Emmett Till's Trial In To Kill A Mockingbird

A wolf-whistle did not bring Emmett Till a young lady’s blush—it brought death. Till had flirted with a white woman, and her husband was enraged. In fact, he kidnapped and murdered Emmett Till. Till’s mournful mother even had her son displayed in his casket “so that viewers could see the gruesome damage inflicted by the murderers.” It was, however, the court trial that exemplified the inequality between white and black Americans, similar to the inequality of Tom Robinson’s trial in To Kill a Mockingbird.

In 1955, the young African American Emmett Till from the North visited his cousins in Northern Alabama. When, on August 24, they crossed into the store “Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market”, Till stayed behind to talk with Carolyn Bryant, the

Nevertheless, everyone heard his wolf-whistle and Till immediately drove away with his group. Roy Bryant, Carolyn’s husband, discovered the incident a few days later. Infuriated that a black man could disrespect his wife, he and his half-brother John Milam resolved to kidnap Till. On August 28, Emmett Till was driven to an isolated farm, shot, and thrown into the Tallahatchie River. Originally, both Bryant and Milam were charged with abduction. It progressed to a murder charge when Till’s body was found three days later. However, the white police officer H.C. Strider claimed that the body was not that of Till’s and that he “is still alive.” This would allow for a murder defense in the case. In obvious denial, both Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley, and great uncle, Moses Wright, testified that the discovered body was Emmett Till. They advocated the fact that the

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee exhibited a similar injustice. The black man Tom Robinson was accused of raping a disrespected man’s white daughter. Also ignoring clear evidence, Tom Robinson was found guilty. On page 295, Harper Lee writes, “There’s something in our world that makes men lose their heads--they couldn’t be fair if they tried. In our courts, when it’s a white man’s word against a black man’s, the white man always wins. They’re ugly, but those are the facts of life.” (To Kill a Mockingbird). Racism overpowered justice with these juries. Prejudice clouded reason. During the time period of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird and Emmett Till, inequality and injustice were common things and, as Lee puts it, “the facts of life.” Both events included all-white male juries because of restrictions. This contradicts the very point of a jury; multiple perspectives need to be shown to let the truth out. With a select pool of jurors, it is impossible to do this. In both events, the white man lived and black man perished as a direct result of the jury. The case, like one of the themes of To Kill a Mockingbird, was the death of innocence. Overall, both cases involved corrupted court systems that neglected evidence that was in favor of black