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Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was an African-American teenager who was lynched in Mississippi at the age of 14, after reportedly flirting with a white woman. Till was from Chicago, Illinois, and visiting relatives in Money, a small town in the Mississippi Delta region. He spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the married proprietor of a small grocery store there. Several nights later, Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam went to Till's great-uncle's house and abducted the boy. They took him away and beat and mutilated him before shooting him and sinking his body in the Tallahatchie River. Three days later, Till's body was discovered and retrieved from the river. Till's body was returned to Chicago. His mother, who had mostly raised him, insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket to show the world the brutality of the killing. "The open-coffin funeral held by Mamie Till Bradley exposed the world to more than her son Emmett Till's bloated, mutilated body. Her decision focused attention not only on American racism and the barbarism of lynching but also on the limitations and vulnerabilities of American democracy". Tens of thousands attended his funeral or viewed his casket and images of his mutilated body were published in black-oriented magazines and newspapers, rallying popular black support and white sympathy across the U.S. Intense scrutiny was brought to bear on the condition of black civil rights in Mississippi, with newspapers around the country critical of the state. Although initially local newspapers and law enforcement officials decried the violence against Till and called for justice, they soon began responding to national criticism by defending Mississippians, which eventually transformed into support for the killers. In September 1955, Bryant and Milam were acquitted of Till's kidnapping and murder. Protected against double jeopardy, Bryant and Milam publicly admitted in an interview with ''Look'' magazine that they killed Till. Problems identifying Till affected the trial, partially leading to Bryant's and Milam's acquittals, and the case was officially reopened by the United States Department of Justice in 2004. As part of the investigation, the body was exhumed and autopsied resulting in a positive identification. He was reburied in a new casket, which is the standard practice in cases of body exhumation. His original casket was donated to the Smithsonian Institution. The trial of Bryant and Milam attracted a vast amount of press attention. Till's murder is noted as a pivotal catalyst to the next phase of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. Events surrounding Emmett Till's life and death, according to historians, continue to resonate. Some writers have suggested that almost every story about Mississippi returns to Till, or the region in which he died, in "some spiritual, homing way".〔Houck and Grindy, pp. 4–5.〕 == Early childhood == Emmett Till was the son of Mamie Carthan (1921–2003) and Louis Till (1922–1945). Emmett's mother was born in the small Delta town of Webb, Mississippi. The Delta region encompasses the large, multi-county area of northwestern Mississippi in the watershed of the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers. When Carthan was two years old, her family moved to Argo, Illinois, as part of the Great Migration of rural black families out of the South to the North to escape lack of opportunity and unequal treatment under the law.〔Whitfield, p. 15.〕 Argo received so many Southern migrants it was named "Little Mississippi"; Carthan's mother's home was often used as a way station for people who had just moved from the South as they were trying to find jobs and housing. Mississippi was the poorest state in the U.S. in the 1950s, and the Delta counties were some of the poorest in Mississippi.〔Beito and Beito, p. 116.〕 In Tallahatchie County, where Mamie Carthan was born, the average income per household in 1949 was $690 ($ in 2013 dollars); for black families it was $462 ($ in 2013 dollars).〔Whitaker (1963), p. 19.〕 Economic opportunities for blacks were almost nonexistent. Most of them were sharecroppers who lived on land owned by whites. Blacks had essentially been excluded from voting and the political system since the white-dominated legislature passed a new constitution in 1890, and had very few legal rights. Till was born in Chicago and nicknamed "Bobo" as an infant by a family friend. His mother Mamie largely raised him with her mother; she and Louis Till separated in 1942 after she discovered he had been unfaithful. Louis later choked her to unconsciousness, to which she responded by throwing scalding water at him.〔Till-Mobley and Benson, pp. 14–16.