Let the People See: The Story of Emmett Till by Elliott J. Gorn
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 1.6 MB
Overview: While visiting family in Mississippi in August 1955, Emmett Till allegedly whistled at a white woman working behind the counter of a crossroads country store. Her husband and brother-in-law kidnapped the fourteen-year-old Chicago kid in the middle of the night and tortured, beat, and shot him. Three days later, his body rose from the Tallahatchie River, a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire.
Confronting her son’s nightmarishly disfigured face, Mamie Till-Mobley decided that his funeral in Chicago would be open-casket. “Let the people see what they did to my boy.” The South Side church where her son’s body lay in state kept its doors open day and night. More than one hundred thousand people came and saw his face. Millions more stared at the photographs of it published in the African-American press, especially Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender.
The pictures galvanized the black community. Journalists and activists drove down to the Mississippi Delta, and risked their lives interviewing townsfolk, encouraging witnesses, spiriting those in danger out of the region, and above all keeping the news cycle turning. Less than a month after Till’s murder, despite strong evidence, a fair-minded judge, and prosecutors eager for a conviction, an all-white jury found Till’s killers not guilty.
Genre: Non-Fiction > History
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