essay on emmett till

Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Social Movements — Emmett Till

Essays on Emmett till

Hook examples for emmett till essays, anecdotal hook.

"In the sultry Mississippi summer of 1955, the tragic story of Emmett Till unfolded, forever altering the course of the civil rights movement. It's a tale of injustice and courage that must never be forgotten."

Rhetorical Question Hook

"What does it take to spark a revolution? The brutal murder of a 14-year-old African American boy named Emmett Till in the segregated South was a catalyst for change that still resonates today."

Startling Statistic Hook

"Over 4,000 African Americans were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968. Emmett Till's case brought worldwide attention to this horrifying practice, igniting the fight for civil rights."

"'The death of Emmett Till was the match that ignited the modern civil rights movement.' These words by historian David Halberstam underscore the profound impact of Till's tragic death."

Historical Hook

"The murder of Emmett Till occurred against the backdrop of Jim Crow laws and racial segregation. Examining this historical context sheds light on the systemic racism of the era."

Narrative Hook

"Imagine being in Emmett Till's shoes—a young boy from Chicago visiting Mississippi, unaware of the dangers he would face. His story is a powerful narrative of innocence lost."

Contrast Hook

"In the face of unspeakable tragedy, Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett's mother, displayed remarkable courage by holding an open-casket funeral. Her actions sparked outrage and laid the groundwork for change."

Emotional Appeal Hook

"Emmett Till's mother famously said, 'I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby.' The emotional impact of this statement underscores the urgency of seeking justice."

Shocking Scenario Hook

"Picture this: an innocent boy kidnapped, brutally beaten, and thrown into a river with a cotton gin fan tied to his neck. Emmett Till's murder is a shocking reminder of the horrors of racial violence."

Curiosity Hook

"What happened to the individuals responsible for Emmett Till's murder? Exploring the aftermath of the trial and its implications on the civil rights movement reveals a complex and haunting tale."

Emmett till and His Influence on The Civil Rights Movement

The blood of emmett till by timothy b. tyson: representation of one of the most notorious hate crimes in american history, an analysis of the death of emmett till by bob dylan and mississippi goddamn by nina simone, made-to-order essay as fast as you need it.

Each essay is customized to cater to your unique preferences

+ experts online

Analysis of Bob Dilan’s Song The Death of Emmett till

July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955

Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year-old African American boy who was abducted, tortured and lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till’s murder became a rallying point for the civil rights movement that followed.

Relevant topics

• Civil Disobedience
• Montgomery Bus Boycott
• Me Too Movement
• Pro Choice (Abortion)
• Illegal Immigration
• Gender Equality
• Human Trafficking
• Gun Control
• Women's Suffrage

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

The Murder of Emmett Till

Written by: Stewart Burns, Union Institute & University

By the end of this section, you will:.

• Explain how and why the civil rights movements developed and expanded from 1945 to 1960

Suggested Sequencing

Use this narrative with the Jackie Robinson Narrative, the Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Montgomery Bus Boycott Narrative, The Little Rock Nine Narrative, and the Rosa Parks’s Account of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Radio Interview), April 1956 Primary Source to discuss the rise of the African American civil rights movement pre-1960.

When 14-year-old Chicago resident Emmett Louis Till was brutally murdered by white supremacists on August 28, 1955, the lynching caught the attention of the national media and the story was broadcast all over the country. One resident of Sumner, as told to a reporter from the  Nation , “nodded his head in the direction of the Tallahatchie [and pointed out]: ‘That river’s full of niggers’.”

More than 4,000 African Americans, overwhelmingly men, were lynched in the South between 1890 and 1930. Almost all were murdered for crimes they did not commit, mostly on false accusations of accosting or assaulting white women. Ninety years after slavery’s abolition, Till’s slaying was an example of this barbaric custom intended to preserve white supremacy and violate the rule of law and fundamental rights.

