Why Emmett Till Will Never Rest in Peace

His ghost can still spook white people.

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It’s been a busy week for a 14-year-old, especially for one who’s been dead for 71 years. Sports columnist Nancy Armor wrote that white basketball player Caitlin Clark was being fouled a lot by black players but warned that defending assaulted white women can be dangerous for blacks: Look what happened to Emmett Till!

Last Thursday, the New York Times wrote about a black teenager named Nolan Wells, who went to an Island with a group of white friends. When the group headed home, Nolan stayed on the island and was later found drowned. Because it happened in Mississippi, the Times reminded us of “Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy whose lynching in 1955 horrified the country.”

Last Friday, Illinois Governor Jay Pritzker signed a law to make July 25 “Emmett Till Day.”

This “ensures that Emmett Till and his mother Mamie Till-Mobley will never be forgotten” — not that there’s any danger of that.

September 10th will be opening day at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photography, for a special called “If Emmett Till Lived.”

Viewers will see photos of the past and “imagine, and meditate on, the roughly 70 years that Till missed.”

Emmett Louis Till was named for his father, Louis Till, and there are photos of him. Look at this colorized version of Louis in his Sunday best.

But I’m quite certain the exhibit will have amnesia about Daddy Till.

Emmett grew up in Chicago with mother Mamie, who worked her way through four husbands.

When he was 11, he got so angry at number three, he grabbed a butcher knife and threatened to kill him.

Mamie was from Mississippi and had relatives in the delta. Emmett always wanted to visit them, but Mamie refused. She said he’d get in trouble because he didn’t know how to act around Southern whites. She finally relented, but told him to speak to whites only when spoken to, say “sir” and “ma’am,” and never make eye contact with a white woman. She testified in court that she told him that if a white person ever told him to get on his knees and ask forgiveness for something, he better do it immediately.

On the third day of his visit, he and two young cousins went to Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Mississippi, where many blacks shopped.

Some of what happened on August 24, 1955 is disputed, but this much is certain:

Twenty-one-year-old Carolyn Bryant, wife of the owner Roy Byant, was managing the store.

Emmett walked in and was alone with her. He also wolf-whistled her. Whatever else he did or did not do, Carolyn Bryant was so frightened, she rushed out of the store and got a pistol out of a car. Emmett’s cousins, who may or may not have heard what he may or may not have said, were so horrified by his breach of decorum that they fled in panic.

Before Emmett entered the store, it’s probable he showed his cousins a photo of a white girl he claimed was his girlfriend. It would have been a class photo of this woman, Joan Brody, who is known to have been a classmate in Chicago.

At trial, Carolyn Bryant, shown here with husband Roy, testified that Emmett took her arm and said, “How about a date, baby?”

He grabbed her waist and said, “You needn’t be afraid of me, baby. I’ve fucked white women before.”

Historian Timothy Tyson claimed that 53 years later, Carolyn Bryant recanted her testimony, but she, and her daughter-in-law who was with her, adamantly denied that, and Tyson’s tape recordings somehow missed that admission.

There is no doubt that a few days later, husband Roy Bryant and his half brother J. W. Milam abducted Emmett, pistol whipped him, shot him, and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River.

They were tried for murder at the Tallahatchie County Courthouse — Milam and his wife are on the left — at a time when only white men could serve on Mississippi juries.

A doctor testified that Till’s body was too badly decomposed to be identified, and that the boy could well be alive. The jury voted to acquit. A guilty verdict would have meant the death penalty or life in prison — there was no other choice — and several jurors later said they thought the men were guilty but the penalty was too harsh.

Four months after the trial, Bryant and Milam explained in an interview that they didn’t intend to kill Emmett, just scare him and “chase him back up yonder.”

However, he was defiant and bragged about sleeping with white women, so they killed him.

After this admission, the two men were shunned as pariahs by the community, and they left Mississippi to live in Texas.

Mother Mamie Till is widely praised for her “incredible courage” in deciding to have an open-coffin funeral for Emmett.

Here she is at a viewing with Gene Mobley, who became her fourth husband.

The open coffin was a calculated decision to stir up outrage, and it worked.

She kept the coffin open for four days, while tens of thousands of people filed by.

Then she went on an NAACP fundraising tour through 33 cities that brought in huge amounts of money.

She got expenses, plus $100 per appearance, but she started asking for so much more that NAACP chief Roy Wilkins said, “You’re trying to capitalize on the death of your son.”

He replaced her with her uncle, Moses Wright — here shown with Mamie — who was happy with expenses-plus-$100.

Emmett’s father Louis had long been out of the picture. In 1942, when Emmett was one, Mamie caught him cheating.

