The St. John's University Queens Library commemorates African
Heritage Month with the showing of
"The Murder of Emmett Till"
part of the series 'American Experience' on PBS.
In August 1955, a fourteen-year-old black boy whistled at a
white woman in a grocery store in Money, Mississippi. Emmett Till,
a teen from Chicago, didn't understand that he had broken the
unwritten laws of the Jim Crow South until three days later, when
two white men dragged him from his bed in the dead of night, beat
him brutally and then shot him in the head. Although his killers
were arrested and charged with murder, they were both acquitted
quickly by an all-white, all-male jury. Shortly afterwards, the
defendants sold their story, including a detailed account of how
they murdered Till, to a journalist. The murder and the trial
horrified the nation and the world. Till's death was a spark that
helped mobilize the civil rights movement. Three months after his
body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, the Montgomery bus
boycott began. (excerpt from http://www.pbs.org)
Date
Thursday, February 3, 2005
Time
12:10 - 1:30 p.m. (Common Hour)
Location
Library Academic Commons, Presentation Room, Queens Campus
More Information
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/index.html