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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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The alleged youthful teasing of 14-year-old African American Emmett Till with white store clerk Carolyn Bryant, on August 28, 1955, led to his brutal murder at the hands of Bryant’s husband Roy and his half-brother, J.W. Till’s death was the catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement.

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As probe ends, details of Emmett Till’s murder remain a mystery

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As probe ends, details of Emmett Till’s murder remain a mystery

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https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2021/12/12/22830668/emmett-till-murder-federal-investigation

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As probe ends, details of Emmett Till's murder remain a mystery

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BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - The investigation into the lynching of Black teenager Emmett Till nearly 70 years ago ended as it began, with a mystery that might never be solved. All these decades later, it's still not even clear whether the gruesome homicide was the work of a pair of racist brutes or a larger group of conspirators.

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Ole Miss Students Face Possible Civil Rights Investigation After Posing With Guns in Front of Emmett Till Memorial

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Ole Miss Students Face Possible Civil Rights Investigation After Posing With Guns in Front of Emmett Till Memorial

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https://www.mississippicir.org/news/emmett-till-sign

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Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting

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Three University of Mississippi students have been suspended from their fraternity house and face possible investigation by the Department of Justice after posing with guns in front of a bullet-riddled sign honoring slain civil rights icon Emmett Till.

One of the students posted a photo to his private Instagram account in March showing the trio in front of a roadside plaque commemorating the site where Till's body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River. The 14-year-old black youth was tortured and murdered in August 1955. An all-white, all-male jury acquitted two white men accused of the slaying.

The photo, which was obtained by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica, shows an Ole Miss student named Ben LeClere holding a shotgun while standing in front of the bullet-pocked sign. His Kappa Alpha fraternity brother, John Lowe, squats below the sign. A third fraternity member stands on the other side with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle..

LeClere posted the picture on Lowe's birthday on March 1 with the message "one of Memphis's finest and the worst influence I've ever met."

Neither LeClere nor Lowe responded to repeated attempts to contact them.

It is not clear whether the fraternity students shot the sign or are simply posing before it. The sign is part of a memorial effort by a Mississippi civil rights group and has been repeatedly vandalized, most recently in August 2018 . Till's death helped propelled the modern civil rights movement in America.

Five days after LeClere posted the photo, a person who saw it filed a bias report to the university's Office of Student Conduct. The complaint pointed out there may have been a fourth person present, who took the picture.

"The photo is on Instagram with hundreds of 'likes,' and no one said a thing," said the complaint, a copy of which was reviewed by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica. "I cannot tell Ole Miss what to do, I just thought it should be brought to your attention."

The photo was removed from LeClere's Instagram account after the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica began contacting fraternity members and friends. It had received 274 likes.

Kappa Alpha suspended the trio on Wednesday, after the news organizations provided a copy of the photo to fraternity officials at Ole Miss. The fraternity, which honors Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as its "spiritual founder" on its , has a history of racial controversy, including an in which students wore blackface at a Kappa Alpha sponsored Halloween party at the University of Virginia in 2002.

"The photo is inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable. It does not represent our chapter," Taylor Anderson, president of Ole Miss' Kappa Alpha Order, wrote in an email. "We have and will continue to be in communication with our national organization and the University."

After viewing the photo, U.S. Attorney Chad Lamar of the Northern District of Mississippi in Oxford said the information has been referred to the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division for further investigation.

"We will be working with them closely," he said Thursday.

University officials called the photo "offensive and hurtful."

University spokesman Rod Guajardo acknowledged that an Ole Miss official had received a copy of the Instagram picture in March. The university referred the matter to the university police department, which in turn gave it to the FBI.

Guajardo said the FBI told police it would not further investigate the incident because the photo did not pose a specific threat.

Guajardo said that while the university considered the picture "offensive," the image did not present a violation of the university's code of conduct. He noted the incident depicted in the photo occurred off campus and was not part of a university-affiliated event.

"We stand ready to assist the fraternity with educational opportunities for those members and the chapter," Guajardo said.

He said the university will continue to build programs to engage students in "deliberate, honest and candid conversations while making clear that we unequivocally reject attitudes that do not respect the dignity of each individual in our community."

Since the first sign was erected in 2008, it has been the object of repeated animosity.

Vandals threw the first sign in the river. The second sign was with 317 bullets or shotgun pellets before the Emmett Till Memorial Commission officials removed it. The third sign, featured in the Instagram photo, was by 10 bullet holes before officials took it down last week. A fourth sign, designed to better withstand attacks, is expected to be installed soon.

News of the suspensions and referral to the Justice Department came as Till's cousin, Deborah Watts, co-founder of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, was already planning a moment of silence Thursday to honor her cousin with a gathering of supporters and friends dressed in black and white in "a silent yet powerful protest against racism, hatred and violence." Thursday is Till's birthday. Had he lived, he would have been 78 years old.

This is not the first time Ole Miss fraternity students have been caught up in an incident involving an icon from the civil rights movement.

In 2014, three students from the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity house placed a noose around the neck of a statue on campus of James Meredith, the first known black student to attend Ole Miss. They also placed a Georgia flag of the past that contains the Confederate battle emblem.

According to federal prosecutors, the freshmen students hatched the plan during a drinking fest at the house, where one student disparaged African Americans, saying this act would create a sensation: "It's James Meredith. People will go crazy."

One pleaded guilty and received six months in prison for using a threat of force to intimidate African American students and employees because of their race or color. Another student also pleaded guilty. He received probation and community service after he cooperated with the FBI. A third man wasn't charged.

All three students withdrew from Ole Miss, and the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity's national headquarters shuttered its chapter on the Ole Miss campus after its own investigation, blaming the closing on behavior that included "hazing, underage drinking, alcohol abuse and failure to comply with the university and fraternity's codes of conduct."
Shirley L. Smith and Debbie Skipper of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and Thalia Beaty, Benjamin Hardy and Claire Perlman of ProPublica contributed to this report. Jerry Mitchell is an investigative reporter for the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization that seeks to inform, educate and empower Mississippians in their communities through the use of investigative journalism.
Correction, July 25, 2019:An earlier version of this story misidentified John Lowe as holding an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. Lowe is squatting beneath the sign without a rifle.

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Ole Miss Students Face Possible Civil Rights Investigation After Posing With Guns in Front of Emmett Till Memorial - Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting

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Three University of Mississippi students have been suspended from their fraternity house and face possible investigation by the Department of Justice after posing with guns in front of a bullet-riddled sign honoring slain civil rights icon Emmett Till.

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OPINION Ole Miss students dishonored civil rights icon Emmett Till in a 'sacred place.'

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OPINION Ole Miss students dishonored civil rights icon Emmett Till in a 'sacred place.'

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https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/07/26/ole-miss-student-dishonored-civil-rights-icon-emmett-till-column/1840976001/

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Jerry Mitchell said he was stunned when he first saw the photo of three University of Mississippi students who posed armed next to a bullet-riddled sign honoring civil rights icon Emmett Till.

"These students could not be much older than Emmett when he was brutally killed," said Mitchell, founder of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, who has covered civil rights murders for decades. "If they truly understood who Emmett was, what he stood for and how he suffered, they never would have done this."

Mitchell said his investigative group received the photograph, which had been posted on Instagram, and quickly verified its authenticity.

One Ole Miss student holds a shotgun; another squats bellow the shot-up sign. A third stands with an AR-15 assault rifle.

"I could not believe it when I first saw it," said Mitchell, a former investigative reporter at the Jackson Clarion Ledger in Mississippi. "There was clearly some intention, whether deliberately or symbolically, to send a message to take something back, or reclaim the past."
Racism isn't new: I saw the KKK burn crosses in North Carolina. 'Send her back' chants can't shock me now.
Mitchell explained that African Americans long outnumbered white residents along the Mississippi Delta but now the black community make up most of local leadership, there is "a backlash" to that power, "wanting to take things back to the way it used to be."

And the anger and hate, Mitchell said, is often directed at the marker honoring Till near the Tallahatchie River where his body was found.

