Unsolved Murders: True Crime Stories

Emmett Louis Till

Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was a 14-year-old who was in in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the .

Till was born and raised in , . During summer vacation in August 1955, he was visiting relatives near , in the region. 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 flirting with or Bryant. In 1955, Bryant had testified that Till made physical and verbal advances. The jury did not hear Bryant's testimony, due to the judge ruling it inadmissible. Decades later, Bryant disclosed that she had fabricated part of the testimony regarding her interaction with Till, specifically the portion where she accused Till of grabbing her waist and uttering obscenities; "that part's not true," Bryant stated in a 2008 interview with historian . Till's interaction with Bryant, perhaps unwittingly, violated the strictures of conduct for an African-American male interacting with a white woman in the -era . 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 the boy. They took him away and beat and mutilated him before shooting him in the head and sinking his body in the . Three days later, Till's body was discovered and retrieved from the river.

Till's body was returned to Chicago where his mother insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket. "The open-coffin funeral held by exposed the world to more than her son Emmett Till's bloated, mutilated body. Her decision focused attention not only on 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, rallying popular black support and white sympathy across the U.S. Intense scrutiny was brought to bear on the lack of black civil rights in Mississippi, with newspapers around the U.S. critical of the state. Although local newspapers and law enforcement officials initially decried the violence against Till and called for justice, they responded to national criticism by defending Mississippians, temporarily giving support to the killers.

In September 1955, an found Bryant and Milam not guilty of Till's kidnapping and murder. Protected against , the two men publicly admitted in a 1956 interview with magazine that they had killed Till. Till's murder was seen as a catalyst for the next phase of the civil rights movement. In December 1955, the began in Alabama and lasted more than a year, resulting eventually in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregated buses were unconstitutional. According to historians, events surrounding Emmett Till's life and death continue to resonate. Some writers have suggested that almost every story about Mississippi returns to Till, or the region in which he died, in "some spiritual, homing way." An Emmett Till Memorial Commission was established in the early 21st century. The Sumner County Courthouse was restored and includes the Emmett Till Interpretive Center. Fifty-one sites in the Mississippi Delta are memorialized as associated with Till.

Early childhood

Emmett Till was born in 1941 in Chicago; he was the son of (1921–2003) and (1922–1945). Emmett's mother Mamie was born in the small town of . The Delta region encompasses the large, multi-county area of northwestern Mississippi in the watershed of the and rivers. When Carthan was two years old, her family moved to , as part of the of rural black families out of the South to the North to escape violence, lack of opportunity and unequal treatment under the law. Argo received so many Southern migrants that it was named "Little Mississippi"; Carthan's mother's home was often used by other recent migrants as a while they were trying to find jobs and housing.