On This Day in History: August 28

The murder of Emmett Till

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He was a 14-year-old boy. He did nothing wrong. His name was Emmett Till. He was murdered solely for the crime of being Black in Mississippi.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: August 28, 1955--

He was born and raised in Chicago and during the summer of 1955 was visiting relatives in the small town of Money, in the Mississippi Delta. This was Jim-Crow era South, a time when a Black man, or boy, even looking at a white woman could result in a severe beating or even death.

During his visit, on August 24, Emmett and his cousin Curtis Jones skipped church to go to Bryant’s Grocery with several other Black boys. The store was owned by Roy Bryant. His 21-year-old wife, Carolyn Bryant, was running the store that day. What transpired is a subject of debate. Emmett may have wolf-whistled at Carolyn, or he may have whistled in general, as he was known to do to cover for his stutter.

When he learned of the whistle, Roy Bryant went nuts. He began to aggressively question several Black boys to find out who dared whistle at his wife. Roy and his half-brother John Milam tracked Till to his uncle’s house, and in the early hours of August 28, 1955, they used a gun to abduct Emmett. They brutally beat him, shot him, tied a heavy piece of farm equipment to his body, and threw him in the Tallahatchie River. The disfigured body was found three days later. Emmett’s mother demanded an open-casket funeral so people would see what they’d done to her boy.

Bryant and Milam were put on trial for the murder. Carolyn Bryant had testified that Emmett Till had done more than whistle. She said he had grabbed her and made sexual advances. The all-white jury never heard that testimony because the judge ruled it inadmissible. The jury acquitted the two men regardless; they even acquitted them of kidnapping despite the men admitting to having done so. The following year, with double jeopardy attached, Bryant and Milam admitted to Look magazine that they had in fact murdered Emmett Till.

Photos of the mutilated body of Emmett Till made international news and served as a catalyst for the next phase of the civil rights movement with the Montgomery bus boycott later that year. On the eighth anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I have a dream” speech during the March on Washington.

Many years later, Carolyn Bryant admitted that her testimony about Emmett grabbing her and making advances was a lie.

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