WASHINGTON — Just a few days before the 70th anniversary of his murder, the federal government unveiled thousands of pages of documents on Emmett Till’s lynching on Friday.
Released by the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board, these records from the National Archives reveal how the Justice Department, the FBI, and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reacted to the 1955 murder of the 14-year-old Till. The release was made under the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act of 2018.
“Our thoughts are with the Till family,” the National Archives and Records Administration said in a news release.
Till, a teen from Chicago, was wrongly accused of whistling at a white woman in a rural Mississippi grocery store. Just four days later, Roy Bryant and John William “J.W.” Milam abducted Till from his great-uncle’s house during the early morning hours. These white men then brutally tortured and murdered Till in a nearby county barn, dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River afterward.
Charged with Till’s murder, Bryant and Milam were acquitted by an all-white male jury. Eventually, they confessed in a media interview to kidnapping and killing Till.
Till’s death served as a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement when his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, demanded an open casket to expose the horrific violence. In 2022, President Joe Biden enacted a law named after Till, making lynching a federal hate crime. Furthermore, in 2023, Biden signed a proclamation to create a national monument in honor of Till and his mother.
The collection features many documents that the public hasn’t seen before, including reports, telegrams, case files, and communications from the NAACP, the White House, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, among others.
The records can be viewed in the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection on the National Archives and Records Administration website.
A member of the Till family did not immediately return a request for comment.
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