Emmett Till Thesis

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Do you ever wonder if what happened to people “back in the day” changes our world now? A lot of people don’t realize that if some of the things that did happen didn’t, how much different our world would be today. Emmett Till wasn’t well known, but he should’ve been for what he went through for winking at a white woman. Emmett till had a big part in the Civil Rights Movement (Latson). The story of Emmett Till is actually quite interesting, and intense. Emmett’s mother sent him on a south bound train to go visit some family members for two weeks in northern Mississippi. Emmett was having a blast with his cousins the first 3 days, From picking cotton, shooting off fireworks, stealing watermelons, and jumping into a snake infested pond. Emmett, …show more content…

That’s where they believe Till was later shot. Before Till was shot and killed he repeatedly said “I’m not afraid of you.” Till wasn’t afraid, he was a very brave young man. If you think about it you probably would’ve been scared to death, but not Till. The men who beat and killed him described him as “defiant”. After the men killed Till they went downtown to the store, when someone noticed the blood dripping out of the truck and the puddle on the ground. Bryant told them he killed a deer, but the people confronted him about it not being deer season and opened the back of the truck to see Emmett dead. Bryant then said “This is what happens to smart black boys.” Bryant then decided to throw Till's body into the Tallahatchie River. Before doing so, they stopped to steal a heavy fan that they planned to use to weigh down the corpse. Then they stopped on a dirt road, near a steep bank in the river. The men tied the fan to Till's neck with barbed wire, and rolled the dead fourteen-year-old into the river. Three days later and eight miles downstream, a boy named Robert Hodges, who was fishing in the Tallahatchie and saw feet sticking out of the water. The badly beaten and bloated body was pulled from the river and loaded into a boat. Called to the scene, Mose Wright peaked into the boat on the riverbank and identified the body of Emmett Till. The men went to jail for abduction but told police they let Till go and was later killed. They let him go but not alive like Bryant told not only everyone, but the police also