Courtroom 302

Content Warning: The source material and this guide contain extensive discussion of mass incarceration, systemic racism, and substance use disorders. They also touch on topics of sexual assault, domestic and child abuse, and hate crimes. This guide obscures the n-word when reproduced in quotes.

When three white teenagers in the Bridgeport section of Chicago beat 13-year-old Lenard Clark almost to death in March 1997, the city’s Black community immediately recalled the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. Till was a 14-year-old Chicago native tortured and lynched by two white men—Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J. W. Milam—in Money, Mississippi, where Till had been visiting relatives. Till’s offense was that he supposedly whistled at Bryant’s wife, Carolyn. An all-white jury acquitted Bryant and Milam. Knowing that double jeopardy laws would prevent them from being tried again for the same crime, the men confessed to murdering Till in the January 1956 Look magazine feature “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi.” In 2017, Carolyn Bryant (later, Donham) confessed to a historian that she had lied about the details of her encounter with Till.

For over half a century, the story of Till’s murder has been a symbol of Black people’s vulnerability within an intrinsically racist justice system—one that so insufficiently recognizes the humanity of Black people that it cannot even manage to protect murdered or assaulted children.