Emmet Till Essay

Emmett Till was a young boy who lived in Chicago and was not used to all the racial issues in the South because he did not have to face them until he went to a small town in Mississippi to visit his relatives. He soon realized just how different the South really was. Emmett and a few friends went to a white-owned store, and on the way out he was dared by his friends to whistle at the white lady running the store. Later that day, he was taken from his uncle's home by the lady's husband and was shot, beaten, and with a heavy weight tied to his neck, thrown in the Tallahatchie River (Emmett Till and the Impact of the Images", 2004). A few days later Till's body was found in the river. Several hours later, Mamie Till was notified of her son's kidnapping. A search of the area was conducted, and Mamie Till notified Chicago newspapers of her son's disappearance. Wright told Money's sheriff who had taken Till, and he arrested Bryant and Milam for kidnapping. The trial was held in a segregated court house. The all-white jury found Bryant and Milam not guilty. Their defense was that the body recovered in the river could not be identified as Till's body ("The Murder of Emmett Till", 2006). Emmett Till lost his life for something that he did not think was wrong. To make matters worse, the killers walked away with no punishment. Maime Till displayed her son in an open casket funeral because she wanted "the world to see what they did to my son". The murder of Emmett Till and the results of the trail were an international story that had a great effect on the civil rights movement.

The story of Emmett Till is an extreme view of what African Americans went through during, prior and following the civil rights movement. It affected many people

and is a strong story that shows the kind of injustice blacks had to go through during those times. Unfortunately, Emmett's killing was only one of thousands of similar murders in the South, and his name is not well-known. But the case was an important turning point in America's civil rights struggle. Langston Hughes once said in a poem "Let America Be America Again". The dream of America was once viewed to be a melting pot of freedom and a land "where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme" (Langston Hughes, 1936). It was to be a land where all men were created equal in the eyes of god and the view of the government. This is not what America turned out to be and what our founding fathers envisioned. Instead America turned out to be a land where separate races and cultures were divided unequally just as what was shown in the trail of Emmett Till.

The Emmett Till murder case has been brought back up into the court systems to be reviewed so that the justice can be brought to this case. There are five out of fifteen people remaining to be put on trail for his murder. The question