"The first marker was thrown into the River in 2008. The second sign was shot 317 times. We counted every bullet and pellet hole," Mitchell said. "A new sign was put up and then shot again. Now this."

The three students have been suspended from their fraternity Kappa Alpha and face possible investigation by the Department of Justice, according to the investigative center's report also published by USA TODAY.

"These students grew up in privilege, went to private schools," said Mitchell, whose group tried to interview the students but they did not respond. "I would want to tell them, 'Do you understand what Emmett Till stands for? His death inspired young people to join the civil rights movement. It also helped free many white southerners from their own racism.'"

Till, age 14, was tortured and murdered in August 1955, after being dragged out of his uncle's home not far from Money, Mississippi. An all-white male jury acquitted two white men of the murder. After Till's body was found, his mother brought him home to Chicago and had an open casket funeral so mourners and the press could see what happened to her only child.

Mitchell, whose own reporting has helped solve civil rights killings, said for African Americans especially, the place where Till's body was found is "a sacred place, a place of somber thought, not a place to hoist guns and smile and act like you have just taken down your first 10-point buck."

Jerry Mitchell, founder of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, is the author of the upcoming memoir for Simon & Schuster, "Race Against Time," which tells the story of his pursuit of civil rights cold cases, including the 1963 assassination of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers. Follow him on Twitter: @JMitchellNews. St andards Editor Manny Garcia interviewed Jerry Mitchell for this column.

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Ole Miss students dishonored civil rights icon Emmett Till in a 'sacred place.'

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Jerry Mitchell said he was stunned when he first saw the photo of three University of Mississippi students who posed armed next to a bullet-riddled sign honoring civil rights icon Emmett Till. "These students could not be much older than Emmett when he was brutally killed," said Mitchell, founder of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, who has covered civil rights murders for decades.

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Bombshell quote missing from Emmett Till tape. So did Carolyn Bryant Donham really recant?

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Bombshell quote missing from Emmett Till tape. So did Carolyn Bryant Donham really recant?

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https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2018/08/21/emmett-till-carolyn-bryant-donham-recant-quote-missing/1017876002/

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Timothy Tyson's book on Emmett Till became a bestseller thanks to the bombshell quote he attributed to Carolyn Bryant Donham - that she lied when she testified about Till accosting her.

Donham's daughter-in-law, Marsha Bryant, who was present for the two tape-recorded interviews Tyson did with Donham, said her mother-in-law "never recanted."

Adding to the intrigue is the fact the quote Tyson attributed to Donham isn't on the recordings.

Bryant said people unfortunately believe the 84-year-old played a role in Till's murder when "she had nothing to do with it. They think she should die or go to jail forever. They think what happened to Emmett Till should happen to her."

Donham's then-husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, on Aug. 28, 1955, grabbed Till from his great-uncle's home, carried him away and killed him. Both men are now deceased.

Donham was "appalled" by Till's murder and never wanted it to happen, Marsha Bryant said. Donham was not available for an interview.

In his book, "The Blood of Emmett Till," Tyson wrote about Donham's memoir recounting "the story she told at the trial using imagery from the classic Southern racist horror movie of the 'Black Beast' rapist. But about her testimony that Till had grabbed her around the waist and uttered obscenities, she now told me, 'That part's not true.'"
Related: Emmett Till case reinvestigated, but what does that really mean?
Tyson said the recordings of his interviews with Donham are now in the hands of the FBI, which is reexamining Till's killing.

"It is true that that part is not on tape because I was setting up the tape recorder," Tyson said.

He said when Donham began to mutter something about "they're all dead now anyway," he snatched up his notebook and began taking notes, which the FBI has since subpoenaed.

He shared a photo of the notes with the Clarion Ledger. They read: "That pt wasn't true. ... 50 yrs ago. I just don't remember. ... Nothing that boy ever did could justify what happened to him."

Bryant said she feels Tyson acted "unethically" in dealing with the book she was writing with her mother-in-law, "More Than a Wolf Whistle: The Story of Carolyn Bryant Donham."

"He had access to the book because he was my editor," she said. "We allowed him to interview Carolyn, and he helped me edit."

Tyson's book, "The Blood of Emmett Till," includes information from that memoir.

Tyson called Bryant's claim that he was editor of the book "bullsh--."

He said the family handed him about 30 pages and "persuaded me to leaf through this short, very flimsy, utterly unpublishable memoir. They asked for advice on how to get a memoir published, and I gave them some garden variety advice."

He said he told them he didn't want to be involved as an editor and didn't line-edit the book.

Bryant said the family knew nothing about Tyson's book until it was released, but Tyson said he told the family years ago he might do a book.

He said he promised the family to deliver the interviews and documents to the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill library archives.

When he first mentioned this, Donham "seemed queasy about that," he said.

But once he explained that the materials wouldn't be available until her death, "that did satisfy her," he said.

Bryant said the family never agreed to put the memoir into the archives.

According to Carly Miller, a spokeswoman for the collection, Tyson gave them an unpublished version of Carolyn Bryant Donham's memoirs as an addition to the Timothy Tyson Papers, which contain his research materials.

"Mr. Tyson," she said, "specified access restrictions to the papers: they were not to be released for 20 years or until the death of Ms. Donham."

Tyson said he contacted Bryant about five years ago, asking if he could conduct another interview with Donham.

"She told me Carolyn wasn't doing well and couldn't talk to me," he said.

He asked if she wanted his father, a pastor, to come by.

He quoted her as saying Donham became upset whenever she heard his name, explaining that "she's afraid you're going to write a book and 'I'm going to be famous again.'"

He said he then told Bryant, "I'm working on a book, but I'm pretty sure she'll not be with us when it's published" because of Donham's continuing poor health.

When the book did come out, Tyson heard from Bryant.

"She told me there were people on their front porch and pictures of their house on Internet," Tyson said. "She was none too happy. She didn't take exception to any of the facts."

Bryant disagreed. "We told him the truth," she said, "and he wrote she recanted."

The idea that Donham would say those words to a stranger is ridiculous, Bryant said.
"Why would she recant to somebody she just met?"
Related: Emmett Till's cousin sets history straight
Asked if the family is planning litigation, she replied no comment.

In 2007 a majority-black grand jury in Greenwood declined to indict Donham, considering charges ranging from manslaughter to accessory after the fact.

Despite the FBI's current reexamination, those familiar with the case doubt there will be any prosecution.

Bryant said Donham has never wavered from the story she has told since 1955.

But her story has differed over the years.

In 1955, she shared with a defense lawyer for her husband and Milam that as soon as her husband Roy returned from a work trip, she told him what happened in the store with Till.

But she has repeatedly said since that someone else told Roy first.

"I didn't say anything, and one of the reasons I didn't ever say anything more about it, was because I was afraid that, what I was worried about was he's gonna go find and beat him up," she told FBI agent Dale Killinger.

Investigations by civil rights leader Dr. T.R.M. Howard and author Devery Anderson each concluded that Roy Bryant learned of what happened at the store from someone other than his wife.

In 1955, she took the witness stand to testify, and the judge concluded her testimony was inadmissible.

With the jury out, she told the courtroom and reporters present that Till grabbed her on the hips and told her that he had sex with white women before, using an obscenity.

Her court testimony differs greatly from her initial statement, where she said Till grabbed her hand, asked for a date, said goodbye and whistled.

When Till's killers arrived at Mose Wright's house, they asked for "the boy who did the talking at Money." They didn't ask for the one who touched Donham.

Davis Houck, co-author of "Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press," said if Donham is saying she didn't recant in her interview with Tyson, "we're left with a familiar story: a predatory black 'man' threatened to rape her on the evening of Aug. 24."

He sees two problems with that:
Also Read: Just 35 days after being replaced, Emmett Till sign hit with bullets
If she indeed recanted, he said, "we are, at long last, asked to see her as a pawn in the defense attorneys' strategy."

In the end, he said, Donham and Tyson "answer the same question: who was Emmett Till? Their very different answers continue to hang over the familiar, if mute, photographs of the Chicago child whose story has become a proxy for so many black boys and men in our present moment."

