been told only that Louis had been killed due to "willful misconduct." The facts of Louis Till's execution were made widely known after Emmett Till's death by segregationist senator James Eastland. Stanley Nelson Jr. has stated that this was attempt to turn public support away from Mamie Till Bradley just weeks before the trials of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam through the implication that criminal behavior ran in the Till family.
In 1955, Till and his cousin were sent to stay for a time at the home of Till's uncle, Moses Wright, who lived in Money, Mississippi, another small town in the Delta, eight miles north of Greenwood.
Before his departure for the Delta, Till's mother had cautioned him to "mind his manners" with white people, as she understood that race relations in Mississippi were very different from those in Chicago. Mississippi had seen many lynchings during the South's lynching era (ca. 1876–1930); though far less common by the mid-1950s, these racially motivated murders still occurred on occasion. Racial tensions were also on the rise after the United States Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education to end segregation in public education.
Till arrived on August 21, 1955. On August 24, he joined other young teenagers as they went to Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market to get some candy and soda. The teenagers were children of sharecroppers and had been picking cotton all day. The market was owned by a white couple, Roy and Carolyn Bryant, and mostly catered to the local sharecropper population.
Till's cousin and several black youths, all under 19, were with Till in the store. The facts of what transpired in the store are still disputed, but according to several versions, Till was dared by one of the other boys to flirt with the 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant. Some accounts say Till wolf whistled at Bryant; others say he grabbed her hand and asked her for a date; still others say that he said "Bye, baby" as he left the store. One of the other boys ran outside to tell Till's cousin (who was outside playing checkers with Moses Wright across the street) what happened. When the old man heard what happened, he urged the boys to leave quickly, fearing violence.
Carolyn Bryant told others of the events at the store, and the story spread quickly. When Bryant's husband returned from a road trip a few days later and was told about the incident, he was greatly angered. Till's cousin, Wheeler Parker, Jr., who was with him at the store, claims Till did nothing but whistle at the woman. "He loved pranks, he loved fun, he loved jokes... in Mississippi, people didn't think the same jokes were funny." Carolyn Bryant later asserted that Till had grabbed her at the waist and asked her for a date. She said the young man also used "unprintable" words. Roy Bryant decided that he and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, 36, would "teach the boy a lesson."
Murder
At about 12:30 a.m. on Sunday, August 28 1955, Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, got into a car with his wife Carolyn and another whose identity has still not been confirmed. They drove to Reverend Wright's house, where Emmett stayed. Bryant pounded on the door until Wright opened it, and asked Wright if he had two black boys in the house. Till was sleeping with his cousin; Milam asked him whether he was "the one who'd done the talking." Till said "Yeah." Bryant brought Till to be identified by his wife. When it was confirmed that Till was in fact "the talker," the men put him in the back of a pickup truck and drove off. According to witnesses, they drove him to a weathered shed on a plantation in neighboring Sunflower County, where they beat, then shot him. A 70-pound cotton gin fan was tied to his neck with barbed wire to weigh down the body, which they dropped into the Tallahatchie River near Glendora, Mississippi, another small cotton town north of Money.
Afterwards, with Till missing, Bryant and Milam admitted they had taken the boy from his great-uncle's yard but claimed they turned him loose the same night. Some supposed that relatives of Till were hiding him out of fear for the youth’s safety or that he had been sent back to Chicago where he would be safe. Word got out that Till was missing, and soon NAACP civil rights leader Medgar Evers, the state field secretary, and Amzie Moore, head of the Bolivar County chapter, became involved, disguising themselves as cotton pickers and going into the cotton fields in search of any information that might help find the young Till.
Till's swollen and disfigured body was found in the Tallahatchie River three days after his abduction. After the body was recovered, the brothers and the police tried to convince people that it was not Till, that Till was in Chicago and that the beaten boy was someone else. Till's features were too distorted by the beatings to easily identify him, but he was positively identified thanks to a ring he wore that had been his father's. His mother had given it to him the day before he left for Money. The brothers were soon under official suspicion for the boy's disappearance and were arrested in early September.
Moses Wright, Till's great-uncle, told the sheriff that a person who sounded like a woman had identified Till as "the one," after which Bryant and Milam had driven away with him. Bryant and Milam claimed they later found out Till was not "the one" who had allegedly "insulted" Mrs. Bryant, and swore to Sheriff George Smith they had released him. They would later recant and confess after their acquittal in a January 1956 interview with William Bradford Huie for Look magazine.
In an editorial on Friday, September 2, Greenville journalist Hodding Carter, Jr. asserted that "people who are guilty of this savage crime should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."
Funeral
After Till's disfigured and partly decomposed body was found, he was put into a pine coffin and nearly buried, but his mother, Mamie Till Bradley, wanted the body returned to Chicago, so she refused to allow burial. A Tutwiler mortuary assistant worked all night to prepare the body as best he could so that Bradley could bring Till's body back to Chicago.
The Chicago funeral home had agreed to not open the casket, but Bradley fought their decision. The state of Mississippi insisted it would not allow the funeral home to open it, so Bradley threatened to open it herself, insisting she had a right to see her son. After viewing the body, she also insisted on leaving the casket open for the funeral and allowing people to take photographs because she wanted people to see how badly Till's body had been disfigured—she has famously been quoted as saying, "I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby."
News photographs of Till's mutilated corpse circulated around the country, notably appearing in Jet magazine, and drew intense public reaction. Some reports said that up to 50,000 people viewed the body. Emmett Till was buried September 6 in Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois. The same day, Bryant and Milam were indicted by a grand jury.
Trial
Mrs. Bradley traveled to Mississippi to testify at the trial, staying in the ho
The Murder Of Emmett Louis Till
When Jet Magazine published a picture of the disfigured corpse of Emmett Till, millions across the world read about the lynching of the fourteen-year-old Emmett Till.
Emmett Louis Till (1941 - 1955) - Find A Grave Memorial
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