Although white supremacists in charge of congressional committees blocked Congress from passing anti-lynching legislation for decades, lynchings decreased overall after the Great Depression. However, this was not true in Mississippi, which always had more lynchings than other southern states. Black Mississippians were victimized by violence and kept politically powerless. During the post – World War II era, only about 5 percent of eligible blacks were registered to vote in the state. Courageous black citizens – such as George Lee and Lamar Smith, who strove to enfranchise fellow African Americans – were sometimes lynched. For example, Lee and Smith were lynched shortly before Till’s murder. At least half a dozen others were killed in the next decade, notably farmer Herbert Lee, father of nine; Medgar Evers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); and young James Chaney, who was killed along with Mickey Schwerner and Andy Goodman, both white volunteers, during Mississippi’s Freedom Summer of 1964.

Pictured is the missing-persons poster released by the FBI showing photographs of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner (left to right), who were murdered in 1964 while in Mississippi attempting to help African Americans register to vote.

In the preceding decades, hundreds of thousands of black families had fled north to midwestern cities during the Great Migration, to escape the misery of life in segregated Mississippi. Many went to Chicago, including Emmett Till’s grandmother and mother, who was still a child at the time. Yet for many African Americans, this move did not mean escape from racially motivated violence. Segregation was not legalized in Chicago, but systemic racism and residential segregation were entrenched. Whites rioted again and again during the Great Migration that started with World War I, burning and bombing blacks’ homes in formerly white areas.

Till and his family avoided the worst of Chicago racism. Emmett knew what dangers lurked and not to cross racial lines. Born in June 1941, he was an only child and was raised by his young, single mother Mamie Till, with whom he had a close relationship. Short and stocky, he had contracted polio when he was six years old, which left him with a stutter. Yet he seemed a born entertainer, charismatic and funny. He loved baseball and was a churchgoing young man. He rode the train alone for an hour every Sunday to attend the Pentecostal church his family had founded. Till loved adventure and was thrilled when his Uncle Moses Wright invited him and two cousins to visit the fertile Mississippi Delta for a vacation of farming, fishing, and play. He convinced his reluctant mother to let him go.

Emmett Till, pictured here in 1954 in an image taken by his mother, was 14 years old when he travelled to Mississippi with his uncle.

From Mississippi, Till wrote his mother that he was having a great time. But one afternoon, while he was buying chewing gum at a country store in the tiny town of Money, Mississippi, the young man offended the pretty 21-year-old shopkeeper, allegedly smiling at her or being suggestive while whistling at her when he left. As she got her husband’s pistol from her car, Till reportedly wolf-whistled at her. Though his antics challenged the racial order of the Deep South, “nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him,” the woman admitted many years later.

Three days later, after midnight, her husband and his brother kidnapped Till from his uncle’s home. With a few white neighbors, they tortured and beat him savagely, shot him in the head, and threw him in the Tallahatchie River with a weight wired to his neck to make him sink and hide the evidence. His body somehow floated to the surface, however, and the killers were caught and eventually put on trial. In the meantime, Mamie Till demanded that her son’s mutilated corpse be displayed at his Chicago funeral in an open casket. “Let the world see what I’ve seen,” she insisted. More than 50,000 people did see what she had seen. Millions more were shocked when they saw pictures of the murdered, mutilated, and grotesquely disfigured boy in Life , Jet , and other national magazines.

At the trial, Mamie Till delivered emotional testimony, but the all-white jury set the men free, as often happened. White juries rarely enforced the rule of law in the segregated South, and whites accused of heinous crimes were usually acquitted. So Till’s killers confessed to the crime but were never punished, and Look magazine paid them for their story. Television, too, was increasingly making Northern whites more aware of the gross injustices suffered by African Americans in the South, such as the violence in Birmingham a few years later.

