[Previous entry: "Ethopian Jew directs Institute of Semitic Studies in Princeton"] [Next entry: "America's Disease is Greed"]

08/20/2004:

"The Lynching of Emmett Till"

Flashback

On August 20, 1955, Emmett Till, a 14 year-old, African-American boy from Chicago, left his home to visit relatives in Money, Mississippi, a tiny cotton gin town on the eastern edge of the Mississippi Delta. His mutilated corpse would return to Chicago in a coffin less than two weeks later.

Emmett wasn't a civil rights activist. He wasn't politically active. He didn't go to Mississippi to change the Jim Crow culture. But, the national media attention surrounding his death and the trial and acquittal of his alleged killers had an impact that no one ever could have imagined. The Emmett Till case became one of the key incidents of 1955, the explosive year that launched the modern Civil Rights Movement.

Full Article : jimcrowhistory.org