Emmett Till

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 Emmett Louis Till was born on July 25, 1941, in Chicago, Illinois. When he was 14 years old his uncle Moses Wright took him to Mississippi to visit relatives. During his stay, Emmett stopped at a grocery store for some bubble gum but ended up being accused of flirting or touching the hand of the white female clerk and wife of the owner Carolyn Bryant. 4 days later Carolyn’s husband Roy Bryant and his half brother kidnapped Emmett from his uncles home. Taking him to the Tallahatchie River and these two men beat him then shot him in the head. They preceded by tieing him with barbed wire to a large metal fan and pushing his beaten body into the water. When his body was found it was shipped to his home town Chicago. His mother chose to have an open-casket funeral with Emmett Tills' body on display for five days. His mother chose to do so to “let the world see what has happened because there is no way I could describe this. And I needed somebody to help me tell what it was like.” Tills death became an outrage throughout the country. Despite the overwhelmingly widespread pleas for justice from the country, on September 23 the all-white male jurors acquitted Bryant and his half brother of all charges. Their deliberations lasted only 67 minutes. Being protected by double jeopardy laws a few months later, in January 1956, Bryant and his half-brother admitted to kidnapping and killing Emmett Till selling their story to Look magazine for $4,000.







History.com Editors. Emmett Till. History.com, A&E Television Networks, 2 Dec. 2009, www.history.com/topics/black-history/emmett-till-1.

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