The Murder of Emmit Till

Emmett Louis Till, an African American boy from Chicago, Illinois, was born on July 25, 1941 and died on August 28, 1955. His mother was Mamie Carthan Till (Bradley, Mobley) and his father was Louis Till. Emmett was raised by his mother mainly because his parents separated in 1942 and his father was drafted in 1943 and then executed by the U.S. Army because he raped two Italian women and murdered another.

In the summer of 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett was sent to Money, Mississippi to stay with Moses Wright, his great uncle. Before he left, his mother warned him of the racial differences between whites and blacks in Mississippi as compared to the relationships of whites and blacks in Chicago. She knew he would be staying in the Delta where there had already been over five hundred African Americans that had been lynched and murders because of race had occurred. People were also on edge because of the Supreme Court ruling in the Brown versus the Board of Education case because schools were now being forced to desegregate.

Emmett arrived in Money on August 21. On August 24, Emmett and some other teenagers, all under the age of sixteen, went to a store to buy refreshments because they had been working in the cotton field all day. The store they went to was called Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market and was owned by Roy and Carolyn Bryant. Emmett went inside and either whistled at Carolyn Bryant or he purposely flirted with her. Exactly what he did is unspecified. By the time Carolyn’s husband returned home the story of what had happened was all over town. Roy Bryant was furious by Emmett’s gesture towards his wife.

On August 28, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, Roy’s half brother, kidnapped Emmett at around 2:30 AM from his uncle’s home. They then drove him from Money to a nearby county named Sunflower County. Bryant and Milam took him to a plantation shed and viciously beat him, gouged out one of his eyes, and shot him. They tied him to a cotton gin fan in order to sink his body to the bed of the Tallahatchie River.