〕 For violating court orders to stay away from Mamie, Emmett's father Louis was forced by a judge to choose between jail or enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1943;〔Till-Mobley and Benson, p. 17.〕 he was executed in Italy in 1945 after being convicted of rape and murder by a court-martial. At the age of six Emmett contracted polio, leaving him with a persistent stutter.〔Till-Mobley and Benson, pp. 36–38.〕 Mamie and Emmett moved to Detroit, where she met and married "Pink" Bradley in 1951. Emmett preferred to live in Chicago, so he relocated to live with his grandmother; his mother and stepfather rejoined him later that year. After the marriage dissolved in 1952, Bradley returned to Detroit.〔Till-Mobley and Benson, pp. 56–58.〕 Mamie Till Bradley and Emmett lived together in a busy neighborhood in Chicago's South Side, near extended relatives. She began working as a civilian clerk for the U.S. Air Force for a better salary and recalled that Emmett was industrious enough to help with chores at home, although he sometimes got distracted. His mother remembered that he did not know his own limitations at times. Following his and Mamie's separation, Bradley visited and began threatening her. At eleven years old, Emmett, with a butcher knife in hand, told Bradley he would kill him if Bradley did not leave.〔Till-Mobley and Benson, pp. 59–60.〕 Usually, however, Emmett was happy. He and his cousins and friends pulled pranks on each other (Emmett once took advantage of an extended car ride when his friend fell asleep and placed the friend's underwear on his head), and spent their free time in pickup baseball games. He was a natty dresser and often the center of attention among his peers.〔Till-Mobley and Benson, pp. 70–87.〕 In 1955, Emmett was stocky and muscular, weighing about and standing . Despite his being 14 years old, whites in Mississippi claimed Till looked like an adult. Mamie Till Bradley's uncle, 64-year-old Mose Wright, visited her and Emmett in Chicago during the summer and told Emmett stories about living in the Mississippi Delta. Emmett wanted to see for himself. Bradley was ready for a vacation and planned to take Emmett with her, but after he begged her to visit Wright, she relented. Wright planned to accompany Till with a cousin, Wheeler Parker, and another, Curtis Jones, would join them soon. Wright was a sharecropper and part-time minister who was often called "Preacher".〔FBI (2006), p. 6.〕 He lived in Money, Mississippi, a small town in the Delta that consisted of three stores, a school, a post office, a cotton gin, and a couple hundred residents, north of Greenwood. Before Emmett departed for the Delta, his mother cautioned him that Chicago and Mississippi were two different worlds, and he should know how to behave in front of whites in the South.〔Hampton, p. 2.〕 He assured her he understood.〔Till-Mobley and Benson, pp. 98–101.〕 Since 1882, when statistics on lynchings began to be collected, more than 500 African Americans had been killed by extrajudicial violence in Mississippi alone, and more than 3,000 across the South.〔Whitfield, p. 5.〕 Most of the incidents took place between 1876 and 1930; though far less common by the mid-1950s, these racially motivated murders still occurred. Throughout the South, whites publicly prohibited interracial relationships (while indulging in affairs with black women) as a means to maintain white supremacy. This was meant to "protect" white women from black men. Even the suggestion of sexual contact between black men and white women could carry severe penalties for black men. A resurgence of the enforcement of such Jim Crow mores was evident following World War II, when African-American veterans started pressing for equal rights in the South.〔Whitaker (1963), pp. 2–10.〕 Racial tensions increased further after the United States Supreme Court's 1954 decision in ''Brown v. Board of Education'' to end segregation in public education, which it ruled as unconstitutional. Many segregationists believed the ruling would lead to interracial marriage. Whites strongly resisted the court's ruling, in the case of a Virginia county, closing all the public schools to prevent integration. Other jurisdictions simply ignored the ruling. In other ways, whites used stronger measures to keep blacks politically disenfranchised, which they had been since the turn of the century. in the South was to constrain blacks forcefully from any semblance of social equality.〔Whitaker (1963), pp. 61–82.〕 A week before Till arrived in Mississippi, a black activist named Lamar Smith was shot and killed in front of the county courthouse in Brookhaven for political organizing. Three white suspects were arrested, but they were soon released.〔FBI (2006), p. 18.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Emmett Till」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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