What was the Emmett Till generation?
The Black Americans who grew up in the 1950s organized nearly all of the mass meetings, sit-ins and marches that accelerated the civil rights movement, calling themselves “the Emmett Till generation.”
“I realized that this could just as easily have been a story about me or my brother,” Muhammad Ali said.
Representative John Lewis of Georgia wrote that he had been “shaken to the core” by Emmett’s death. As was Representative Bobby L. Rush of Illinois, who was 9 years old and living in the Deep South at the time of the killing.
“When the photograph from Emmett Till’s funeral ran in Jet magazine, I will never forget how my mother gathered us around the living room coffee table, put the magazine in the middle, pointed to it, and said, ‘This is why I brought my boys up out of Albany, Ga.,’” he said in an interview. “That photograph shaped my consciousness as a Black man in America. The course of my life would not have been the same had I not been exposed, as a child, to the horror of the photograph.”
Were his killers ever held accountable?
No. In May 2004, the F.B.I. opened an investigation to see if others were involved, and Emmett’s body was later exhumed for an autopsy, which had not previously been performed. In 2007, a state grand jury in Mississippi declined to indict anyone else.
Mr. Bryant, who spent time in prison for food stamp fraud, died in 1994. Mr. Milam also spent time in jail, for using a stolen credit card and, in a separate case, for assault and battery. He died in 1980.
What about Carolyn Bryant?
The local authorities initially issued a warrant for Ms. Bryant’s arrest on kidnapping charges, but it was never served. A grand jury in Greenwood, Miss., declined to indict her in 2007.
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