On September 23, 1955, an all-white jury acquitted the two men tried for murdering Emmett Till. Emmett was 14 years old. He had gone to Mississippi to visit family. He should have returned home to Chicago with stories of his summer, ready for school and all the years of life still ahead of him. Instead, his mother had to bury him.
Mamie Till-Mobley made the painful decision to let the world see what had been done to her son. She refused to let his death be hidden or softened for anyone else’s comfort. People across the country saw Emmett’s face and mourned a child they had never met. Then they watched the men accused of killing him walk out of court acquitted. After the trial, those men admitted to a journalist that they had murdered him.
Sixty-five years later, September 23 brought another announcement that broke a family’s heart.
In 2020, a Kentucky grand jury announced its decision in the case of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman shot by police inside her Louisville home. No officer was charged in connection with her death. One former officer was charged with wanton endangerment for shots fired into a neighboring apartment. To Breonna’s loved ones, the distinction was agonizing: the legal system addressed the danger to her neighbors, while bringing no state charge for the loss of her life.
Breonna was a daughter, a loved one, and a young woman with a future. Emmett was a son whose life had barely begun. Neither family should have had to plead with the country to see the fullness of the person they lost.
Their cases are different, and the court decisions were different. But the shared date is hard to sit with. On September 23, 1955, Emmett’s family heard that the men tried for his murder were free. On September 23, 2020, Breonna’s family heard that no officer would face a state charge for her death. Across sixty-five years, two families were left to grieve while much of the nation asked how justice could feel so far away.
America has a long way to go before African Americans can trust that they will receive fairness from the justice system. That is a painful truth to say aloud. Fairness means more than mourning someone after they are gone. It means valuing Black lives while they are here, investigating their deaths with care, and applying the law with equal seriousness when their families seek answers.
We remember Emmett Till and Breonna Taylor because they deserved long lives. We remember them because their families deserved to bring them home. And we remember September 23 because grief should never have to do the work that justice was meant to do.
