Original subtitles

This is the money back.

What is Tallahatchie River?

Where awaited body was found.

Alleged to be that of young Emmett Till.

I saw a whole

which I presumed was a bullet hole.

And I could look through that hole and see daylight on the other side.

And I wonder, was it necessary to shoot it?

Here is money Mississippi,

the home of Roy Bryant.

It was here that the Chicago

Negro boy, Emmett Till, is alleged to have paid

unwelcome attention to Roy Bryant's most attractive wife.

When white women's was on the streets.

You had to get off of this street.

That was a way of life.

And all white,

one would have to say was that nigger kind of looked at me.

I sass me.

So we're talking about a way of life that

in this part of the country that was enforced by law.

This was the home of Mose Wright.

It was from this shack.

The state alleges Emmett Till was taken by Roy Bryant and J.W.

Mather.

The house was as dark as a thousand midnight.

You couldn't see.

It was like a nightmare.

I mean, it's

I mean, someone come and stand over you with a pistol in one hand, a flashlight.

You 16 years old?

It's a terrifying experience.

The terror case

held the whole system up for inspection.

But the rest of the country and by the rest of the world,

it was the beginning of the focusing

on the problems, between the races in the Deep South

that culminated in

the ultimate, civil rights battles of the,

of the rest of the 50s and the end of the 60s.

I think black people's reaction

was so visceral, and I think it was probably more than anything else in terms

of the mass civil rights movement, the spark that launched it.

Everybody knew we were under attack,

and that attack was symbolized by the attack

on a 14 year old boy.

When one drives through the lowest hills.

And looks out at the sweep of those fields below.

Flat as a pancake as far as the eye can see.

It's breathtaking.

Those who had not been to the Delta,

found themselves gasping at the sight as they come over

the lowest hills and see that expanse of flat agricultural land.

It was the summer of 1955

when Emmett Till arrived in Mississippi from Chicago.

His family had worked cotton for generations, but this trip would be

Emmett's introduction to the Delta, known as the most

southern place on Earth.

This is Mississippi.

Today, a situation exists in Mississippi

that is unlike the situation in most states in the nation.

In some sections of the state, there is a preponderance of colored citizens.

This situation has brought problems.

It has created challenges.

But most important of all, it has inspired

a social system to meet the challenge

in every community in Mississippi.

There is segregation of the races.

Drinking fountains are segregated.

Restrooms are segregated.

The local theater is segregated.

You never balcony in any way.

Said anything that they didn't like.

You didn't disagree with them

on the whole.

You just didn't do that.

If a white person did something to you,

you had no recourse at all.

People disappeared.

We don't know what happened to them.

They just disappeared.

In the 75 years before Emmett Till set foot in Mississippi.

More than 500 black people had been lynched in the state.

Most were men who had been accused of associating

with white women.

Part of that culture was that

the women were put on pedestals, and they were,

some sort of,

idealization of. Of what?

Whatever it means to be woman or to be female.

There was an almost,

irrational fear of black men.

As if every black man

was ready to attack or rape a white woman.

If you gave him a chance.

I can remember when my father died.

Sammy, the black man who worked for him would say.

And I threw my arms around his neck, and he pulled away from me.

He could not have that,

you know, physical show of affection,

of sharing grief for whatever.

Black men did not touch.

White women.

Many white

Southerners, and perhaps most deep South Southerners

that convinced themselves that, black people were relatively happy

in their in their segregated relationships with white people.

Most white people, I think, had,

had convinced themselves that this was a defensible social system

in which they lived.

I had a cousin that was living in Mississippi

and was walking down the sidewalk down near downtown in Tunica

and didn't get off the sidewalk, and the man slapped him

and knocked him off the sidewalk, and he got up.

Instead of killing the white man like he wanted,

he just started walking and never stopped until he got to Memphis

and never stopped till he got up to Chicago. Hey,

baby, don't you want to go?

Yeah.

Hundreds of thousands of black people fled Mississippi

for Chicago in the years between the world wars.

One way train fare of $11.10 took them to a different world.

With whom Chicago neighborhoods and schools were segregated.

But the city offered a kind of freedom.

Black Mississippians could only dream about.

Chicago was a land of promise,

and they thought that milk and honey was everywhere.

And so it was a lot of excitement

leaving the South, leaving the cotton fields.

