Getting Away with Murder

The kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till and the trial of his killers became one of the biggest news items of 1955. The viewing of his disfigured corpse at Rainer Funeral Home and his funeral at the Roberts Temple of the Church of God in Christ in Chicago attracted more than ten thousand mourners. The grisly open-casket photo of Emmett that appeared in Jet magazine horrified and angered hundreds of thousands more. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), other civil rights organizations, and political leaders expressed outrage at the cold-blooded murder of this boy from Chicago. In an interview, Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the NAACP, labeled the crime a racist act, saying, “It would appear that the state of Mississippi has decided to maintain white supremacy by murdering children.” Newspapers across the country, especially those in the Northern states, condemned the killing and the racist attitudes that led to it.

A huge crowd gathers in front of Roberts Temple of the Church of God in Christ, the Chicago church that held Emmett Till’s funeral

The protests and condemnations from civil rights leaders and Northerners poked an already raw nerve in the South. The white leaders in Southern states like Mississippi that enforced Jim Crow laws, regulations that segregated Blacks from whites, were still stinging from the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which declared that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional. In May of 1955, the Supreme Court pushed the issue even further when it ordered that integration of schools must proceed “with all deliberate speed.” The two rulings alarmed Southern leaders who feared that the federal government and Northern agitators planned to destroy the Southern way of life. Comments from a speech given by the police commissioner of Montgomery, Alabama, typify the attitude of many white Southerners regarding forced desegregation of public schools:

“Since the infamous Supreme Court decision rendered in 1954, we in Montgomery and the South have been put to a severe test by those who seek to destroy our time-honored customs.

“Not since Reconstruction have our customs been in such jeopardy.... We can, will and must resist outside forces hell-bent on our destruction....”

Despite the Supreme Court’s intentions, citizens in the South knew that efforts to change the South would be resisted. A prediction by an editor of the Jackson Daily News foreshadowed the violence that would stir up Mississippi, setting the stage for Emmett Till’s murder: “Mississippi will not obey the decision. If an effort is made to send Negroes to school with white children, there will be bloodshed. The stains of that bloodshed will be on the Supreme Court steps.”

The defensiveness triggered by the desegregation mandate prompted many white Southerners to take offense at the widespread criticism in the media regarding Emmett’s murder. Angry editorials like the one published in the September 2, 1955, issue of The Greenwood Commonwealth appeared in newspapers in Mississippi and across the South complaining that Southerners were being unfairly criticized for the isolated actions of two men. Even the governor of Mississippi, Hugh White, reacted in the press: “Mississippi deplores such conduct on the part of its citizens and certainly cannot condone it. This is not a lynching. It is straight out murder.” By claiming that Emmett’s death was not a lynching, the governor hoped to defend his state from the Northern and liberal press that considered the murder a racially motivated crime.

The intense media coverage in the weeks between Emmett’s death and the trial of his killers focused worldwide attention on the legal proceedings that would be held in a sleepy little town in the Mississippi Delta, exposing to the world the cruel racial intolerance that existed in the South. Enormous changes in the Southern way of life would soon follow. Thirty years after the case, a former NAACP official said, “I think sometimes that the hand of God was in the whole thing. White men had been killing Black boys down here for years without anybody making much of a fuss. The Emmett Till case became a cog in the wheel of change. Perhaps we have television to thank for that. Television and the printed media turned the spotlight on Mississippi.”

The weeklong trial of Milam and Bryant, held in the county courthouse in the small farming community of Sumner, Mississippi, drew a standing room only audience every day, with more than three hundred spectators, most of them white, packed into the courtroom. Newspapers and magazines from all over the United States sent correspondents to cover the trial. In the early days of television, long before satellite broadcasts, the three major television networks even assigned camera crews to report the events of the sensational case; film had to be flown to New York daily. The national and international publicity surprised and angered many local Mississippians, convincing them that they had to defend their Southern way of life against attacks from outsiders. One reporter covering the trial explained the reaction of local citizens to the invasion by the news media this way: “The feeling that [the media spotlight] all was a plot against the South was the most accepted explanation, and when Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam ambled into the court in September 1955, they were armed not only with their wives, baby boys, and cigars, but with the challenge of the Delta whites to the interference to the outside world.”

