Emmett Till, born in Chicago in 1941, visited the Mississippi Delta in August 1955, in the midst of growing Black civil rights activism and mounting white backlash to it. A few days after his arrival, Till and a group of teenagers went to purchase candy at Bryant’s Grocery. The store was owned by a white couple, Roy and Carolyn Bryant, and primarily served African American field laborers. Emmett went into the store to buy bubble gum and whistled at Carolyn Bryant on the way out of the store.
Bryant went to her car to get a gun, and the teens ran off. Three days later, Carolyn’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, kidnapped Emmett Till from Mose Wright’s home at gunpoint. After Wright reported Till missing, Leflore County Sheriff George Smith questioned Bryant and Milam, who confessed to kidnapping Till but claimed they let him go once they realized he was not the right boy.
Three days after Till was kidnapped, his decomposed body was found floating in the Tallahatchie River. He had been brutally tortured and shot in the head. A 75-pound cotton gin fan had been tied around his neck to weigh the body down.
It is impossible to fully understand the meaning of Emmett Till’s murder without recognizing the political and historical context in which it happened. The murder of Emmett Till was a continuation of the violence used to enforce white supremacy and protect the color line in the decades following Emancipation and Reconstruction. In the context of a white power structure intent on keeping white people and Black people segregated and the white race “pure,” Emmett's whistle was seen as an assault that had to be countered.
Efforts to preserve racial purity had a long history in Mississippi and found expression in the state’s anti-miscegenation laws. The first anti-miscegenation law in Mississippi was passed on the heels of the Civil War in 1865 and gave life imprisonment for any “freedman, free Negro, or mulatto to marry any white person.” In the ensuing decades, anti-miscegenation laws also prohibited intermarriage with Asians, and the sentencing was modified to ten years and/or a $500 fine. After 1942, anyone advocating intermarriage was subject to a fine of $500 and/or six months in jail. Furthermore, white purity was codified into law in 1910, when Tennessee became the first state to pass a “one-drop” statute that asserted a person with even one Black ancestor (“one drop” of “black blood”) is considered Black. Mississippi adopted its “one-drop” statute in 1917.
For decades prior to Till’s murder, white supremacists invoked the cause of racial “purity” to justify violence against Black people in the South, most notably through public lynchings. However, by 1955, racial lynchings had significantly declined from their peak in the 1890s.
Nonetheless, in the 1950s, the threat of violence persisted following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954). The Brown decision struck down segregation in public schools, declaring “separate but equal” education as unconstitutional. The decision agitated segregationists and surfaced Southerners’ fears of miscegenation. This anxiety was expressed by the editor of the Jackson Daily News, Frederick Sullens, who wrote:
Human blood may stain southern soil in many places because of this decision, but the dark red stains of that blood will be on the marble steps of the United States Supreme Court building. White and Negro children in the same schools will lead to miscegenation. It means racial strife of the bitterest sort. Mississippi cannot and will not try to abide by the decision.
While the Brown decision galvanized resistance from segregationists, it was celebrated by the Black community and inspired Black political activism in the South. Black leaders organized voter registration drives in an effort to establish a Black electorate that could influence local governments. These efforts threatened white political power, and white segregationists responded with violence. On May 7, 1955, George Wesley Lee, a Black minister from Belzoni, Mississippi, and the first Black person to register to vote in Humphreys County, was murdered after refusing to remove his name from the qualified voters list. No one was arrested or charged for the crime. Six months later, Lee’s colleague Gus Courts (who, with Lee, co-founded the Humphreys County chapter of the NAACP) was shot in front of the grocery store he owned. Courts survived his wounds and moved to Chicago. Nobody was charged. Then, on August 13, Lamar Smith, a Black voting rights advocate, was shot and killed in broad daylight. He was at the courthouse in Brookhaven, Mississippi, helping Black voters fill out absentee ballots when he was gunned down in front of the town sheriff. Three white men were arrested for the crime, but none were indicted.