He got angry, nearly choked her to death, and left the house. She knew he’d be back, so she boiled up a pot of water and threw it on him. She got a restraining order against him, but after repeated violations, in 1943, a judge gave him a choice: go to prison or join the army.

He was stationed in war-time Italy. On a night off with a black buddy, he raped two heavily pregnant Italian women and shot to death a third woman, Anna Zanchi. He is buried under marker 73 in the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery  in France, in plot E, reserved for 94 executed soldiers, and closed to the public.

As for Emmett, after the NAACP fundraising campaign, he fell into obscurity — until the 2000s. Beginning in 2006, nine historical markers went up in Mississippi, including one where half-brother J.W. Milam’s house used to be — I’m sure a lot of people want to see that — and the spot where Emmett’s body was fished out of the river.

The original of that one was vandalized, so this version, which went up in 2019, is 500 pounds of steel, cost more than $10,000, and is guaranteed to withstand rifle fire.

The vandalized version is so precious, it’s worthy of museum exhibition!

The Tallahatchie County Courthouse was carefully restored in 2015 to its notorious 1955 appearance and is now a civil rights memorial on the National Register of Historic Places.

Not far is the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center, with a mockup of Bryant’s Grocery — paid for with government money.

Admirers would love to make a shrine out of the grocery, but the owners won’t sell, and have let it fall down. But it does have a historical marker.

Everything Till-related is a holy relic. In 2009, his original casket went to the Smithsonian. It’s meticulously restored and now on display at the Black History Museum on the Mall in DC.

As Google explains, “Photography and video recording are strictly prohibited inside the Emmett Till memorial space to preserve the dignity of the sacred artifact and privacy of visitors.”

In 2025, the murder weapon, a 1911 government model .45, went on permanent display in the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.

Louis Till used the same model .45 to kill Anna Zanchi, but I don’t think it’s on display anywhere.

In 2023, President Joe Biden established a National Monument to honor Emmet Till and his mom, including this statue of Emmett in Greenwood, Mississippi.

The National Parks Service also looks after Roberts Temple Church where Emmett’s funeral was held.

Three years earlier, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the church one of America’s most endangered historic places, and granted $750,000 as a first step to restoring its authentic 1955 appearance, inside and out.

In Pueblo, Colorado, of all places, there is a statue of Martin Luther King with his hand on Emmett Till’s shoulder.

In 2023, a statue of Mamie Till was unveiled in front of Argo High School in Summit Illinois, where she was a student.

There have been no fewer than eight feature-length movies about Emmett Till, including once called, believe it or not, “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till.”

In 2006, the school Emmett attended in Chicago was renamed the Emmett Louis Till Math and Science Academy.

In 2025, 5 percent of students were proficient in math and 10 percent in reading.

The house where Emmett and Mamie lived was designated a Chicago Landmark in 2021, and the next year it got a National Trust for Historic Preservation award.

Emmett Till Memorial Highway was dedicated in 2006, 32 miles of US 49 that runs through sacred ground in Mississippi, trodden by Emmett and Mamie.

I know this is getting tedious, but one last item. In 2023, President Joe Biden signed legislation to award Emmett and Mamie the Congressional Gold Medal posthumously. The design is not yet certain, but when the medal is struck, it will go on display in the Black History Museum in DC.

The gold medal is the highest civilian honor Congress can grant, and the first recipient was George Washington.

What explains this idolatry? There’s an obvious payoff for blacks. They love to tell us we’re bad, bad, bad, and we can never do enough for them. Pay up, honkie. But isn’t it pathetic to nourish hatred by making a hero out of a boy who accomplished nothing in life, but be killed? Aren’t any blacks revolted by this?

But it’s white people who are the real mental cases. The Till business was not the white man at his finest, but was it a colossal horror that condemns us all? Hardly. And no past horror, no matter how colossal, implicates any of us. This foolishness is supposed to be about tackling the always unfinished work of racial equality, and never repeating the crimes of the past. Clearly, beneath the surface, we’re all monsters. Without constant surveillance and browbeating, we’ll run amok and start slaughtering and enslaving people.

Only white people think this way. Only white people rub their own noses in the unsavory parts of their past — while we better forget any wrongs ever done to us.

How about a historical marker for the Wichita Massacre?

Or the rape, torture and murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom by this lot?

There are countless cases like this.

The bus Rosa Parks is supposed to have sat down on is in a museum.

Why not the light-rial car Iryna Zarutska was stabbed to death on?

Oh, that would be tacky, barbaric. But nothing is tacky or barbaric if the idea is to demonize white people.

And that’s why Emmett Till, casket and all, will never rest in peace.