White men kidnapped, mutilated and murdered Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy, on Aug. 28, 1955—a murder that sparked national outrage and helped kick off the Civil Rights Movement. But in the decades after a jury made up of only white men acquitted his killers, silence blanketed the Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, community until around 2005, when County Supervisor Jerome Little decided he wanted to honor Till with both action and remembrance.

“There are so many other folks who had been murdered in other places prior to (Till), and no one said a word. Or more specifically, from a collective standpoint, there was silence. And that was the truth about Tallahatchie County. And as a native, I can tell you no one was talking about Emmett Till, Mamie Till-Mobley,” Benjamin Salsberry, the Emmett Till Interpretive Center’s director of public education and museum education, said at the Two Mississippi Museums’ History Is Lunch panel on Aug. 13, 2025.

Little and six other Black men formed the Magnificent Seven in 1977 with the intent to seek public office and give housing, clean water, voting rights, health care and education to the county’s Black residents.

Jerome Little was Tallahatchie County’s first Black supervisor, board president and vice president. He is pictured speaking to a group at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in winter 2009. Photo by Belinda Stewart

In 1994, Little and Bobby Banks became the first Black supervisors elected to the Tallahatchie County board. The Magnificent Seven had to sue the County three times because local election officials would not certify the election results and allow Black voters to have representation in the county.

Tallahatchie County did not have any Black supervisors from 1855 until 1994 despite being a majority-Black county throughout its history. Little was also the county’s first Black board president and vice president.

Little established the Emmett Till Memorial Commission in 2006, kicking off a wave of activism in the Tallahatchie County community. The commission orchestrated a 2007 community apology to Till’s family for the county’s wrongdoings and acknowledged Till’s kidnapping and murder. Till’s relatives, Simeon Wright and Weaver Parker, who are witnesses and survivors of Till’s story, attended the event held on the steps of the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in 2007.

The commission installed historic land markers around the county in 2008 that memorialized where Till was kidnapped and murdered. Racists stole one of Till’s markers and shot up another one 317 times.

“I want to make sure that whoever did this knows that. … every time (this sign is) taken down, it’s going back up,” Little said in 2008, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History reported.

Three University of Mississippi students from the Kappa Alpha fraternity posed while holding rifles in front of a shot-up historic marker at the river site in 2019. The commission erected a bulletproof historic marker later that year. But within a few months, a security camera recorded pictures of a white supremacist group with a Confederate-themed 1894 state flag (which was still the official state flag then) and a League of the South flag making a propaganda film in front of the marker.

Little advocated for the creation of an Emmett Till museum and for the restoration of the Tallahatchie County Courthouse, where a jury acquitted Emmett Till’s murderers. The supervisor died in 2011.

Racists stole one of Emmett Till’s historical markers and shot up another marker 317 times. Three University of Mississippi students from the Kappa Alpha fraternity posed while holding rifles in front of a shot-up historic marker in 2019. Photo courtesy The Emmett Till Memorial Commission

The memorial commission now continues as the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, which opened its doors in Sumner, Mississippi, in 2015. It is one of the four sites that are part of the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument that President Joe Biden signed into law in 2023. The center maintains relationships with the community and educates people about Till’s spot in the Civil Rights Movement.

Aug. 28, 2025, marks the 70th anniversary of Till’s kidnapping and murder. The Emmett Till Interpretive Center is honoring his legacy with ceremonies and educational events on Aug. 28 through Aug. 30 at Mississippi Valley State University in Itta Bena.

“The Till story is not just a Mississippi story or a southern story—it is a human-rights story that is very much a part of this nation’s complicated historical fabric,” Daphne Chamberlain, chief program officer of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, said during the Aug. 13 History Is panel.

‘In My Day, The Girls Had One Ambition—To Get Married’

Mamie Till-Mobley was born Mamie Carthan in 1921 in Webb, Mississippi, in Tallahatchie County, just two miles away from the courthouse in which her son’s murderers would eventually face trial. She and her family moved to Argo, Illinois, in 1924 during the Great Migration period in which about six million Black people fled the South in search of a better life in the North, Midwest and West.

Till-Mobley was a good student who became the first Black student to make the “A” rating honor roll and the fourth Black student to graduate from the predominantly white Argo Community High School. She spent her summers with her aunt in the hot, humid state of Mississippi.

“In my day, the girls had one ambition—to get married. Very few kids finished high school,” Till-Mobley recalled in a PBS article.

At age 18, Louis Till set his eyes on Mamie Carthan. He took her on a date to the ice cream parlor for her first banana split. Her mother disapproved of their relationship, so she briefly called it off. But the couple began dating again and got married on Oct. 14, 1940.

An old black and white photo of Mamie Till Mobley posing with her infant son Emmett Till — Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley are photographed together when Till was a toddler. Photo courtesy PBS

Nine months later, Emmett Till made his arrival into the world. He had a bout with polio at age 5 that left him with a lifelong stutter, but he was otherwise happy and healthy. Emmett Till never had a relationship with his father because the U.S. Army deployed Louis Till to Europe when his son was a baby.

Mamie Till-Mobley and Louis Till divorced in 1942. The U.S. Department of Defense sent Mamie Till-Mobley a brief, non-descriptive letter in 1945 that said her ex-husband was killed in Italy due to “willful misconduct.”

Till-Mobley and Emmett Till moved to Chicago’s South Side in the early 1950s. Till-Mobley married Gene “Pink” Bradley, but they divorced after two years together.

She decided to travel to Nebraska to visit some of her relatives in 1955. The mother wanted her son to join her on the trip, but Emmett Till wanted to spend the last of summer with his cousins in Mississippi.

