Emmett Till case: the worst criminal case in history

In 1955, a 14 year old boy by the name of Emmett Till

walked into a grocery store in Mississippi. Till was from Chicago, And was not used to the Culture Of Mississippi, and allegedly tried to flirt with the married white woman behind the counter.

What exactly happened is not clear. The woman admitted to lying about the event many years later, specifically in how he acted towards her. She had accused him of Wolf Whistling, but Till had a stutter and would often to whistle to alleviate that. There was disagreement between the witnesses, primarily along racial lines (the white witnesses described it as worse than the black witnesses).

Either way, the woman told her husband and brother about it, and later admitted to making it sound worse than it was. The two men then hunted down where Till was staying, abducted him at gunpoint at three in the morning.

Then they tied him up in the back of a truck and brought him to a barn. They then horrifically beat him, executed him with a handgun, tied a 70 pound fan from a cotton gin to his body, and threw it into the river.

When his body was recovered three days later, the damage to his face was so severe the only way he could be identified was a ring he wore. His mother ordered his funeral be open casket saying, “I want the world to see what they did to my baby.” The funeral, broadcast across the nation, galvanized the Civil Rights Movement. Those responsible for his death were brought to court.

There was no shortage of evidence. Till was abducted from a house with seven other African Americans inside, all who could testify about the details of the men who abducted Till. There were three more witnesses who reported hearing sounds of someone being beaten and tortured in the barn. The Sherriff kept two more witnesses in jail so they couldn’t testify, but there was such a wealth of evidence, it was an open and shut case.

But the jury was all white men from rural areas, where racism was inflamed, and they all voted innocent in less than an hour of deliberation. Emmett Till’s murderers walked free. There was no justice for Emmett Till.