The Blood of Emmett Till summary

Throughout the twentieth century, the United States struggled to confront its history of slavery and to counteract prevalent racial prejudices. In the southern States, segregation, both legal and illegal, was ubiquitous.

Consequently, between 1910 and 1970, millions of African-Americans fled and migrated to the North from the American South. They settled in cities like Chicago, hoping for a better life.

But in these northern cities, too, separation of communities along race lines was common.

Such racial ghettoization was clearly indicative of the discrimination blacks faced. Violence against them was not uncommon.

Between 1910 and 1930, the number of African-Americans in Chicago doubled. Competition for housing and work was tough, especially with European immigrants.

Blacks were forced to live in ghettoized parts of Chicago’s South Side. Eventually, housing shortages forced black residents to move out into adjoining neighborhoods, which had previously been entirely white.

In 1949, a mob of whites, about 2000-strong, attacked a building belonging to a black couple in a white neighborhood on the South Side.

If you were black, any supposed transgression in this atmosphere could cost you your life.

This is how Emmett Till met his end, at the age of 14. In 1955, Till caught a train from Chicago to Mississippi to visit his great uncle and cousins. Till was unused to the extreme racism of the South, and made the mistake of flirting with Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, while she was working at her husband’s store.

She later told her attorney that Till had squeezed her hand, asked her out and boasted to her about sleeping with white women in the past.

Within days of the incident, Carolyn’s husband, Roy Bryant, and her brother-in-law, J. W. Milam, arrived at the house of Reverend Mose Wright, Till’s great uncle. They were brandishing guns. They were there for Till.

After lynching Emmett Till, they threw his body into the Tallahatchie River.

Carolyn Bryant, however, never expressed utter certainty that Till was the boy who’d talked her up at the store.