The impact of emmett tills murder |
MOmentum for a movement |
By 1955, African Americans across the country, including in the segregated South, had begun the struggle for justice. Emmett Till's murder was a spark that became known as the civil rights movement. The sight of his body pushed many who had been content to stay on the sidelines directly into the fight.
After Till's murderers, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, were freed, Howard boldly and publicly chastised FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover: "It's getting to be a strange thing that the FBI can never seem to work out who is responsible for the killings of Negroes in the South." In December 1955, after the national black magazine Ebony reported that Dr. Howard was on the Ku Klux Klan's death list and that several others on the list had already been killed, Howard sold most of his property in Mound Bayou, packed up his family and moved to Chicago. |
For Dr. Howard and others, the immediate impact of the freeing of Till's killers increased repression in Mississippi. The momentum and mobilization that followed Till's murder fed the next stage of the movement. One hundred days after Emmett's death, a black woman, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery city bus and was arrested for violating Alabama's bus segregation laws. The Women's Democratic Council, under Jo Ann Robinson, called for a citywide bus boycott. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. took part in this citywide bus boycott.
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