Why Emmett Till’s life still matters

On July 23, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed House Bill 4323, which designated July 25 of every year as Emmett Till Day to remember the legacy of Till and his late mother, Mamie Till-Mobley.

Emmett Till, born on July 25, 1941, in Chicago, was a 14-year-old African American who was abducted in late August 1955 by two Ku Klux Klansmen, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, while Till was visiting his great-uncle in Money, Mississippi. These white supremacists tortured and then lynched Till.

They accused Till of whistling at the spouse of one of the Klansmen. When Till’s body was found days later at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River, his mother made the decision to have an open casket funeral so the entire world could see her son’s horrific disfigured, decomposed remains. An estimated 50,000 people came out for the funeral in Chicago on Sept. 6, 1955.

 While Milam and Bryant confessed to murdering Till, both were found “not guilty” by an all-white jury. This mockery of a trial was highly publicized in a Look magazine issue dated Jan. 24, 1956.

During Pritzker’s signing of the Bill, held at the same church where Till’s funeral took place over 70 years ago, state Attorney General, Kwame Raoul, said: “The commemoration of Emmett Till in Illinois reminds us that we must not allow hate crimes directed towards Black people to be normalized. We must carry on the legacy of Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley by fighting ongoing hate crimes and attacks on civil rights.” (Riverbender News, July 23)

Until the day she died on Jan. 6, 2003, Mamie Till-Mobley demanded justice for her son.

Emmett Till’s legacy today

The anger at Emmett Till’s lynching helped to ignite the historic Civil Rights Movement, beginning with the heroic Montgomery Bus Boycott in December 1955 that led to the desegregation of buses.

Historically, Till might have remained just one of many thousands of nameless Black victims of brutal lynchings that escalated following the demise of Reconstruction over 150 years ago. His lynching occurred many decades before the creation of social media, where the police lynching of George Floyd was recorded on video on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis. Nonetheless, the image of Till’s battered body will forever be etched in the memory of millions of people even now due to high-profile campaigns, including several documentaries.

The truth is that lynchings have never ceased and have continued since Till’s murder. These heinous murders come in many forms, such as the recent police lynching of 38-year-old Corey Ruiz in Madison, Wisconsin. Ruiz was tasered and then shot three times in the head at close range.

There is 18-year-old Nolan Wells, whose body was found two days after he was declared missing on July 4 in the Mississippi Gulf Coast after vacationing with white youth. The police were quick to rule his death accidental, as opposed to a homicide, with very little investigation. There is also the tragic case of Trey Reed, another Black youth found hanging from a tree in 2025 at Delta State University, in Cleveland, Mississippi. There was very little publicity about this crime. (Read more at workers.org/2026/07/93839/)

Under the current White House administration led by a blatant white supremacist, Black people, along with Latines and other people of color, are treated as less than human by police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and racist vigilantes who commit atrocities with impunity. When oppressed communities suffer a loss of someone to this kind of legal or extralegal domestic terrorism, they should not be alone when they cry out for justice. They deserve the broad class solidarity that lays the basis for a revolutionary solution leading to a more just society.

This is the true legacy for the Emmett Tills of the world.