The image, in his casket, of the murdered Emmett Till, the black 14-year-old lynched in 1955 Mississippi after reportedly wolf-whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, is said to have added urgency to the civil rights movement.
Disfigured in death, Till’s swollen, virtually unrecognisable face was made famous in a photograph by David Jackson, first published in Jet magazine, showing the boy’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, looking down on her son.
The implication of the violence visited upon him by two white men – Bryant’s then-husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother JW Milam, who confessed to the killing in a 1956 magazine profile but have never been convicted of any crime – was more hideous than anything captured on film.
That is the story told, with unflinching honesty and to…
