The Murder Of Emmett Till

Imagine something terrible happened to someone close to you and the case never gets justified. That is exactly what happened to this young child. Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago, Illinois, was born on July 25, 1941. He was raised by his mother. In 1995, Emmett’s mother sent him to Mississippi to visit his family on his mother’s side during his summer vacation. His mother had warned him regarding how the South had a different way of living than Detroit and Chicago. Lots of Northern cities were segregated not by law but by the way the people decided to live. Cities in the South didn’t have strict, discriminatory racial customs. His mother told him to be careful and then drove him to the train station. She then kissed him goodbye without

He did not deserve what came to him, especially at such a young age. It was the evening of August 24, 1955, when Emmett had just arrived in Mississippi. He and a few cousins decided to go to a store nearby to purchase some snacks. This store is now known as the Bryant Grocery and Meat Market. It was run by a white couple, the Bryants. When Emmett was just leaving the store he whistled at the woman behind the counter. Immediately after, he and his cousins all ran away knowing that they had messed up. Later in the night, after the incident with Emmett Till, Bryant's husband, Roy, heard about what had happened to his wife at their store and he was enraged and furious. So he, irrational and impulsive, decided to take his half-brother, J.W. Milam, and kidnap Emmett from his uncle’s home. They then brutally beat Till and took him to the bank of the Tallahatchie River. This is where they tied him to a fan with barbed wire and then shot him in the head afterward. (The Murder of Emmett Till, Emmett Till). Till’s mother wanted justice for her child so she had an open casket for Emmett. “Till’s mother demanded that the body be returned to Chicago and insisted on an open casket, so that ‘the world’ could ‘see what they did to my boy’” (History Till, Emmett Louis 1). Mamie Till was never happy at all with the turnout of the case so she decided to hold an open casket ceremony for her