Because of Mamie Till’s determined efforts, the lynching and trial drew unprecedented national and world outrage over the murder of an African American, soiling America’s image in the Cold War against Communism, especially in developing nations. It washed out the optimism black Americans had felt a year earlier when the Supreme Court’s Brown decision outlawed segregated schools. During the fall of 1955, several hundred thousand joined rallies protesting Till’s murder in Chicago and other large cities. The growing coalition of churches, labor unions, and black organizations that marched helped launch the emerging civil rights movement, in conjunction with the simultaneous Montgomery Bus Boycott. Indeed, Rosa Parks was inspired, in part, by the Till murder to act against injustice when she made history on a bus in Montgomery just three months after his death. And, in the early 1960s, the lunch-counter protesters and freedom riders called themselves the “Emmett Till generation.” A preacher in the Albany, Georgia, movement declared he could “hear the blood of Emmett Till as it calls from the ground.”

The tragedy of Emmett Till echoes even today, in a room at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, where a display including Till’s casket has drawn multitudes to learn about the lynching, its impact on American history, and its lessons for American democracy. African Americans demonstrated during the civil rights movement for suffrage and equality, and for their inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Review Questions

1. What was the main reason African Americans left Mississippi for northern cities during the post World War II years?

• To escape poverty by getting jobs in factories
• To establish homes for family members who would soon follow
• To attend integrated universities
• To purchase property, which was illegal for African Americans in Mississippi

2. Why did the state trial jury acquit Emmett Till’s killers?

• The defense testimony was persuasive
• Many blacks were present in the courtroom
• White witnesses gave dishonest testimony
• Till’s body was never found

3. Most African American men who were lynched in Mississippi were

• guilty of an unspecified crime
• innocent but murdered to preserve the existing social system
• fugitives from neighboring states

4. The main reason Congress failed to pass anti-lynching laws was that

• Democrats opposed the power of a strong central government
• the argument had been made that murder was already illegal
• southern Democrats controlled a majority of Congressional committees and refused to consider anti-lynching legislation
• Democratic senators would filibuster anti-lynching legislation until it was withdrawn from consideration

5. As a result of the trial of Emmett Till’s killers and Till’s funeral,

• the social advancement of African Americans slowed for the remainder of the 1950s
• integrated schools in Chicago became segregated again
• the nation began to have more sympathy for the African American community
• anti-lynching laws were passed

Free Response Questions

• Explain the reasons Emmett Till’s mother insisted on an open casket at his funeral.
• Analyze the reasons lynching was pervasive in the mid-twentieth-century South.

AP Practice Questions

“Twas down in Mississippi Not so long ago When a young boy from Chicago Town Walk in a southern door This boy’s fateful tragedy We should all remember well The color of his skin was black And his name was Emmett Till Some men they dragged him to a barn And there they beat him up They said they had a reason But I disremember what They tortured him and did some things Too evil to repeat There was screamin’ sounds inside the barn There was laughin’ sound out on the street They dragged his body to a gulch Amidst a bloodred rain And they threw him in the waters wide To cease his screaming pain The reason that they killed him there And I’m sure it ain’t no lie He was a blackskin boy So he was born to die”

Bob Dylan, “The Death of Emmett Till,” © 1963

1. These lyrics most directly reflect the

• desire of southerners to maintain a segregated society
• victimization of African Americans in the South
• police brutality in northern communities
• harsh living conditions of African Americans in America

2. An immediate outcome of the incident described in the provided lyrics was the

• passage of new civil rights legislation
• revival of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi
• race riots breaking out in northern cities
• injustice of a famous court trial

3. The life of African Americans in the South during the 1950s was much the same as

• the antebellum experience of slaves
• the life of African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South
• the experience of indentured servants in early colonial days
• the life of free African Americans in the antebellum North

Primary Sources

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “The Lynching of Emmett Till”. Press release. September 1, 1955. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/naacp/the-civil-rights-era.html#obj9

Suggested Resources

Oates, Stephen B. Let the Trumpet Sound . NY: New American Library/Mentor, 1982.

Till-Mobley, Mamie. Death of Innocence . NY: Random House, 2003.

Tyson, Timothy B. The Blood of Emmett Till . NY: Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Whitfield, Stephen J. A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till . Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Related Content

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

In our resource history is presented through a series of narratives, primary sources, and point-counterpoint debates that invites students to participate in the ongoing conversation about the American experiment.