Age, Biography, and Wiki
Emmett Till was born on July 25, 1941, in Chicago, Illinois. He became an icon of the civil rights movement after his abduction and lynching in Mississippi at the age of 14. Till was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, when he was falsely accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family's grocery store. His death drew national attention and sparked widespread protests against racial violence.
| Occupation | Activist |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 25 July 1941 |
| Age | 84 Years |
| Birth Place | Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Horoscope | Leo |
| Country | U.S |
| Date of death | 28 August, 1955 |
| Died Place | Drew, Mississippi, U.S. |
Height, Weight & Measurements
There is no detailed information available about Emmett Till's height, weight, or measurements, as these aspects are not commonly documented for historical figures.
During the murder trial, Bryant testified that Till grabbed her hand while she was stocking candy and said, "How about a date, baby?" Bryant said that after she freed herself from his grasp, Till followed her to the cash register, grabbed her waist and said, "What's the matter baby, can't you take it?" Bryant said she freed herself, and Till said, "You needn't be afraid of me, baby", used "one 'unprintable' word" and said "I've been with white women before." Bryant also alleged that one of Till's companions came into the store, grabbed him by the arm, and ordered him to leave. According to historian Timothy Tyson, Bryant admitted to him in a 2008 interview that her testimony during the trial that Till had made verbal and physical advances was false. Bryant had testified Till grabbed her waist and uttered obscenities but later told Tyson, "that part's not true." As for the rest of what happened, the 72-year-old stated she could not remember. Bryant is quoted by Tyson as saying, "Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him." However, the tape recordings that Tyson made of the interviews with Bryant do not contain Bryant saying this. In addition, Bryant's daughter-in-law, who was present during Tyson's interviews, says that Bryant never said it.
Author Devery Anderson writes that in an interview with the defense's attorneys, Bryant told a version of the initial encounter that included Till grabbing her hand and asking her for a date, but not Till approaching her and grabbing her waist, mentioning past relationships with white women, or having to be dragged unwillingly out of the store by another boy. Anderson further notes that many remarks prior to Till's kidnapping made by those involved indicate that it was his remarks to Bryant that angered his killers, rather than any alleged physical harassment. For instance, Mose Wright (a witness to the kidnapping) said that the kidnappers mentioned only "talk" at the store, and Sheriff George Smith only spoke of the arrested killers accusing Till of "ugly remarks". Anderson suggests that this evidence taken together implies that the more extreme details of Bryant's story were invented after the fact as part of the defense's legal strategy.
| Height | |
| Weight | |
| Body Measurements | |
| Eye Color | |
| Hair Color |
Dating & Relationship Status
Emmett Till was a teenager when he died, and there is no public information about his dating or relationship status.
During summer vacation in August 1955, he was visiting relatives near Money, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region. Till spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the white, married proprietor of a local grocery store. Although what happened at the store is a matter of dispute, Till was accused of flirting with, touching, or whistling at Bryant. Till's interaction with Bryant, perhaps unwittingly, violated the unwritten code of behavior for a black male interacting with a white female in the Jim Crow-era South. Several nights after the encounter, Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam, who were armed, went to Till's great-uncle's house and abducted Till, age 14. They beat and mutilated him before shooting him in the head and sinking his body in the Tallahatchie River. Three days later, Till's mutilated and bloated body was discovered and retrieved from the river.
Till's body was returned to Chicago, where his mother insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket, which was held at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ. It was later said that "The open-coffin funeral held by Mamie Till Bradley exposed the world to more than her son Emmett Till's bloated, mutilated body. Her decision focused attention on not only American racism and the barbarism of lynching but also the limitations and vulnerabilities of American democracy." Tens of thousands attended his funeral or viewed his open casket, and images of Till's mutilated body were published in black-oriented magazines and newspapers, rallying popular black support and white sympathy across the United States. Intense scrutiny was brought to bear on the lack of black civil rights in Mississippi, with newspapers around the U.S. critical of the state. Although local newspapers and law enforcement officials initially decried the violence against Till and called for justice, they responded to national criticism by defending Mississippians, giving support to the killers.
The Delta region encompasses the large, multi-county area of northwestern Mississippi in the watershed of the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers. When Carthan was two years old, her family moved to Argo, Illinois, near Chicago, as part of the Great Migration of rural black families out of the South to the North to escape violence, lack of opportunity and unequal treatment under the law. Argo received so many Southern migrants that it was named "Little Mississippi"; Carthan's mother's home was often used by other recent migrants as a way station while they were trying to find jobs and housing.
