On this day, Aug. 28, 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was kidnapped and brutally murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi.
The Black teenager was accused by Carolyn Bryant, a white woman working at a store, of whistling at her. Days later, Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, dragged Till from his uncle’s home at gunpoint.
In this undated photo 14-year-old Emmett L.Till from Chicago, is shown.(AP Photo, File)
They mutilated him, tied a 75-pound cotton gin fan around his neck with barbed wire and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River.
An all-white jury acquitted them, but months later the men admitted the killing in an interview with Look magazine.
Mose Wright, right, and his son Simeon, sit in their home at the community of Money, Miss. , near Greenwood, and discuss the loss of their 15-year-old relative, Emmett Till, September 1, 1955. Till was a nephew of Mose Wright. Till’s body was found in the Tallahatchie River August 31. He had a bullet hole in his head. Two white men are being held in jail at Greenwood in connection with the death. (AP Photo)
The case became a catalyst for the civil rights movement in America.
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In this Sept. 22. 1955 photo, Carolyn Bryant rests her head on her husband Roy Bryant’s shoulder after she testified in Emmett Till murder court case in Sumner, Miss. A team searching the basement of a Mississippi courthouse for evidence about the lynching of Black teenager Emmett Till has found the unserved warrant charging a white woman in his kidnapping in 1955, and relatives of the victim want authorities to finally arrest her nearly 70 years later. A warrant for the arrest of Carolyn Bryant Donham, identified as “Mrs. Roy Bryant” on the document, was discovered last week by searchers inside a file folder that had been placed in a box, Leflore County Circuit Clerk Elmus Stockstill told The Associated Press on Wednesday, June 29, 2022. (AP Photo, File)