You could hold your head up in Chicago.

Sweet home.

Mamie Carthon arrived in Chicago at the age of two, and only child,

young Mamie, was the hope of her family of former sharecroppers.

She graduated from high school at the top of her class,

and became one of the first black women in town to hold a civil service job.

In 1940, Mamie married soldier Louis Till,

and one year later their son Emmett was born.

In 1945.

Mamie got word that Private Till had died in Europe.

All she received of his possessions was a signet

ring inscribed with his initials Lt.

Emmett.

Her only child was four years old.

A childhood case of polio left him with a stutter.

But by the time he was a teenager, Emmett Till had grown into a cocky,

self-assured boy who loved to be the center of attention.

When we first met, we went Jim,

and Mr.

Long's gym period.

I remember Emmett raising his shirt

up to about his navel and start making his belly roll.

Just waves of fat

rolling, and it just broke us up.

I mean, the whole gym went crazy. He was that kind of kid.

Anything going on?

He's in the middle of all of it.

And he just love to play ball.

He just love jokes.

He would pay people to tell him jokes if there was a group there.

Emmett was in front and he was the lively one.

He was the one that everybody kind of looked to.

Natural born leader.

In June of 1955,

black Chicago swung to a new kind of music called rock n roll.

A Supreme Court decision had struck down school segregation the year before.

Emmett finished seventh grade, and in July

he turned 14.

Handle Emmett Till.

We went to grammar school together, and Emmett was,

fine, young man, just like any other young teenager.

The boys wore polyester pants, crape soled shoes.

I would wear flared skirts with the crinoline underneath.

You must have the crinoline.

And we were doing the bop. That's the bebop.

And we just danced and had fun.

And we were just all good friends and.

In August,

Emmett's great uncle, Mose Wright, visited Chicago

and invited Emmett and his cousin Wheeler, home to Mississippi

before she let them go.

Mamie schooled the boys on the ways of the South.

I let them know

that Mississippi was not Chicago.

And when you go to Mississippi, you are living

by an entirely different set of rules.

It is. Yes, ma'am, and no, ma'am.

Yes, sir, and no, sir.

And, Bo, if you see a white woman coming down the street,

you get off the sidewalk and drop your head.

Don't even look at her.

The concern for him, it was that he could be with his fun loving,

free spirited way of living.

He could get in trouble, could have a lot of problems.

He was 14, but he just turned 14 just 13 a few weeks before we went down.

He thought I was exaggerating, which I was.

I was trying to exaggerate.

If I could,

go high enough, I things can see that was,

soak into his head that you have to be

very careful.

As Emmett packed

his bags, Mississippi was set to explode.

Two black men had recently been

killed for registering black voters.

And a push to implement the new law on school desegregation

had whites from the Delta to the statehouse spitting fire.

You are not going to. Mr.

beat yourself.

You are not going to permit

that inner city to fight for your state.

It was hard getting coffee shops all over the Deep South

that if we give on this, then we will start giving on everything else.

And the first thing you know, we won't have a segregated society

and black people will be taking over in this part of the country.

We are not doing a lot of the leadership was,

going around

making outrageous threats and, claiming

they weren't going to obey the law and that sort of thing.

Consequences was that, almost

anything could happen, to anybody at any time.

There.

On August 19th,

Mamie gave Emmett the ring that had belonged to his father.

The next morning, Emmett and his mother grabbed his bags

and rushed off to the 63rd Street station.

He was running up

the steps to try to make it to the train.

And I said, Emmett, I bo.

I called him Bo.

I said, where are you going?

You haven't kissed me goodbye.

And how do I know I'll ever see you again?

And he looked at me and he said, oh, mama.

He kind of scolded me for saying something like that.

But he turned around and came back

and, he kissed me goodbye.

And he said, here, take this.

He pulled his watch off and gave it to me.

He said, I won't need this where I'm going.

I said, what about your ring?

He said, oh, I'm going to show it off to the fellows.

And with that, he was up the steps and on his way to get on the train, they.

Emmett rode the Illinois Central 16 hours

out of Chicago to the Mississippi Delta.

We went to South near the beginning of cotton

Pickin Time, late August,

and we picked cotton for a half a day,

and we would go swimming round the snake side of the river.

We have a lot of fun.

