Although Jerome Rogers, the protagonist of Ghost Boys, is a fictional character, Jewell Parker Rhodes based another prominent "ghost boy" character on Emmett Till, a real-life icon of the civil rights movement.
Born on July 25, 1941, in Chicago, Illinois, Emmett Till was abducted, tortured, and lynched in a racially motivated hate crime at the age of 14. In August 1955, Till traveled to Money, Mississippi, to visit family members. While there, Till encountered a white woman named Carolyn Bryant at a local grocery store. The exact details of what transpired between them remain unclear, but it is thought that Till—raised in the integrated North—offended the white woman by breaking the unwritten code of behavior for Black men in the racially segregated South. At the time, Bryant accused Till of putting his hands on her waist in a sexually suggestive manner. In 2017, decades after the incident, Bryant allegedly admitted to Dr. Timothy B. Tyson in an interview that she "perjured herself on the witness stand to make Emmett's conduct sound more threatening than it actually was." However, a Justice Department investigation into Tyson's research materials and the tape recording of the interview didn't contain a recantation from Bryant.
Several days after Till's interaction with Bryant, on August 28, 1955, Bryant's husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, abducted Till from his relatives' home. The white men brutally beat, tortured, and shot Till. His body was found three days later in the Tallahatchie River, weighted down with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck. Till's face was unrecognizable due to the severe injuries he had suffered. When his body was returned to Chicago, Till's mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral so that the world could witness the brutality inflicted upon her son.
With tens of thousands of people attending Till's funeral, and images of his mutilated body circulating in media, the murder sparked outrage and became a catalyst for the civil rights movement. The trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam garnered significant media attention. Despite overwhelming evidence against the defendants, an all-white jury acquitted them.
The trial's outcome highlighted the deep racial divisions and injustices that persisted in the United States at the time. Emmett Till's case is credited for having drawn widespread attention to the violence and racism faced by African Americans in the Jim Crow era and for having galvanized civil rights activists who would spend the 1950s and 1960s campaigning for the abolition of racial segregation, disenfranchisement, and discrimination.
