Emmett Till

African Americans come from a long line of royal ancestors, warriors, and spiritual people. Our legacy in the United States cannot be told without recognizing the fighters that came before us— the ones who started movements, the ones who kept us alive, and the ones who sacrificed their lives for our freedom.

Emmett “Bobo” Till, a sacrificial lamb, is one of those heroes, who cannot be erased from the memories of our history.

Young Till was born July 25, 1941 in Chicago’s Cook County Hospital to Mamie Carthan Till and Louis Till, but was largely raised by his mother. In 1955, he and his cousin were sent to stay with their uncle, Moses Wright in Money, Miss. for the summer.

Before sending him off, his loving mother told Till to mind his manners and be aware of the racial dynamics of the South. Being a boy from Chicago, Till did not quite grasp the magnitude of race relations in the Old South, where countless unrecorded lynchings took place. Despite Brown v. Board of Education passing the year prior, racism and segregation still dominated many areas of the U.S.

On Aug. 21, 1955, Till arrived in Money. Three days later he and a group of teenagers made their way to the town’s grocery store, Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, after picking cotton in the summer heat. The store was owned by Roy and Carolyn Bryant, a White couple who sold supplies and candy primarily to Black townspeople.

Rumors spread that Till whistled at Bryant. Supposedly, Bobo bragged about a White beau he had back in Chicago. One of the youth dared him to ask Carolyn on a date. Not wanting to chicken out, the 14-year-old Till bought some bubble gum in the store. When she handed him the gum, the Chi-town native squeezed her hand flirtatiously and asked for a date. Alarmed, the woman ran out to her truck to find a pistol while Till’s cousin snatched him out of the store and escorted him back home. On the way Till, whistled at Bryant.

The news eventually got back to Bryant’s husband, and on Aug. 28 at about 2:30 a.m., Roy Bryant and his half brother J. W. Milam took Till out of his uncle’s home. Till never returned.

The next day, the perpetrators were arrested and charged with kidnapping. They were jailed in Greenwood, Miss., without bail.

On Aug. 31, Till’s decomposing body was found in the Tallahatchi River. His neck was tied to 70-pound cotton gin fan with barbed wire. His face was mutilated and unrecognizable. His uncle identified him by a ring his father used to wear that bore the initials “L.T.”

Hugh White, the governor of Mississippi at the time, ordered the full prosecution of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam.

On Sept. 3, an open-casket funeral, requested by his mother, sent a message across the world, showing the ugly face of hate and racism in America. The youngster was buried in Burr Oak Cemetery in Illinois.

Shortly thereafter, the murder trials of Till’s accused kidnappers began. In the jury box were 12 White men—farmers, carpenters, and one insurance agent. While the trial was underway, reporters, activists, and local men and women teamed up to locate sharecroppers who saw and overheard the events of that early morning.

His uncle (Wright) testified at the trial, pointing his finger at the assailants, proclaiming they were the ones who barged into his home and took Till.

On Sept. 23, after a four-day trial, and 67 minutes of deliberation, both Bryant and Milam were acquitted of murder. According to reports, the two stood in front of photographers, lit up cigars and kissed their wives in celebration of the not-guilty verdict.

Wright and Willie Reed, who also testified in the trial, were quickly smuggled out of Mississippi to Chicago.

International publications in Germany and France followed the case closely and printed in their papers, “Killing a Black person isn’t a crime in the home of the Yankees: The White killers of young Emmett Till are acquitted” and “The Scandalous Acquittal in Sumner.”

On Nov. 9, Bryant and Milam, who were released from jail on bond while their kidnapping charges were still pending, were also found not-guilty of kidnapping. The men lived as free men for the remainder of their lives.

In the February 1956 issue of Look magazine (published Jan. 24), Bryant and Milam confessed to the crime. They described each moment to the reporter, saying their intention was to whip him, but they were not able to scare the young boy. They took Till to a tool house in the back of Milam’s home and pistol whipped him. He never hollered. The teen told his kidnappers that he wasn’t afraid of them, and that he was just as good as they were. According to the confessions, he said, “I’ve had White women. My grandmother was a White woman.”

Milam told the Look reporter that he would never hurt a “nigger” but this boy was someone who had to be made an example of. They ordered Till to take his clothes off, shot him in the head, and then tied his neck around a cotton gin fan.

Till’s murder was not the end of horrendous racial violence in America. In fact incident involving hangings  and other crimes continued into contemporary times.

A California State University Long Beach football player, Ron Settles, was arrested by Officer Jerry Brown of the Signal Hills Police Department in 1981. On June 2, 1981, Settles was found hanging in his jail cell. He was 21.

The officers accused of strangling and killing Settles, were never convicted and walked away from the incident without a blemish on their records. However, the police department settled with the family of the murdered athlete for $1 million.

On June 7, 1998, James Byrd Jr. suffered a similar fate in Jasper, Texas. Three White men— John William King, Lawrence Russell Brewer, and Shawn Allen Berry—kidnapped the 49-year-old.

Byrd was walking along the road from a party, when the men, who were drinking, drove up beside him and offered him a ride. Instead of taking him home, they drove him to an isolated road where they chained him by his ankles to the back of their truck. They dragged him for three miles along the road.

By the time the drivers stopped the vehicle, Byrd’s head and right arm had been severed. They dumped his torso at the gate of the town’s oldest Black cemetery.

Two of the men were sentenced to death and the other to life in prison.

Senseless race murders continue to happen in the United States, however many are quietly forgotten about. The story of Emmett Till and so many others are a part of the continued struggle for freedom and justice in America.