Emmett's

family lived on the outskirts of money, a whistlestop town

in the heart of Delta cotton country.

The town of money

was one street

with maybe

5 or 6 stores.

But that's all just one. One story

wasn't much, wasn't really a town.

At one end of money

was Bryan's Grocery, which made a business of selling candy

to black kids and provisions to field hands from nearby plantations.

Roy Bryant, a 24 year

old ex-soldier, and his wife Carolyn, owned the grocery and not much else.

The Bryants lived with their two boys

in cramped rooms behind the store.

Roy's half brother, J.W.

Milam, helped out around the grocery.

The 235 pound Milam was a hard drinking man

with a reputation for being tough on anyone who got in his way.

On a steamy Wednesday

afternoon, Emmett and seven other teenagers piled into Mose

Wright's old Ford and headed to Bryant's grocery store.

The day that we went to the store and money.

We were picking cotton,

first half of the day and the second half, because it was so hot.

My uncle sold the car and took off the money to get some refreshments.

Just general things you buy in a store.

Roy Bryant was out of town, leaving his wife Carolyn

alone behind the counter when Emmett and his cousins pulled up.

Other customers were sitting outside

talking and playing checkers in the cool of the shade.

1 or 2 at a time, the boys drifted into the store

and back out again with a cold drink or a piece of candy.

Then Emmett went in

and bought $0.02 worth of bubble gum,

according to witnesses.

On his way out of the store.

Emmett turned to Carolyn Bryant

and whistled.

She stormed out.

We all got scared and someone said, she's going to get a pistol.

That's when we became afraid.

So she's gone to the car to get a pistol and as she went to the car,

we all jumped in my uncle's car.

I'm going pretty fast and dust is flying behind us.

And of course, Emmett Till.

Wade does not to tell our grandfather what it took place.

And we did.

And this was on a Wednesday and we didn't tell them were taking place.

So Wednesday went by, Thursday went by.

Nothing.

Friday.

We forgot about it.

Sunday morning, about 230.

Or I heard a boy at the door

and it said, This is Mr.

Bright, and said he wanted to board a dead coast at noon in.

And when I open the door,

there was a man with a pistol

in one hand and the flashlight in the other.

It was like a nightmare.

I mean, it's I mean, someone come and stand over you with a pistol,

one hand, a flashlight, new 16 years old.

It's a terrifying experience.

Very terrifying.

So we might go around to the found,

to the room in the bay with my baby boy.

And they told him to get up and pretty close.

Mose, right, pleaded with the two men.

He's only 14 and he's from up north.

Why not give the boy a whipping right bait and leave it at that?

The two in the next room.

Cousin and uncle. They never woke up.

My Uncle Semi did wake up.

They told him to go back to sleep.

He's 12 years old.

And I'll just say I'm six in the dark.

J.W. Milam turned to Mose Wright.

How old are you, preacher?

He asked.

64, Wright replied.

If you make any trouble, you'll never live to be 65.

Yeah, kid.

Cardiac equation. Is this the right one?

And I heard a voice a year,

and they drove off toward money.

Nobody talked to anybody.

The house was as dark as a thousand

midnight and couldn't see.

And when they left, I was so afraid.

And so I'm waiting for them to come back.

There was a Sunday morning, early Sunday morning.

I was playing beside the old,

and I saw Mr., Miles and them truck coming by,

and it had all had a couple that had no what we call a top podium.

And I heard somebody hollered on the truck.

I could hear all this being

and I could hear this being a lock, and it is crying and crying and beat.

And I'm saying it must have been somebody up there.

I hope it didn't.

Even before I got to info, I got to the barn, I passed.

They still would be.

They still would be down here in.

Mile came out.

So he said, did you hear anything?

I saw me, had a cattle pass

and had a green out and sheet and a 45 on his side.

So I said, no, I said, I ain't heard anything.

I said anything.

I was coming through there that morning.

Two Ty was out there watching the truck go,

latch and get on my truck out.

That's all that blood come from.

He laid the boy lay as we did.

He said, there's a shoe here.

The one is still there.

So that's the way I said, who?

Emitted a shoe.

In Chicago.

A desperate Mamie Till notified the local newspapers

of Emmett's disappearance

in Mississippi.

The family alerted the sheriff and then began to search for any sign of the boy.

