An Important News Story to Me: The Death of Emmitt Till

Emmitt Till
The story is about a fourteen-year-old African American boy from
Chicago named Emmitt Till who was murdered during a visit to his
family in Money, Mississippi. While he was staying with his uncle,
he went to a grocery store with a couple teenagers and was flirting
with a White woman that was the cashier and wife of the store
owner. Four days later, Roy Bryant, the cashiers husband and his
brother J.W. Milam kidnapped Till from his uncles home. From
there the ended up brutally beating the Emmitt Till, dragged him to
the waters of the Tallahatchie River, shot him in the head, tied him
with barbed wire to a large metal fan and threw his body into the
water. His uncle reported the disappearance of Till to the
authorities, and three days later they found his body in the river.

They were only able to identify his body by the ring he was
wearing with his fathers initials L.T. engraved in it. In the trial,
an all white male juror later acquitted Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam
of all charges.
This story is very important to me because it shows how much of a
problem racism was back then and still is to this day. Before
Emmitt Tills death, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in
the Brown v. Board of Education, which mandated the end of
racial segregation in public school. One hundred days after his
murder, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama city
bus, which started the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Nine years later,
Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended many
forms of racial discrimination and segregation. The story of
Emmitt Tills death was a situation that couldve been avoided and
is a story that many African Americans have as part of their history
of what we went through during the darkest times of our ancestors.