Emmett Till and the Weight of a Summer
Mississippi
In late August of nineteen fifty-five, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago named Emmett Till was visiting relatives in the town of Money, in Leflore County in the Delta. On August twenty-eighth, two white men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, abducted him from his great-uncle Moses Wright's home in the middle of the night. Three days later his body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River, weighted with a cotton gin fan and bound with barbed wire. He had been beaten, shot, and his face was mutilated beyond easy recognition. He was fourteen years old.
His mother, Mamie Till Bradley, made a decision that changed America. She insisted on an open casket funeral at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago so that the world could see what had been done to her son. Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender published photographs. An estimated one hundred thousand people filed past the casket over four days.
In September, Bryant and Milam stood trial in Tallahatchie County. The jury deliberated sixty-seven minutes and acquitted both men. Moses Wright, Till's great-uncle, had the courage to stand in that courtroom and point at the men who had come for the boy, saying in a voice that broke as he pointed, 'Thar he.' Protected acquittals in hand, Bryant and Milam gave a full confession to Look magazine in January nineteen fifty-six, knowing the double-jeopardy protection would shield them.
The murder and acquittal were a turning point. They were cited by Rosa Parks when she refused to move on a Montgomery bus three months later. They were cited by Medgar Evers, who had investigated the case. They were cited by a generation of organizers who understood that the comfortable fiction of American progress could no longer stand after Money, Mississippi. The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act was signed into law in March twenty twenty-two, sixty-seven years after his murder.
