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… learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.
Isaiah 1:17
Reflect
If you don’t know who Emmett Till is, you should know. Honestly, I’m amazed I didn’t know his story until my daughter told me about him when she was in middle school. It’s an incredible and tragic tale that entails two injustices that almost defy imagination.
Emmett Till was 14 years old when he traveled from Chicago to Mississippi to visit his great-uncle and cousins. One day, they went into the town of Money and stopped at a general store to get some candy. Emmett had grown up in Chicago and was not accustomed to the severe racial restrictions imposed on African Americans in the Jim Crow South, including the rigid social boundaries between Black boys and white women.
Exactly what happened inside and outside that store has been disputed for decades. Carolyn Bryant, the white woman working there, later accused Emmett of behavior far more serious than what witnesses initially described, and considerable doubt has surrounded the truthfulness of her most inflammatory allegations. Whatever Emmett said or did, however, there is one thing that should never have been in question: nothing a 14-year-old boy could have said in that encounter remotely justified what happened next.
Four days later, on August 28, 1955, Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, went to the home of Emmett’s great-uncle, Mose Wright. After threatening the family, the men kidnapped Emmett and took him away. He was brutally beaten and shot in the head. His body was bound to a discarded cotton-gin fan with barbed wire and thrown into the Tallahatchie River. Three days later, his body was found.
At first, it appeared that justice might actually take place. Bryant and Milam were arrested and charged with Emmett’s murder. Outrage spread across the nation, in large part because Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, made the courageous decision to allow the world to see what had been done to her son. Photographs of Emmett’s mutilated body were published in Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender.
Racism suddenly had a face — Emmett’s nearly unrecognizable face — and people who might otherwise have looked away were forced to confront where unchecked hatred could lead.
But injustice was multiplied.
The murder trial began just a few weeks after Emmett’s death. Mose Wright did something almost unimaginable for a Black man in Mississippi in 1955: he stood in a courtroom, pointed directly at the white men who had taken Emmett from his home and identified them.
It wasn’t enough.
An all-white jury acquitted Bryant and Milam. Then, protected from another murder prosecution by double jeopardy, the two men sold their story to Look magazine for $4,000 and openly described killing Emmett. They had murdered a child, escaped punishment and then profited from telling the story.
There was never earthly justice for Emmett Till or for his mother, Mamie.
But his death was not forgotten. Millions of Americans saw the horrifying consequences of racism, and Emmett’s murder became one of the sparks that helped ignite the modern civil rights movement. Only about 100 days after his death, Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery bus. Years later, when asked what she had been thinking about when she refused to move, Parks said, “I thought of Emmett Till and I couldn’t go back.”
There are few good things to take from a story like this, but it should remind all of us that we are called to stand on the side of what is right and good — and that our understanding of right and good must be shaped by Scripture rather than twisted to justify whatever prejudices we already possess.
Throughout history, people have selectively pulled verses from Scripture to defend racism, oppression and hatred. But hatred is not the Gospel. Jesus commands us to love our neighbors and even our enemies, and He sends us into the world carrying a message of grace, mercy, repentance and salvation.
But what about justice? Are we guaranteed that justice will prevail here on Earth? Sadly, no.
Human courts fail. People lie. Powerful people sometimes escape consequences. Victims sometimes die without ever seeing those who harmed them held accountable.
But that does not release us from the responsibility to seek justice.
Isaiah doesn’t tell God’s people to guarantee justice. He tells them to pursue it.
“Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression.”
Those are action words.
Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam escaped punishment in a Mississippi courtroom, but no one escapes the judgment of God. Every hidden act, every injustice and every sin ultimately stands exposed before perfect righteousness. Human justice may fail. God’s justice will not.
Our responsibility, then, is not to shrug at injustice because God will eventually sort everything out. Our responsibility is to make sure that when injustice comes into view, we stand on the side of what is right. We defend the vulnerable. We challenge oppression. We refuse to accept a broken status quo simply because it is familiar or comfortable.
Isaiah doesn’t tell us merely to recognize injustice when we see it. He tells us to seek justice, correct oppression, bring justice to the vulnerable and plead the cause of those who have no voice.
We may not be able to guarantee justice in a broken world, but we can decide which side we’ll stand on when injustice comes into view.
Emmett Till never received justice from the men charged with providing it. But his story helped awaken millions of people who decided that the status quo could no longer stand. That’s what can happen when enough people stop accepting injustice as somebody else’s problem.
We can’t undo what happened in Money, Mississippi, in 1955. But we can learn to do good. We can correct oppression. We can defend the vulnerable.
And we can seek justice.
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Reflection copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt.
