Emmett Till Murdered in Mississippi After Accusation from White Woman

On August 28, 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Louis Till, an African American boy visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, was abducted from his great-uncle’s home and brutally murdered by Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, two white men. Till had allegedly whistled at or made remarks to Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, in her family’s grocery store—conduct that was perceived by the white community to violate the Jim Crow South’s unwritten code forbidding Black men from any interaction with white women. The men pistol-whipped Till with their .45 caliber handguns, shot him in the head, tied a 75-pound cotton gin fan to his body with barbed wire, and threw him into the Tallahatchie River. When his body was recovered three days later, it was so mutilated that his mother, Mamie Till, could only identify him by a ring he wore.

Mamie Till made the courageous decision to hold an open-casket funeral in Chicago, allowing the world to witness the brutal violence inflicted on her son. The photographs of his disfigured body, published in Jet magazine and newspapers across the country, shocked the nation and became a catalyst for the civil rights movement. Despite overwhelming evidence and the men’s own later confessions, the case exposed the complete failure of Southern institutions to deliver justice for Black victims. On September 23, 1955, an all-white jury in Tallahatchie County acquitted Bryant and Milam after deliberating for only 67 minutes—a time they later said would have been shorter if they hadn’t stopped to drink soda. One juror explicitly stated their decision was predetermined by race.

The Till case revealed the systematic corruption of Southern legal institutions designed to protect white supremacy. Despite Black citizens comprising over 63 percent of Tallahatchie County’s population, not a single Black person served on the jury because Mississippi’s voter registration laws prevented any Black citizens from registering to vote, and only registered voters could serve as jurors. Defense attorney Sidney Carlton told the all-white jury that if they didn’t free the defendants, “Your ancestors will turn over in their grave, and I’m sure every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men.” Just four months after their acquittal, protected by double jeopardy, Bryant and Milam sold their confession to Look Magazine for $1,500 each, admitting in detail how they murdered Till. Neither man was ever held accountable, demonstrating how institutional racism systematically denied equal protection under the law through voter suppression, jury exclusion, and judicial complicity with racial violence.