Along riverbanks and under bridges where black folks always look,

Emmett's uncle said, when something like this happens, you.

The next day,

Roy Bryant was arrested for kidnaping.

J.W. Milam was at a store in nearby

Minto City when the La Flor County sheriff caught up with him.

The day I got a report for you.

To read up there like this.

He spoke again, all over again.

Yeah. I got to retrieve you.

Go away. Hell, no.

Thank you.

Okay.

It's no longer the two hour.

The high shave. Come back.

I say come on in and you need not go.

No. Do another.

Walked in and said, get up, Malcolm H.

I'm okay.

There a lot.

You've got to get ready. Go.

Yeah.

You know, and.

On August 31st,

three days after Emmett Till I disappeared, a boy fishing

in the Tallahatchie noticed a body caught on a gnarled root in the muddy water.

He informed Tallahatchie County Sheriff

Clarence Strider.

My dad called me and

asked me, I have a boat in the river.

And I told him I did.

Then he said, well,

we'll be down there in a little while.

And he sent deputies down here to go with me, and we took the boat

and went up the river.

It was in a curve in the drift,

and the foot was taking a.

And we tore into the drift and got to him and,

you know, got him out.

Then we carried him up to the,

the land landing and put him in the Irish.

Emmett's body

had been weighed down with a 75 pound cotton gin fan

tied around his neck with barbed wire,

and the boy was so badly beaten that Mose Wright could identify Emmett

only by his father's ring.

Mamie Till was in Chicago, surrounded by worried family

and friends, when she was told that her only child was dead.

Those words were like

arrows sticking all over my body.

My eyes were still full of tears

until I couldn't see.

And when I began to make the announcement,

that Emmett had been found,

and how he was found,

the whole house began to scream and to cry.

And that's when I realized

that this was a load that I was going to have to carry.

I wouldn't get any help carrying this.

You know,

by the time Mamie received her son's body back in Chicago, two weeks

after she had kissed him goodbye, Emmett's murder was front

page news.

His body was taken

to a funeral home owned by a ranger who had promised Mississippi authorities

that he would keep the casket nailed shut.

When Mamie Till asked him to open it up, Raynor refused,

not asking.

Mr. Raynor, do you have a hammer?

I said, I haven't signed anything

and I haven't made any promises.

And if you can't open those back that box, I can.

We open the casket.

There was a terrible odor

that came from the body because the body had been in the water

and began to deteriorate.

Mr. Raynor was he told the mother.

He said, if I was you, I wouldn't look at this body,

but this body in such a horrible condition.

She said, Mr.

Wayne, I want to see my son.

And I decided then that I would start at his feet and work my way up,

maybe gathering strength as I went,

I paused at his midsection

because I knew he would not want me looking at him,

but I

saw enough that I knew he was intact.

I kept on up until I got to his chin,

and then I was forced

to deal with this face.

I saw that his tongue was choked out.

I noticed that the right I was lying on

midway, his cheek.

I noticed that his nose had been

broken, like somebody

took a meat chopper and chopped his nose

in several places.

As I kept looking, I saw a hole

which I presumed was a bullet hole,

and I could look through that hole and see daylight on the other side.

And I wondered, was it necessary

to shoot it?

Mr. Raynor asked me.

He said,

do you want me to touch the body up?

I said, no, Mr.

Raynor, let the people see what I've seen.

I was just willing to bear it all.

I think everybody needed to know what had happened

to Emmett Till.

Mamie's decision

would make her son's death a touchstone for a generation.

At a church on the south Side of Chicago, Emmett

Till's mutilated body would be on display for all to see.

It was on a Sunday afternoon.

I won't ever forget.

It was a Sunday afternoon.

The church was very calm.

The line was very orderly.

I thought that pretty soon the crowd would die down.

I looked like all of Chicago was there.

He well,

they brought the children with him because Emmett was 14 years old

and they wanted the younger kids to see what happened to Emmett.

He they were mad.

They were angry. He.

And as

we were led into the church, my girlfriends and myself,

we walked up to the casket and it was covered with, glass.

And we all looked down.

This was our friend

laying looking like a monster. He

he they said that about one

in every five had to be assisted out of the building.

They would just go into a fight.

See, I think black

people's reaction was so visceral.

He everybody knew we were under attack.

