28 agos 1955 año - Emmett Till murdered

Descripción:

Brown had been the law of the land for barely a year when a single act of violence jolted black America. Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American from the South Side of Chicago, visited relatives in Mississippi in the summer of 1955. Seen talking to a white woman in a grocery store, he was tortured and murdered by local whites during the night of August 28. Several days later, his mutilated body was found at the bottom of a river, tied with barbed wire to a heavy steel cotton gin fan. Till’s mother chose to hold an open-casket funeral back in Chicago, and photos of his disfigured corpse ran in Jet magazine and other black publications. The gruesome images brought national attention to the heinous crime.


Two white men were arrested for Till’s murder. During the trial, followed closely in black communities across the country, the lone witness to Till’s kidnapping — his uncle, Mose Wright — identified both of the accused men. Feeling “the blood boil in hundreds of white people as they sat glaring in the courtroom,” Wright said, “it was the first time in my life I had the courage to accuse a white man of a crime.” Despite Wright’s eyewitness testimony, the all-white jury found the defendants innocent. This miscarriage of justice — later, the killers even admitted their guilt in a Look magazine article — galvanized an entire generation of African Americans.

Añadido al timeline:

fecha: