Remembering Emit Till

 

As a kid I remember a troubling story that I was told about from my parents about how vicious and brutal the Deep South was to black people. The story of Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was chilling not only for the fact that this young man was a child but that lynching’s were a common occurrence within the south The cruelty of his murder and lynching plus ,the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent toward  Black  Americans in the United States. While explaining  this tragedy  to girls I’m taken a back to how handsome this young man was I found myself wondering what his future might have been had he been allowed to grow old and have a family of his own.

Sadly during the summer month  of August 1955, he was visiting relatives near  the Mississippi Delta region. He spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the white married proprietor of a small grocery store there. Till was accused of flirting with Bryant. Till's interaction with Bryant unwittingly, violated the unwritten code of behavior for a black male interacting with a white female in the south . Several nights after the incident in the store, Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J.W. Milam were armed when they went to Till's great-uncle's house and abducted Emmett. They took him away and beat and mutilated him, before shooting him in the head and sinking his body in the Tallahatchie River. Three days later, Till's body was discovered and retrieved from the river.

Till's body was returned to Chicago where his mother insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket which was held at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ.^[4] It was later said that "The open-coffin funeral held by Mamie Till Bradley exposed the world to more than her son Emmett Till's bloated, mutilated body. Her decision focused attention not only on U.S. racism and the barbarism of lynching but also on the limitations and vulnerabilities of American democracy.

In September 1955, an all-white jury found Bryant and Milam not guilty of Till's murder. Protected against double jeopardy, the two men publicly admitted in a 1956 interview with Look magazine that they had killed Till. Till's murder was seen as a catalyst for the next phase of the civil rights movement. In December 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott began in Alabama and lasted more than a year, resulting eventually in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregated buses were unconstitutional. According to historians, events surrounding Emmett Till's life and death continue to resonate. An Emmett Till Memorial Commission was established in the early 21st century.