September 24, 2025
A look back on the case of 14-year-old Emmett Till, 70 years after his white killers were acquitted of his lynching.
Sept. 23, 2025, marks 70 years since two white men were found not guilty in the brutal murder of 14-year-old Chicago native Emmett Till.
Half-brothers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were able to walk away free men on Sept. 23, 1955, after a jury in Sumner, Mississippi, acquitted them of killing Till, a Black teenager from Chicago who was accused of “wolf-whistling” as Bryant’s wife, Carolyn Bryant Donham, the Chicago Tribune reports. Just months after the acquittal, in January 1956, the two men admitted to killing Till in an interview with Look magazine.
During the three-day trial, prosecutors presented testimony from Moses Wright, Till’s great-uncle, who witnessed his abduction, and Willie Reed, a Black sharecropper who overheard Bryant and Milam torturing Till.
The defense argued that the mutilated body found in the Tallahatchie River was not Till’s and included Bryant Donham’s testimony, in which she claimed she was “scared to death” after alleging Till grabbed and threatened her. After just over an hour of deliberation, the all-white, all-male jury returned a not-guilty verdict.
Later, all but one juror admitted they believed Bryant and Milam were guilty but acquitted them, unwilling to impose the mandatory punishment of life imprisonment or death on white men for killing a Black boy. Decades later, historian and author Timothy Tyson revealed that Bryant Donham admitted in a 2008 interview that her 1955 testimony about Till’s “verbal and physical advances” was false.
“Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him,” Tyson claimed Bryant Donham told him.
The U.S. Justice Department reopened the case in 2018 based on this admission but closed it in 2021, citing insufficient evidence for federal prosecution, as Bryant Donham later denied making the admission to federal investigators. Bryant Donham’s false claims that Till made advances toward her at a Mississippi grocery store led to his brutal kidnapping, torture, and lynching by her husband and his half-brother.
She died in April 2023 at age 88, but her role in the murder helped spark the Civil Rights Movement and continues to draw renewed attention in the 21st century. Till’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, courageously held an open-casket funeral in Chicago and distributed photographs of her son’s corpse to newspapers and magazines, so that “the whole nation had to bear witness” to her son’s brutal murder.
Emmett Till’s death and the shocking images of his mutilated body became a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement. The graphic depiction of racial violence, widespread media coverage, and the blatant injustice of the legal system ignited public outrage and made Till a national symbol of racial oppression. His case helped unify Black communities and laid the emotional and political groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
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