Till traveled from Chicago to visit relatives in Mississippi in August 1955. Elliott Gorn is Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. Wells. On September 23, 1955, they were found not guilty as the jury believed the state failed to prove the identity of the body. Donham then named Carolyn Bryant accused him of making improper advances on her at a grocery store in the small community of Money. Jet was small enough to carry in your pocket, but its impact was huge. For more information, visit the Smithsonian's, International media Interoperability Framework. He is the author of the influential Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955 (2007), which analyzes how Ebony and Jet helped catalyze Black political, social, and cultural consciousness, including the role the Emmett Till photographs played in bringing African Americans together. Emmett Till Thanks to the acquisition and recent ownership transfer, however, the companys influential archives will live on. They then beat the teenager brutally, dragged him to the bank of the Tallahatchie River, shot him in the head, tied him with barbed wire to a large metal fan and shoved his mutilated body into the water. Her death marks the last chance for anyone to be held accountable for a kidnapping and brutal murder that shocked the world. There remains considerable doubt as to the credibility of her version of events, which is contradicted by others who were with Till at the time, including the account of a living witness.. The archive is more than a trophy, Cherry says. In 2003, PBS did an investigatory documentary The Murder of Emmett Till. Please try again later. As Rhae Lynn Barnes, an assistant professor of American cultural history at Princeton University, points out, when entities that can afford high fees produce history-related work, its more likely to be entertainment, even if its a documentary. There were few articles in the press commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Till slaying, even fewer on the 25th.