Emme THE THAT THE

In August 1955, a 14-yearold African American boy named Emmett Till went into a Mississippi grocery store to buy a 2 cent stick of gum. The Chicago teenager was visiting the Southern state that summer, staying with his uncle Mose Wright in the town of Money.

In the family-owned grocery store, Emmett was served by Carolyn Bryant, a 21-year-old married white woman.

What transpired may never be known, but it soon became the catalyst for America’s emerging civil rights movement.

Carolyn told her husband and brother-in-law that young Emmett flirted and whistled at her. She also accused him of grabbing her around the waist and threatening her.

Four days later, on August 28, 1955, Roy Bryant, Carolyn Bryant’s husband, and his half-brother J.W. Milam, abducted Emmett from his uncle’s home.

The pair brutally beat Emmett to the point of disfigurement, then dragged him to the bank of the Tallahatchie River, shot him in the head, tied him with barbed wire to a large metal fan and pushed his body into the water.

On August 31, three days after the lynching, Emmett’s body was discovered floating in the muddy river by a teenager.

His body was shipped home to Chicago, where his mother Mamie chose to have an open-casket funeral, with Emmett’s body on display for five days.

His funeral drew tens of

“NOTHING THAT BOY DID COULD EVER JUSTIFY WHAT HAPPENED”

thousands of mourners.

Mamie said she wanted to “let the world see what has happened, because there is no way I could describe this. And I needed somebody to help me tell what it was like”.

Bryant and Milam were charged with murder and kidnapping, and stood trial in September, 1955.

Black people and women were banned from serving in juries, so the pair were tried before an all-white, all-male jury.

Emmett’s uncle Mose stood before the court to identify Bryant and Milam as his nephew’s killers. It was an extraordinary move, as Black citizens almost never accused white citizens of crimes during this era, in fear of