On August 28, 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Black boy from Chicago, was abducted from his great-uncle’s home in Money, Mississippi. He had been visiting family for the summer. Two white men — Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam — dragged him from his bed in the middle of the night, beat him savagely, shot him in the head, tied a seventy-pound cotton gin fan around his neck with barbed wire, and threw his body into the Tallahatchie River. His crime, according to his killers, was speaking to Bryant’s wife in a grocery store.
His body was recovered three days later. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, made a decision that would alter the course of American history. She insisted on an open casket funeral in Chicago. She wanted the world to see what had been done to her son. An estimated 100,000 people filed past his body over four days. Jet magazine published photographs of his mutilated face. The images traveled across the country and around the world.
Bryant and Milam were tried by an all-white jury in Sumner, Mississippi. The trial lasted five days. The jury deliberated for sixty-seven minutes — one juror later said they took a soda break to stretch the time. Both men were acquitted. Protected by double jeopardy, they later confessed to the murder in a 1956 magazine interview, knowing they could never be tried again.
The reaction to Till’s murder and the acquittal accelerated the Civil Rights Movement in ways that no single legislative act could match. Rosa Parks later said she thought of Emmett Till when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus three months after his death. The Greensboro Four were fourteen and fifteen years old when Till was murdered — the same age as their victim. Decades later, three of the four said the Till case was formative in their decision to sit down at the Woolworth’s counter.
In 2022, President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law — making lynching a federal hate crime for the first time in American history, sixty-seven years after Till’s murder. Mamie Till-Mobley did not live to see it. She died in 2003. The case was reopened by the Department of Justice in 2004 and again in 2017. No one was ever convicted of Emmett Till’s murder.