Emmett Till Essay Thesis

- Emmett was beaten, forced to carry a large metal fan, and shot through the head.

On the train the boys were evidently taken away by the sheriff, once Ruby told a posse member (sheriff/police) of what went on. They were taken to the jail, Ruby and Victoria told the jail, they should be lynched as their chastisement.

The following day, the Wrights reported the kidnapping of Emmett Till to the local sheriff, but the case was deemed of low priority. Back in Chicago, Mamie Till received the heart-shattering news of her son’s disappearance. She alerted the Chicago police of the abduction who in turn called the Mississippi sheriffs. On Sunday, Bryant and Milam were arrested and charged with the abduction of the Chicago youth, and then three days later, the body of

Roy Bryant and John Milam kidnapped and murdered Emmett Till in cold blood because he flirted with Bryant’s spouse 4 days earlier. The case being that Emmett Till was “brutally murdered for flirting with a white woman four days earlier” (“Aug 28, 1955: The Death of Emmett Till”) isn’t something you would hear much nowadays, but in 1955, it was unfortunately common. Curtis Jones watched Till flirt with Carolyn Bryant, the spouse of Rob Bryant. What started as a prank went terribly wrong. Not to mention that racism went into play, as Till, being a black kid trying to flirt with a white woman in the South, would never go freely.

A African American boy named Emmett Till discovered dead by the Tallahatchie river, on October 28th. Till was found with a hole right through his head, and tied up with barbed wire.

“They then beat the teenager brutally, dragged him to the bank of the Tallahatchie River, shot him in the head, tied him with barbed wire to a large metal fan and shoved his mutilated body into the water...and three days later his corpse was pulled out of the river” (“Emmett Till”).

On September 19, 1955 Emmett’s murder had became an outrage. Because blacks and women were not allowed to serve jury duty, Bryant and Milam were judged in front of an all white male jury. At the end of the case the two white men were found innocent. This really made a lot of chaos. To add to the madness, a couple months later they admitted the crime to Look magazine for four thousand dollars.

Emmett Till was born and raised in Chicago, IL by his mother, Mamie. Emmett travelled by train to Money, Mississippi where he visited with relatives and worked on a cotton farm. Emmett and his cousin went into town one afternoon to take a break from the hot sun on the farm. Emmett entered the grocery store to buy candy where a Caucasian female was working behind the counter. The female was Carolyn Bryant, and her husband Roy owned the store. Carolyn told her husband that the day Emmett was in the store, he whistled at her which was inappropriate during this time. Once Roy was aware of what happened, he and another White man went to where Emmett was living and took him in the early morning. Emmett was then beaten and kept in a barn near Bryant’s

A theme for the Mississippi Trial 1955 is justice. African Americans wanted justice and equality throughout the book. The trial of Emmett Till represented justice even though Roy and J.W were convicted not guilty because the African American witnesses were able to participate in the trial. This unfair trial will be told throughout history, which will prove the racist acts that were convicted on African Americans. Emmett Till’s mother had an open casket for her son, because she wanted

The documentary, narrative "The Lynching of Emmett Till" by Christopher Metress, tells Emmett's story of death through various points of view. On August 24, 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago, entered a rural grocery store of Money, Mississippi. Because the young child had been gloating about his bond with white people up north, his southern cousins had dared him to go into the store and say something to the women working the register. Emmett accepted their challenge; seconds later he was at the counter, set on purchasing two items. What he did or said next will never be known for sure, but whatever passed between these two strangers from two different worlds set off a chain reaction that would forever

In addition, anger whites southerners were not accepting blacks in the society they started lynching African Americans. " Excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ' keep the nigger down this is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was" said Wells. One of the most cruel and memorable lynching in history was Emmett Till. Emmett Till a 14-year-old African American from Chicago, visited his family in Mississippi was accused of flirting with a white woman. White woman's husband and her brother found Till and took him to Tallahatchie River and asked him to take off his clothes. Then they started beating him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and then threw his body into the river. Moreover Well points out that " I found that in order to justify these horrible atrocities to the world, the Negro was branded as a race of rapists, who were especially after white women."(P66) There was no trial in a court for the accused criminal, which made it easy for the racist white mob to hold the law and sentence any African American.

African Americans were more likely to flee to the North from areas with abundant lynchings and racial violence. On February 12th, 1918, Jim McIlherron, an African American from Estill Springs, Tennessee, was accused of murdering two white men. Twenty masked men tortured him with hot irons, forcing other residents to watch. He was then chained to a tree and burned while he was still alive in front of a crowd of one thousand-five hundred. Many African Americans in Estill Springs left after that (Racial Violence and Black Migration in the American South). In 1912, Ernst Cox was accused of murdering and raping a young, white girl. Afterward,

The effect of Emmett's death on people was made personal for coloured people all over America. Tens of thousands of people showed up to view his body and many more to his funeral. After an African-American magazine released a photo of Emmett’s corpse, the mainstream media picked up on his story. It brought attention to the rights of the blacks in the Southern parts of the U.S. Less than two weeks after Emmett was laid to rest, Milam and Bryant went on trial in Sumner, Mississippi for his murder. There were many witnesses who positively identified the defendants as Emmett’s killers. On September 23, the jury of all white deliberated for less than an hour before giving a verdict of “not guilty,” saying that they believed the state had failed

As you are aware a young man named Emmett Till was dragged from his home and brutally murdered on August 28, 1955 less than one year ago. His murder occurred in Money, Mississippi less than three hours from here. Emmett Till went to visit relatives on August 24, 1955. He was accused of flirting and whistling at a white woman, a cashier at the grocery store. Four days later Emmett was kidnapped by two men from his home. They beat him and shot him in the head. The men that committed this terrible act have not been brought to justice.

In 1955 Emmett planned to visit family in Money, Mississippi (“The death of”, n.d.). The trip was scheduled for August 20th and Emmett was going to stay with his great uncle Moses Wright (“The death of”, n.d.). As J. Williams writes in a book about Emmett’s life, the day before Emmett left for his trip Mamie Till, Emmett’s mother, gave him the ring from his father, inscribed with his father’s initials, L.T. (1987). After a day long train ride Emmett arrived in Mississippi and joined his great uncle and friends to begin his visit to the south. A few days after his arrival, Emmett went with friends to a local grocery store where they spent time relaxing after picking cotton during the day. To the disbelief of his friends, Emmett bragged that his girlfriend at home was a white girl. Emmett was a comical young man and a rambunctious teenager, who when dared