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Bombshell quote missing from Emmett Till tape. So did Carolyn Bryant Donham really recant?

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Timothy Tyson's book on Emmett Till became a bestseller thanks to the bombshell quote he attributed to Carolyn Bryant Donham - that she lied when she testified about Till accosting her. Donham's daughter-in-law, Marsha Bryant, who was present for the two tape-recorded interviews Tyson did with Donham, said her mother-in-law "never recanted."

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Justice Department calls it quits on Emmett Till probe. No charges.

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Justice Department calls it quits on Emmett Till probe. No charges.

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https://www.mississippicir.org/news/justice-department-calls-it-quits-on-emmett-till-probe-no-charges

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Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting

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In 2004, one of those cousins, Simeon Wright, along with Beauchamp and activist Alvin Sykes, helped convince the Justice Department to reinvestigate the case.

During that probe, Donham told FBI agent Dale Killinger that Till "accosted" her and that she screamed for her sister-in-law, Juanita Milam, who was in back.

But Juanita Milam told the FBI that she wasn't there that day.

Federal prosecutors considered charging Donham with lying to an FBI agent, but ultimately decided to let the case go instead to a Mississippi grand jury.

In 2007, a majority-black grand jury voted against charging Donham with manslaughter. The panel also voted against charging Henry Lee Loggins, an African-American field hand who reportedly helped keep Till in the back of the truck before the white men began to beat him.

In his 2017 book, The Blood of Emmett Till, author Timothy Tyson wrote that Donham recanted the story she told at trial, saying the part about her testimony that Till had grabbed her around the waist and uttered obscenities wasn't true.

He quoted Donham as saying, "Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him."

(Donham's family has denied she recanted.)

After this revelation, the FBI reopened the case a second time.

Watts said she and other members of the Till family don't believe it's too late for justice.

"The past is not the past until justice prevails," she said. "I want to be on the right side of history, and I want everybody else to be on the right side of history."

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Justice Department calls it quits on Emmett Till probe. No charges. - Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting

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In 2004, one of those cousins, Simeon Wright, along with Beauchamp and activist Alvin Sykes, helped convince the Justice Department to reinvestigate the case. During that probe, Donham told FBI agent Dale Killinger that Till "accosted" her and that she screamed for her sister-in-law, Juanita Milam, who was in back.

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https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/nation-now/justice-dept-reopens-emmett-till-murder-case-that-helped-inspire-civil-rights-movement/465-4428738d-5608-411b-8b0d-8aebe8f3bcd7

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John Bacon and Jerry Mitchell (USA TODAY)

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Feds reopen Emmett Till murder case, family ‘wants justice to prevail’

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Remembering Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi

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Remembering Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi

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https://placesjournal.org/article/remembering-emmett-till/?cn-reloaded=1

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Nearly fifty years passed between the 1955 murder of Emmett Till and its first public commemoration in the Mississippi Delta. When the memorials finally emerged, so too did accounts of a long-enforced silence. In her gripping memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody says that she was haunted by Till's murder, but never allowed to speak of it openly. Outside the Delta, Till's story was passed down by writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Bob Dylan, Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Lewis Nordan, and it figured prominently in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "dream" speech in Detroit in June 1963 (though not in the more famous version delivered two months later in Washington). But in the place where it occurred, Till's murder was seldom discussed publicly. Architectural historian Dell Upton observes that even as the civil rights movement began to be commemorated across the South in the 1970s, memorials were concentrated in "Alabama, Georgia, and other places where the great, telegenic mass demonstrations were held, rather than, say, in Mississippi, the scene of quieter, less visible efforts and of more sinister, more random, and less restrained violence."

In 2005, the silence was broken with two blue roadside markers designating a 30-mile stretch of Highway 49E as the "Emmett Till Memorial Highway." In the years that followed, the Delta experienced an unprecedented memory boom. More than $5 million was spent on the production of a significant commemorative infrastructure, including dozens of roadside markers, a museum, two restored buildings, an interpretive center, a walking park, and a community building. These works are unevenly distributed, ideologically inconsistent, and frequently vandalized, and yet they ensure that, at last, the memory of Till's murder has a material presence in the landscape of the Mississippi Delta.

When the memorials finally emerged, so too did accounts of a long-enforced silence.... There is a world of patronage, nepotism, and enduring racism behind the surface of those historical markers.

While seemingly major parts of Till's story (such as his murder site) have gone uncommemorated, relatively minor elements have been affectively charged. Where was Till's body dropped in the water? Where was it recovered? From where was the gin fan stolen that weighted his body in the river? If these questions have been debated with an intensity out of proportion with their historical significance, it's because the economic well-being of entire towns hinges on the answers given. As Till's story is passed down through generations, its plot is shaped by the conditions of remembrance in the Delta as much as by the distant facts of 1955. Now the story is in the hands of the legislators, county supervisors, funding boards, nonprofit organizations, private foundations, small-town mayors, anonymous citizens, ex-cons, and mid-level bureaucrats who oversee the new commemorative works. There is a world of controversy, patronage, nepotism, and enduring racism behind the surface of those historical markers.

Some controversies are fueled by forensic debates over what precisely happened to Emmett Till. Others are motivated by the simple fact that stories of Till's death are one of the few Delta commodities not controlled by agribusiness. And in many cases, the desperate pursuit of revenue has fueled an even more desperate creativity with Till's story, unsettling the plotline of a murder that was ambiguous from the start. By studying this commemorative infrastructure and its controversial appearance on the landscape of the Delta, we can see with a newfound clarity how race, place, and memory work through one another - and how they are transformed in the process.

The Freedom Trail

In 2011, the Tourism Division of the Mississippi Development Authority announced the creation of the Mississippi Freedom Trail, commemorating 25 places that played a significant role in the state's civil rights history. Today these sites are marked by cast aluminum signs, mounted on seven-foot posts, with an oval-shaped crest emerging from the top. The front features a raised-letter surface; the back is a printed, black-vinyl sheet with explanatory text and photographs. At a cost of $8,000 apiece, the signs were designed by Hammons and Associates, a graphic design firm in Greenwood, and cast by Sewah Studios in Ohio.

My point in rehearsing these details is that none of them - from the post height to the crest shape to the local design firm or distant industrial forge - were developed for commemorating the civil rights movement. They were borrowed from the well-established practice of blues commemoration in the Mississippi Delta, a massively successful experiment in tourism and economic development. Indeed, the Freedom Trail was originally proposed as an extension of blues commemoration. The design recalls the circular crest of the Blues Trail signs, which replicated the shape of an LP vinyl record.

In any case, the tourism boosters who created the Freedom Trail were convinced that the most important of these 25 sites was Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Mississippi - the country store where Emmett Till whistled at Carolyn Bryant on August 24, 1955, three days before her husband, Roy Bryant, and an unknown number of accomplices snatched the fourteen-year-old boy from his uncle's home, tortured him, shot him, attached his body to a cotton-gin fan with a length of barbed wire, and sank him in the river. From the perspective of the Mississippi Development Authority, the "murder and funeral of Emmitt [ sic] Till" was "the genesis of the [civil rights] movement, giving Rosa Parks the strength to sit down and Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. the courage to stand up." In a symbolic gesture, the ruins of the abandoned store were designated as the starting place of the Freedom Trail. Surviving members of the Till family joined veterans of the Mississippi freedom struggle in a ceremony to unveil the first trail marker.

