Remembering Emmitt Till

Today in history class, we watched a movie on the brutal murder of Emmitt Till, a 14-year-old boy who was visiting his family in Money, Mississippi, for the first time. He was a northern boy from Chicago, who didn't understand the rules and regulations of the South, and he had "whistled" or said "bye baby" to a young white woman in a grocery store, as he was walking out of the store. He had only did it as a dare given to him from the local boys, but he didn't know that the dare would cost him his life. Two days later, Emmitt was kidnapped from his home, held hostage at gunpoint from two white men, one was the husband of the woman in the store (Bryant), and the other her brother-in-law (Milam). Then two days after that, Emmitt Till was found in the Tallahatchie River, with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His face and body was so mangled that they couldn't even recognize him, except for the ring on his finger with his initials on it. During the two days that he was missing, Emmitt was tortured in Milam's barn then they drove him to the river, told him to undress, and then shot him in the head. When Emmitt was found, he had his right eye missing, no teeth, a gun shot wound on the side of his head, and a broken nose. His body was shipped up north to his mother, Mamie Till, where she held an open-casket funeral, so the world could see what they had done to her son. It was horrible, his face was so disgusting to look at, it looked like he was bloated from being in the water, his skin looked stretched out and black, his lips looked like burnt fish lips, it was just too disgusting. And it was so sad because he was just a kid, visiting his family for the first time, and he was killed because of a dare. The men, Milam and Bryant, were the main suspects and were sent to court for the murder of Emmitt. However, the prosecution did not have enough good evidence to send the men to jail, and the jury was all white, so the men were acquitted. Then a few months later, the men committed to the crime and told a magazine that they had actually killed the boy, but the police couldn't do anything about it because the men couldn't be tried for the same thing, so there was no justice for the death of Emmitt Till. But karma crept up on the men who murdered him because in 1981, Milam died of cancer and in 1994, Bryant died of cancer too. It's sad when a boy's murderers are acquitted and are allowed to go on living their lives happily while he had barely begun his and it ended too early.

First picture: Emmitt and his mother
Second picture: Emmitt in his casket, unrecognizable