And that attack was symbolized

by the attack on a 14 year old boy

who, me?

As far as I was concerned, that wasn't him.

There.

Yet at the same time,

as confused as it may sound, it was him.

But I didn't accept it. He,

Just in my mind, I kept saying, I'll see him again.

You know?

And, I guess to me it didn't happen,

but it did happen.

50,000 people in Chicago

had seen Emmett Till's corpse with their own eyes.

When the black magazine jet ran photos of the body,

black Americans across the country shuddered.

It was grotesque.

I mean, it was just.

It blew my mind.

I couldn't sleep at night.

It was traumatic for me.

From for months,

I mean, I it touched us all.

Mainstream newspapers

and magazines spread the story of the 14 year old black

boy who'd been brutally killed for whistling at a white woman.

It stunned white America.

Most white Americans at that time were saying

things such as the Emmett Till murder

had happened back in slavery times, that these kinds of things

were not of their generation, that they no longer happened in America.

And this said to them clearly, hey, it's right

here it is now. You.

Roy Bryant and J.W.

Milam admitted having taken Emmett Till, but claimed they'd let him go.

Now, with the eyes of the nation turning to Mississippi,

the state appointed a special prosecutor and filed charges.

Formal indictment is that they did willfully, unlawfully felonious

none of them, malice aforethought, kill and murder

Emmett Till, a human being.

Scores of reporters descended on the Delta television networks,

chartered a plane to send footage to New York for the nightly news.

The Associated Press fielded queries from Paris, Copenhagen, Tokyo

the till case had become a major

international news story.

Under the glare of the spotlight,

white Mississippians began to close ranks.

Local stores collected

$10,000 in countertop jars for Bryant and Milam.

Every lawyer in the county joined their defense team.

People of the socio economic level

of the two defendants in this case

were obviously looked down on by the,

more aristocratic whites,

almost, with the same disdain

that they looked down on, on blacks,

but they were still white folks.

And, when push came to shove, the white community

read it in support of them against,

a young black person

for whom they had even greater disdain,

the atmosphere among whites.

And Tallahatchie County and other,

the whole surrounding area was one of, absolute scorn

at the fact that these men were being put on trial for their lives.

And the cynicism, was,

usually couched in very crude jokes.

One of them was, in that just like a nigger

to or swim across the Tallahatchie River with a giant fan around his neck.

I can't understand how

a civilized mother could put a dead body

of a child on public display.

I'm almost convinced

that the very beginning of this was by a communistic front butcher.

I tell you right now, if he gets justice, they're turning the loose.

If others on the grand jury, that is what I would do.

Among African Americans,

there was outright fear to tide Collins, who worked for J.W.

Milam and had been seen washing blood from my limbs.

Trunk disappeared.

The message to black people was clear.

Hide what you know.

Hide even what you think or face the consequences.

Young man.

Do you think these two men should be indicted?

I mean, no, no.

What do you mean you don't know?

I don't know. You're up.

Have you studied the case by reading the papers?

Perhaps

that's.

And you don't know whether they should be invited.

Those indicted? Yes.

Thank you very much.

Well.

On September 19th, less than three weeks

after Emmett's body was found, Roy Bryant and J.W.

Milam Trial for murder opened in Sumner, Mississippi,

which touted itself as a good place to raise a boy.

The air in the courtroom, a reporter wrote, was as heavy

and oppressive as the moss that hangs from the cypress trees

in the courtroom.

They recorded 118 degrees.

And, of course, there was no air conditioning.

They had the ceiling.

Fans were only stirring the air up,

making it hotter when it reached your body.

On the first day of the trial, presiding Judge Curtis Wango

named the jury all white men from Bryant and Milam, home County.

I remember looking at the at that jury,

and even though I knew a good many of the men who owned the jury

and and they looked mean to me,

I would have hated going up against any of those guys.

Tallahatchie County Sheriff

and plantation owner Clarence Strider was responsible for locating witnesses

and gathering evidence against Bryant and Milo.

Sheriff Strider was a big,

fat, plain talking, obscene talking sheriff.

You would expect to find in the South.

His actions at the trial were more.

I think he would latter so much to see justice of what was going on,

but to be sure that he has courtroom was totally segregated.

The man had laid it out.

We got 22 seats over here for you white boys, and we got four seats.

Oh, we have you got a board?

