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Civil rights cold cases board releases 6,510 pages of federal records in Emmett Till lynching case

By Steve Fennessy · August 21, 2025
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Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi on August 28, 1955.

The Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board today released 6,510 pages of federal documents concerning the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi on August 28, 1955. The documents include hundreds of letters written by the public to then-U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. and other government officials, urging federal intervention in the wake of the acquittals by an all-white jury in Mississippi of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, who had kidnapped Till, then beat, mutilated, and shot him in the head.

“All decent democratic-thinking Americans demand that your dept take steps to end the lynch terror that now exists in the South,” reads one handwritten letter from 1955, signed by S.H. Malone of Los Angeles. “When local authorities refuse to act, it is up to the federal govt. They have reached a new low when they murder children.”

The files also contain correspondence from federal officials, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s then-Director J. Edgar Hoover, who explained the federal government’s refusal to intervene. The Department of Justice’s determination, Hoover writes in one 1955 letter, “was that there had been no violation of Federal law; consequently, this Bureau had no authority to take part in this case.”

The records can be viewed and downloaded via the Civil Rights Cold Case Records portal, maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration. A summary of the Till case is on the Board’s website, coldcaserecords.gov. Today’s release spans 27 files and consists primarily of records from the 1950s. Three of the files include limited redactions protecting confidential informants and personally identifiable information for living individuals; the other files are released in full.

Today’s release reflects just a portion of the documents held by the federal government in the Tillcase. Before its work sunsets – by current statute no later than January 2027 – the Board expects to release thousands more pages, which are being readied for the Board’s review by the FBI and the Department of Justice. Subsequent
releases are expected to include records concerning the federal investigations of the Till case in 2004 and 2017.

“The release of these records is nothing short of historic,” said Board co-chair Margaret Burnham. “The brutal killing of Emmett Till helped galvanize the civil rights movement, and generations of Emmett’s family members, as well as historians and the public at large, have deserved a complete picture of the federal government’s response. The story of Emmett Till and the injustices done to him is still being written, but these documents offer up some long-overdue clarity.”

The Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board was created as part of the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act of 2018, which passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Trump in 2019. The Board is empowered with reviewing and expediting for release records surrounding unsolved or unresolved cold cases from the civil rights era – specifically from 1940 through 1979.

Since last fall, the Board has released federal case files spanning 31 incidents, involving 36 victims. Dozens more cases, spanning thousands of pages, are slated for release over the coming months.