‘Better Be the Business of Us All’

Mamie Till-Mobley put her son on a southbound train from Chicago, Illinois, to Money, Mississippi, where Till’s cousins and great-uncle Moses Wright lived. Before he left, Till-Mobley warned Till to behave in front of white people and said that he had to act differently in Mississippi than he did in Chicago. She never saw her son alive again.

Till had spent three days in Money with his cousins before they went to Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market to buy food and drinks on Aug. 24, 1955, after they had worked outside on a farm in the hot sun. Carolyn Bryant, the wife of store owner Roy Bryant, was tending the store by herself that day while her sister-in-law watched her children.

Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, accused Till of wolf-whistling at her, touching her and flirting with her. Till’s cousin Simeon Wright, who was at the store that day, said Till wolf-whistled at Carolyn Bryant as a joke and said he did not touch or flirt with the woman. Carolyn Bryant admitted decades later that she had lied about Till touching her.

“Well, it scared us half to death,” Simeon Wright told Chicago Magazine in 2009. “You know, we were almost in shock. We couldn’t get out of there fast enough, because we had never heard of anything like that before. A black boy whistling at a white woman? In Mississippi? No.”

Mose Wright, right, and his son Simeon, sit in their home on Dark Fear Road in the community of Money, Mississippi, and discuss the loss of their 15-year-old relative, Emmett Till, on Sept. 1, 1955. Till was a nephew of Mose Wright and cousin of Simeon Wright. AP Photo

Roy Bryant was transporting shrimp to Texas during the time Till visited the store, and he arrived back in Mississippi on Aug. 27, 1955. At 2:30 a.m. on Aug. 28, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam abducted Till from Wright’s cabin on Dark Fear Road, where he was sleeping in a bed with his cousin.

Till’s great-aunt Elizabeth Wright offered the men money to prevent them from taking her nephew, but the men declined and said they would kill Moses Wright if the family did not let them kidnap Till.

Till admitted to the men that he was the person who talked to Carolyn Bryant at the marketplace. Milam and Roy Bryant stripped him of his clothes, pistol-whipped him, brutally beat him and shot him in the head. They dumped his dead body, with a 75-pound gin fan tied around his neck using barbed wire, over the Bayou Bridge in Glendora near the Tallahatchie River.

With Till’s face unrecognizable due to the brutality, Moses Wright was only able to identify his nephew’s body because of the ring Till was wearing that had “L.T.” and “May 25, 1943” carved into it.

Milam and Roy Bryant went on trial for Till’s kidnapping and murder, but an all-white jury acquitted them after a five-day trial with a 67-minute deliberation.

J.W. Milam (left) and Roy Bryant (right) sit with their wives, Juanita Milam (center left) and Carolyn Bryant (center right) in the courtroom in Sumner, Miss. on September 23, 1955 before the start of the fifth day of their murder trial. The half-brothers are charged with the murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy. AP Photo

On the third day of the trial, attorneys asked if Moses Wright could identify Till’s abductor. Wright pointed at Milam, and said, “There he is,” the Emmett Till Interpretive Center website says.

Till-Mobley flew to Mississippi and gave testimony during the trial.

“When something happened to the Negroes in the South, I said, ‘That’s their business, not mine.’ Now, I know how wrong I was. The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us anywhere in the world had better be the business of us all,” Mamie Till-Mobley said in September 1955.

Milam and Roy Bryant later admitted to killing Till in a 1956 Look magazine article, but could not be tried again due to protections against double jeopardy.

Moses Wright moved his family from Mississippi to Chicago after the trial, his son, Simeon Wright, told Chicago Magazine in 2009.

A Name Heard Around The Country

Mamie Till-Mobley insisted that the casket holding her son’s body be left open during the funeral. She had a five-day-long open-casket funeral at the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago.

“I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby,” she said after the funeral.

More than 50,000 people viewed Till’s body during the funeral, and photographs circulated around the U.S. in magazines like the Chicago Defender and Jet.

Mamie Till-Mobley (center) and Emmett Till’s grandmother, Alma Carthan (right, with arm raised) mourn at Till’s funeral in 1955. Photo by Dave Mann / courtesy Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

Till-Mobley became a public speaker after her son’s murder and had a close relationship with Black media outlets. The NAACP hired her to travel around the country on a speaking tour to share her son’s story, marking one of the most successful fundraising tours in the organization’s history.

Following the tragedy, Till-Mobley focused her work and activism on education for children living in poverty. She taught in Chicago’s public school system for 23 years. At Carter Elementary School, she started a theater troupe called the Emmett Till Players that worked with children outside of the classroom to learn and perform speeches by civil-rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., with a goal of uplifting and unifying the community.

Till-Mobley coauthored her memoir, “Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America,” with Christopher Benson. Random House published the book in 2003—almost 50 years after Till’s death—and a few months after Till-Mobley died.

“Although I have lived so much of my life without Emmett, I have lived my entire life because of him,” the last line of her memoir says.

Till-Mobley married Gene Mobley on June 24, 1957. He died due to a stroke on March 18, 2000, and she died of heart failure at age 81 on Jan. 6, 2003. Till-Mobley is buried next to her husband and near her son in Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois. Her headstone reads, “Her pain united a nation.”

Read more stories about Emmett Till at our Emmett Till archive page here.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said that Carolyn Bryant’s sister was watching her children; it has been corrected to say her sister-in-law was watching the children. It has also been corrected to say that Milam threatened Moses Wright, not the entire family.

Read original article by clicking here.

On Emmett Till’s 70th Death Anniversary, Mississippi Museums Remember Survivors, Witnesses and Activists

‘In My Day, The Girls Had One Ambition—To Get Married’

‘Better Be the Business of Us All’

A Name Heard Around The Country

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