We don't mix them down here. We ain't going to mix them.

I don't intend to.

You ain't going to be with the white folks,

and white folks are going to be with you.

And y'all might be baking, but ain't going to be no love nest between

black and white. Well,

Strider consigned black reporters and Detroit

Congressman Charles Diggs to a card table on the sidelines.

Strider greeted them as he passed with a cheery hello, niggers!

We never having a trouble until some of our southern niggers

go up north in an NAACP talk term, and it come back home.

If they will keep their nose and mouths out of our business,

we'll be able to do more

when enforcing the laws of Tallahatchie Pen and Mississippi.

The reaction of reporters from out of

the South was one of just absolute amazement.

They knew that there were, strange things going on in and in places

like Sumner, but they did not know it to be quite like that.

They were really surprised that, and what they found at the same time,

of course, they wrote about it with great relish because it was a good story.

It had sex,

it had murder, it had mystery.

When Mamie Till arrived, she had to make her way through.

An unsympathetic crowd gathered on the courthouse lawn.

What do you intend to do here?

I tell you to answer any questions that might.

That the attorneys might ask you to answer to the fact that,

how do you think you could possibly be a help to them?

I don't know what you mean.

Just by answering that as a question that they asked me. See,

do you have any evidence bearing on this case?

Obviously, I didn't know that

this is my son.

Mamie Till testified that the body

she had examined and buried was indeed her son.

In their cross-examination, Bryant and Mylan's attorneys peppered her

with hostile questions and then presented the main argument for the defense

the corpse pulled from the Tallahatchie River was not Emmett Till.

They summed up by saying,

isn't it true that you and the ACP got your heads together

and you came down here?

And with their help, you all dug up a body

and you have, claimed that body to be your son.

Isn't it true that your son is in Detroit, Michigan

with his grandfather right now,

with Sheriff Strider and courtroom sentiment clearly on the side

of the defendants, reporters began their own desperate search for witnesses.

Black people wasn't speaking out about the Emmett Till, case

at that particular time because they knew that it could happen to them.

The blacks feared fighting for their lives and for their family life

because of what it was they were.

Those white folks were for real.

So it was just, you know, like, hush hush, you know?

So I was told to keep my mouth shut.

And that's what I did.

Two days into the trial, reporters got a lead on a young

sharecropper named Willie Reed who might be willing to talk

now. Was in the cotton field. I was picking.

I was picking cotton, picking cotton.

And I looked across a field in was about so many people come across

the field toward me was white and black, and that way.

And then they began to question me about this.

It did you see anything?

So I told them when I saw.

Putting his life at risk,

Willie Reed agreed to step forward.

Whenever you walk near a courtroom and,

you know what?

You there you go on testifying.

Then you look at all these white folks, everybody looking at you.

Now, you got a frowns on your face and everything.

You see

them, they be looking at you really wrong and looking at you.

Yeah.

Why is you looking at it? Was.

Reed spoke

in a voice barely louder than a whisper.

He'd seen Roy Bryant, J.W.

Milam and one other white man with Emmett Till early that Sunday morning

and had heard the sounds of a beating coming from Milam shed.

After delivering his testimony,

Reed was smuggled out of Mississippi.

When he reached Chicago, he was hospitalized

with a nervous breakdown.

The prosecution's best witness was Mose Wright,

who had clearly seen the man who took Emmett Till from his home.

Wright had been in hiding since the night of the kidnaping

and had been threatened with death.

But there, in the searing heat of a Delta courtroom,

the 64 year old sharecropper had his say.

One of the attorneys asked,

do you know the man

who came to your house at night to get

Emmett Till?

How do you how?

Mose Wright stood and pointed first at Roy Bryant, then at J.W.

Milam.

There he he said.

Wright later claimed he could feel the blood

boil and hundreds of white people in the courtroom.

But he said I had decided to tell it like it was.

That was a dramatic moment, and it took an awful lot of courage

for him to get up there and, do what he did.

I think he had decided that he was going to do it.

No matter what happened.

After he testified,

Wright left his cotton blooming in the field, his old car

sitting at the station, and slipped on to the train to Chicago.

He would never again live in Mississippi.

The trial drew to a

close after only five days.

In his summation, the lead defense attorney

warned members of the jury that their ancestors would turn over

in their graves if Bryant and Milam were found guilty.

