Personal Statement For Emmett's Murder

Aashiq Jivani
Stanford Law School Personal Statement On August 28th, 1955, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago, Illinois, was mercilessly lynched by two middle-aged white men in Money, Mississippi. In a matter of minutes, the two had clawed out one of his eyes, shot him in his head, tied his neck to a cotton-gin fan, and heaved his corpse into the depths of the Tallahatchie River. That boy whose body was found nearly four days later was Emmett Till. The reason for his murder? A false accusation of indecently grabbing a white woman as he meandered out of a grocery store. Like Emmett, between 1877 and 1950, nearly 4000 black men in the south had been lynched for alleged minor social transgressions. However, unlike those victims, Emmett’s lynching was much more than just another hate-crime that would be ignored. When Emmett’s mother saw his mutilated body, she held an open-casket funeral, and at that funeral, the entire world saw how viciously her son had been slain. Jet Magazine, a popular publication at the time, presented pictures of Emmett's gruesomely disfigured remains, lighting a fire that forced the American people to address the consequences of segregation in the South. Emmett’s murder inspired the likes of Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks to adopt a deeper level of activism; a crusade that would eventually become the American Civil Rights movement.

The killings of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and a plethora of other Black Americans have shown that the manifestation of hate and fear towards individuals of color is still deeply rooted in the American culture. Furthermore, the systematic maltreatment of groups of people in America has extended far beyond just the black community; it has become painfully clear that members of the LGBTQ, Latinx, and Islamic communities are facing a similar level of