WHO
WAS
EMMETT
TILL?

Emmett Louis Till was born in Chicago in 1941. Nicknamed “Bobo,” Emmett was “very industrious” according to his mother, helping around the household with an unfailing can-do attitude. He also liked to tell jokes, memorizing comedy sets he’d seen on television and paying friends to share a joke with him. Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett’s mother, called their town “Little Mississippi” in light of all the friends and family from the state who either moved to Illinois or visited.

 

In the summer of 1955, one of Emmett’s cousins was going to visit family in Mississippi. Emmett wanted to go, and with his mother’s permission, he boarded the train. With his cousins, Emmett picked cotton, swam in a nearby lake, and went fishing. On a trip to Bryant’s Grocery in Money, Emmett whistled at a white woman as a joke. His cousins quickly hurried everyone away, knowing Emmett had violated an unspoken norm of race relations in the Jim Crow South.

 

Days later in the early morning of August 28, Roy Bryant, husband of Carolyn Bryant, whom Emmett whistled at, and J.W. Milam, Roy’s half-brother, abducted Emmett from his great-uncle’s home. They took him to a barn near Drew, where at least eight men were involved in the torture and murder of Emmett. They bound his body with barbed wire to a large cotton gin fan and dumped him in the Tallahatchie River. On August 31, Emmett’s body was discovered by a local fisherman.

 

Despite attempts by authorities in Tallahatchie County to bury the body quickly, Mamie demanded her son’s body be returned to Chicago, where she held an open-casket funeral to “let the world see” what hatred had done to her son. Tens of thousands attended, and the photos of Emmett’s brutalized body were published in the Black press, drawing wider attention to the treatment of Black people in the South.

 

The subsequent trial for the murder was covered by various publications, arousing more national sentiment for change. The verdict of “Not guilty” was not the end, however. Emmett’s mother continued to speak publicly about the tragedy, and many others were motivated by Emmett’s murder to organize and advocate for equality.

 

The lynching of Emmett Till is widely regarded as the spark that ignited the civil rights movement.