“But when I started writing the book, I knew I had to just see it through the eyes of a historian.” “The case went, in my mind, from just a historical one to a personal one,” he said. Davis/Chicago Sun-Times via AP, File) The definitive bookĪfter Anderson interviewed Mamie Till Mobley over the phone in 1996, they remained in contact until shortly before her death in 2003. The suspects later admitted to the crime.įILE - This May 4, 2005, file photo shows Emmett Till's photo on his grave marker in Alsip, Ill. Millam - were acquitted by an all-white jury. The two white men charged in Emmett’s death - Carolyn’s husband, Roy, and his half-brother, J. “Anything you could turn into a sexual encounter between a Black male and a white female would have got the blood boiling on any white Southern jury,” Anderson said. And Bryant changed her story, alleging that Emmett grabbed her and asked her out on a date. Witnesses disagreed about whether Emmett actually whistled at Bryant. “Even today, they get emotional, just like the people who filed by the casket in 1955.

“There’s a certain power when people come across the photos of his face,” Anderson said.

His body was weighted down and thrown in a river.Įmmett’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, made national headlines when she insisted on an open-casket wake and funeral, hoping her son’s bloated, mutilated body would show the world what happened to him. Shortly after he was accused of whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, at a grocery store, Emmett was kidnapped, tortured, brutally beaten, shot and killed. In 1955, a boy from Chicago - Emmett Till - was visiting relatives in Mississippi. (ABC/James Van Evers) Mamie Till Mobley (Adreinne Warren) talks to reporters after her 14-year-old son, Emmett, was kidnapped and murdered by white men.

What happened to emmett till