That might seem strange to people who remember coverage of the murder trial in September 1955, where focusing on the grocery store was a racist strategy used by defense lawyers to get Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam acquitted. Prosecutors argued that the plotline of the murder began at the site of the abduction, the homestead of Till's uncle Moses Wright on Dark Fear Road. By starting their story at the Wright residence, three days after the events at the grocery, prosecutors were trying to keep Till away from Carolyn Bryant, keep Bryant herself from testifying, and thereby avoid the suggestion of a "justifiable homicide" - the notion that murder could be a fitting punishment for a black boy who insulted a white woman. Defense lawyers argued, rather, that the events of Bryant's Grocery formed the "essential background for a later happening." Judge Curtis Swango ruled in their favor and allowed Bryant to tell her story, and although she would later confess that this was a lie, she testified in court that Till forcibly held her hand, asked her for a date, grabbed both of her hips, and propositioned her with "unprintable words." The judge dismissed the jurors during this testimony, but they got the gist of it. Nine of the twelve later confided that they voted to acquit not because they believed the men were innocent (they did not) and not because they doubted the identity of the body (which was the open argument of the defense), but rather because of what happened at Bryant's Grocery. "The simple fact was that a Negro had insulted a white woman. Her husband would not be prosecuted for killing him."

Today few people remember the debate about whether the store should be considered the origin point of Emmett Till's murder. The processes of commemoration have changed the meaning of the store, and the old racially charged geography that enabled his killers to go free is now advanced by the Mississippi Development Authority and put in the service of the state's "epic struggle for equality." The moment the Freedom Trail sign went up, it was no longer racist to say that the murder began at the store.

The Forensic Tradition

Not insignificantly, the ruins of that grocery store are owned by the children of Ray Tribble, an unrepentant juror from the 1955 trial. The family also owns the beautifully restored Ben Roy's Service Station, immediately to the south. After the trial, Ray Tribble excelled in business. He and his family bought farmland around Money, and in the mid-1980s purchased the two-story building that once housed Bryant's Grocery. By 2003, when two of the children acquired the gas station, the family owned everything in Money except the Baptist church.

Perhaps hesitant to let the crumbling grocery store become a monument to their patriarch's complicity, the Tribbles have rejected numerous offers to buy the property and have allowed it to fall into ruin. The iconic front porch collapsed in the early 1990s, the interior floors were gone by the end of the decade, and Hurricane Katrina claimed the roof and a large part of the north wall. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the store draws an ever-increasing number of tourists who want to see the place at which many believe an ill-timed whistle set in motion the civil rights movement. It seems the greater the ruin, the more potent the memory site.

The ruins of Bryant's Grocery are owned by the children of Ray Tribble, an unrepentant juror who helped acquit the storekeeper.

A mere 67 feet away, Ben Roy's Service Station has followed a different trajectory. Although it has no historic connection to Emmett Till's murder, since 2011 it has been actively written into his story. Two months after the Freedom Trail ceremony at the grocery store, Tribble's children won a Mississippi Civil Rights Historical Sites grant to restore the gas station, reasoning that its covered portico was a good place for tourists to gaze at the grocery and learn civil rights history. That was apparently enough for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to give $206,360.80 earmarked for civil rights to the restoration of Ben Roy's Service Station. And thus, both buildings are now inescapably a part of Till's story.

After the trial, black sharecroppers refused to patronize Bryant's Grocery, and it was almost immediately put up for sale. It remained a country store for the next three decades, known as Wolfe's, then as Young's Grocery and Market, but it is still remembered as Bryant's, thanks to the historians who have normalized the legal narrative established by the defense at the murder trial. From William Bradford Huie, to Steven Whitaker, to Stephen J. Whitfield, to Devery Anderson, to Timothy B. Tyson - for 60 years the most influential voices shaping Till's story have begun their narratives at Bryant's Grocery.

That's not to say that historians believed Carolyn Bryant's testimony or endorsed the suggestion of a justifiable homicide. The opposite is rather the case. While the inclusion of Bryant's Grocery in Till's story is no longer controversial, questions about what precisely happened there are as all-consuming as they were in the 1955. Did Till really assault Carolyn Bryant? Did he proposition her? Did he whistle at her? These are forensic questions, focused on determining precisely what happened, and they are the definitive model for Emmett Till commemoration. The most recent, most comprehensive, and most respected scholarship on the Till murder is motivated by an ever-more-determined investigation to figure out what happened inside the store.

Tribble's children won a grant to restore the gas station next door, reasoning that its portico was a good place for tourists to gaze at the grocery and learn civil rights history.

Consider Devery Anderson's Emmett Till (2015), currently the authoritative history of the murder. Seven years before the book was released, Anderson published a detective entry in Southern Quarterly titled "A Wallet, a White Woman, and a Whistle: Fact and Fiction in Emmett Till's Encounter in Money, Mississippi." The book tellingly ends with a long appendix, "Piecing the Puzzle," which provides a question-and-answer guide to the most controversial elements of the murder. Anderson proceeds as if a detailed ledger of misdeeds exhausts the obligations of memory. He even divides his extensive list of sources by their proximity to 1955: primary sources are considered in main text, while secondary sources are relegated to footnotes.

The most recent forensic pursuit is Timothy Tyson's acclaimed The Blood of Emmett Till (2017). That project began in 2008, when Carolyn Bryant contacted Tyson and told him that she had lied under oath about what happened in Bryant's Grocery, and specifically about her testimony that she was assaulted: "That part's not true." Tyson then rewrote the story of Emmett Till based on a new account of the events at Bryant's Grocery.

Although these two books are very different, together they demonstrate how strongly the forensic approach to commemoration has taken hold. While Anderson and Tyson circle continuously around Bryant's Grocery, they never feature the store itself. The grocery was the site of their inquiry and even the inspiration for it, but not the object of their inquiry. The only relevant questions were who did what to whom? How can guilt, blame, victimhood, and responsibility be distributed?

The placelessness of the forensic tradition is evident, too, in the histories written by people who visited the store in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, when it was owned by J. L. "Bud" and Rita Young. We know little about the proprietors except that they kept a country store in the building that once housed Bryant's Grocery. This simple act, however, had profound commemorative ramifications. In good repair, the building itself attracted zero attention, allowing those who visited it to become entirely absorbed in forensics. It's startling how many people could visit Young's and call it Bryant's - as if the material history of the place were unrelated to questions of commemoration.

For example, Richard Rubin's Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South (2002) purports to be the true story of the year he spent in Greenwood, Mississippi, just a few miles south of Money, in 1988. A native New Yorker with an Ivy-League history degree, the recent graduate headed south to work for the Greenwood Commonwealth newspaper. It was to be a personal adventure. From his perspective, the Mississippi Delta was "pure mystery, an abyss at the bottom of America." The book's title refers to Rubin's sense that he could not get along in Delta society unless he kept his progressive racial views to himself. Silence, he suggested, was the cost of admission for a liberal. Needless to say, this is the kind of book Deltans have learned to distrust: a northerner dropping in to tell them how racist they are.

Rubin was "fascinated with the murder of Emmett Till," and he returns to it throughout the book. In 1987, as a junior in college, he had seen Eyes on the Prize, the celebrated six-hour documentary that stressed the role of Till's murder in sparking the civil rights movement. Rubin was captivated by Till's story, and he developed a "burning desire" to visit Mississippi for himself. He became preoccupied with Bryant's Grocery and visited the store "every few weeks" during the fall of 1988. The store was still open, he wrote, selling Vienna sausages, sardines, and deviled ham. He would park across the street from Young's Grocery and "just stare at it for a few minutes," before slowly making his way toward the entrance, while speculating about what happened inside. He would examine the front porch where, he claimed, Till bragged about his biracial sexual prowess. Then Rubin would "saunter on into the store itself and greet the clerk behind the counter." This, he reports, was so much "meaningless conversation," a cover for the author's silent forensic calculations: "she stood there, a little to the left, probably, and he stood here, right on this spot where I am right now."

We know that Rubin's story is fabricated, because Young's had been closed for at least three years when he arrived in 1988. He would have found the porch sagging and no longer enclosed, the sign gone, the windows broken or missing. Rubin, however, could not admit the extent of the damage. His fiction required an inhabitable store, so that he could forget its material status and focus on the forensic questions. He even occasionally seemed to forget that the building itself had changed hands. This is nowhere clearer than in his fictional one-person boycott of Young's Grocery. He claims that he would leave without buying anything - as a protest against Bryant's! "I did not wish to patronize the place, no matter what it was called these days." The ownership had become literally interchangeable, which was only possible because Rubin so completely disregarded the building and its history.

