Emmitt Till Murder Case

Emmitt Till was a fourteen-year-old boy that went to the meat market one day in late August. He and his family were in Mississippi for summer vacation. He supposedly whistled at Carolyn Bryant, the white woman that owned the store. Emmitt Till was kidnapped, tortured, and shot in the head four days later by Carolyn’s husband and half-brother. His dead body was discovered in the Tallahatchie River three days after being kidnapped. His body naked and tied to a seventy-five-pound cotton gin fan with barbed wire.
Till grew up near Chicago. His parents were working class citizens. He also attended a segregated school. He was not used to the type of segregation he found in Mississippi. Emmitt enjoyed pranking people, his mother knew this so she told him that in the south he had to be careful

Emmitt’s mother insisted on a public display of his remains, which was against the wishes of the police dealing with Emmitt’s case. His body was shipped back to Chicago, where there was an open casket funeral held for him. Many pictures were taken and articles written on this horrid murder.
Not even two weeks after Emmit’s burial, the two men responsible were put on trial. There were not very many witnesses outside of Emmitt’s uncle that could identify these men as Emmitt’s murderers. They were tried in a segregated courthouse with an all white jury that took only an hour to decide that these men were not guilty. The men that murdered and kidnapped Emmitt Till walked away freely. People all over the country were outraged about this great injustice.
A few weeks after being charged as not guilty, the two men admitted to killing Emmitt Till in a newspaper article. The case was already over and closed, though, so they got to walk away with no charges. This was a great injustice that helped show the horridness of the Jim Crow segregation in the southern states of our