ABSTRACT
In his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Eyes on the Prize, Juan Williams tells the story of Emmett Till. Till was a 14-year-old African-American boy from Chicago visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, in the summer of 1955. He told some African-American boys down there that he had a White girlfriend. These boys challenged him to talk to a White woman who was in the store with him. Not one to back down from a dare, Till left the store and said, “Bye, Baby” to the woman. The woman’s husband, Roy Bryant, was outraged by this. He and a friend, J. W. Milam, went searching for Till. They found him at his uncle’s (Mose Wright’s) house around midnight that night.
Till’s body was found three days later. The barbed wire holding the cotton-gin fan around his neck had become snagged on a tangled river root. There was a bullet in the boy’s skull, one eye was gouged out, and his forehead was crushed on one side.
(Williams, 1987, p. 43)