Till, Emmett, 1941-1955
Biography:
In August 1955, Emmett Till , a fourteen year old African American boy from Chicago, went to visit relatives near Money, Mississippi. While he had experienced racial discrimination in his hometown of Chicago, he was unaccustomed to the severe segregation he encountered in Mississippi. Soon after talking in too friendly a manner with a young white woman in a store, he was kidnapped in the night at gunpoint and brutally murdered by two white men. He was badly beaten before being shot and thrown into the Tallahatchie River. His corpse was nearly unrecognizable. His mother insisted on an open casket funeral in Chicago and news of Emmett Till's murder shocked America and the world. An all-white jury failed to convict the accused murderers, adding a further sense of injustice. The case is viewed as a turning point in the civil rights movement because of the notoriety it gave to the plight of African Americans in the South. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library & Museum WWW site.
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Archival Collections and Reference Resources
- Civil Rights-- Emmett Till Case (Dwight D. Eisenhower Library)
- Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive (University of Southern Mississippi Libraries)
- FBI Freedom of Information Act Collection (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
- Oral Histories: Interviews with Sam H. Bowers, Jr. (Mississippi Department of Archives and History)
- USM Oral History (University of Southern Mississippi Libraries)
- Voices of Freedom: The Virginia Civil Rights Movement (Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries)
- Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Bradley, head-and-shoulders portrait (Black-and-white photographs)
- Street rally in New York City, October 11, 1955, under joint sponsorship of NAACP and District 65, retail, wholesale and department store workers Union in protest of slaying of Emmett Till (Black-and-white photographs)
Educator Resources
- American Experience (PBS Online)
- Amistad Digital Resource for Teaching African American History (Columbia Center for Digital Research and Scholarship)
- Independent Lens (PBS Online)
- Unsung Foot Soldiers : The Foot Soldier Project for Civil Rights Studies at the University of Georgia (Foot Soldier Project for Civil Rights Studies at the University of Georgia)