September 23, 1955 – All-White Jury in Mississippi Acquits Two White Men of the Murder of 14-Year-Old Emmett Till

Emmett Till was a 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago who was brutally tortured and murdered in August, 1955, while visiting family in Mississippi.

His mother Mamie was a single mom; her husband had gone into the army leaving Mamie a widow at the age of 23. Emmett contracted polio as a child and while he recovered, he developed a stutter. Mamie taught him to whistle to help him get the words out. As the author notes, “whistling calmed Emmett, steadied him, allowing him to finish what he started to say.” It may have been that whistling that cost him his life.

Emmett Till, photo via Simeon Wright

While in Mississippi, he was accused of offending Carolyn Bryant, a 21-year-old white woman, allegedly by whistling at her in her family’s grocery store. Whether he whistled at her, or whistled to help him talk, or whether he did anything at all, is in dispute to this day. What is not disputed is what happened next. As a PBS account of the incident reports, “In the Deep South—where the separation between blacks and whites was defined by law, [Carolyn’s husband] Roy and his half-brother J.W. Milam decided Emmett needed to be taught a lesson. Several nights later, Roy and J.W., who were armed, went to Till’s great-uncle’s house and abducted Emmett. They took him away, beat and mutilated him, shot him in the head, and sunk his body in the Tallahatchie River. Three days later, the boy’s very mutilated and bloated body was discovered and retrieved from the river. His eyes had been gouged out and his penis was cut off. His body was weighted by a fan blade fastened round his neck with barbed wire. His face was unrecognizable but he was able to be identified by the silver ring he was wearing.

Emmett’s body was returned to Chicago, where Mamie insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket, so the world could see what was done to her son. She said: “Let the people see what I have seen. We have averted our eyes far too long. Everybody needs to know what happened to Emmett Till.” Tens of thousands attended his funeral or viewed his open casket, and images of his mutilated body were published in black-oriented magazines and newspapers.

Mississippi was still the deep South, however, and on this day in history, September 23, 1955, an all-white jury found Bryant and Milam not guilty.

All-white jury, Getty Images, via Equal Justice Institute

As the Equal Justice Institute (EJI) points out, despite the fact that Black citizens comprised over 63% of Tallahatchie County’s population, not a single Black person served on the jury. Under state law, only registered voters qualified as jurors, and not one Black citizen in Tallahatchie County was able to register to vote at the time. EJI notes:

Lawyers for the defense and the prosecution appealed to white jurors’ commitment to racial hierarchy. Defense lawyer John Whitten accused civil rights groups of planting Mr. Till’s body in the river as a challenge to the ‘Southern way of life.’ District Attorney Gerald Chatham told the jury that Emmett deserved punishment for ‘insulting white womanhood,’ but argued that Mr. Bryant should have limited his vengeance to ‘beating [him] with a razor strap.’”

Further, EJI records, “The jury only deliberated 67 minutes before returning a verdict of not guilty. One juror later said: ‘We wouldn’t have taken so long if we hadn’t stopped to drink pop.’”



(A PBS history observes that when Bryant and Milam could not afford a legal defense, five local lawyers volunteered to represent them pro bono.)

After their acquittal in the Emmett Till trial, defendant Roy Bryant (right), smokes a cigar as his wife happily embraces him and his half brother, J.W. Milam, Corbis

Protected against double jeopardy, the two men publicly admitted in a 1956 interview with Look magazine (for which they were reportedly paid $4,000) that they had tortured and murdered the boy. No one ever went to jail for Emmett’s murder.

Decades later, Carolyn Bryant would also admit that she lied on the stand.

Emmett’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley spent years teaching about the failure of the justice system for African Americans and about other murders of Blacks that have never been resolved. After years of lobbying by Mamie and others, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, an American law which makes lynching a federal hate crime, was signed into law on March 29, 2022 by President Joe Biden. Decades of lawmakers’ systematic and shameful opposition to such a law had blocked more than 200 earlier attempts at similar bills.

Emmett Till and his mother Mamie Till-Mobley