Mamie largely raised Emmett with her mother; she and Louis Till separated in 1942 after Mamie discovered that he had been unfaithful. Louis later assaulted Mamie, choking her to unconsciousness, to which she responded by throwing scalding water at him. For violating court orders to stay away from Mamie, Louis Till was forced by a judge in 1943 to choose between jail or enlisting in the U.S. Army. In 1945, a few weeks before his son's fourth birthday, Louis Till was court-martialed and executed in Italy for the murder of an Italian woman and the rape of two others.
At the age of six, Emmett contracted polio, which left him with a persistent stutter. Mamie and Emmett moved to Detroit, where she met and married "Pink" Bradley in 1951. Emmett preferred living in Chicago, so he returned there to live with his grandmother; his mother and stepfather rejoined him later that year. After the marriage dissolved in 1952, "Pink" Bradley returned alone to Detroit.
Mamie Till-Bradley and Emmett lived together in a busy neighborhood in Chicago's South Side near distant relatives. She began working as a civilian clerk for the U.S. Air Force for a better salary. She recalled that Till was industrious enough to help with chores at home, although he sometimes got distracted. Till's mother remembered that he did not know his own limitations at times. Following the couple's separation, Bradley visited Mamie and began threatening her. At 11 years old, Till, with a butcher knife in hand, told Bradley he would kill him if the man did not leave. Till was typically happy, however. He and his cousins and friends pulled pranks on each other (Till once took advantage of an extended car ride when his friend fell asleep and placed the friend's underwear on his head), and they also spent their free time in pickup baseball games. Till was a smart dresser, and was often the center of attention among his peers.
In 1955, Mamie Till-Bradley's uncle, 64-year-old Mose Wright, visited her and Emmett in Chicago during the summer and told him stories about living in the Mississippi Delta. Emmett wanted to see for himself. Wright planned to accompany Till with a cousin, Wheeler Parker; another cousin, Curtis Jones, would join them soon after. Wright was a sharecropper and part-time minister who was often called "Preacher". He lived in Money, Mississippi, a small town in the Delta that consisted of three stores, a school, a post office, a cotton gin, and a few hundred residents, 8 mi north of Greenwood. Before Till departed for the Delta, his mother cautioned him that Chicago and Mississippi were two different worlds, and he should know how to behave in front of white people in the South. Till assured her that he understood.
Racial tensions increased after the United States Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education to end segregation in public education, which it ruled unconstitutional. Many segregationists believed the ruling would lead to interracial dating and marriage. Whites strongly resisted the court's ruling; one Virginia county closed all its public schools to prevent integration. Other jurisdictions simply ignored the ruling. In other ways, whites used stronger measures to keep blacks politically disenfranchised, which they had been since the turn of the century. Segregation in the South was used to constrain blacks forcefully from any semblance of social equality.
Till arrived at the home of Mose and Elizabeth Wright in Money, Mississippi, on August 21, 1955. On the evening of August 24, Till and several young relatives and neighbors were driven by his cousin Maurice Wright to Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market to buy candy. Till's companions were children of sharecroppers and had been picking cotton all day. The market mostly served the local sharecropper population and was owned by a white couple, 24-year-old Roy Bryant and his 21-year-old wife Carolyn.
The facts of what took place in the store are still disputed. Journalist William Bradford Huie reported that Till showed the youths outside the store a photograph of a white girl in his wallet, and bragged that she was his girlfriend. Till's cousin Curtis Jones said the photograph was of an integrated class at the school Till attended in Chicago. According to Huie and Jones, one or more of the local boys then dared Till to speak to Bryant. However, in his 2009 book, Till's cousin Simeon Wright, who was present, disputed the accounts of Huie and Jones. According to Wright, Till did not have a photo of a white girl, and nobody dared him to flirt with Bryant. Speaking in 2015, Wright said: "We didn't dare him to go to the store—the white folk said that. They said that he had pictures of his white girlfriend. There were no pictures. They never talked to me. They never interviewed me." The FBI report completed in 2006 notes: "[Curtis] Jones recanted his 1955 statements prior to his death and apologized to Mamie Till-Mobley".
