What did Martin Luther King Jr say about Emmett Till?
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, Carolyn Bryant, in her family’s grocery store. Till was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. During summer vacation in August 1955, he was visiting relatives near Money, Mississippi,…
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, Carolyn Bryant, in her family’s grocery store.
Till was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. During summer vacation in August 1955, he was visiting relatives near Money, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region. He spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the white, married proprietor of a small grocery store there. Although what happened at the store is a matter of dispute.
What did Martin Luther King Jr say about Emmett Till?
Dr. King addressed Till’s murder when talking about “the evil of racial injustice” in subsequent years. He evoked “the crying voice of a little Emmett C. Till, screaming from the rushing waters in Mississippi” in a 1963 Mother’s Day sermon.
Dr. King did not mention the eighth anniversary of Till’s death to the hundreds of thousands gathered before him at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. Instead, his “I Have a Dream” speech spoke to the broader institutional discrimination of police violence, political and economic disenfranchisement, and more that allows for deadly racist terror to flourish