The trial captured the outside world’s interest for several reasons. The Jet magazine photo of Emmett publicized the gruesome details of the murder, making it more than just another Southern lynching. The nature of the crime itself, a fourteen-year-old boy brutally murdered by two men, made it news, but the reason for the kidnapping and killing—Emmett had allegedly whistled at and made “ugly remarks” to a white woman—turned it into big news. The racial context of the case also contributed to its notoriety; at the time, Medgar Evers and the NAACP were fighting hard to gain equal rights for Blacks in the South, and Emmett’s senseless murder seemed to symbolize the plight of Blacks in the region. Finally, the murder indictment against Milam and Bryant was a landmark event in Mississippi, a state where more than 500 lynchings had occurred since 1880, because, as far as many people knew, it was the first time white men had been indicted for killing a Black person. The trial gave many African Americans hope that, finally, equal rights for all citizens, regardless of race, might be on the way. For entrenched Southern segregationists, the trial confirmed the fears that had begun with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling: The white-dominated Southern way of life was in jeopardy.

Though everyone involved in the trial already knew the guilt of the defendants, the prosecution, led by District Attorney Gerald Chatham, worked diligently to present a strong case. A number of eyewitnesses testified against the killers, including Emmett’s great-uncle. In a spectacularly intense moment, Mose Wright stood at the witness stand, pointed at Milam and Bryant, and stated that they were the ones who had come into his home to kidnap Emmett. Wright’s act of courage marked one of the first times an African American accused a white of a crime in a Mississippi court of law. Fearing for his life, he had to leave the state immediately after the trial.

Despite the many testimonies, the clear evidence (including Milam and Bryant’s confession to kidnapping), and Chatham’s eloquent closing argument, after deliberating for barely an hour, the all-white jury declared the defendants not guilty.

The verdict set off a storm of reactions equal to those before the trial. Segregationists and racists claimed victory for the South. Civil rights activists and Northerners lamented the miscarriage of justice and condemned the acquittal. Both sides agreed on one thing, however: The jury’s decision seemed to signal that in the South, Jim Crow laws and racial segregation were not going to go away.

A courtroom artist’s depiction of Mose Wright testifying against Emmett Till’s killers

But Charles C. Diggs, Jr., a Black congressman from Michigan who had attended the trial, saw things differently. The landmark trial, he suggested, could be used as a starting point for further change. “The Emmett Till trial is over, but we, as Negroes, should never forget its meaning. The fact that Milam and Bryant were acquitted shows us how tremendous a job we face to bring complete democracy to our entire nation. Negroes and other clear-thinking Americans must combine their efforts to press for freedom and equality through both political and legal challenges.”

Congressman Charles C. Diggs, Jr., center, was among those who attended the trial

The aftershocks of the Emmett Till case continued long after the Tallahatchie county jury set Milam and Bryant free. For many people involved in the civil rights movement, the murder of Emmett Till and the acquittal of his murderers was the last straw. If Black boys could be killed by white men with no fear of criminal prosecution, something had to be done, and there was no better time than 1955 for the movement to begin.

“The murder of Emmett Till and the trial of the two men accused of murdering him,” wrote journalist and historian David Halberstam, “became the first great media event of the civil rights movement.” It was the kind of attention that the struggling civil rights movement desperately needed to generate support. With the emotional outrage from the murder and trial, the national and international media attention, and the increased efforts by Americans who were working for equality, the civil rights movement gained the momentum necessary to break free from the social bondage that had enslaved Blacks since before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Myrlie Evers-Williams, whose husband, NAACP field director in Mississippi, Medgar Evers, was killed by an assassin in 1963, recognized the essential role the Emmett Till case played in future events in the South. In her 1967 biography of her husband, she placed the case in its proper historical context:

“[I]t was the murder of this fourteen-year-old out-of-state visitor that touched off the world-wide clamor and cast the glare of a world spotlight on Mississippi’s racism.... The Till case, in a way, was the story in microcosm of every Negro in Mississippi. For it was the proof that even youth was no defense against the ultimate terror, that lynching was still the final means by which white supremacy would be upheld, that whites could still murder Negroes with impunity, and that the upper- and middle-class white people of the state would uphold such killings through their police and newspapers and courts of law. It was the proof that Mississippi had no intention of changing its ways, that no Negro’s life was really safe, and that the federal government was either powerless, as it claimed, or simply unwilling to step in to erase this blot on the nation’s reputation for decency and justice. It was the proof, if proof were needed, that there would be no real change in Mississippi until the rest of the country decided that change there must be and then forced it.”

On December 1, 1955, less than four months after the trial of Emmett Till’s murderers, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus, and her arrest for violating city segregated bus laws led to the famous Montgomery bus boycott, the first highly visible civil rights action led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Many historians—and most history textbooks—cite Parks’s act of civil disobedience as the beginning of the great civil rights movement, but it was the senseless murder of Emmett Till that galvanized Blacks all over the United States and set the stage for the civil rights movement to begin.