Who Was Emmett Till?

Emmett Till was born in Chicago and grew up in a middle-class Black neighborhood. Till was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, in 1955 when the fourteen-year-old was accused of whistling at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who was a cashier at a grocery store.

Four days later, Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J.W. Milam kidnapped Till, beat him and shot him in the head. The men were tried for murder, but an all-white, male jury acquitted them.

Till's murder and open casket funeral galvanized the emerging civil rights movement. More than six decades later, in January 2017, Timothy Tyson, author of The Blood of Emmett Till and a senior research scholar at Duke University, revealed that in a 2007 interview Carolyn admitted to him that she had lied about Till making advances toward her.

In 2018, the Justice Department said that it had received “new information” about Till’s death, and the FBI reopened an investigation into his murder.

Mother and Father

Till was the only child of Louis and Mamie Till. Till's mother was, by all accounts, an extraordinary woman. Defying the social constraints and discrimination she faced as an African American woman growing up in the 1920s and '30s, Mamie excelled both academically and professionally.

She was only the fourth Black student to graduate from suburban Chicago's predominantly white Argo Community High School, and the first Black student to make the school's "A" Honor Roll. While raising Till as a single mother, she worked long hours for the Air Force as a clerk in charge of confidential files.

Till never knew his father, a private in the United States Army during World War II. Till was born in 1941; his parents separated in 1942. Three years later, Mamie received word from the Army that Louis had been executed for "willful misconduct" while serving in Italy.

Childhood

Till, who went by the nickname Bobo, was born on July 25, 1941, in Chicago. He grew up in a thriving, middle-class Black neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. The neighborhood was a haven for Black-owned businesses, and the streets he roamed as a child were lined with Black-owned insurance companies, pharmacies and beauty salons as well as nightclubs that drew the likes of Duke Ellington and Sarah Vaughan.

Moar:

https://www.biography.com/.amp/crime-figure/emmett-till

Before it's scrubbed this is their poster child for lynching…

Till was beaten and shot in the head, not hung