FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM

The civil rights movement saw hundreds of thousands of Americans rallying to the cause of racial equality. Rhiannon Davies has spoken to several historians of the campaign for a new podcast series. Here she revisits five key moments in the struggle

-  Rhiannon Davies

AUGUST 1955

A lynching jumpstarts the civil rights movement

Teenager EMMETT TILL’s brutal murder exposed the savagery of southern racism as never before

On 20 August 1955, Mamie Till embraced her 14-year-old son, Emmett, one final time, before ushering him on to the train that would take him out of his native Chicago into the heart of the Deep South. He was travelling to Mississippi, intending to soak up the last of the summer sun and visit his extended family, before returning home .

As Emmett’s train travelled south, he was entering a different world. Devery Anderson, the author of a biography of Till, told me: “In Chicago and in the north, there was certainly still racism. But the difference between the north and the south was that in the south it was done by statute.”

For decades, the southern states had been the land of the Jim Crow laws, where segregation in all aspects of life was legally sanctioned. In 1896, this practice had been rubber-stamped at the highest federal level, as the US supreme court had ruled that providing “separate but equal” facilities to white and black Americans was constitutional.