The Spark for Civil Rights
August 31, 2015
Last Friday, August 28, and over the weekend of the 29th and 30th, memorials were held in remembrance of Emmett Till, who was murdered 60 years ago. Emmett Till was a young African American teenager from Chicago who was visiting family in Mississippi. He and other teens went to a small store in Money, Mississippi. Some witnesses say Till spoke to, or may have flirted with, the white woman who owned the store, Carolyn Bryant. On August 28, 1955, Till was kidnapped, horribly beaten, and shot in the head. His body was found three days later in the Tallahatchie River.
Till’s funeral drew thousands of mourners. His mother, Mamie, insisted Emmett’s coffin be open for the service, so that others could see what had been done to her son. Till’s death and funeral are seen by some experts as the seeds that grew into the Civil rights movement.
Two white men were charged with Till’s death—Roy Bryant, Carolyn Bryant’s husband, and J. W. Milam, the husband’s half brother. In September 1955, both men were acquitted by a jury of 12 white men. A year later, however, Milam bragged in a magazine interview that he and Roy Bryant had in fact killed Emmett Till.
After a service on August 28, 2015, at Till’s gravesite in Alsip, Illinois (near Chicago), parents of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown attended events memorializing Till. Trayvon Martin was an unarmed African American youth shot and killed in 2012 by a man claiming self-defense. Michael Brown was an unarmed African American teen shot and killed in 2014 by a white policeman.
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