Ruins

Only after the Tribbles bought the store from the Youngs and let it fall into ruin did the building itself come to the foreground of historians' attention. The conspicuous disrepair of such an important place (Ray Tribble's daughter, Annette Morgan, called it the most historic site in the country) seemed to signify that the events of 1955 had been ignored and untended. Visitors began to see the murder of Emmett Till in light of persistent racism in the Mississippi Delta, effectively extending the chronology of Till's story. Just as a decade's worth of pilgrims visited Young's store and misnamed it Bryant's, a subsequent generation visited the Tribble building and found it haunted. Ruins, Mary Carruthers observed in a different context, "all but [shout] that they have been preserved for the chastisement of future generations." The more the store crumbles, the greater the evidence of unaddressed racism mounts.

Like the ruins of Bryant's Grocery, tales of Till's murder are ignored but not erased. The more obvious the neglect, the more urgently the ruins discharge their commemorative function.

By 2000, when Paul Hendrickson profiled the building for a Washington Post article titled "Mississippi Haunting," the floors were completely gone. In contrast to those who visited the store during the Young era, Hendrickson focused on the building itself. He described the broken plate glass, the rafters fallen to the foundation, and the rodents scurrying among the debris. A second-story toilet, still bolted to the brick wall, hung suspended in space, "with only air beneath, a ludicrous sight." While Hendrickson found the ruins beautiful, he wrote, "beauty of the building has to do with its look of extreme fragility. A good cough would knock it over." To his mind, the ruins were a poignant commentary on the uncommemorated murder and an indictment of bigotry in the contemporary Delta. "There is no plaque from a state historical commission," he wrote, which seemed to confirm the obvious meaning of the ruins: Emmett Till's legacy was ignored and abandoned.

And yet, for Hendrickson, that was only half of the story. Despite the material evidence of neglect, the building still gestured to the facts of 1955. This is why he had come to Money, he wrote, "why I'm standing now on this spot. I am trying to dream my way into the brutal murder of Emmett Till. I am trying to imagine what some of it was like." Imagine it he did. After contemplating the ruins, Hendrickson proceeded to cover the same ground as earlier writers - the whistle, the alleged violation of sexual taboos, the kidnapping, torture, and death. But this was not simply an opportunity to rehearse the facts of the murder. Hendrickson was attuned to the symbolic complexity of the ruins and saw in them both a call to memory and evidence that the call had been ignored.

The same patterns play out across the Delta. Like the ruins of Bryant's Grocery, tales of Till's murder are ignored but never erased from the cultural landscape. The longer they are ignored, the more obvious the neglect becomes; and yet, the more obvious the neglect, the more urgently the ruins discharge their commemorative function. In 2003, Hendrickson republished his article as the prologue to Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy, where the title shifted from "Mississippi Haunting" to "Nothing Is Ever Escaped."

The Tribbles are, in effect, holding the building hostage. 'They just want history to die.'

In 2007, Robert Jenkins, a community development expert from Virginia, learned of the neglected store on a business trip to Jackson. He offered to buy the property and restore it, only to be rebuffed by the Tribble family, who, he claims, proposed selling the bricks one by one to African Americans. One year later, a local insurance agent named Billy Walker was so embarrassed by the ruins ("a disgrace" to the local community) that he, too, tried to buy the store. Neil Padden, a Nashville businessman with connections to Congressman John Lewis, offered six figures in 2010 but could not close the deal. As Sherron Wright (the great-niece of Moses Wright) summed up the situation, by not selling the store, the Tribbles are, in effect, holding the building hostage. "They just want history to die," she said.

In 2009, two residents of Jackson, a retired businessman and a doctor, visited the ruins of Bryant's Grocery on a tour of civil rights sites organized by the Mississippi Center for Justice. Months later, they set up a dinner with their tour guide at the legendary Mississippi blues joint Po' Monkey's to ask what could be done about commemorating the site. By the time they had finished their beers, $4,000 had changed hands. While the full story of how that initial gift grew into the larger project of the Mississippi Freedom Trail is too complex to relay here, the essential point is that it started with the haunting power of the ruins.

Since its installation in 2011, the Mississippi Freedom Trail marker has accentuated the symbolic power of Bryant's Grocery. The sign emphasizes, if not exaggerates, the site's historical importance, framing it as the origin point of the American civil rights movement, and that makes its disregard more palpable. In June 2017, the Freedom Trail sign was vandalized, the black vinyl either erased with acid or scraped from the aluminum with a blunt instrument. Although it was quickly replaced, the vandalized sign was a perfect analogue to the ruins of Bryant's Grocery. Journalist Jamil Smith saw this clearly, tweeting that the vandal "tried to, quite literally, erase history." Tried to, but could not. Attempts to erase Till's story become part of the story itself. The ruined store ensures that when Till is remembered today, the Delta's will-to-forget is remembered as well.

Countermemorial

Which brings us back to the countermemorial of Ben Roy's Service Station, whose 2014 restoration was funded by a Mississippi Civil Rights Historic Sites grant, a one-time initiative coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides. The program also funded preservation projects like the Mississippi Freedom Trail, the headquarters of the Council of Federated Organizations in Meridian, the Medgar Evers house in Jackson, the Amzie Moore house in Cleveland, the Vernon Dahmer house in Hattiesburg, and the second-district Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner (home of the Till trial). In fact, Ben Roy's was the only funded project that was not a civil rights site.

Importantly, the MCRHS grant program was nested under a state congressional bill supporting projects demonstrating "the state's attractiveness as a tourism destination." Thus, the same bill that funded civil rights commemoration also funded a horse show on the Gulf Coast, renovations to the home of Elvis Presley, and the restoration of the home of Confederate icon J. Z. George, who signed the ordinance of succession, defended the disenfranchisement of African Americans, and backed the racist state constitution of 1890. With tourism as the ultimate driver of state funding, the capacity of Ben Roy's to attract visitors was just as important as its link to the civil rights movement. Indeed, in the case of Ben Roy's, the potential to attract tourists was its link to the civil rights movement. Mary Annette Morgan (granddaughter of Ray Tribble and the family's grant writer) used the indiscriminate movement of tourists between the two buildings to state her claim for civil rights money:

In this day and age, tourists to Mississippi and to the Delta region want to get "off-the-beaten-path." They want to experience history hands-on and see places where events took place and where legends lived and died. Today, without any investment in the site, hundreds of visitors travel to the site just to see the ruins of the Bryant Grocery building and to experience the nostalgia of small town Money. Just imagine if we could make Money, Mississippi more of a destination, instead of just a disappearing ghost town. How many more visitors would travel to Money if there was actually some type of cultural center for them to see and to experience?

Remember, the gas station was not the site "where events took place." Nor did "hundreds of visitors" travel there. These claims could be true only if Ben Roy's and Bryant's Grocery were counted as the same site.

The lead architect on the project was the Greenwood firm of Beard and Riser. Dale Riser wrote portions of the grant application and helped Morgan build her case that tourism could provide Ben Roy's with a retroactive civil rights history:

It is not inconceivable, in fact it is very likely, that the events that transpired at Bryant's Grocery on that day in August of 1955 were discussed underneath the front canopy of the adjacent service station; rehabilitating that service station will allow new and future generations of Mississippians, Americans, and others to meet under that canopy and discuss the events surrounding the death of Emmitt [ sic] Till and the civil rights era in a new light.

Morgan and Riser concluded that Ben Roy's could serve as a "visitor center," an "interpretive space," or "cultural center" where tourists could engage the history of civil rights. But what would that "new light" help us see? Not just a disappearing ghost town, Morgan wrote. Ghost towns are haunted, after all, and that was the frame Hendrickson used to set up his study of American racism. Against this vision of a haunting at Bryant's Grocery, the proposal to restore the gas station posited "the nostalgia of small town Money."

To make the gas station into an 'interpretive space,' the Tribbles promised to restore the segregated bathrooms. They emphatically chose not to install interpretive signs about the history of civil rights or the memory of Emmett Till.

