Murder Of Emmett Till Thesis

The mid-1900s was not the best time for African-Americans, especially not for Emmett Till. Emmett Till was fourteen years old when he went from Chicago, Illinois to Money, Mississippi. Till was a wild boy who loved to joke around and pull pranks. He lived in a community in the North where there was segregation but nothing that compared to the South. This scared his mother who was not sure if Emmett was prepared to go. The death of the fourteen year old Emmett Till is one that will spark the civil rights movement and go down in history.
What occurred on August 24, 1955, proved that he was not ready to go to the South. When Till was dared to ask out the lady behind the cash register, Carolyn Bryant, he “was heard saying, ‘Bye baby’ to the woman” (“August 28, 1955 : The Murder of Emmett Till). This showed that Till was not ready to go to the South and did not take his mother’s warning. What Till did was very abnormal and dangerous for a black man, as black people then did not dare to look at white women or walk on

Milam. When people came into the courtroom, they realized that “all the juries on Grant and Milam’s case were white men” (“The Murder of Emmett Till”). To make the situation even worse, all the jurors came from Milam’s hometown so they all knew the people being tried. These factors immediately determined what was going to happen. The attorney defending Bryant and Milam said that “the body found was not Emmett Till’s body” (“The Murder of Emmett Till”). This went against Mose Wright’s and many other claims that those two were the ones that came to Wright’s house in the middle of the night, kidnapped Till, and murdered him. In the end, the jurors decided that the two were not guilty, saying that there was no proof that the body was Till’s, ignoring the witnesses’ claims. This angered all the African-Americans in the courtroom who wanted the two to at least get a sentence for