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The Murder of Emmett Till · 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories

• 0:07
  Discretion. Is it by it's him made murder? Emmett Till was only fourteen
• 0:31
  years old during the summer of nineteen fifty five when he traveled from his home
• 0:35
  in Chicago, Illinois, to stay with his relatives in the Mississippi Delta.
• 0:40
  It was in Mississippi that he had an interaction that changed the course of the
• 0:44
  rest of his short life, although at the time he didn't even notice that
• 0:48
  he'd done anything wrong. Exactly what happened when Emmett Till met Carolyn Bryant in
• 0:54
  the grocery store she and her husband owned is still up for debate. At
• 0:59
  twenty one years old, Carolyn was seven years Immitt's senior, and crucially,
• 1:03
  unlike Emmett, she was white. After his short interaction with Carolyn, he
• 1:08
  was accused of many things, whistling at her in a casual manner, touching
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  her, and even flirting with her brazenly. He might have done it because
• 1:19
  of a dare. He might not have been dared at all. He might
• 1:22
  not have even done it at all. Most of the witnesses seemed to agree
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  that whatever Emmett had done, he had not been obeying the unwritten rules of
• 1:30
  how a black boy should interact with a white woman in America's southern states.
• 1:36
  Two days passed. At the time of her interaction with Emmett. Carolyn's husband,
• 1:41
  Roy, had been away in Texas. When he returned home, Carolyn
• 1:46
  initially didn't tell him whatever Emmett had said or done. Later, she explained
• 1:49
  that she tried to hide this information because she believed that if Roy found out,
• 1:53
  he would harm Emmett. However, Carolyn's secrecy was pointless. One of
• 2:00
  the grocery stores customers told Roy anyway. He was furious at his wife for
• 2:04
  keeping a secret, but he was even more mad at Emmett. Till,
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  along with his half brother j W. Milam, Roy, tracked Emmett down
• 2:13
  to his great uncle's house where he was staying during his visit. Armed with
• 2:17
  pistols, the two men knocked on the door and demanded to see Emmett.
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  Emmett's great aunt offered j W and Roy money in exchange for not harming the
• 2:27
  boy, but they refused, continuing to demand that Emmett get dressed and come
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  with them. After threatening the rest of the household to stay quiet, Roy
• 2:37
  and j W. Ordered Emmett to come out to their truck Meanwhile, Emmett's
• 2:42
  great uncle, Moe's Wright, stayed awake, sitting on his porch and hoping
• 2:45
  that Emmett would come home. Eventually, he got into his own car and
• 2:49
  circled the nearby streets looking for any sign of his great nephew. The sun
• 2:53
  rose, and Emmett was still nowhere to be found. Mo's was afraid for
• 2:59
  his own life, believing that Roy and j W would follow through in their
• 3:02
  promise to kill him if he contacted the police. Instead, Curtis Jones,
• 3:07
  Emmett's cousin, made two phone calls, one to Emmett's mother and the other
• 3:13
  to the Lafleur County Sheriff's office. Sheriff George Smith paid a visit to Roy
• 3:17
  and j W, who had clearly expected Emmett's family members to stay quiet.
• 3:23
  Reluctantly, both men admitted that they had taken Emmet with them on the previous
• 3:28
  night, but insisted that they had released him shortly afterwards, dropping him off
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  in front of the grocery store that Roy and Carolyn owned. Sheriff Smith suspected
• 3:37
  that they were lying about that detail, but because both men had admitted to
• 3:39
  kidnapping Emmett, he was able to place them under arrest. Words spread quickly
• 3:46
  about the missing black teenager, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
• 3:50
  People, or NACP, was alerted. Two members of the nub ACP staff
• 3:57
  went under cover as cotton pickers, asking black workers in the cotton fields about
• 4:00
  Emmett, but the search for the missing boy ended three days later after a
• 4:05
  body was found in the Tallahatchee River. Two young boys were fishing when they
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  came across a badly bloated, mutilated male human body. The body was completely
• 4:15
  naked and his facial features were unrecognizable, but there was a silver ring on
• 4:20
  one of his fingers. The ring had a unique engraving of the initials LT
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  next to the date of May twenty fifth, nineteen forty three. That ring
• 4:30
  belonged to the missing fourteen year old Emmett Till It was clear that after his
• 4:34
  abduction, Emmett had suffered terribly. He had been beaten severely, with one
• 4:40
  of his eyeballs protruding from the socket. He'd also been shot in the head,
• 4:44
  which appeared to be his cause of death. After Emmett's great uncle Mos
• 4:48
  identified the body, Emmett's remains were transported back to his home in Chicago.
