On July 25, 1955, Emmett Till, a young Black boy in Mississippi turned 14. About one month later, Emmett was brutally murdered after being accused of sexually harassing a white woman named Carolyn Bryant in a grocery store.
The two white men accused of his murder were found not guilty by an all-white, all-male jury. Just four months later, those two men confessed to murdering Emmett, but since they had already been acquitted, they couldn’t be tried again.
Sixty years later, Carolyn Bryant admitted that she lied about Emmett harassing her, but she’s never faced any legal consequences.
Emmett Till with his mother, Mamie Bradley, in 1950. Photo: Everett Collection Historical / Alamy Stock Photo.
Emmett Till’s story has not been forgotten, and the same racism and inequality he faced still persists today — especially in our legal system. Black and brown men in America have continued to be perceived as dangerous, violent, and hypersexual. These racist stereotypes that see Black men as predators and don’t give them the presumption of innocence have often led to over-policing of communities of color, disproportionately high rates of incarceration, and wrongful convictions.
In the case of Pervis Payne, who’s scheduled to be executed later this year, prosecutors evoked these very same racist stereotypes to convict him of murder. They argued that he had been searching for sex after allegedly using drugs and looking at a Playboy magazine, and attacked a white woman after he made an advance on her and she rejected him. But no evidence supports this theory.
Pervis Payne, age 7. Photo courtesy of the Payne family.
Pervis, who has an intellectual disability, has spent 32 years on death row in Tennessee for a crime he has always said he did not commit.
The Innocence Project exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and reforms the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. www.innocenceproject.org
