How Did Emmett Till Influence The Civil Rights Movement

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Destiny Mujahid

AP U.S History This Generation Will Never Fade

“Emmett’s naked body, his head battered and with a bullet hole through, had been weighted with a cotton gin pulley and thrown in the Tallahatchie River,” sparking nationwide fear for African Americans. The murder of a fourteen-year-old boy named Emmett Till struck fear into the hearts of African Americans around the country, a fear that they had never known. Till was accused of making inappropriate comments to a white woman in Mississippi and was murdered for it. Blacks across the South felt the vulnerability that came with Till’s murder; even a child could be killed in the name of keeping African Americans in their “place.” After Till’s death, there was a …show more content…
Regardless of what the adults tried to do, children saw something had to be done if a boy around their age could be killed for merely whistling. After Till’s death, children’s involvement in the movement increased despite the concerns of worried parents. Without these children, the movement would not be the same. The children, influenced by Till’s death and everyday racism, joined the Birmingham, Alabama campaign and saved the dying movement there in 1963. There were “thousands of southern blacks who were young and involved in the civil rights movement…but with a few exceptions, they aren’t famous.”Often overlooked, these children propelled the Civil Rights Movement around the nation, which ultimately led to the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Emmett Till’s death inspired a generation of children to spark a fading movement through the use of the media as a weapon. Within the Mississippi Delta, more than five thousand lynchings had occurred since 1882, with the majority never being officially reported. It was common for blacks to go missing and never return; when this
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