TALLAHATCHIE COUNTY, Miss. — The historical sign marking where Emmett Till’s body was found in the Tallahatchie River in 1955 has been riddled with bullets.
Since the Emmett Till Memorial Commission put up eight markers in Tallahatchie County in 2008, the sign near the river has been a repeated target of vandals.
It’s one of a number of civil rights markers and symbols that have been vandalized in Mississippi over the past decade.
“These are easy targets, a low-risk outlet for racism,” said Dave Tell, an associate professor at the University of Kansas who is part of the Emmett Till Memory Project.
Some people mistakenly see “civil rights monuments as a form of reverse discrimination, a threat to their own well-being,” he said.
On Sept. 23, 1955, an all-white, all-male jury acquitted half-brothers Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam of Till’s murder.
Months later, the two men confessed to Look magazine they had indeed killed Till.
Four days after Rosa Parks heard a speech on Till, she boarded a bus in Montgomery, Ala., on Dec. 1, 1955, and refused to give up her seat to a white man.
“The Emmett Till case propelled the civil rights movement,” said Devery Anderson, whose book on the case is now being made into an HBO miniseries being produced by Jay-Z, Will Smith, Casey Affleck and Aaron Kaplan.
Click here to read more about the historic markers commemorating the death of Emmitt Till and the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County continuously being the target of vandalism.
