How did the Emmett Till murder impact American society for African Americans and whites?

Emmett Till, a native of Chicago, was killed in 1955 during a visit to Money, Mississippi when he was fourteen years old. Carolyn Bryant, a local woman, falsely claimed that Till had whistled to her when he went into her store to buy something. Some who knew Till claim that he had a lisp which Ms. Bryant somehow mistook as a whistle. Others say that the Chicago boy simply did not know how to behave toward whites in the South and did not show the proper level of deference, such as not looking directly into a white person's eyes when speaking to them. Bryant's story repeatedly changed, depending on whom she was talking to. At the trial, she said that the boy had threatened to rape her. Later, she said that the boy had insulted her. Five decades later, she said that he had touched her hand.

In response to Till's perceived impudence, her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother kidnapped Till from his uncle's home in the middle of the night. In the Deep South at this time, black people had no way of stopping whites from abusing them. Very often, members of the police force were also members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Bryant and his brother beat and tortured Till, shot him in the head, then tied his body with barbed wire to a cotton gin fan and threw him into the Tallahatchie River.

When Till's body was discovered, he was barely recognizable. Mamie Till, his mother, insisted on having an open-casket funeral and invited news photographers to the funeral so that the world could see what crime had been committed against her son. Photos of Till's body went into newspapers and magazines around the world.

For black people, the Till murder was no surprise. Northern and Western blacks, many of whom had migrated to other regions to escape from Southern oppression, knew that one had to act differently down South or face mortal violence. For Southern blacks, what had happened to Till was a fear that they lived with from day to day.

For whites who did not live in the South and did not think much, if at all, about black people, it alerted them to a problem that they knew little, if anything, about. After the horrors that World War II veterans had seen in Europe during the liberation of the concentration camps, it seemed hypocritical to be tolerant of similar abuses on American soil.

Arguably, the Till murder was a catalyst for a sustained Civil Rights movement. Though there had been an effort to make black people full citizens since the abolition of slavery and the end of the Civil War, most strides were small. However, in the year in which Till was killed, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and Claudette Colvin organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Nine years after his murder, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law, making it impossible to refuse black people equal treatment in public accommodations, which reduced many black people's fears about how they could occupy public space.

The Till murder injected a sense of urgency into the movement that had not existed before, and encouraged more white allies to join in the effort for civil rights.

Summarize the Emmett Till case and its impact on the Civil Rights Movement.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Emmett Till grew up in a middle-class neighborhood on the South Side. After his great uncle visited from Mississippi in 1955 when Emmett was 14, he planned on taking Emmett's cousin Wheeler Parker back with him on his return to Mississippi.

When Emmett heard that his uncle was taking his cousin back with him to visit relatives in Mississippi, he wanted to accompany them despite his mother's objections.
One day while he was in Money, Mississippi, Emmett (nicknamed Bobo) stood outside a country store with his cousins and some friends as they joked with him. He was known for his humorous nature and his pranks.

Bobo bragged about his white girlfriend. He showed the boys a picture of a white girl in his wallet; and to their jeers of disbelief, he boasted of success with her. [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/sfeature/sf_look_confession.html]

What happened next is disputed. According to some sources, Emmett jokingly asked the white woman behind the store counter for a date, not understand the danger such an action posed in Mississippi. Till's cousin claimed that no such conversation ever happened, an account which was later corroborated by an anonymous source.

The woman behind the counter, Carolyn Bryant, claimed that Emmett did much more. She said that he touched her and made lewd advances. Then, as he walked out, he "wolf-whistled at her." These accusations were extremely damaging coming from a white woman in the Jim Crow South. The men who killed Emmett claimed that they were just going to "whip him and chase him back yonder." But, according to their account, he refused to be intimidated by them. One of his killers, J. W. Milam said in a magazine interview, "What else could I do? No use lettin' him get no bigger." [ Look magazine] 

"Big Milam," as he was called, was a friend of Roy Bryant, Carolyn's husband. When Roy Bryant returned from out of town, he heard the "talk" about what had happened (his wife had not told him). According to Look magazine, 

"Once Roy Bryant knew, in his environment, in the opinion of most white people around him, for him to have done nothing would have marked him for a coward and a fool."

