Emmett Till

     In 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black youth visiting family in Mississippi, was murdered by white men after the wife of one of the men claimed that Till had propositioned her. Till, who was from Chicago, Illinois, visited relatives near Money, Mississippi, during the summer of 1955. On August 24 of that year, he entered Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market and had an interaction with Carolyn Bryant, the wife of the store’s owner. Accounts differ as to precisely what happened during that encounter. Black witnesses who had accompanied Till to the store reported—both near the time of the incident and more recently—that Till’s behavior was limited to whistling at Bryant as she left the store. Bryant, however, alleged that Till was physically aggressive towards her and that he propositioned her. What is clear from all accounts is that Bryant suffered no physical harm and that Till’s conduct was likely perceived by many in the white community to violate their unwritten code, prevalent in the Jim Crow South, that Black men were forbidden from initiating interactions with white women. Four days later, Till was forcibly abducted from his relatives’ home by at least two men. His brutally beaten body was found three days later in the Tallahatchie River. Because there did not appear to be a basis for federal jurisdiction given the limited scope of the civil rights statutes in effect in 1955, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) did not investigate Till’s murder at that time. Mississippi state authorities, however, arrested two men: Carolyn Bryant’s husband, Roy Bryant, and her brother-in-law, John William (J.W.) Milam. They were indicted for murder and tried by a local, all-white jury, which quickly acquitted them. Following their acquittal, the men admitted to a journalist that they murdered Till in part because of his earlier actions toward Carolyn Bryant. Both Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam are now deceased.