Courtroom 302

When three white teenagers in the Bridgeport section of Chicago beat 13-year-old Lenard Clark almost to death in March 1997, the city’s black community immediately recalled the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. Till was a 14-year-old Chicago native tortured and lynched by two white men—Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam—in Money, Mississippi where Till had been visiting relatives. Till’s offense was that he supposedly whistled at Bryant’s wife, Carolyn. An all-white jury acquitted Bryant and Milam. Knowing that double jeopardy laws would prevent them from being tried again for the same crime, the men confessed to murdering Till in the January 1956 Look magazine feature “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi.” In 2017, Carolyn Bryant (later, Donham) confessed to an historian that she had lied about the details of her encounter with Till.

For over half a century, the story of Till’s murder has been a symbol of black people’s vulnerability within intrinsically racist justice system—one that so insufficiently recognizes the inhumanity of black people that it cannot even manage to protect murdered or assaulted children. Though Till’s murder was a major catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement, the memory of his lynching is resurrected in every public instance in which a black boy is beaten, tortured, or murdered in a hate crime or during instances of supposed community vigilantism.