Significance Of Emmett Till Death

This investigation will explore the question: To what extent was the death of Emmett Till significant to civil rights and the accountability of white individuals? The year that will be focused on is 1955, during and after the August when Emmett Till was lynched in order to answer the part of the question of the significance of his death. My first source is Policing the Boundaries of Whiteness: The Tragedy of Being "Out of Place" from Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin by Angela Onwuachi-Willig, written in 2017. Angela Onwuachi-Willig teaches Employment Discrimination, Evidence, Family Law, Critical Race Theory, and Torts at the Berkeley Law School at the University of California, which implies that Angela may have quite the extensive amount

Emmett Till was visiting his cousins in Money, Mississippi for a few weeks that summer. When he went into a grocery store to buy some bubblegum on August 24, proceeded to do something that got him killed. It is alleged that Emmett Till whistled/cat-called one of the female members of the white family who owned the store, Carolyn Bryant. This led to his capture 4 days later by Roy Bryant and his half brother, J.W. Milam. They captured Till and tortured him until they eventually shot him in the head and dumped his 14 year old body in the Tallahatchie River, they found him in the water three days later. Being in the water only added to the disfiguration of Till’s body, making him borderline, if not completely,

Around two weeks later, Milam and Bryant got a trial in a segregated courtroom in Sumner, Alabama. But one of the most interesting things about their trial is that they had an all white jury, in the Southern United States, to bring justice to a young black man who had been murdered by white men from Mississippi. In reality, Emmett Till’s trial was very unfair from the start, which ultimately led to Till’s murderers going free due to failure to truly identify and prove the identity of the body, and they went unreprimanded on kidnapping charges as well. So, Emmett Till never truly got the justice he deserved. And even more than not getting his justice, his murders confessed to killing him in a magazine some time after the trial, but they could not be tried due to double-jeopardy. This outraged much of the public, especially people who supported civil rights in its early stages with more passion than imaginable. Emmett Till’s murder brought up the Jim Crow segregation in the South and was an early but driving force of the civil rights movement. So, even though Emmett did not get justice himself, he began to pave the long road of racial equality that we still have yet to achieve to this day due to many factors, but especially because in Emmett Till’s time and even now, the United State’s government is seemingly run by white men who have superiority complexes who think