Emmett Till was a 14-year-old boy when he was murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955. He made the mistake of breaking an unwritten Southern rule by whistling at a white woman and daring to speak to her as if she were his equal. Until this point, Till had lived an ordinary life as a young boy in Chicago. He loved baseball and doo-wop music. He attended church regularly and had a charming, playful personality. Having heard stories of Southern life, and having met someone in Illinois who was from Mississippi, his mother’s home state, Till was inspired to visit the state. The Southern culture was very different from that of the North, however, and Emmett fell afoul of its rules. His behavior toward Carolyn Bryant would have been considered normal and acceptable in Chicago; it was nothing more than a mild bit of flirting. In the South, however, such behavior broke a fundamental rule of race relations that maintained whites in a superior position to blacks. That Till stood up to his captors and defied them suggests he had far more character than they did.

Carolyn Bryant was the young woman Emmett Till spoke to in the Bryant Store. The interaction offended her and her husband, who was one of Emmett Till’s killers. Carolyn Bryant took offense to Till because young black men were not supposed to address white women as equals. She then allowed herself to be bullied into lying about what happened, fabricating a story about Till touching her and blocking her path. Many years later Carolyn Bryant confessed that these acts did not occur.

Milam was a bully who took pleasure in harming people. His belief that blacks should be kept in a subordinate position in Southern society was not unique to him, but he differed in that he was willing to use violence to ensure black men behaved themselves around whites. Any sign of disrespect, especially toward white women, was an occasion for justified violence against them. Milam was one of the two men who went to the house where Till was staying and took him away into the woods. He was later put on trial for Till’s murder and subsequently acquitted.

Roy Bryant was the husband of Carolyn Bryant and the half-brother of J. W. Milam. He came from a lower-class family that inhabited the rung above blacks in the South’s social hierarchy. After getting married, the Bryants opened the store in which Carolyn encountered Emmett Till. After this incident, Roy Brant joined with J. W. Milam to target and murder Till. While not portrayed as a violent man, Roy Bryant seems to have allowed himself to be bullied by Milam into committing the crime.

Till’s mother is a major figure in the book because of her courage. She stood up to Sheriff Henry Strider, who wished to bury her son’s body quickly to avoid controversy. Instead, she demanded that the body be shown to the world so that Till’s wounds might inspire anger and elicit change that prevent similar violence from being committed against others. She testified at the trial, and she later mobilized support for the civil rights movement.

Strider appears only briefly in the book, but he plays an important role because he assumed jurisdiction over the case from another sheriff, Crosby Smith, who would have been more likely to pursue evidence to convict the killers. Instead, Strider did all he could to weaken the prosecution. He claimed the body found in the river was not Emmett Till, and he locked two witnesses in his jail so they could not be found and forced to testify about what they saw.