Bryant talked to Milam, a veteran who served "in the Patton manner." Milam picked Bryant up and they went to Wright's house where Emmett was staying. The men took Emmett away from the house at gunpoint and made him lie down in the back of a truck. They drove for a long ways with him because they were trying to find a place that had a large gorge. Hoping to stand him near this gorge, they planned on frightening him by letting him see where he could fall after they pistol-whipped him.

They could not find this location, however. According to the kilers, Emmett was not afraid and talked back to them as they were beating him. Clearly, Emmett's resilience disturbed Milam, who said,

"We were never able to scare him. They had just filled him so full of that poison that he was hopeless."

Unfortunately for Emmett, this fearlessness apparently infuriated the cruel men. They drove to a cotton gin and stole a discarded fan. Then they took Emmett to the other side of a bridge that crossed the Tallahatchie River. There, they shot him in the head. Tying Emmett's neck to the 74-pound fan with barbed wire, they threw his body into the river. Later, two boys who went fishing discovered his body because his feet stuck out of the water.

A Tallahatchie County grand jury indicted Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam for the murder and kidnapping of Emmett Till. The trial began on September 1, 1955; if convicted, the men would face the death penalty.
Although three African-American witnesses were called, and they testified that they had seen and heard Milam whipping the someone in the Milam barn, the sheriff of the county testified that the boy's body that was found in the river had been there ten to fifteen days. An embalmer testified that the body was "beyond recognition." On September 23, 1955, an all-white, all-male jury returned a "Not Guilty" verdict.
Afterwards, there were thousands of people--mostly Northerners--who attended rallies in protest of this case.

Emmett's mother had an open casket at his funeral so that people could see what was done to her son. His violent murder incensed many people and stoked the fires of the Civil Rights Movement. Emmett was clearly a victim of racism since he was targeted solely on Mrs. Bryant's accusation that he violated racist Jim Crow law.

In 2004 the Justice Department reopened the Till case and the body was exhumed and autopsied with a positive identification of Emmett Till.

How did the murder of Emmett Till relate to the early civil rights movement?

The murder of Emmett Till in 1955 galvanized many who laid eyes upon his mangled body to action, including many who had preferred safety by staying on the sidelines. Medgar Evans was a prominent NAACP field leader in Mississippi who urged the national organization to get involved. Their search produced black witnesses to Till's fate that took serious risks coming forward.

After the two accused whites' trial and acquittal, a doctor and civil rights leader named T.R.M Howard had to relocate to Chicago following his criticism of the result. He had protection for him and his family, but hearing that several on a KKK list had already been killed compelled him to move from his home in Mississippi.

Perhaps most famous was an incident that occurred in Montgomery, Alabama, in which a woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man, promoting the citywide bus boycotts that became a defining event. It was also the start of a young minister's career who had been called to help: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

How did the Emmett Till case influence the Civil Rights Movement?

Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year-old African-American teenager from Chicago who was brutally murdered in Money, Mississippi, in August of 1955 when visiting relatives in the segregated south. Till allegedly flirted with a white woman in a store and was later murdered by the woman's husband and his brother, who beat and shot Till and deposited his body in a local river, where it was found three days later.

Till's mother, Mamie Till Bradley, chose to display her mutilated son's body in an open casket in an emotional funeral service in Chicago that was attended by thousands of people. Mamie Till Bradley bravely made this decision to show the world how people had murdered her young son, who was also allegedly a bit developmentally disabled and who certainly did not understand race relations in the racially segregated town of Money, Mississippi (as Emmett Till had grown up in Chicago). Pictures of Till's mutilated body were shown in African-American publications such as Jet, and they raised sympathy among whites and African-Americans and raised awareness of racism and lynchings in the south.

The case is regarded as a milestone in the development Civil Rights Movement, as whites and African-Americans across the nation were motivated to take action against the brutality of the segregated system in the south. Many people were incensed by the acquittal of the two white men, who later admitted to killing Till. In December of that same year, 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began under Martin Luther King to protest segregation on that city's buses, marking the first major victory of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The movement was a loosely organized network of different kinds of activists who used protests, sit-ins, voter registration drivers, and the courts to break down the system of segregation and the infringement of African-American rights in the United States.