AUGUST 1955
A lynching jumpstarts the civil rights movement
Teenager EMMETT TILL’s brutal murder exposed the savagery of southern racism as never before
On 20 August 1955, Mamie Till embraced her 14-year-old son, Emmett, one final time, before ushering him on to the train that would take him out of his native Chicago into the heart of the Deep South. He was travelling to Mississippi, intending to soak up the last of the summer sun and visit his extended family, before returning home .
As Emmett’s train travelled south, he was entering a different world. Devery Anderson, the author of a biography of Till, told me: “In Chicago and in the north, there was certainly still racism. But the difference between the north and the south was that in the south it was done by statute.”
For decades, the southern states had been the land of the Jim Crow laws, where segregation in all aspects of life was legally sanctioned. In 1896, this practice had been rubber-stamped at the highest federal level, as the US supreme court had ruled that providing “separate but equal” facilities to white and black Americans was constitutional.
However, this meant far more than simply restricting what water fountains people could drink at, or what restaurants they could frequent. Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of history at Duke University, says: “Jim Crow was sending your child to the store and not knowing if they were going to come back home. It was getting killed because you stepped into an elevator without realising a white woman was in there, and were accused of rape. People need to understand how ghastly and all-consuming it was.”
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