Witness to Emmett Till lynching dies in Illinois

[The Straight Story]

CHICAGO (AP) — Hearing the screams of 14-year-old lynching victim Emmett Till from inside a Mississippi barn left a teenage field hand with an unbearable choice. He could tell a courtroom and risk paying for it with his life or keep quiet and let those screams eat away at his conscience.

Grisly photos of Till's mutilated body, discovered three days later by a fisherman in the Tallahatchie River, left Willie Louis with no doubt about what he would do: testify at the trial of two white men accused in the black teen's slaying.

"In the pictures, I saw his body, what it was like. Then I knew that I couldn't say no," Louis recalled in a 2004 "60 Minutes" interview about the testimony he gave half a century earlier.

Louis died July 18 at age 76 at a hospital in a suburb of Chicago, the city he fled to in fear of his life after the 1955 trial, his wife, Juliet Louis, said in an interview Wednesday, a few hours before her husband's funeral service.

Till's torture and killing in the Mississippi Delta galvanized the civil rights movement. The Chicago boy was visiting an uncle and had been warned by family to be on his best behavior in the segregated South. On Aug. 28, 1955, two white men abducted him from his uncle's home because he had whistled at one of their wives. They admitted to the kidnapping, but claimed they just wanted to scare the boy and that they eventually turned him loose.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/witness-emmett-till-lynching-dies-illinois

[The Straight Story]

2. It is not so far off in a sense from what happened to Trayvon

Who was doing nothing but walking home.

[napkinz]

4. we still have a long way to go ...

[JustAnotherGen]

3. I disagree

They never feared for their lives

They feared for all of white America's lives. Hence why a kid whistling at a white woman to them - meant he was going to rape her - and sully and stain white America with blackness forever.

[Agschmid]

6. The way you word your OP it looks like you are saying Trayvon attacked his killer...

Is that what you meant by that? Love an explanation...

[Wednesdays]

8. Did I miss something?

Trayvon wasn't mentioned in either the OP or reply #1.

[Agschmid]

9. You did...

The murder of Till was atrocious. He did not physically attack the killers

They never feared for their lives. The only "sin" Emmet" committed was (allegedly) whistling at a woman.

Thank God I was not born during those dark years of our nation.

... Eyeroll this is someone trying to (not so subtly) hide their true intentions.

[Hoyt]

5. Took a lot of guts to testify. Notice that family told Emmett Till to be careful how he acted around

white folks. That stuff still seems to be going on today to some extent. Shame.

RIP Mr. Louis.

[KansDem]

7. What I find bizarre about this tragic incident...

...is that Roy and Carolyn Bryant's customers were mostly African-American.

Till arrived in Money, Mississippi on August 21, 1955. On August 24, he and cousin Curtis Jones skipped church where Wright was preaching, joining some local boys as they went to Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market to buy candy. The teenagers were children of sharecroppers and had been picking cotton all day. The market was owned by a white couple, 24-year-old Roy Bryant and his wife Carolyn, and mostly catered to the local sharecropper population. Carolyn was alone in the store that day; her sister-in-law was in the rear of the store watching children. Jones left Till with the other boys while Jones played checkers across the street. According to Jones, the other boys reported that Till had a photograph of an integrated class at the school he attended in Chicago,[note 1] and Till bragged to the boys that the white children in the picture were his friends. He pointed to a white girl in the picture, or referred to a picture of a white girl that had come with his new wallet,[20] and stated that she was his girlfriend. One or more of the local boys dared Till to speak to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant.[21]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till

You'd think someone who worked with the African-American population in Mississippi might have a bit more patience with and understanding for a black kid visiting from Chicago. You'd think given the climate for racial hatred and violence, Roy would have taken him to one side and gave him some advice about visiting Mississippi.

You wouldn't think torture and murder would be his "lesson."