If I Did It: 1955

In the summer of 1955, Emmett Till traveled from Chicago to Mississippi to stay with relatives. He had just turned fourteen. His mother, Mamie Till Bradley, worried about how the sometimes smart-alecky Emmett would manage. He'd never been to the South, and didn't understand how serious she was when she warned him to be careful.

After only a week, he somehow insulted a young white woman. Did his new friends in Mississippi dare him to ask the white woman for a date? Did he whistle at her? Call her "baby?" The woman, Carolyn Bryant, said one thing and Emmett's cousins said another. Emmett wasn't able to give his version. Whatever the eighth-grader did, he was murdered for it.

Carolyn Bryant's husband heard about the "Chicago Boy's" outrageous behavior. Two nights later, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam roused Emmett's uncle and cousins, demanding Emmett. He was not seen alive again.

Three days later, a mangled, beaten, decomposing body was fished out of the Tallahatchie River. The corpse had been weighted with a 75-pound fan tied to the neck with barbed wire. Emmett was identified by a ring that had belonged to his father.

His mother demanded that the body be returned to Chicago, where she decided that the world would see what had been done to her child. Newspapers and Jet Magazine published pictures of the swollen face. National outrage in the black community mounted, but an all-white, all-male jury (in 1955, that was the norm) found Bryant and Milan not guilty after one hour and seven minutes.

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A grand jury met in November and refused to indict the two men for kidnapping. Bryant and Milam were free; they could not be tried again. There were no federal "hate crime" laws in those days, and the 5th Amendment of the Constitution protected them from double jeopardy. Roy Bryant and "Big" Milam did the unthinkable-they sold their confessions to Look Magazine for $4,000.

The story ran in January 1956. The man who took down their words (in a Holiday Inn and a law office) was William Bradford Huie, who wrote The Execution of Private Slovik, The Americanization of Emily, and other novels.

"They didn't think they'd done anything wrong," Huie wrote of the meeting. They didn't intend kill him at first, but when the men went through Emmett's wallet and found a picture of a white girl in it, a school friend that Emmett claimed was his girlfriend, "they took him out and killed him."

Milam admitted to firing the gunshot that killed Emmett Till, and his words are chilling. Emmett, whose nickname was Bobo, told the pair he wasn't afraid of them.

"Well, what else could we do?" Milan said. "He was hopeless. I'm no bully; I never hurt a n----- in my life. I like n-----s-in their place-I know how to work ‘em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice." Milam went on in this vein, explaining graphically what the place of black men was in his well-ordered world: separate and powerless.

Huie revisited the area a year later and found that the Bryant and Milam families were being shunned by the community. They'd shut down their store-the store where Emmett Till had met Carolyn Bryant. Both men eventually died of cancer, decades later. No one ever served time for the murder.

In a sense, the crime they committed ended the world they thought they were upholding

The killing of Emmett Till is viewed by many as the first event of the Civil Rights movement. The shock and horror most people felt simmered and brewed and got everyone thinking: black, white, north, south. They were ready for change.

In December 1955, just before the confession of Bryant and Milam appeared in Look Magazine, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man.