In order to make Ben Roy's into an "interpretive space," the Tribble family promised to restore the segregated bathrooms on the north side. During the 1950s, the gas station had two bathrooms, marked "colored" and "white," opening to the outside. Sometime later, the signs were taken down, the exterior doors removed, and the bathrooms reoriented to the inside; one was accessible from a storage room, the other from an office. The grant application included a $6,000 line item to put things back the old way. The restored bathrooms would "display the reality of segregation in the Jim Crow South before the enforcement of Civil Rights legislation." Indeed, this was the only mechanism connecting the gas station restoration to the Delta's racial history. The Tribble family emphatically chose not to install interpretive signs about the history of civil rights or the memory of Emmett Till. As Morgan explained to Leflore Illustrated, "We're going to set it up exactly as it would have looked in the 1950s. ... It's not going to be a museum with panels and reinterpretations. It's none of that. It's the real thing."

So the commemorative work would be borne exclusively by the building and the collection of midcentury artifacts it housed. Two things about the Tribbles' collection of southern artifacts deserve mention. First, it did not include the Jim Crow signage that once marked the bathrooms "colored" and "white." While the Tribbles refurbished the bathroom fixtures and reoriented the doors, they did not put the old signs back, so the unmarked bathrooms could not truly "display the reality of segregation." Second, in addition to the original artifacts returned to the store, the family collected a variety of extra midcentury items to help refashion Ben Roy's as a "period piece," including a vintage sofa, circular washtubs, sewing machine, Hobart meat slicer, Coca-Cola signs, midcentury wheelbarrows, and decorative trunks. While they refused to add signage that could have linked their gas station to civil rights, they were happy to add artifacts that connected it to the charms of midcentury rural America. The cumulative effect is that the restored Ben Roy's is far more powerful as a period piece than as a civil rights cultural center.

This was by design. While the grant application acknowledged that the restored building would be both "an authentic time period exhibit and [a] visitor's center," the emphasis was on its value as a "reminder of an era in the history of Mississippi." Morgan wrote that the renovation would "allow visitors to step back in time to the summer of 1955." Riser emphasized the nostalgic value of service stations in the "small-town South" as "the hub of social activity ... a visible 'front stoop' for the community." Although the application acknowledged the "reality of segregation," it made that reality seem rather charming. On weekend nights, blacks and whites alike gathered to "shed their work-week blues and enjoy the Jukebox at Ben Roy's."

The restoration was paid for, literally, by the memory of Till's murder, but the finished product recodes the racial history of the Mississippi Delta and makes Till's murder seem like an aberration.

While the Tribbles won their civil rights grant by using tourists to blur the distinction between Bryant's Grocery and Ben Roy's Service Station, they spent the money in such a way that Ben Roy's appears not as an extension of the grocery, but as a countermemorial. When all the erasures of race and the investments in nostalgia are accounted for, we are left with a period piece that evokes nostalgia for racially promiscuous front-stoop Saturday nights that may well have never happened. Indeed, the first businesses in the Delta boycotted during the civil rights movement were white-owned service stations. With the help of Medgar Evers, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership distributed 50,000 bumper stickers with the phase "Don't Buy Gas Where You Can't Use the Restroom." Although Ben Roy's did provide Jim Crow facilities, and thus would not have been a target of the campaign, David and Linda Beito report that the campaign "galvanized ordinary blacks in the Delta." As early as 1952, before civil-rights activists were contesting sidewalks, lunch counters, bus stations, or swimming pools, they targeted gas stations as lighting rods of black inequality in the Delta. It is difficult to imagine that a front-porch jukebox could have overcome that charge. Moreover, we know the social habits of at least one black family in Money. On Saturday nights, the Wrights didn't go to Ben Roy's Service Station, three miles from their home, but to the segregated streets of downtown Greenwood, which had more to offer. We also know the Wrights believed Ben Roy's wife failed to treat blacks with respect.

Without saying a word - or posting a sign - Ben Roy's just stands there, beautifully restored, evidence for those who need it of the charms of midcentury Delta life. I cannot look at it without imagining what red-capped Trump supporters might see when they look backward to a once-great America. They see an entire American infrastructure made possible by economies of race but unmarked by legacies of violence. And this is the tragic irony of Ben Roy's: its restoration was paid for, literally, by the memory of Till's murder, but the finished product recodes the racial history of the Mississippi Delta and makes Till's murder seem like an aberration.

In these twin histories of abandonment and preservation, we see how race, place, and commemoration shift together. As soon as the Bryants' store was allowed to crumble, the forensic fascination of who-did-what-to-whom was reframed as an examination of how racism persists in the Delta. The onset of ruin has transformed the focus of commemorative inquiry: the inattention of the local community is now part of the meaning of Till's murder. And while the haunted ruins of Bryant's Grocery suggest that the Delta has not adequately dealt with the murder of Emmett Till, the countermemorial at Ben Roy's argues that there was not much to deal with in the first place.

Over and over again, we see that the Mississippi Delta is not simply the place where Till was killed or the setting where memory work happens. It is an ingredient part of the work itself.

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Nearly fifty years passed between the 1955 murder of Emmett Till and its first public commemoration in the Mississippi Delta. When the memorials finally emerged, so too did accounts of a long-enforced silence. In her gripping memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody says that she was haunted by Till's murder, but never allowed to speak of it openly.

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Nov. 27, 1955: Rosa Parks Attends Meeting About Emmett Till

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Nov. 27, 1955: Rosa Parks Attends Meeting About Emmett Till

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https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/rosa-parks-emmett-till/

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On Nov. 27, 1955 Rosa Parks attended a packed mass meeting at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to hear Dr. T. R. M. Howard speak. Howard was the lead organizer in the Emmett Till case, the 14-year-old Chicago boy who had been tortured and murdered near Money, Mississippi.

Four days later, when bus driver James Blake told Parks to give up her seat - "pushed as far as she could be pushed," she refused.

This story is excerpted from the Rosa Parks biography website by Jeanne Theoharis. Read more:

Rosa Parks was sickened, angry, depressed, horrified. She had been fighting for years to get justice for Black people under the law - Recy Taylor and Gertrude Perkins who'd been raped, Viola White and Claudette Colvin who had been arrested for resisting on the bus. She'd sought protection for Black people and particularly Black men from false charges - like the Scottsboro boys and 16-year-old Jeremiah Reeves. A young Black minister that Raymond [Parks] knew had been killed for appearing to make an advance at a white woman, as had their neighbor Hilliard Brooks for resisting on the bus.

Parks was discouraged. Most of these cases just got swept under the rug.

With Till, people had brought enough attention - an incredible amount of attention - so there had actually been a trial. And yet still, Till's killers were acquitted. These men who had killed a 14-year-old went free.

Many years later, she told Emmett Till's mother that she had thought of him at this moment.

In key ways, then, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was not just a reaction to bus segregation but also to this pattern of injustice in the criminal justice system - and Rosa Parks' determination to take a stand against it. Parks understood that it was not just about this lynching or this acquittal but about a structure that allowed and protected discrimination, segregation, the differential treatment of Black people under the law. Read more.

Learn more about Parks at the Rosa Parks biography website and in Jeanne Theoharis's outstanding book The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.

One of the sources for this post was T. R. M. Howard: Doctor, Entrepreneur, Civil Rights Pioneer by David Beito and Linda Beito, pages 138-139. (Read review here Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power.)

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Nov. 27, 1955: Rosa Parks Attends Meeting About Emmett Till - Zinn Education Project

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On Nov. 27, 1955 Rosa Parks attended a packed mass meeting at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to hear Dr. T. R. M. Howard speak. Howard was the lead organizer in the Emmett Till case, the 14-year-old Chicago boy who had been tortured and murdered near Money, Mississippi.

