5th-Emmett+Till

The Murder: Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was an African American boy from Chicago, Illinois. He was murdered at the age of 14 in Money, Mississippi, 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. 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.

Background: Emmett Till was the son of and Mamie Carthan Till and Louis Till. Emmett's mother was born to John and Alma Carthan in the small Delta town of Webb, Mississippi. 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.

Emmett Till was the son of and 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. 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 Donham. 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 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, age 36, would "teach the boy a lesson."​ The Trial: Roy Bryant, Donham's husband at the time, and his half brother, J.W. Milam, were acquitted of the crime by an all-white jury in 1955. The men later confessed in an interview with Look magazine. Both are dead. The FBI reopened the case in 2004 but decided in 2006 not to press charges. The case was turned over to local prosecutors. In February 2007, a grand jury refused to bring any new charges. The district attorney in rural Leflore County had sought a manslaughter charge against Donham, who was suspected of pointing out Till to her husband to punish the boy for what was then a grave offense in the segregated South