On this day in 1955, in the courthouse at Sumner, Mississippi, a jury of twelve white men returned a verdict of not guilty for Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, charged with the murder of Emmett Till. Emmett was fourteen. He had come down from Chicago in August to spend part of the summer with relatives. The deliberation took a little over an hour.
Earlier, in Chicago, his mother Mamie Till-Mobley had made a decision that the record still carries. She insisted on an open casket, and she allowed photographs. Tens of thousands of people filed past. She said she wanted the world to see what had been done to her son, and the world did see, in funeral homes and in the pages of magazines that carried the pictures across the country.
The front page below is the Evening Star of the following morning, and it is worth noticing how the day looked while it was still only a day. The banner is about arms talks. The Sumner story sits lower down the page, under a line about a kidnapping charge still to come. Emmett Till was buried outside Chicago. His mother lived until 2003, and spoke about him for the rest of her life.
The funeral was at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ on the South Side, and the line of mourners ran for days. Mamie Till-Mobley said later that she was thinking of the church as a place where people are used to looking at what is hardest to look at.
In 1962 a young Bob Dylan wrote and sang "The Death of Emmett Till," one of the first songs to carry the story to rooms that had only read about it. He was twenty-one, and he sang it plainly, with one guitar. It travelled.