Over the course of about a week in 1955, “Emmett Till” went from being the name of an ordinary child to an anti-lynching cri de coeur.
Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, early on August 28, snatched Till from his great-uncle Mose Wright’s home near Money, Mississippi, set off by the spurious accusation that the Black 14-year-old had assaulted a White woman, Bryant’s then-wife, Carolyn Bryant (later Bryant Donham). The men beat Till, put a bullet in his head, tied a 75-pound cotton gin to his neck and threw him into the Tallahatchie River.
The first week of September, Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, held a funeral at the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, in Chicago. Propelled by grief and outrage, she insisted on an open-casket funeral so that visitors could see the body, mangled beyond recognition. She wanted to bring greater visibility to the horrors of White supremacy, to move people to battle against it. And she succeeded: Her son’s killing energized the Black freedom struggle. Till-Mobley spent the rest of her life refusing to allow the world to ignore what had happened to her boy.
Till’s presence still resonates throughout society. Chinonye Chukwu’s new film, “Till,” which paints a picture of the racial equality activism Till-Mobley embraced after her son’s death, debuts on Friday. In June, members of Till’s family found new evidence in the case—an unserved arrest warrant for Bryant, Milam and Donham. And, in March, President Joe Biden signed into law the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, making lynching a federal hate crime. Together, these events give us an opportunity to revisit an important question: What might justice for the slain teenager look like today, nearly 70 years after an all-White jury acquitted Bryant and Milam?
We can answer that question in a variety of ways, scholars and advocates say, because justice can take many different forms.
As Keisha N. Blain, a professor of history and Africana studies at Brown University, told CNN, “I always think about redress, this notion of justice—whether that’s legal justice and steps to help Till’s surviving relatives, or justice to Till’s memory and responses to urge people to consider how to stop present-day racial violence.”
