Emmett Till: A Victim of Racial Segregation

Since the start of racial segregation, African Americans have been treated badly and Emmett Till was one of them. He was one of the victims of racial discrimination and segregation. Segregation limited all African Americans daily life like, eating in a restaurant, drinking from a water fountain, using a public toilet, attending school, riding a bus, and the purchase of a home. Through all of this, Emmett Till and his family were strong and lived on with their lives.

Emmett Louis Till was an African American male who was born in Chicago, IL on July 25, 1941. Till’s parents were Mamie and Louis Till. When he got into grammar school, Emmett attended McCosh Grammar School. When he was 5 , he was diagnosed with Polio on July 25, 1946, but still took responsibility at a very young age when he got better.

Till grew up in a middle-class neighborhood on the Southside of Chicago, and although he went to a segregated elementary school, he was not prepared for the level of segregation he encountered as he got older.

A day before Emmett left for a summer in Mississippi with his uncle, Moses Wright, his mother, Mamie, gave him a ring which once belonged to Till’s father, Louis Till. It was inscribed with the initial L.T. The next day on August 20, 1955, Emmett took a train to reach his destination and his mother told him to take

care because racial segregation was really serious. Later, he arrived on August 20, 1955.
With his uncle Moses, seven more boys, and one girl, Till went to the store to buy “sweet treats.” He was accused of whistling and flirting with a 21 year old white woman, Carolyn Bryant, who was a cashier at Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market. The story got around to the woman’s husband, Roy Bryant, and brother, John Milam. Four days later, the two men kidnapped Till. They drove to a barn nearby and pistol whipped the boy while they continued to beat him as the men debated on what to do with him next.
Rev. Wright went looking for him refusing to call the police. Curtis Jones got word back to the police, and Emmett’s mother, Mamie, was alerted that her son went missing. Then, the two men made Emmett carry a 75 pound cotton gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River, ordered him to take his clothes off, and beat him again, but this time nearly to death. Even worse they gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and then threw
his body into the river, tied to the cotton gin fan.
Three days after Till’s murder on August 28, 1955, his body was recovered at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River.

Bryant and Milam were questioned by the police but were said to be innocent. Later, the men were tried for murder and kidnapping but an all-white, male jury discharged them even after they admitted to kidnapping and murdering Emmett Till. At her son’s funeral on September 6, 1955 at The Burr Oak Cemetery, Mamie Till insisted on having an open casket service.The Emmett Till murder trial brought to light the brutality of Jim Crow segregation in the South and was an early motivation of the African American civil rights

movement.
By 1955, African Americans across the country, including in the segregated South, had begun the struggle for justice.
Rosa Parks, a seamstress who started the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott on Dec. 1, 1955, by refusing to yield her bus seat to a white man, has become far more famous. The boycott is widely considered the start of the modern black movement. Emmett Till's murder was a spark in the rise of activism and resistance that became known as the civil rights movement. The sight of his brutalized body pushed many who had been content to stay on the sidelines directly into the fight.
Today, while most of the world may have forgotten him, Emmett Till is remembered by his mother and his hometown. His memory has grown strong roots, both as a legend and a legacy. His grandparents pass his grim tale on to their descendants, and black politicians say it still motivates them in their fight to share local power. Even now, his name seems to haunt local whites.