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* Corresponding author: Professor Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Dean and Professor of Law, Boston University School of Law, 765 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215. E-mail: [email protected]
INTRODUCTION
At approximately 2:30 A.M. on August 28, 1955, two White men, John William Milam (J.W. Milam) and Roy Bryant, invaded the house of Preacher Moses Wright, an elderly Black man who was hosting Emmett Till, his fourteen-year-old grandnephew from Chicago, Illinois at his home in Leflore County, Mississippi. After hearing through the rumor mill that Till had allegedly hit on and wolf-whistled at Roy Bryant’s wife, Carolyn Bryant, Milam and Bryant abducted the young Chicagoan with plans to teach him a good lesson, a lesson about his place in society as a Black person and their “superiority” over him as White people. In fact, Milam and Bryant’s lesson would become Till’s very last because the two White men would beat, maim, and torture Till so badly that when his body was discovered three days later, his father’s ring, which Till wore during his trip to Mississippi, was the only clearly identifiable item on his person. Although Milam and Bryant admitted to kidnapping the young boy from his uncle’s home, on September 23, 1955, an all-White and all-male jury in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi acquitted the two White defendants of the murder charge against them (Anderson 2015; Goldsby 1996; Harold and DeLuca 2005; Hudson-Weems 2006; Pollack and Metress 2008; Russell 2005; Tyson 2017; Whitfield 1988).
In her autobiography Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America, Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, pondered the following:
I wonder how different things might have been if the laws and practices of Tallahatchie County had been different. . . . What if the law had allowed women to serve then? What if only one woman had been allowed on that jury? Even a white woman in Sumner, in Mississippi, in 1955 would have had to feel something for another woman who had felt what I did. Wouldn’t she? A mother, someone who understood, as only a mother could, what it felt like to become a mother, what it must feel like to lose a child, a part of yourself. (Till-Mobley and Benson 2003, pp. 189-190)
Nearly fifty years later,...