Emmit Till murder

• In 1955,14 year old boy called "Emmet Till" left Chicago to go the his cousins' house in Money, Mississippi.
• In Chicago racism was less severe than southern areas.
• Emmet was streetwise and knew about the problems of racism in the north but didn't have any idea of how bad it was in the south. His mum warned him to "bow down to every white person".
• He went to a convenience store to buy some gum and said to the lady behind the counter "Bye bye, baby". He returned home after.
• In the middle of the night, the lady from the store, "Caroline Bryant" and her husband "Rob Bryant" came to where Emmet Till was staying and demanded to see him.
• Mose, the granduncle of Emmet, opened the door and was put at gunpoint and they demanded to see and take away Emmet.
• J.W. Milam, the brother-in-law, had a barn and drove them there. 
• They tortured Emmet and shot him in the head.
• They tied him to a heavy Gin fan and dumped him in the Tallahatchie river.
• His body was completely mutilated and could not have been identified through facial features, instead he was identified by his intial ring.

After the trial, where the suspects were not found guilty, Bryant and Milam told their story to a magazine in which they were paid $4000. They said:

• they had not intended to kill Emmet, but he was cheeky and disrespectful
• they expected him to be frightened and sorry, but he wasn't
• he continued to boast about his white girlfriend
• they beat Emmet
• they gouged one of his eyes out his socket
• they shot Emmet in the head
• they tied his body to a heavy gin fan from Milam's barn

Emmets body was returned to Chicago and his mother asked for an open casket funeral.

Some reasons for the murder are:

• It was in a deep southern USA town which was highly racist and intolerant of coloured people
• Emmet could've been seen as arrogant as he bragged about having a white girlfriend and because he was black it made the Bryants very angry.
• It may have been a relatively poor area of America where the community had nothing better to do than being racist
• The Ku Klux Klan may have been very prominent in the area, as they tried to threaten Mose Wright at the trial, but Mose was protected by the NAACP
• Emmet was from Chicago and didn't understand how intolerant the southern states were and wasn't careful enough
• Chicago was a very rich city and wasn't as bad in racism as the southern areas, which could;ve aggravated the killers.