How Does Emmett Till Show Courage

“When something happened to Negroes in the South, I said, ‘That’s their business, not mine.’ Now I know how wrong I was. The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of all of us.’” (Crowe 121). That’s what a mother of a son that was just murdered and lynched brutally told the world after his death. It’s hard to imagine how much courage that would have taken. Emmett Till’s story and the author teach us a lot about courage, like courage can be hard to show but when you do it can lead to great things. Emmett Till was a 14 year old boy who lived with his mother in Chicago in the 1950s, when blacks were discriminated against in the South. Emmett went down to his uncle’s

“At gunpoint, Miliam challenged the boy. ‘You still as good as I am?’ Miliam said Emmett’s answer was ‘Yeah.’ ‘You’ve still ‘had’ white women?’ ‘Yeah,’ said Emmett. That was all the enraged Miliam needed to hear. He squeezed the trigger of his .45 pistol and fired an expanding bullet into Emmett’s skull, killing him instantly. Then, according to their interview, they used barbed wire to tie a cotton gin fan around Emmett’s neck and threw him into the muddy green water of the river.” (Crowe 116). This shows how hard it can be to show courage because Emmett must have been slightly afraid with a gun against his head. This also shows that showing courage can lead to good things because even though Emmett’s courage killed him many argue that he was the start of the civil rights movement. Another piece of evidence that shows how Emmett showed courage was “Miliam claimed that even after the beatings, Emmett showed no remorse for what he had done at Bryant’s Market.” (Crowe 62). This shows that it is hard to show courage because even though Emmett was beaten he still stood up for himself and never backed down from his murderers. This also shows that showing courage can lead to good things because even though it lead to Emmett being more beaten if he had not stood up for himself they probably would have killed him earlier or let him go and he would not have been beaten as much and his death would not have been as much of a big deal causing the civil rights movement to maybe not even