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The Legacy of the Lynching of Emmett Till

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The Legacy of the Lynching of Emmett Till

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https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/legacy-lynching-emmett-till/

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Family of Emmett Till reflects on murder, trial, civil rights

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Family of Emmett Till reflects on murder, trial, civil rights

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https://abcnews.go.com/US/family-emmett-till-reflect-funeral-killers-trial/story?id=82243182

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When George Floyd's 6-year-old daughter, Gianna, said, "My daddy changed the world," Amos Smith was taken back to the night almost 65 years ago when the body of his cousin Emmett Till was brought back to Chicago from Mississippi.

"We knew something terrible had happened. We just couldn't understand what it was," he said in an interview for the ABC documentary series "Let the World See."

Smith and his sister listened to the adults in their family talking about what happened from the top of the stairs.

"We crept back into the bedroom and we didn't go to sleep, but we did go back to bed, and we kinda talked to say Bobo's not coming back. Bobo's dead," he said.

"When George Floyd's daughter said, 'My daddy changed the world,' it all came back," Smith added. "It was about the same feeling I had that night I listened at the top of the stairs. And I had to leave the room."

The second episode of "Let the World See," airing Thursday, Jan. 13, explores the impact of Mamie Till-Mobley's decision to hold an open casket funeral for her son as well as the impact his killer's trial had on the civil rights movement.

In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was kidnapped and murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi. He was accused of whistling at and making sexual advances toward Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who later remarried and is now known as Carolyn Bryant Donham.

Till's mother, Till-Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral and allowed Jet Magazine to take photos of Till, so the public could see his badly beaten body.

Common, a rapper and actor from Chicago, where Till was born and raised, recalled seeing those photos of Till decades later.

"I couldn't believe a human body had become that and the hatred that caused that," he said in the ABC documentary series. "Seeing that picture of Emmett Till was the impetus for me actually feeling like, you gotta do something purposeful."

Bryant's then-husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were charged with Till's murder. Their trial began in September 1955, with almost every attorney in Tallahatchie County volunteering to defend them, according to Jack Smith, the son of one of the prosecutors.

Despite fearing for her safety, Till-Mobley traveled from Chicago to Mississippi for the trial. She testified about her son, as did Moses Wright, Till's great-uncle who identified Milam and Bryant as Till's kidnappers.

"She came down here knowing that they were going to get away with it. She had to," Angie Thomas, author of the novel "The Hate U Give," told ABC.

Milam and Bryant were ultimately acquitted by an all-white jury, and a grand jury declined to indict them for kidnapping Till.

For many people, elements of the trial echo today.

"That his wolf whistle could be punishable by death -- yes, absurd, but pretty much what the state of play was, and in some small ways, still with us. You know, when we've seen, in cases like the McMichael father and son who killed Ahmaud Arbery," said Khalil Muhammad, a professor of history, race and public policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School.

Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed in February 2020 while jogging in Brunswick, Georgia. Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael and their neighbor William Bryan were convicted of murdering Arbery and were sentenced to life in prison.

While the McMichaels argued that they were acting in self-defense, many say Arbery was killed for "jogging while Black."

"It's so similar to me. It's so similar," Wheeler Parker, one of Till's cousins, said on ABC's "Let the World See." "I know we come a long way. We made a lotta progress. Laws make you behave better, but they don't legislate the heart."

For Thomas -- whose book centers around a fatal police shooting of the main character's young friend -- the public outcry around the verdict in Till's murder trial reminded her of the protests that happened after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by a self-appointed neighborhood watch captain in 2012. George Zimmerman was acquitted of his murder a year later.

"I think if we look at Emmett and his death and the way things turned out and we compare it to the death of Trayvon Martin, Black people then had nowhere to turn to," Thomas told ABC. "Their goal was to try to hold people accountable for these things. But it's almost impossible in a place like Mississippi."

After being acquitted of Till's murder, Milam and Bryant confessed to the killing in a paid interview for Look Magazine. Decades later, the FBI opened an investigation into Till's killing, giving his family hope that they would find justice. The investigation was closed in December 2021.
ABC News' Jeanmarie Condon and Fatima Curry contributed to this report.

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Family of Emmett Till and more reflect on his funeral, killers' trial

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When George Floyd's 6-year-old daughter, Gianna, said, "My daddy changed the world," Amos Smith was taken back to the night almost 65 years ago when the body of his cousin Emmett Till was brought back to Chicago from Mississippi. "We knew something terrible had happened.

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https://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/feb/10/murder-emmett-till-based-lies/

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AP National Writer
NEW YORK

The woman at the center of the trial of Emmett Till's alleged killers has acknowledged that she falsely testified he made physical and verbal threats, according to a new book.

Historian Timothy B. Tyson told The Associated Press that Carolyn Donham broke her long public silence in an interview with him in 2008. His book, "The Blood of Emmett Till," was published Jan. 31.

"She told me that 'Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him,'" said Mr. Tyson, a Duke University research scholar whose previous books include "Blood Done Sign My Name" and "Radio Free Dixie."

Emmett Till was just 14 years old when he was tortured and killed in 1955 in Mississippi after allegedly whistling at a white woman, Ms. Donham. His murder became national news and was a galvanizing event in the Civil Rights Movement. It also has been the subject of numerous books and movies.

During the trial, Ms. Donham said that he had grabbed her, and, in profane terms, bragged about his history with white women. The jury was not present when she testified.

Ms. Donham's then-husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were acquitted by the all-white jury. Both men, who later told Look magazine they murdered Emmett, have since died. Mr. Milam's widow, Juanita Milam, would later tell the FBI she believed that Ms. Donham had fabricated her story. Juanita Milam died in 2014.

The Justice Department re-examined the case a decade ago, but no one was indicted as a murderer or an accomplice.

Last month, the maker of a documentary on Emmett said he had long been sure that Ms. Donham's story was false.

"His mother had mentioned that Emmett had a speech impediment and that the things Bryant claimed he was saying he could not have said easily," said Keith Beauchamp, whose "The Untold Story of Emmett Till" came out in 2005.

Mr. Tyson said that he spoke with Ms. Donham after her daughter-in-law, Marsha Bryant, contacted him. Marsha Bryant had read "Blood Done Sign My Name," about a racist murder during his childhood in Oxford, N.C., and invited Mr. Tyson to meet with her and Ms. Donham.

Mr. Tyson said he and Ms. Donham had two conversations, both lasting two to three hours, and that he planned at the time to place the material in the archives at the University of North Carolina. Asked why he waited so long to publicize his findings, he responded that historians think in different terms than journalists.

"I'm more interested in what speaks to the ages than in what is the latest media thing," he said.

He added that he wasn't sure whether Ms. Donham knew about the book. He said he had fallen out of touch with the family and that when he last spoke with Marsha Bryant, a few years ago, she said Ms. Donham was in poor health.

Emmett was a fun-loving teenager from Chicago visiting the Mississippi Delta and helping out on his great-uncle Mose Wright's farm. On Aug. 24, 1955, Emmet and some other kids drove to a local store, Bryant's, for refreshments. At Bryant's, some of the kids stayed on the porch, watching a game of checkers, while the others filed inside to buy bubblegum and sodas.

Then Carolyn Bryant, the 21-year-old wife of proprietor Roy Bryant, was behind the counter.

Accounts of what happened next differ.

She claimed Emmett bragged about dating white women up North. She said he grabbed her and asked her, "How about a date, baby?"

Simeon Wright, Emmett's cousin, heard none of this. But there is no doubt about what he heard when they left the store, he told the AP in 2005.

Standing on the front porch, Emmett let out a wolf whistle.

Carolyn Donham's whereabouts have long been a mystery, but North Carolina voter rolls list a Carolyn Holloway Donham. Holloway is her maiden name.

The address is for a green, split-level home in Raleigh at the mouth of a neat cul-de-sac just two turns off a busy four-lane thoroughfare. The well-tended house has burnt-orange shutters and a front-facing brick chimney decorated with a large metal sunburst. Orange flags emblazed with the word "Google" dot the lawn.

A woman, who appeared to be of late middle age, and a small barking dog appeared at the front door. When a reporter asked if this was the Bryant family home, the woman replied, "Yes."

When asked if Carolyn Donham was at home, the woman replied, "She's not available."

At first, she refused to accept a business card, but relented after hearing about Mr. Tyson's book.

