Emmett Till - 50 years ago this week

The attention surrounding hurricane Katrina has obscured some other recent noteworthy events, including the fiftieth anniversary of the lynching death of Emmett Till.

Till was a 14 year old black boy from Chicago who was visiting relatives in Mississippi.  Till made the grave mistake of jokingly telling a white female store clerk, "Bye, baby!"  Till was taken from the home where he was staying by the store owner (and husband of the female clerk) Roy Bryant, and Bryant's half-brother, J. W. Milam.

Till's mutilated body was found some days later.  Till's mother had the body brought back to Chicago, where she held an open-casket funeral for her boy.  Photographers from Jet magazine were there, and published gruesome shots of the boy's body.

Authorities arrested Bryant and Milam, and amazingly the state of Mississippi was able to get Moses Wright, who was lodging Emmett Till, and who witnessed his kidnapping by Bryant and Milam, to positively identify the two suspects in court.  Not surprisingly though, the all-white jury found Bryant and Milam not guilty, claiming that the state failed to prove that the body was indeed Emmett Till.

In November 1955, a grand jury failed to indict Bryant and Milam on a separate kidnapping charge, so presumably the two men felt sure that they would never have to answer for their crimes.  In a bizarre turn of events, Bryant and Milam (who could not be tried for murder again because of double jeopardy) sold their story to Look magazine, which published their graphic description of the Till murder in January 1956.  Bryant told the Look reporter,

"I'm no bully.  I never hurt a nigger in my life. I like niggers. In their place. I know how to work'em. But I just decided it was time a few people were put on notice ... As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain't gonna vote where I live! If they did, they'd control the government."

After the Look magazine story was published, the white citizens of LaFlore County, Mississippi began to distance themselves from Bryant and Milam.  Blacks refused to patronize Bryant's store, and he was forced to close.  He and his wife divorced in 1979, and Bryant, a broken and bitter old man, died of cancer in 1990.  Milam continued to farm, but blacks refused to work his crops or purchase his produce.  He was forced to give up farming and move to Texas, where he worked as a laborer.  He also died of cancer in 1981.

Emmett Till's lynching, which occurred three months before Rosa Parks' historic standoff on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, is considered to be the tipping point that turned the gathering groundswell of public concern over civil rights into a true nation-wide movement. 

Ironically, the case garnered most of its national coverage from magazines: the pioneering effort by Jet magazine to show the truly brutal nature of the crime, and the stunning confession of the killers published by Look.  Both stories together painted a picture of a boy who had been senselessly murdered by two men who were cleared of any wrongdoing because they did what they (and their community) incomprehensibly thought was "right."

Fortunately, few people outside of the deep South ever agreed with them.

The best narrative of the Emmett Till murder can be found at Court TV's Online Crime Library.

(h/t Oliver Willis)