1941- 1955
The Death of Emmett Till
• In 1955, Emmett (aged 14) went to spend
the summer with family in Money,
Mississippi.
• He and a group of teenagers went to
Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market for
refreshments to cool off after a long day of
picking cotton in the hot sun.
•When he showed the teenagers a picture of a white girl who was one
of his friends back home and bragged that she was his girlfriend, one
of them said, "Hey, there's a [white] girl in that store there. I bet you
won't go in there and talk to her."
• Emmett went in and bought some candy. As he left, he said "Bye
baby" to Carolyn Bryant, the wife of the store owner, according to
some accounts. Others say he whistled at her.
• Four days later, Roy Bryant and his half brother J. W. Milam
kidnapped Emmett from the house of his great uncle, Moses
Wright.
• They brutally beat him, took him to the edge of the Tallahatchie
River, shot him in the head, fastened a large metal fan used for
ginning cotton to his neck with barbed wire, and pushed the
body into the river.
• Emmett’s decomposed corpse
was pulled from the river three
days later.
• His great uncle identified the
body from a ring with the initials
L.T.
"Have you ever sent a loved son on vacation and had
him returned to you in a pine box, so horribly battered
and water-logged that someone needs to tell you this
sickening sight is your son -- lynched?"
-- Mamie Bradley
• The men were arrested and tried in a
segregated courthouse in Sumner,
Mississippi
• Mose Wright pointed them out in
court when asked to identify the men
who had taken his nephew. His
bravery encouraged other blacks to
testify against the two defendants. All
of them were hurried out of the state
after their testimony.
• The men were acquitted after the jury
deliberated for 67 minutes.
"Your fathers will turn over in their graves if [Milam and
Bryant are found guilty] and I'm sure that every last AngloSaxon one of you has the courage to free these men in the
face of that [outside] pressure."
-- Defense attorney John C. Whitten, to the jurors in his
closing statement
The Impact of Emmett Till
• Ann Moody says, “Before Emmett Till’s murder, I had
known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now
there was a new fear known to me - the fear of being killed
just because I was black. This was the worst of my fears”
(125).
• “I was fifteen years old when I began to hate people. I
hated the white man who murdered Emmett Till and I
hated all the other whites who were responsible for the
countless other murders” (129).