June 19, 2013

Crime History: Slaying of Emmett Till helps galvanize civil rights

BY: SCOTT MCCABE AUGUST 27, 2012 | 8:00 PM
Leave a comment

On this day, Aug. 28, in 1955, black teenager Emmett Till was killed in Mississippi after someone said he whistled at a white woman.

The slaying of the 14-year-old helped galvanize the emerging civil rights movement.

Till, who was from Chicago and was visiting family, was kidnapped, beaten, shot in the head, had a large metal fan tied to his neck with barbed wire, and was thrown into the Tallahatchie River.

Roy Bryant, the white woman's husband, and his half-brother J.W. Milam, were charged in Till's death shortly after the killing but were acquitted by an all-white jury.

Nearly 100,000 people viewed Till's open casket in Chicago. Till's mother allowed her son's beaten face to be photographed because she wanted the whole world to see the atrocity. The image shocked the country, and fueled the civil rights movement.

-Scott McCabe

View article comments Leave a comment

More from washingtonexaminer.com

From the Weekly Standard

  • Frack to the Future

    Williston, N.D.

    Read More...
  • Downsize Ike

    The beleaguered Eisenhower Memorial Commission holds its next public gathering later this month, and before its members duck-walk into the hearing room, huddled in a hoplite phalanx against a...

    Read More...
  • The Lesson of Kermit Gosnell

    What was the lesson of the Kermit Gosnell trial? Since the Philadelphia doctor was convicted last month of murdering three born-alive infants, two competing viewpoints have emerged.

    Read More...