Emmett Till Case

In August, 1955, 15-year-old Emmett Till, who lived in Chicago, was sent on a vacation to visit with relatives in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. Emmett Till was naïve about the social etiquette of living in the heavily Jim Crow South. He failed to treat white adults with the respect and deference practiced by other African-Americans in Mississippi, kept a photo of his white girlfriend from Chicago in his wallet, and he made another fatal mistake. On a dare, he entered a store in Money, Mississippi and asked the cashier, a young white, married woman, for a date – and he whistled at her. Two days later, the woman’s husband and brother-in-law went to the cabin where Emmett was staying with his elderly uncle, Moses Wright, and took him away to give him a beating.

Milam, went beyond just beating Emmett because, as they later admitted, because didn’t ask for mercy or show remorse for his behavior. Instead of just a beating, they pistol whipped him, shot him in the head, and threw him into the Tallahatchie River with a heavy fan tied around his neck to weigh his body down. After his body was found and Bryant and Milam were identified as the most likely suspects in his murder, murder charges were brought against the two men. With an all-white jury, despite the fact that blacks constituted about 63 percent of the residents of Tallahatchie County, that jury, after deliberating for slightly more than an hour acquitted the defendants. Later, Bryant and Milam would openly admit in media interviews that they murdered Emmett Till (Kennedy,