A History of the Civil Rights Movement

THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT TAKES HOLD

27

The Murder of Emmett Till During the 1950s, leaders like Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King advocated nonviolence as a way to draw attention to the plight of African Americans in the South. However, some whites had no qualms about using violence as a way to deter blacks from speaking out. African Americans were expected to “keep in their place”—to be subservient to white Americans. In the South, racist whites could hurt or even kill blacks and expect to get away with it. Police departments and local courts were con trolled by whites, and they rarely prosecuted whites who attacked blacks. In one famous case, a 14-year-old African-American boy named Emmett Till traveled by train from Chicago to visit his great-uncle Moses Wright in Money, Mississippi. On August 24, 1955, the boy spoke to a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, who was working at a grocery store. She was so upset that she told her husband, Roy Bryant. On the night of August 28, Roy Bryant and his half-brother John W. Milam drove to Moses Wright’s house and took Till. They met a group of other white men, who beat Till severely, shot him in the head, and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. Till’s mutilated body was found three days later. The horrible murder drew national attention. The body was returned to Chicago, where 50,000 people attended Emmitt Till’s funeral. His mother Mamie Till Bradley insisted on an open casket. She said, “everybody need ed to know what had happened to Emmett Till.” Photographs of Till’s muti lated body were published in national magazines. Despite the outrage, on September 23, 1955, an all-white, all-male jury found Bryant and Milam not guilty, and freed them. In January 1956, Look magazine published an article titled “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi.” In it, Bryant and Milam told exactly how they had murdered Emmett Till. Mamie Till wrote to the president and the FBI, asking them to investigate, but they never answered. Nonetheless, the publicity surrounding the murder of Emmett Till became a symbol of the unfair status of blacks in the South.