System Critical

August 28, 1955: 14-year-old Emmett Till is kidnapped, tortured and brutally murdered in Mississippi for allegedly "flirting" with Carolyn Bryant 4 days earlier.

KIDNAPPING:
Between 2 a.m. - 3:30 a.m., Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam drove to Mose Wright's (Till's Uncle) house. Milam was armed with a pistol and a flashlight. He asked Wright if he had 3 boys in the house from Chicago.

Till was sharing a bed with another cousin; there were 8 people in the small two-bedroom cabin.

Milam asked Wright to take them to "the n*gger who did the talking". Till's great-aunt offered the men money, but Milam refused as he rushed Emmett to put on his clothes. Mose Wright informed the men that Till was from up north and didn't know any better. The men marched Till out to the truck. Wright said he heard them ask someone in the car if this was the boy, and heard someone say "yes".

MURDER:
They tied up Till in the back of a green pickup truck and drove toward Money, Mississippi. They took Till back to Bryant's Groceries and recruited two Black men. The men then drove to a barn in Drew.

They pistol-whipped him on the way and reportedly knocked him unconscious. Willie Reed, who was 18 years old at the time, saw the truck passing by. Reed recalled seeing two white men in the front seat, and "two Black males" in the back.

In an interview with William Bradford Huie that was published in Look magazine in 1956, Bryant and Milam said that they intended to beat Till and throw him off an embankment into the river to frighten him.

While they were beating Till, he called them bastards, declared he was as good as they, and said that he had sexual encounters with white women.

They put Till in the back of their truck, drove to a cotton gin to take a 70-pound fan—the only time they admitted to being worried, thinking that by this time in early daylight they would be spotted and accused of stealing—and drove for several miles along the river looking for a place to dispose of Till. They shot him by the river and weighted his body with the fan.