Published in
Sep 23, 2020
Today is 65 years to the day Emmett Till’s murderers were acquitted in Sumner, Mississippi.
Every lawyer in town had signed on to defend Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam; businesses put out jars to collect donations for the defense. The proceedings took five days, and the deliberation — soda break included — was hardly more than an hour.
Rep. John Lewis was 15 at the time, just one year older than Till. “Emmett Till was my George Floyd,” he wrote in an op-ed published posthumously in the New York Times. “He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland, and Breonna Taylor.”