Every last Anglo-Saxon one of you,

he said, has the courage to free these men.

As the jury retired,

the black people who were standing around the walls

began to ease out of the door.

I said, it's time for us to go.

Congressman Diggs so what?

I missed the verdict.

I said, Congressman, this is one verdict

you don't want to be present to hear.

The crowd

in the courtroom waited in the heat.

Reporters overheard members of the jury

laughing and joking in the jury room.

In just over an hour, the jury returned.

And the Emmett Till murder trial.

The all white jury has acquitted the two white

defendants accused of killing the 14 year old Negro youth.

The jury foreman said the deciding factor was the state's failure

to prove the identity of the body.

Pulled from a river near Sumner, Mississippi.

A juror later revealed that

the jury had stalled to make it look good.

They wouldn't have taken so long to return to the courtroom, he said.

If they hadn't stopped to drink, pop,

the verdict came in not guilty.

You could hear guns firing.

I mean, it was almost like a 4th of July celebration,

or it was almost as if the White Sox

had won the pennant in the city of Chicago.

It was just, it was just

oh, it was a mess.

After the

trial, Sheriff Clarence Strider told reporters,

I hope the Chicago niggers and the ACP are

satisfied.

People are used to doing things

normal around here.

And they just

tried to run anything.

They thought they could run over the judge.

And this year, and everybody over there, they thought that they,

you know, could just take over, but they didn't.

How do you feel now?

It's all over, Roy, how about you?

I'm just glad it's over.

I, I'm doing a little black, firm

like you must smile.

Reports

of the acquittal made front page headlines across the United States

and set off an international firestorm.

The life of a Negro in Mississippi,

one European paper observed, is not worth a whistle.

From Boston to Los Angeles, black people packed meeting halls

and spilled into the streets to hear Mamie Till tell her story.

And what I saw was a shame before God.

And I,

and the way the charity chose to believe

the ridiculous stories of the defense attorneys.

I just can't go into detail to tell you the silly

things, the stupid things that were brought up as probabilities.

And they swallowed it like a fish swallowed up.

Just anything, just any excuse to put these two men

protected from further prosecution.

Roy Bryant and J.W.

Milam sold their story to a reporter from look magazine

for $4,000.

Their account appeared

just four months after the acquittal.

We took them in.

We was just going to whip them, scare some sense into them.

Back of the house to share

two rooms about 12ft square.

You walked them in there and took turns

smashing them across the head with the 45.

First.

My brother and me.

We put him back in the truck.

We knew what we was going to do.

Here's a spot about a mile

and a half from the bridge where the banks are steep.

It was just spot.

I held up the gun

I fired, and the Chicago boy

twisted round and caught it right in the ear.

We tied the gin fan to his neck with barbed wire,

and rolled his body into 20ft of muddy water.

For three hours that morning,

we had a big old fire in the yard.

Damn if that nigger didn't have crape soled shoes.

You know how hard they are to burn.

If there were others involved, as Willie Reed and Mose Wright

had testified under oath, Milam and Bryant

did not name them.

Mamie Till went to Washington

to press the federal government to reopen the case.

Despite thousands of letters protesting Mississippi's handling of the murder,

President Dwight Eisenhower and FBI director J.

Edgar Hoover ruled out a federal investigation.

Eisenhower didn't even answer

Mamie Till's telegram.

No one ever did time for the killing

of the 14 year old black boy from Chicago.

But his murder

and the trial and acquittal of his killers send a powerful message.

If change was going to come, people would have to put themselves on the line.

Contributions to civil rights groups soared,

and 100 days after the death of Emmett Till, Rosa Parks refused

to give up her seat to a white person, and the Montgomery bus boycott began.

When people

saw what had happened to my son,

men stood up who had never stood up before.

People became vocal, who had never vocalized before.

Emmett's death

was the opening of the civil rights movement.

He was the sacrificial lamb of the movement.

I do believe that

nationally, or at least across the South, the Emmett Till trial and the

and the result of that trial somehow spurred the civil rights movement

to see if this was the last straw.

Or maybe it was the spark.

People were thoroughly disgusted at,

what happened in that situation and made an awful lot of people

realize that they themselves had to get involved

and do something.

It was just a magnificent reaction

to a very ugly thing that had taken place in this country.