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Chicago Marks 60th Anniversary of Emmett Till’s Death

HeadlineAug 28, 2015

In Chicago, relatives and community members held church services to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the death of 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was abducted, beaten and shot after he allegedly wolf-whistled at a white female store clerk named Carolyn Bryant while Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi. Till was a stutterer, and his mother had taught him to whistle any time he felt a stutter coming on. He was kidnapped from his uncle’s farm on August 28, 1955. His corpse was found three days later in the Tallahatchie River with a bullet hole in his head, barbed wire wrapped around his neck and a cotton-gin fan weighing down his body. Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, held an open-casket funeral for her son in Chicago, and the published images of his brutalized body galvanized the civil rights movement. Store clerk Carolyn Bryant’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were tried and acquitted for Till’s murder by an all-white, all-male jury that fall. The two later confessed to the murder but have since died.

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