Emmett Louis Till was born in 1941. He was just 14 years old when he was murdered in 1955 near Money, Mississippi.

Emmett Till was born and raised and lived in Chicago with his mother Mamie Bradley. In August 1955, Emmett’s great uncle Moses Wright came up from Mississippi to visit the family in Chicago. At the end of his stay, Wright was planning to take Till’s cousin back to Mississippi with him to visit relatives down South, and when Emmett learned of the plans he begged his mother to let him go along. She reluctantly agreed, knowing full well the danger faced by black people in Mississippi.

Three days after arriving in Money, Mississippi on August 24, 1955, Emmett Till and several other teenagers went into Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market after a long day in the hot MIssissippi sun. Emmett bought some gum, but what exactly transpired inside the grocery store that afternoon will never be known. to a certainty. What is known is that Emmett spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant; the white, married proprietress of the store; she accused Emmett of wolf whistling and making sexual advances toward her.

In the Jim Crow South, black men were depicted as hideous, terrifying predators who targeted helpless white women, and Carolyn’s tears had to be avenged with righteous fury. Black males threatened the flower of Southern womanhood because whites knew that all black men were rapists. The reality was that Emmett merely violated the unwritten rules of conduct for black males interacting with white women .

Several nights later, at about 2 A.M., armed with five cell flashlight and an Army .45, Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J.W. Milam went to Emmett's great-uncle's house, and awakened the terrified family. They abducted Emmett at gunpoint., then took him away, viciously torturing and mutilating him before shooting him in the head. Afterwards, they tied a heavy cotton gin fan around his neck with barbed wire, and sunk his body in the Tallahatchie River.

Just a few days after his abduction and murder, Emmett's swollen and disfigured body was found by a youth fishing in the Tallahatchie river. His head was badly mutilated, he had been shot above the right ear, and his eye was dislodged from the socket. No autopsy was performed on Emmett’s body until some 40 years later in 1955. The grisly details revealed that he died of a gunshot wound to the head, had broken arm and femur bones and a fractured skull. According to the report, “the crown of his head was just crushed out . . . and a piece of his skull just fell out.” The report said that Emmett had been beaten so badly that his brain had to be removed before he was buried.

The trial began just 22 days after the murder, and Carolyn Bryant testified only that Till made verbal advances; she never alleged anything else. The jury did not officially hear Bryant's testimony, since the judge ruled it inadmissible, but the whole town and the all-white jury quickly knew what she said., because the defense attorney used her testimony in his closing arguments. White residents had raised over $10,000 for the defense. The jury and townspeople all knew that Emmett had gone too far and violated the code of the South. In effect, he caused his own death.

Initially, local newspapers condemned Emmett’s murder and called for justice, but in response to worldwide media criticizing MIssissippi, they did an about-face and supported the killers. A local attorney stated “…hell, we got to have our Milam’s to fight our wars and keep our niggers in line” and “If anymore pressure is put on us, the Tallatchee won’t hold all the niggers that’ll be thrown in it.” The white jury took a little over an hour to find Bryant and Milam not guilty of Emmett’s kidnapping and murder, even though the killers admitted on the stand that they had abducted Emmett from his great uncle’s home.

Emmett’s body was returned to Chicago, and his mother insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket, so the world could see what had been done to her son. The funeral showed Emmett’s horribly broken and mutilated body, and tens of thousands of people lined up and viewed his open casket. Images of Emmett’s body were published in black-oriented magazines and newspapers, rallying black support and white sympathy across the U.S. Intense scrutiny was brought to bear on the lack of black civil rights in the South, with newspapers around the U.S. and world critical of the state of MIssissippi.

Only one year later in 1956, shielded by double jeopardy, Milam and Bryant brazenly admitted in an interview with LOOK magazine that they had committed the murder. . It is reported that LOOK paid the men $4,000 in cash for the story and their confession, the equivalent of almost $40,000 today.

Author Timothy Tyson interviewed Carolyn Bryant in 2008, over 50 years after the murder, and wrote in his book “THE BLOOD OF EMMETT TILL” that Carolyn admitted that the incident that triggered Emmett’s murder never happened. She said that she had fabricated the testimony regarding her interaction with Emmett, specifically the portion where she accused him of grabbing her waist and uttering obscenities, saying "That part's not true," and “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”

Emmett’s mother lived with the grief of her murdered son for another 50 years. The self-confessed killers lived another 30 years; neither apologizing nor ashamed of what they had done. Nobody was ever held accountable for Emmet’s brutal murder.

In America, it’s always been this way. A white woman’s tears are worth more than a black man’s life.