On this date, August 28, 1955, Emmett Till, an African-American boy who was
murdered in Mississippi at the age of 14 after reportedly flirting with a white
woman.
We, the comrades of Unit 1012: The VFFDP, will make him one of The
82 murdered children of Unit 1012, where we will not forget him. Let us
remember how he lived and not how he died.
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Emmett Till in a photograph taken
by his mother on Christmas Day 1954, about eight months before his murder. When
the photo ran in the Jackson Daily News Till and his mother were given
"a profound pathos in the flattering photograph", which
"humanized the Tills".
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Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was an
African-American boy who was murdered in Mississippi at the age of 14 after
reportedly flirting with a white woman. Till was from Chicago, Illinois,
visiting his relatives in Money, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region,
when he spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the married proprietor of a small
grocery store there. Several nights later, Bryant's husband Roy and his
half-brother J. W. Milam went to Till's great-uncle's house. They took Till
away to a barn, where they beat him and gouged out one of his eyes, before
shooting him through the head and disposing of his body in the Tallahatchie
River, weighting it with a 70-pound (32 kg) cotton gin fan tied around his
neck with barbed wire. Three days later, Till's body was discovered and
retrieved from the river.
Till's body
was returned to Chicago. His mother, who had raised him mostly by herself,
insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket to show the world the
brutality of the killing. "The open-coffin funeral held by Mamie Till
Bradley exposed the world to more than her son Emmett Till's bloated, mutilated
body. Her decision focused attention not only on American racism and the
barbarism of lynching but also on the limitations and vulnerabilities of American
democracy". Tens of thousands attended his funeral or viewed his casket
and images of his mutilated body were published in black-oriented magazines and
newspapers, rallying popular black support and white sympathy across the U.S.
Intense scrutiny was brought to bear on the condition of black civil rights in
Mississippi, with newspapers around the country critical of the state. Although
initially local newspapers and law enforcement officials decried the violence
against Till and called for justice, they soon began responding to national
criticism by defending Mississippians, which eventually transformed into
support for the killers.
The trial
attracted a vast amount of press attention. "When an all-white, all-male
jury acquitted Bryant and Milam of kidnapping and murder in September, the
verdict shocked observers across the country and around the world. And when,
mere months later, the men openly admitted to Look magazine that they had, in
fact, mutilated and murdered Till, the outcry was so intense — and the reaction
of Till’s devastated family so dignified — that it lit a spark that helped
ignite the modern civil rights movement". Bryant and Milam were acquitted
of Till's kidnapping and murder, but only months later, a Look magazine
reporter interviewed Bryant and Milam. Protected against double jeopardy, they
admitted to killing him, which further inflamed black opinion. Till's murder is
noted as a pivotal event motivating the African-American Civil Rights Movement.
Problems
identifying Till affected the trial, partially leading to Bryant's and Milam's
acquittals, and the case was officially reopened by the United States
Department of Justice in 2004. As part of the investigation, the body was
exhumed and autopsied resulting in a positive identification. He was reburied
in a new casket, which is the standard practice in cases of body exhumation.
His original casket was donated to the Smithsonian Institution. Events
surrounding Emmett Till's life and death, according to historians, continue to
resonate, and almost every story about Mississippi returns to Till, or the
region in which he died, in "some spiritual, homing way".
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