The Murder of Emmett Till

In August 1955, a 14 year old black boy from Chicago whistled at a white woman in a grocery store in Money, Mississippi. Emmett Till didn't understand that he had broken an unwritten law of the Jim Crow South. Three days later, two white men dragged him from his bed in the dead of night, beat him brutally, shot him, and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. Although his killers were arrested and charged with murder, they were both acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury. Shortly after the trial, the defendants sold their story to the press. They sold a detailed account of how they murdered Emmett Till to a journalist. The story revealed how little remorse the men felt. The federal government's failure to intercede in the Till case led blacks and whites to realise that if change were to come, they would have to do it themselves. The Murder Of Emmett Till was a watershed in the development of the nascent movement for civil rights. Three months and three days after Emmett Till's body was pulled from the Tallahatchie, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began. (From ABC program guide).

ClickView-logo-inverted-RGBClickView-logo-white-RGBhyperlink-circle