The Blood of Emmett Till

Emmett Till exists in the text as a character and as a symbol. When he’s alive, he’s a young black American with his entire life before him. Before he can reach adulthood or realize his potential, he’s targeted, kidnapped, murdered, and discarded. The racist system that governed Mississippi in the 1950s worked to first bury the case and then to discredit Till’s character, spinning falsehoods about attempted rape in an attempt to justify his violent death.

Upon seeing her son’s brutalized corpse, Mamie Till said, “Let the people see what they did to my boy” (71). She turned her son into a symbol of racial injustice when she held an open-casket service to display Emmett’s body. She was resolved to expose her son’s murder and refused to let him become something even less than a statistic—a buried and unacknowledged casualty of racism in the South. Thousands of people came to view Emmett’s body, and pictures of his corpse circulated across the globe; the whole world bore witness to the horrific violence enacted against this 14-year-old boy. By presenting his body to the world, Mamie Till forced the general public to confront the racial violence in America, particularly in the South. Consequently, the image of Emmett Till’s body galvanized the civil right movement, spotlighting the violence bred by racism, injustice, and inequality.