Illinois to annually honor Emmett Till, Chicago teen whose 1955 murder galvanized Civil Rights Movement

Olivia Olander, Chicago Tribune on Jul 23, 2026

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CHICAGO — Illinois will annually honor Emmett Till, the Black teenager from Chicago whose 1955 murder galvanized the Civil Rights Movement and became a glaring example of failures in the justice system, under a new law Gov. JB Pritzker signed Thursday.

“Every policy that advances justice passed, every bill signed, every monument built, is in the spirit of the legacy of accountability and progress, every inch of which was fought for, often with blood,” Pritzker said. “Today, we are building on that legacy.”

Speakers on Thursday at the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Bronzeville, the location of Till’s funeral that in 2023 became a national landmark dedicated to Till and his mother, said the annual commemoration on Till’s birthday, July 25, will serve as a reminder of both the nation’s past moral failures and the possibility of working for a better future.

Till’s mother “said, ‘Let the people see what they did to my boy,’” Pritzker said, referring to Mamie Till-Mobley’s decision to keep her son’s casket open to his brutally beaten body at his Chicago funeral. “Illinois is answering the call one more time.”

Till, who was in Mississippi visiting relatives, was abducted and killed in August 1955 after he reportedly whistled at a white woman shopkeeper, Carolyn Bryant. He was 14 years old.

A jury of all white men found her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother J.W. Milam not guilty after just more than an hour of deliberation on Sept. 23, 1955. The pair confessed to killing Till months later in an article in Look magazine.

The annual commemoration of Till’s birthday in Illinois “will serve as a reminder that the fight to combat hate and to defend civil rights is not over,” state Attorney General Kwame Raoul said at the event, which was also attended by the Rev. Wheeler Parker, a relative of Till’s who witnessed his abduction.

Till’s death inspired Rosa Parks to remain seated instead of giving up her place to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, the Chicago Tribune previously reported. And exactly eight years after Till was killed, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C.

Decades later, the FBI reopened the investigation into Till’s death and his body was exhumed for an autopsy in 2005.

President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act in 2022, sponsored by then-U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush of Illinois. Thousands of Americans were lynched from 1865 to 1950, a 2020 report from the Equal Justice Initiative found.

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