1. The Civil Rights Movement

2. Emmett Till (1955)
Look at the following images and note down the following:
Your overall impression.
Details from some of the photos.
What is the subject of the photos?

8. Emmett and Mamie Till

9. Emmett Till

11. Emmett Till’s Corpse

12. Assignment: Answer the questions posed in the PowerPoint readings or other sources from the web.

13. Questions Where was Emmett from?
Where was Emmett murdered? Give the location and date of the incident.
Why was Emmett murdered?
Who were the persons involved. Name and identify.
Provide a brief summary of the events.
What social conditions caused the death of Emmett Till?
What happened to the men accused of the murder? Why?

14. Questions 8. What do you think of what happened?
9. What were the long term effects of his murder?
10. What made this case different from the other murders happening in the south at this time?
11. What effect do you think the photos had on other African-Americans? On whites who lived in the South? On the rest of the country?

15. Timeline of Emmett Till
Emmett Till’s murder in 1955 would come a year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision
Months before 2 African American activists in Mississippi murdered
NAACP Reverend George Lee shot and killed after trying to vote
Lamar Smith shot and killed in front of courthouse after casting vote
Many eyewitnesses, no one arrested
100 days after the death of Emmett Till on December 5, 1955 Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus

16. How did this happen? Emmett Till was 14
Emmett Till lived in Chicago but had relatives in Mississippi who he wanted to visit
In 1955 Emmett Till went to visit his relatives in Mississippi
Mother gave him a stern warning before he left, she said, “Be careful. If you have to get down on your knees and bow when a white person goes past, do it willingly.”

17. How did this happen?
Emmett was out front of a local grocery store playing and showed a picture of a white girl from Chicago
Till said that this was his girlfriend
Somebody suggested he go inside and talk to the white women behind the register
Till did and there are conflicting reports about what was said
Supposedly Till as he was leaving said, ‘Bye Baby” and maybe whistled at her

18. What happened
A couple days later Ron Bryant whose wife was the woman behind the register and J.W. Milam his half brother found Emmett Till
They came in the middle of the night and took him from his uncle’s house
Next, Bryant and Milam beat Till to death and shot him in the head
After the two had killed Till they tied him to a cotton gin fan and dumped him into the Tallahatchie River near Money, Mississippi

20. Aftermath
Till was so badly beaten that the only way his uncle could identify him was by an initialed ring he was wearing
One eye was gouged out and his head was crushed in with a bullet hole thru it
Till’s mom, Mamie Till held an open casket funeral so everyone could see what had been done to her son
Thousands of people came and saw the body

21. Trial
Bryant and Milam were arrested and brought to trial for the murder of Emmett Till
Prosecution was having a tough time finding witnesses because at this point in time it was unheard of for an African American to accuse a white of committing a crime
It was not until Till’s uncle Mose Wright stepped to the stand and very bravely and boldly gave his testimony

22. Trial
In his testimony he was asked if he could point out who had taken his nephew that summer night
Wright stood up and pointed at Bryant and Milam and said, “Dar he” “There he is”
After this many more African Americans came to testify against the two men
These witnesses were all hurried out of the state quickly after their testimony

23. Decision Jury consisted of 12 white men
The jury deliberated for only an hour
Returned with the verdict of “not guilty”
Verdict delivered on September 23rd, 1955 the 166th anniversary of the signing of the Bill of Rights
Months after the trial is over Bryant and Milam do an article for Look Magazine in which they confess to the crime

24. Impact of Emmett Till
Helped to unite Northern and Southern African Americans
Membership in the NAACP soared
Till’s murder was a spark that caused a surge in the activism and resistance of the civil rights movement
The picture of Till’s brutalized body pushed many into the fight for civil rights who had been content to sit on the side

25. Emmett Till
1955

26. Questions Use the following link and read the article that appeared
in Look magazine following the Emmet Till trial.
Write a one page response to the article focusing on the following prompts:
What evidence reveals the social conditions in the South?
Would you have acted similarly? Why or why not? Consider the time in which this occurred.
PowerPoint Sources:

27. Mamie Till, Emmett’s mother
Emmett Till
“Two months ago I had a nice apartment in Chicago. I had a good job. I had a son. When something happened to the blacks 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, Emmett’s mother

28. Emmett Till
The Emmett Till case was a spark for a new generation to commit their lives to social change, you know. They said, "We're not gonna die like this. Instead, we're gonna live and transform the South so people won't have to die like this." And if anything, if any event of the 1950s inspired young people to be committed to that kind of change, it was the lynching of Emmett Till.
Emmett Till, in some ways, gave ordinary black people in a place like Montgomery not just courage, but I think instilled them with a sense of anger, and that anger at white supremacy, and not just white supremacy, but the decision of the court to exonerate these men from murdering -- for outright lynching this young kid -- that level of anger, I think, led a lot of people to commit themselves to the movement. And Montgomery felt the reverberations of that just like Little Rock, Arkansas, two years later.

29. spark for a new, younger generation to commit lives to social change:
What was the effect of Emmett Till’s murder on the Civil Rights Movement?
spark for a new, younger generation to commit lives to social change:
Rosa Parks
Martin Luther King
the images of Emmett’s body made it impossible for the rest of the country to ignore the racism, discrimination and level of violence against blacks in the south.
international attention on verdict made it harder for US to serve as a model of democracy– pressure for federal government to intervene.

30. Why did the civil rights movement spring to life in the 1950s?
Murder of Emmett Till
1950
1960
1955
1954
1956
1957
1959
Start of McCarthyism
1958
Brown vs. Board of Education
McCarthy era comes to an end
Copy and paste the above timeline into PowerPoint or Word. Complete the timeline for the years 1956 to Chose two important events for each year and place them on the timeline.
Provide a brief description for each event at the bottom of the slide or page. Be prepared to describe each event.

31. Amendment XIV
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the
United States, and subject to the jurisdiction
thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.