• 4:54
  His mother, Maimi Till, wasn't just grieving. She was furious both at
• 4:59
  the killers and at the Jim Crow era, which had made it so dangerous
• 5:03
  for her son to simply exist while being black. Her fear and anger led
• 5:09
  her to a simple conclusion. Emmett's funeral would be public and the casket would
• 5:14
  be open. She wanted everyone who attended to see what racism had done to
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  her child. Emmett's funeral was attended by thousands, and pictures of his body
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  were quickly distributed across black newspapers and magazines all over the United States. But
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  despite the public outcry, not everybody thought that Emmett's death had been an injustice,
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  especially white people living in America's southern states. Roy Bryant and J.
• 5:42
  W. Milam went to trial for Emmett's murder in September of nineteen fifty five.
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  The day before the trial began, a black man named Frank Young came
• 5:51
  forward saying that he knew two other black men who had witnessed Emmett being tortured.
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  Their names were Henry Lee Loggin's and Levi College, and they worked for
• 6:00
  j W. Milam's brother. However, the prosecution was never told about these
• 6:04
  two potential witnesses. Instead, both Henry and Levi were placed in a local
• 6:10
  jail before the trial began, preventing them from testifying against Roy and JW.
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  The following day the trial began. It was a spectacle, with almost three
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  hundred people, both black and white, coming to the courtroom to watch.
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  The selected members of the jury were all white and all male. Women and
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  black people were forbidden from participating. From its very beginning, the trial was
• 6:35
  incredibly relaxed, with the members of the jury being permitted to drink alcohol throughout
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  the five days the trial continued. The defense suggested that the missing boy might
• 6:46
  actually still be alive because the body found in the Tallahatchee River had been so
• 6:50
  damaged that it was impossible to positively identify it. They were leaning on that
• 6:56
  story that Roy and j W had initially told the sheriff that they duct at
• 7:00
  Emmett to scare him, but released him unharmed shortly afterwards. Despite multiple eyewitnesses,
• 7:06
  The defense attorney's attempted to prove that there was no way Emmett's great uncle
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  Moe's rights would have been able to identify Roy in j W as perpetrators.
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  It had been the middle of the night and Mo's only had the light of
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  a flashlight to see. In a matter of minutes, Mo's rights went down
• 7:23
  in history, possibly becoming the first Southern black man to testify against a white
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  man in court and lived to talk about it. Mo's stood up to identify
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  j. W. Milam as one of the perpetrators, saying, there he
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  is. The jury deliberated for just over two hours, taking a break in
• 7:42
  the middle to drink soda. They were aware that in Mississippi, there were
• 7:46
  only three outcomes for Roy in JW. A death sentence, life in prison,
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  or acquittal. Later, some members of the jury were interviewed and said
• 7:57
  that they made their decision because they believed that no white man should ever be
• 8:01
  killed or face life in jail for killing any black man. Only one member
• 8:05
  of the jury believed that Roy and j W should be found guilty, but
• 8:09
  the rest of the jury were able to convince him to change his mind.
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  Finally, the jury made their official decision. Roy Bryant and j W.
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  Milam were acquitted of Emmett Till's murder in nineteen fifty six, Roy and j
• 8:24
  W sold their story to Look magazine in exchanged for four thousand dollars cash.
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  They'd described how they killed Emmett and why, and even as they admitted that
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  they'd murdered the boy, both of them still maintained that Emmett had deserved it
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  because of his confidence and his treatment of Carolyn. When he was asked why
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  he murdered Emmett, j W responded, what else could I do? He
• 8:50
  thought he was as good as any white man. The public reaction to this
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  interview was even more extreme than the reaction to Emmett's death. The outrage pushed
• 8:58
  the federal government to make changes in how black people were treated in America,
• 9:03
  even contributing to the nineteen fifty seven Civil Rights Act being passed. In two
• 9:07
  thousand and six, the Tallahatchee Board of Supervisors established a memorial commission in Emmett's
• 9:13
  memory and then issued a formal apology to Emmett's family. In the years since
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  his death, Emmett has been the subject of countless poems, essays, and
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  songs, to the point where he has been referred to as the sacrificial lamb
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  of America's civil rights movement. His death inspired change, but only when it
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  was too late to help Emmett, a fourteen year old boy who didn't think
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  he had done anything wrong. That is ten Minute Murder for today, brief
• 9:56
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• 10:01
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