1955: Emmett Till is Murdered

        In the August of 1955, a 14 year-old African-American boy named Emmett Till was murdered for supposedly having flirted with a white woman. Emmett, who had grown up in the south side of Chicago, was visiting family in Mississippi for the summer. Although Emmett had  experienced racism in the North, he was not used to the level of segregation that he found in Mississippi.  

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        On August 24, Emmett Till entered the store where Carolyn Bryant worked. While there were no witnesses to the event, Carolyn later claimed that he had touched her as well as made inappropriate comments while making his purchase.

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        Roy Bryant, Carolyn’s husband, and his brother-in-law, J.W. Milam, heard about the “incident” and on August 28th they went to Emmett’s uncle’s house, where the boy was staying. The two forced Emmett to carry a cotton-gin fan to the Tallahatchie River where they proceeded to have him strip, beat him, gouge out his eyes, shoot him, and dump the boy’s body, tied with barbed wire to the fan, into the river.  

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        Emmett’s mother, Mamie Bradley, had a open-casket funeral so that the world would see what had happened to her son. While Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam would later go to court, where they were identified by multiple witnesses, the jury found them innocent, claiming that it had never truly been proven that the body found was Emmett’s.

 

 

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        Carolyn Bryant recently revealed, in Timothy B. Tyson’s 2017 The Blood of Emmett Till, that her accusations had been entirely false and that the boy had never touched or harassed her.

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