Today in History: Emmett Till is murdered, 1955

While visiting family in Money, Mississippi, 14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, is brutally murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman four days earlier.
His assailants—the white woman’s husband and her brother—made Emmett carry a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to take off his clothes. The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head and then threw his body, tied to the cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, into the river.
As is now well-known, the woman who told her husband that Emmett had assaulted her had completely made up the story.
Right now for my true-crime book club, we're reading a book called The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, about how an untrained medical examiner and a dentist were able to put away many, many innocent people in Mississippi, many of whom were black, by giving either bad or outright false expert testimony at trial.  There's a section dedicated to Emmett Till's murder, stating that his body was not autopsied until 2005, and how resistant the state was to implementing a medical examiner's office because they knew it would impact the intention of racially-motivated crimes.  
That poor boy.


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