The Murder And Lynching Of Emmett Till: The Book The Movie The Untold Story

Emmett Till was a 14-year-old black boy, who was brutally lynched in Money, Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder plus the fact that Emmett's killers were acquitted, drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of Black Americans in the United States.

Emmett was born and raised in Chicago. During summer vacation in August 1955, he was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi. He spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the white married proprietor of a small grocery store there. Although what happened at the store is a matter of dispute, Till was accused of whistling at Bryant. His interaction with Bryant, perhaps 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 savagely 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.

Emmett'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. 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". Tens of thousands attended his funeral or viewed his open casket, and images of his mutilated body were published in black-oriented magazines and newspapers. 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 murdered Till.