Emmett Till's Real Name: Emmett Louis Till

Quick answer: Emmett Till's documented full name is Emmett Louis Till. He was born on July 25, 1941, in Chicago, and was murdered on August 28, 1955, in Mississippi, at 14. The killing of the African American teenager and the acquittal of the men charged in it helped catalyze the civil rights movement (Britannica).

Real name and early life

Britannica lists him as also known as Emmett Louis Till and says he was born on July 25, 1941, on Chicago's South Side, to working-class parents. The Library of Congress heading is "Till, Emmett, 1941-1955"; notes in that record also use Emmett Louis Till and the spelling Emmet. When he was 14, Britannica says, he went to rural Mississippi to spend the summer with relatives. His mother, Mamie Till, warned him that behavior tolerated in the North could be met with violence in the South. He arrived in Money, Mississippi, on August 21, 1955, and stayed with his great-uncle, Moses Wright, a sharecropper, helping with the cotton harvest.

Career highlights

Till was a child and did not have a public career. What made his name nationally known were the events of August 1955 and their aftermath.

On August 24, Britannica says, Till and a group of other teenagers went to a store in Money. Later accounts differed about what took place between Till and the cashier, Carolyn Bryant. In the early morning hours of August 28, Bryant's husband, Roy Bryant, and J.W. Milam, Bryant's half brother, forced their way into Wright's home and abducted Till. Till was murdered that day. Britannica gives the place of death as Money, Mississippi; a Library of Congress note lists Drew, Mississippi.

Death and aftermath

Mamie Till insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago so that the public could see what had been done to her son. An all-white jury in Mississippi acquitted Bryant and Milam. Protected from further prosecution by double jeopardy, the two men later described the kidnapping and murder in a 1956 Look magazine interview, Britannica says. Mamie Till, later Mamie Till-Mobley, spent the rest of her life pressing for civil rights and for a fuller accounting of her son's death. The FBI reopened the case in 2004; the investigation did not lead to new criminal charges. Till became, posthumously, a central figure in the history of the civil rights movement.

Name notes for searchers

Emmett Louis Till is the documented full name; he is almost always referred to as Emmett Till. The spelling Emmet appears as a variant in some Library of Congress records. This page is about the Chicago teenager murdered in 1955, not any other person with a similar name.