Emmett Till: The Open Casket

On August twenty-fourth, nineteen fifty-five, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till walked into Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Mississippi. He was from Chicago, visiting his great-uncle Moses Wright and cousins in the Delta for the summer. What happened inside the store that afternoon became the center of a murder trial and a half-century of disputed testimony. Carolyn Bryant, the white woman working behind the counter, told her husband Roy that Till had touched her hand and made a threatening remark. Her husband and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, decided to act.

At two thirty in the morning on August twenty-eighth, Roy Bryant and Milam came to Moses Wright's home and took Till from his bed at gunpoint. Three days later, Till's body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River, weighted with a seventy-five-pound cotton gin fan. He had been beaten, shot in the head above his right ear, and an eye had been gouged out. He was fourteen years old.

His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, made a decision that changed the course of American history. She insisted on an open casket. She insisted that the people who came to Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago see exactly what had been done to her son. An estimated one hundred thousand people viewed the body over five days. Jet magazine published photographs. Those photographs, and the open casket, and Mamie Till-Mobley's refusal to let the world look away, galvanized the civil rights movement in a way that no legal brief or Sunday sermon had managed to do.

Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam were tried for murder in September nineteen fifty-five in Sumner, Mississippi. An all-white jury deliberated for sixty-seven minutes and acquitted both men. One juror later said the jury had taken a soft drink break to make the deliberation look more serious.

Protected by the constitutional prohibition on double jeopardy, Bryant and Milam then told their story to William Bradford Huie of Look magazine, which published it in January nineteen fifty-six. They described, in detail, what they had done. Neither man was ever charged again.

About three months after Till's murder, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. When journalists later asked what she had been thinking about, she cited Emmett Till.

The ruins of Bryant's Grocery still stand in Money, a small deteriorating structure beside a road that does not see much traffic. A Mississippi Freedom Trail marker stands outside.