The Lasting Impact of Emmett Till

Amy Lazet, Digital Scholarship Librarian

August 28, 2022 marks the 67th anniversary of the death of Emmett Till – a vigilante act of violence and murder which galvanized the nation and precipitated the Civil Rights Movement. 

Emmett Till’s Life

In 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year old African American boy from Chicago, visited his extended family in the Mississippi Delta. While there, he and his cousins went to a store run by a white woman. Being from Chicago, Emmett unknowingly violated social mores for interactions between Black and White people in the South: he put his money into her hand rather than on the counter, and she claimed that he wolf-whistled at her. When the woman’s husband heard the story, he and his half-brother drove to where Emmett was staying, kidnapped him, and tortured him before shooting him and throwing his body into the river. Three days later his body was found, so disfigured that he could only be identified by his ring. (1)

His corpse was returned to his mother, Mamie Till, who brought the issue to national attention by opting for an open-casket funeral on September 6, saying, “You didn’t die for nothing.” (2) The funeral received national coverage and the horrific photos of Emmett’s body shocked the nation. In November 1955, Emmett’s killers were tried in Mississippi but acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury. (2)

The story of Emmett and the images of his funeral made national and international news. For Black people, the images served as a reminder of what could happen to any of them; for many white people, the images were irrefutable proof that racism was rife in the US. The photographs galvanized African Americans across the nation to fight the oppression of segregation and Jim Crow laws, calling themselves the “Emmett Till Generation.” (2)

Effect on the Civil Rights Movement

Emmett’s murder was a pivotal event which hastened the Civil Rights Movement. Just three months later, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama for refusing to vacate her seat at the front of a bus in order to allow a white man to sit. (3) When asked why she refused to move to the back of the bus, she said, “I thought of Emmett Till and I couldn’t go back.” (4) Her arrest precipitated the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott, facilitated by the ​​Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and its president, Martin Luther King, Jr. (5) Her arrest led the MIA to file suit over the constitutionality of bus segregation and in 1956, the US Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling overturning segregation. (6)

The Civil Rights Movement was long and arduous and included the 1957 integration of Little Rock’s Central High School, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, lunch counter sit-ins in 1960, the 1961 Freedom Rides, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Walk to Freedom March in Detroit on June 23, 1963 and March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. (7) These are just a few of the events of the Civil Rights Movement that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Acts, although monumental victories for equality in the US, did not immediately or fully eradicate racism and segregation, and numerous court cases were necessary to force desegregation in the following decades. 

Lasting Impact

Emmett Till continues to resonate in our culture, not least because the fight for equal rights is still ongoing. We see echoes of Emmett’s gruesome murder in the images of dogs and water hoses being turned on peaceful protestors in the 1960s or the videos of Rodney King’s beating or George Floyd’s murder. (1) Because of the courage of his mother, Emmett Till became the symbol of a generation of activists and served as a turning point in the fight for equality for all in the US.

Learn more:

Emmett Till:
The Murder of Emmett Till (video and online exhibit)
Lynching’s Legacy: Emmett Till, George Floyd, and the Long History of Lynching (podcast)
Killing of Emmett Till (video)

Detroit Civil Rights:
African American Civil Rights: Detroit
Rosa and Raymond Parks Flat

Sources:

1. “Mamie Till Mobley” in “The Murder of Emmett Till. PBS. 2003. PBS.org, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/emmett-biography-mamie-till-mobley/.
2. Hassan, Adeel. “Emmett Till’s Enduring Legacy.” The New York Times, 6 Dec. 2021. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/article/who-was-emmett-till.html.
3. “Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words.” Library of Congress. 2019. https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/rosa-parks-in-her-own-words/about-this-exhibition/.
4. “Emmett Till with His Mother” in “Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words.” Library of Congress. 2019. https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/rosa-parks-in-her-own-words/about-this-exhibition/the-bus-boycott/emmett-till-with-his-mother/. Accessed 17 July 2022.
5. Stanford University. “Montgomery Bus Boycott.” The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute. 26 Apr. 2017. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/montgomery-bus-boycott.
6. “The Bus Boycott” in “Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words.” Library of Congress. 2019. https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/rosa-parks-in-her-own-words/about-this-exhibition/the-bus-boycott/. 
7. “Civil Rights Era (1950-1963)” in “The Civil Rights Act of 1964.” Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/civil-rights-era.html.