Emmett Till was a 14-year-old African American boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955.
The 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy, is one of the most notorious crimes of the 20th century. Till was brutally beaten and shot after allegedly flirting with Carolyn Bryant, a white woman working at a grocery store in Money, Mississippi. Bryant’s husband Roy and his half brother J.W. Milam were charged with the murder but acquitted by an all-white jury. The two men later admitted to killing Till in an interview for Look magazine, where they detailed how they had kidnapped him from his uncle’s home and brutally beaten him before shooting him in the head and disposing of his body in the Tallahatchie River.
The case has since been immortalized by artist Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica, which depicts the aftermath of a bombing during the Spanish Civil War. The painting is on display at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
