No Justice For Emmett

On Aug. 28, 1955 — 70 years ago today — a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago who was visiting family in Mississippi was dragged out of bed, beaten, shot and his body thrown into a river. He had been accused of either flirting or being disrespectful to a white woman in a country store.

His killers never faced justice. But Emmett Till would become a rallying point for the growing Civil Rights movement.

The Murder of A 14-Year-Old-Boy

Emmett Till, age 14

Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till of Chicago’s South Side, was so excited about his summer trip to visit relatives in the tiny town of Money, Mississippi. His mother, Mamie, attempted to lecture him on how to talk to people there: white people in the South in 1955 regarded Black people very differently than did white people up north. Emmett promised her he would behave.

On just his third evening in Mississippi, Emmett and his young relatives dropped by a local grocery store to buy candy. What happened that night has never definitively been settled. But Emmett was later accused of:

- Bragging to his companions about having a white girlfriend in Chicago.

- Grabbing the hand of the clerk and co-owner of the store, Carolyn Bryant, and flirting with her.

- Handing money to Bryant, which would have been considered disrespectful. Black customers were expected to lay their coins on the counter for the clerk to pick up.

- Wolf-whistling at Bryant.

Carolyn Bryant, age 21

It’s been established that none of those things actually happened. The whistling accusation is particularly troublesome: At age 6, Emmett had contracted polio and was left with a prominent stutter. He had particular difficulty pronouncing “b” sounds and would work through his stutter by whistling softly. And Emmett was buying 2¢ worth of bubble gum.

The boys returned home. Not much was thought about it ... until four nights after their visit. Bryant’s husband, Roy, returned from a trip hauling shrimp to Texas and heard about an incident with a Black boy and his wife in their store. Incensed, he and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, armed themselves and went to the house where the boy was staying and, at 2 a.m. on Aug. 28, 1955, banged on the door, demanding to see him.

Emmett’s great uncle, Mose Wright, offered the men money to leave but they refused. They marched Emmett to their truck, drove him to a toolhouse where they beat him and then drove the boy to the Tallahatchie River. There, they tied a large fan blade to him with barbed wire, shot him in the head and tossed his body into the river.

Three days later, two boys fishing in the river came across Emmett’s horribly disfigured body. Emmett was no longer recognizable but he was still wearing a silver ring that his mother identified as his.

Local officials prepared Emmett’s body for burial but his mother insisted he be shipped back to Chicago. Once she saw and identified Emmett’s body, Mobley insisted on an open-coffin funeral because she wanted the world to “see what they did to my boy.”

Mamie Till insisted on an open-casket funeral for her son. “I just wanted the world to see” she said. This photo was sourced from the Smithsonian.

Mobley invited in members of the Black media to view Emmett and to take pictures. John Johnson’s noted weekly magazine, Jet, published pictures of Emmett’s swollen face, sparking outrage about the crime.

Back in Mississippi, Bryant and Milam were arrested, indicted and — just four weeks later — put on trial for Emmett’s murder. The trial itself would last only five days in a segregated courtroom in which local officials gleefully toss around the N-word at Black spectators.

Bryant testified, making claims about Emmett’s behavior that night. She’d later admit none of what she said on the stand was true. In 2017, Bryant told journalist Tim Tyson: “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”

On Sept. 23, the all-white, all-male jury acquitted Bryant and Milam after just 67 minutes of deliberation. The jury explained that the state had failed to prove the identity of the body that had been pulled out of the river.

On Sept. 23, 1955 — just 26 days after the murder — Roy Bryant, left, and his half-brother J.W. Milam, center, were acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury. Photo sourced from the Library of Congress

The acquittal of the two men — and the state’s decision to not indict Milam and Bryant on the charge of kidnapping, which would likely have been much easier to prove — helped galvanize the determination of African Americans to fight racial oppression and segregation. That December in Montgomery, Alabama. Rosa Parks would refuse orders from a city bus driver to give up her seat for a white man. Parks later explained, “I thought about Emmett Till, and I could not go back.”

The next year, Look magazine paid Milam and Bryant $4,000 — $48,000 in 2025 dollars — to sit for an interview in which they admitted they had killed Emmett but denied they had done anything wrong.

“What else could I do?,” Milam said. “He thought he was as good as any white man.”

In 2004, the U.S. Department of Justice reopened the case but failed to determine who else, if anyone, might have been involved in the murder.

In 2005, the body was exhumed. It was positively identified as Emmett’s.

Lynching And Mob Violence

Charles Lynch was a Virginia farmer during the Revolutionary War who was known for capturing and jailing people who were loyal to the British crown and to those who had dealt with local slaves. He admitted he had no legal right to do this but claimed a moral right to administer what he called “Lynch’s law.”

Over time, the practice became known as just lynching and escalated to mobs torturing and killing Black people and White people accused of being too cooperative with Blacks. Lynchings were especially prevalent in the South and became even more common after the removal of Union troops with the end of Reconstruction in 1877.

Some lynchings attracted crowds of white spectators. William “Froggie” James, accused of raping and murdering a white woman in Cairo, Illinois, in 1909, was pulled out of jail and killed while a crowd of about 10,000 watched.

Black journalist Ida B. Wells, who lost three friends to lynchings in 1892 — the year lynchings peaked — publicized the practice and called for lynchings to end.

Anti lynching legislation was passed by the U.S. House in 1922 but was blocked by Southern senators. It wasn’t until 2022 that Congress passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. President Joe Biden signed it into law on March 29 of that year.