Tt Till MURDER CHANGED WORLD
THE HORRIFIC LYNCHING OF AN INNOCENT TEENAGER SPARKED A CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
being lynched themselves.
Despite the undeniable evidence of the pair’s guilt, the jury took only 67 minutes to acquit Milam and Bryant of all charges.
Months later, the two men admitted to media they were guilty of murdering the young boy. But under double jeopardy laws, they were protected from being charged again.
Horrified by the images of Emmett’s brutalised body, and the unfair trial, many Black men and women decided enough was enough.
Emmett’s death had a powerful effect on Mississippi civil rights activists and sparked protests around the United States.
Emmett’s family, national newspapers and civil rights organisations used his death to demand social change against racial injustice.
Only 100 days after Emmett’s murder, a Black woman named Rosa Parks refused to give her seat up to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was arrested for violating bus segregation laws, again sparking activism in the Black community.
In 1988, Reverend Jesse Jackson told Vanity Fair: “Rosa said she thought about going to the back of the bus. But then she thought about Emmett Till and she couldn’t do it.”
The Women’s Democratic
Council called for a citywide bus boycott and asked a young, 26-year-old minister for help. His name was Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, and he was also deeply impacted by Emmett Till’s kidnapping and murder.
Much like today’s Black Lives Matter protests, hundreds of thousands of people attended rallies to condemn racism.
Martin Luther King Jr used the momentum of pure outrage following Emmett’s death to rally the United States against racism. This, in turn, paved the way for his legendary ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in 1963, on the anniversary of Emmett Till’s murder.
In 2017, The Blood of Emmett Till, by historian Timothy Tyson, stated that Carolyn Bryant admitted she lied about what happened in the grocery store in 1955.
She confessed that Emmett Till didn’t “wolf-whistle” at her at all. “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him,” Bryant said. She is still alive today.
Today, Sarah Turney is a strong and determined 31-yearold woman on a quest for justice. But 19 years ago, she was just a little girl who adored her big sister, Alissa Turney.
And for the past two decades she’s had no idea where Alissa is, or if she’s even alive. It was May 17, 2001, when Sarah, then 12, came home from school to find a note on Alissa’s bedroom dresser saying she’d run away to stay with her aunt. But Alissa never arrived at her aunt’s house and Sarah never saw or heard from her again. That day, not only did Sarah lose a sister but so much more. “My mum died in 1993 when I was 4 and Alissa was 9. Alissa was the only mum I knew,” Sarah explains. “She had never left like that