Carolyn's husband, Roy Bryant, was on an extended trip hauling shrimp to Texas and did not return home until August 27. Historian Timothy Tyson said an investigation by civil rights activists concluded Carolyn Bryant did not initially tell her husband Roy Bryant about the encounter with Till, and that Roy was told by a person who frequented their store. Roy was reportedly angry at his wife for not telling him. Carolyn Bryant told the FBI she did not tell her husband because she feared he would assault Till.
When Roy Bryant was informed of what had happened, he aggressively questioned several young black men who entered the store. That evening, Bryant, with a black man named J. W. Washington, approached a black teenager walking along a road. Bryant ordered Washington to seize the boy, put him in the back of a pickup truck, and took him to be identified by a companion of Carolyn's who had witnessed the episode with Till. Friends or parents vouched for the boy in Bryant's store, and Carolyn's companion denied that the boy Bryant and Washington seized was the one who had accosted her. Somehow, Bryant learned that the boy in the incident was from Chicago and was staying with Mose Wright. Several witnesses overheard Bryant and his 36-year-old half-brother, John William "J. W." Milam, discussing taking Till from his house.
| Parents | |
| Husband | |
| Sibling | |
| Children |
Net Worth and Salary
Emmett Till did not have a career that would have led to a personal net worth, as he was a victim of racial violence at a young age. His family did not benefit financially from his death during his lifetime, but his legacy has been used to support civil rights causes and educational initiatives.
Career, Business, and Investments
Emmett Till did not have a career due to his untimely death. However, his tragic story has had a lasting impact on civil rights movements. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, became a prominent advocate for racial justice using her son's story as a catalyst.
Social Network
Emmett Till did not live during the era of social media, so he did not have a social network presence. However, his legacy continues to be celebrated and honored through various social media platforms and civil rights organizations.
In September 1955 an all-white jury found Bryant and Milam not guilty of Till's murder. Protected against double jeopardy, the two men publicly admitted in a 1956 interview with Look magazine that they had tortured and murdered Till, selling the story of how they did it for $4,000. Till's murder was seen as a catalyst for the next phase of the civil rights movement. In December 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott began in Alabama and lasted more than a year, resulting eventually in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregated buses were unconstitutional. According to historians, events surrounding Till's life and death continue to resonate.
According to both Simeon Wright and Wheeler Parker, Till wolf-whistled at Bryant. Wright said, "I think [Emmett] wanted to get a laugh out of us or something," adding, "He was always joking around, and it was hard to tell when he was serious." Wright stated that following the whistle, he became immediately alarmed. "Well, it scared us half to death," Wright recalled. "You know, we were almost in shock. We couldn't get out of there fast enough, because we had never heard of anything like that before. A black boy whistling at a white woman? In Mississippi? No." Wright stated "The Ku Klux Klan and night riders were part of our daily lives". Following his disappearance, a newspaper account stated that Till sometimes whistled to alleviate his stuttering. His speech was sometimes unclear; Mamie said he had particular difficulty with pronouncing "b" sounds, and he may have whistled to overcome problems asking for bubble gum. She said that, to help with his articulation, Mamie taught Till how to whistle softly to himself before pronouncing his words.
In the early morning hours of August 28, 1955, sometime between 2:00 and 3:30 a.m., Bryant and Milam drove to Mose Wright's house. Armed with a pistol and a flashlight, he asked Wright if he had three boys in the house from Chicago. Till was sharing a bed with another cousin and there were a total of eight people in the cabin. Milam asked Wright to take them to "the nigger who did the talking." Till's great-aunt offered the men money, but Milam refused as he rushed Emmett to put on his clothes. Mose Wright informed the men that Till was from up north and did not know any better. Milam reportedly then asked, "How old are you, preacher?" to which Wright responded, "64." Milam threatened that if Wright told anybody, he would not live to see 65. The men marched Till out to the truck. Wright said he heard them ask someone in the car if this was the boy, and heard someone say "yes." When asked if the voice was that of a man or a woman Wright said that "it seemed like it was a lighter voice than a man's." In a 1956 interview with Look magazine, in which they confessed to the killing, Bryant and Milam said they would have brought Till by the store in order to have Carolyn identify him, but stated they did not do so because they said Till admitted to being the one who had talked to her.
Education
Emmett Till attended McCormick Elementary School in Chicago before his death. His educational journey was cut short, but his story has been used to educate future generations about the importance of civil rights.
Conclusion
Emmett Till's life was marked by tragedy, but his legacy continues to inspire and educate people about the importance of racial justice. While he did not have a career or personal wealth, his story has been pivotal in shaping the civil rights movement in the United States.
