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On September 23, 1955, the two men who murdered 14-year-old Emmett Till were acquitted in a Mississippi courtroom. “Every lawyer in town had signed on to defend Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam,” explains Alexandra Marvar in her recent feature for GEN on the efforts to commemorate Till’s death in the Mississippi Delta. “The businesses put out jars to collect donations for the defense. The proceedings took five days, and the deliberation — soda break included — was hardly more than an hour.”
The two men later “confessed” to the murder in a mostly fabricated narrative for Look magazine. This, paired with misleading and false testimony during the trial has made the true story of what happened hard to pin down, but since 2005, the Emmett Till Memorial Commission has attempted to commemorate Till’s life and the locations surrounding his death in Mississippi.
In July, in a posthumous op-ed for the New York Times, U.S. Rep. John Lewis, who was a year older than Till, recounted how the death affected him. “Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland, and Breonna Taylor.”
Sixty-five years to the day after the acquittal of Till’s murderers, a Jefferson County grand jury indicted one of three officers involved in the shooting of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, for “wanton endangerment”—but held none of the officers responsible for her death.
