1955

When Emmett Till's mutilated body is returned to Chicago, his mother Mamie Till-Mobley insists on an open casket funeral at Roberts Temple Church of God. 'I wanted the world to see what they did to my boy,' she says. An estimated 50,000-100,000 people view the body over four days. Jet magazine publishes the photographs. Mamie's decision to make her son's murder visible galvanizes the civil rights movement. Rosa Parks later says she thought of Emmett Till when she refused to give up her bus seat.

Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam are tried for Emmett Till's murder in Sumner, Mississippi. The trial lasts five days. Moses Wright courageously identifies the defendants from the stand — an act of extraordinary bravery for a Black man in Mississippi. The all-white jury deliberates 67 minutes before acquitting both men. A juror later says they would have decided sooner but took a soda break to make it 'look like they considered it.' Protected by double jeopardy, Bryant and Milam confess to the murder in Look magazine in January 1956.

By 1955, only about 5 percent of eligible Black voters in Mississippi are registered despite being a majority of the population in many counties. Barriers include literacy tests administered subjectively (requiring interpretation of obscure constitutional provisions), poll taxes, economic retaliation, physical violence, and murder. Registrars accept illiterate white applicants while rejecting college-educated Black applicants. In Humphreys County, where Black people are 70 percent of the population, not a single Black voter is registered in 1955.

By 1955, only about 5 percent of eligible Black voters in Mississippi are registered despite being a majority of the population in many counties. Barriers include literacy tests administered subjectively, poll taxes, economic retaliation, physical violence, and murder. Registrars accept illiterate white applicants while rejecting college-educated Black applicants. In Humphreys County, where Black people are 70 percent of the population, not a single Black voter is registered in 1955.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a trained NAACP activist and secretary of the Montgomery chapter, is arrested for refusing to yield her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery city bus. Parks is chosen by the NAACP as an ideal plaintiff — she had long been active in civil rights, is dignified and well-respected. Her arrest triggers the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Parks is less spontaneous 'tired seamstress' than the mythology suggests; she is a deliberate activist who had attended the Highlander Folk School.

Construction begins in 1955 on the Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago's South Side — 28 high-rise buildings stretching two miles, housing 27,000 people in the world's largest public housing project. The Chicago Housing Authority, under pressure from white aldermen who block public housing in white neighborhoods, concentrates all projects in already Black areas. The result is a racially homogeneous 'second ghetto' of concentrated poverty with substandard maintenance, crime, and social isolation. The towers become symbols of deliberate segregation by public policy.

Construction begins in 1955 on the Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago's South Side — 28 high-rise buildings stretching two miles, housing 27,000 people. The Chicago Housing Authority, under pressure from white aldermen who block public housing in white neighborhoods, concentrates all projects in already Black areas. The result is a racially homogeneous 'second ghetto' of concentrated poverty with substandard maintenance, crime, and social isolation. The towers become symbols of deliberate segregation by public policy.

In Brown II on May 31, 1955, the Supreme Court orders school desegregation proceed with 'all deliberate speed' — a deliberately vague standard proposed by Justice Felix Frankfurter. The phrase is interpreted by Southern school districts as permission to delay indefinitely. In 1964, ten years after Brown I, only 2.3 percent of Black students in the South attend school with white students. The 'all deliberate speed' standard is widely criticized as sacrificing Black children's rights to political feasibility.

During the Montgomery Bus Boycott (December 1955 – December 1956), white supremacists bomb the homes of Martin Luther King Jr. and E.D. Nixon, fire shotguns into buses, shoot Rosa Parks's carpool driver, bomb four Black churches and the homes of two ministers. The city arrests and fines 89 Black leaders under an anti-boycott law. The economic impact on the bus system is severe: the bus line loses approximately 30,000-40,000 daily fares. The boycott reveals that nonviolent resistance is met with organized violence.

On March 2, 1955, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin refuses to give up her bus seat in Montgomery and is forcibly removed and arrested. She is later convicted of violating segregation laws and assault. NAACP leaders consider using her case to challenge bus segregation but decide against it partly because Colvin, unmarried, is pregnant. Her act of resistance predates Rosa Parks by nine months. Colvin is later a plaintiff in Browder v. Gayle but receives far less historical recognition than Parks.

Reverend George Lee of Belzoni, Mississippi, a grocer and NAACP leader who had registered to vote and encouraged others to do so, is shot and killed while driving on May 7, 1955. Lead pellets are found in his jaw but local authorities rule his death a traffic accident. The sheriff tells reporters the pellets might be dental fillings. No arrests are made. Lee had been warned to take his name off the voter rolls and refused.

On August 13, 1955, Lamar Smith is shot and killed on the Lincoln County courthouse lawn in Brookhaven, Mississippi in broad daylight in front of numerous witnesses. Smith was 63 years old and had been helping Black citizens file absentee ballots to circumvent white primaries. A white man is arrested covered in blood but witnesses refuse to testify and the case is dismissed. Smith's murder occurs two weeks before Emmett Till's kidnapping, part of a summer of racial terror in Mississippi.

After Emmett Till's murder and the acquittal of his killers, Mississippi Senator James Eastland and the White Citizens Council obtain Louis Till's confidential military records — his father, executed by the U.S. Army in Italy in 1945 for murder and rape — and leak them to the press to suggest Emmett inherited criminal tendencies. The U.S. Army cooperates in releasing normally confidential records. The smearing of a dead soldier's record to justify his son's murder illustrates government complicity in white supremacist propaganda.

On October 22, 1955, 16-year-old John Earl Reese is shot and killed when white men fire into a dance hall in Mayflower, Texas. The Ku Klux Klan carries out the attack to intimidate Black residents who had petitioned for better school facilities. One attacker is convicted but receives a suspended sentence and serves no time. Reese's murder is part of a pattern of Klan terrorism against Black communities seeking educational equality.

The lynching of a 14-year-old in Mississippi, and his mother's open casket, galvanizes the movement.

In August 1955 a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago was tortured and murdered in Mississippi; his mother's decision to hold an open-casket funeral seared the nation's conscience and helped ignite the civil rights movement.

In September 1955 an all-white Mississippi jury acquitted Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam of Emmett Till's murder in about an hour — even after Mose Wright bravely identified them in court. Months later, the two confessed in a paid magazine interview.

Sparked by Rosa Parks, a 381-day boycott launches Dr. King and mass nonviolent protest.

The Highlander Folk School incubates Citizenship Schools that teach literacy and voting rights to tens of thousands across the South.