The Emmett Till Legacy Foundation has shared news reports about the book on Instagram and asked if Ms. Donham would have the "decency and courage" to speak with Mr. Till's relatives.
AP National Writer Allen Breed contributed to this report from North Carolina.

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AP National Writer NEW YORK The woman at the center of the trial of Emmett Till's alleged killers has acknowledged that she falsely testified he made physical and verbal threats, according to a new book. Historian Timothy B. Tyson told The Associated Press that Carolyn Donham broke her long public silence in an interview with him in 2008.

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https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/nation-now/did-emmett-till-have-a-white-girlfriend-yes-and-shes-been-found/465-c417720c-8a0b-4a87-b4b3-8b9a66f9dac3

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Emmett Till's 'white girlfriend' found

CHICAGO - For more than six decades, a mystery has swirled around the Emmett Till case, a mystery involving the photograph of a white girl.

Till, 14, who was black, was abducted Aug. 28, 1955, and murdered after supposedly whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in a grocery store in Money, Mississippi.

J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant were acquitted in his murder but later confessed in a now-infamous 1956 Look magazine story by journalist William Bradford Huie. Although the exchange between Till and Carolyn Bryant, Roy Bryant's wife, was the basis of the case against Milam and Roy Bryant, Huie's story offers an additional reason for Till's death.

Till's murderers "killed him because he boasted of having a white girl and showed them the picture of a white girl in Chicago," Huie told filmmakers for the 1987 documentary "Eyes on the Prize."

The years have passed, and the long-lost photograph has remained an enigma.

Who was this girl? Did she even exist?

Now, 63 years later, the answer is yes, and her name is Joan Brody. Brody gave her first interview about Till to a Clarion-Ledger reporter and others at her condo in the northern suburbs of Chicago.

In "Eyes on the Prize," Till's cousin Curtis Jones mentioned that Till had a "picture of some white kids that he had graduated from (elementary school with) ... female and male."

The documentary's producer, Henry Hampton, told NPR that Till showed this photo of his classmates to his Mississippi peers, pointing to the white girl and saying she was "his girlfriend. In fact, it was his classmate."

Upon hearing the audio interview of Hampton, Brody said, "That had to be me."

She was the only white girl in Till's class.

In the classroom that year, she sat next to Till, who was 13. She was 12.

"He had beautiful eyes," she recalled.

Their first teacher was a white lady, who lasted only a few days.

Their second teacher was a black man, who ran the classroom with a firm hand, whacking students with his ruler.

One day, she and Till were tugging on a belt, and they were both laughing, possibly because of their strict teacher, Brody recalled.

When the teacher saw them goofing around, he came over and smacked her on the hand with his ruler. She grabbed onto the ruler in defiance, she said.

When July 25 came, Till celebrated his 14th birthday. She had to wait a month to celebrate her 13th birthday.

At their graduation, she joined other students on the stage where photos were apparently taken, she said. "I had no interest in it."

Brody never saw Till again.

In his interview, Hampton explained that when Till showed the picture of the white girl, his cousins scoffed.

Till explained that he would talk to anybody, Hampton said, and his peers then challenged him to talk to Carolyn Bryant.

After Till bought something and began to leave, "he turned around and said, 'Bye, baby,'" Hampton said. "He didn't understand that was a killing offense in Mississippi in (1955), but indeed it was."

In the 1955 trial, Carolyn Bryant testified that Till grabbed her by the waist and told her he had had sex with white women before, uttering an obscenity.

Brody shook her head in disbelief.

"He wasn't a smart-alecky kid," she said. "He wasn't a person to smart off to a white woman or any woman."

The Look magazine article obsesses about the claim Till said he'd had sex with white women.

His mother, Mamie Till, called it preposterous, saying her son would "never brag about the women he had. How could he? He was only 14."

Brody agreed with her, saying that wasn't the Till she knew. He never talked about sex, or she would have certainly blushed, she said. "He was a gentleman."

In Mississippi, Till's killers pistol-whipped him so severely that parts of his skull fell out.

Mamie Till insisted his casket be left open during his funeral so "the world could see what they did to my boy."

The photograph of his mutilated face ran in the Chicago Defender, Jet magazine, many other black publications and in publications around the world, yet many Americans have never seen it because mainstream publications considered it too graphic to print.

Brody was one of them until she recently saw the photo online. It was so horrific that she turned away, and tears streamed down her cheeks.

The men that killed him, she said, "were worse than animals."

She wonders what might have been if Till had lived.

"He had his whole life ahead of him - to be gone just like that," she said. "And for what reason?"

She wiped away her tears.

"He could have been president," she said. "He was just a nice kid with a nice smile."

"He didn't deserve it," she said. "Nobody deserves what they did to him."

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Did Emmett Till have a white 'girlfriend'? Yes, and she's been found.

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Emmett Till's 'white girlfriend' found CHICAGO - For more than six decades, a mystery has swirled around the Emmett Till case, a mystery involving the photograph of a white girl. Till, 14, who was black, was abducted Aug. 28, 1955, and murdered after supposedly whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in a grocery store in Money, Mississippi.

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Articles about the Emmett Till Interpretive center

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Articles about the Emmett Till Interpretive center

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https://www.emmett-till.org/news

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Maddy Quon, "After white supremacists mocked the Till memorial, $20,000 was donated to the Emmett Till Interpretive Center", The Daily Mississippian, 8 November 2020.

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https://www.npr.org/2019/07/26/745731808/emmett-till-memorial-sign-to-be-replaced-after-being-defaced

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This week a photo of three students posing with guns in front of a sign commemorating Emmett Till went viral. NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with journalist Jerry Mitchell, who reported on the photo.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

It has been almost 64 years since the body of Emmett Till was pulled from the Tallahatchie River in northwest Mississippi. Emmett Till was 14. He was black. He was tortured and murdered after allegedly whistling at a white woman. Had he lived, Emmett Till would have been 78 years old yesterday. Yesterday was also the day that a photo of three Ole Miss students, two of them holding guns, went viral. They were photographed in front of a bullet-scarred sign commemorating that spot where Till's body was recovered.

The photo was uncovered by ProPublica and the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting. Journalist Jerry Mitchell is head of the center, and he is here to tell us more.

Jerry Mitchell, good to speak to you.

JERRY MITCHELL: Good to be with you.

KELLY: Tell me a little bit more about this picture, what it shows.

MITCHELL: Well, there are three Ole Miss students. They're all members of the Kappa Alpha Order fraternity. And one of them posted it on his Instagram account on March 1. And it got 274 likes, which I found kind of shocking. And five days after that, someone anonymously complained to Ole Miss - University of Mississippi - about this photograph. But it was still up when we started asking questions.

KELLY: And when was that? How did you get involved?

MITCHELL: We got the photograph last week and just were stunned that someone would take a picture in front of a bullet-riddled sign. And they're all smiling and holding - kind of hoisting the guns. And it really shocked, to be honest - and then began digging into, looking, asking questions and things like that.

KELLY: So you start digging and asking questions. The photo gets taken down. I know you've reached out to the three students pictured here.

MITCHELL: Yes, we have.

KELLY: And they haven't commented, you said.

MITCHELL: No, no comment at all.

KELLY: What's happened to them? What have been the consequences?

MITCHELL: Well, they were suspended from their fraternity. When we asked the fraternity for comment, in less than 24 hours, the Ole Miss chapter of that fraternity suspended those students. Then once that happened, of course, we had to break the story.

KELLY: And anything beyond being suspended from their fraternity? I saw Ole Miss has put out a statement calling this offensive, calling it hurtful but saying it doesn't violate the student code of conduct.

MITCHELL: Well, that's kind of interesting. I guess I need to read what the student code of conduct is. I don't know what all - I think someone sent out the Ole Miss creed yesterday, and it certainly would violate the creed, you would think. But, you know, kind of more broadly, I think the other question is whether a crime was committed. And so the U.S. attorney in Oxford has sent this on to the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department in Washington. So they're going to be examining that.

KELLY: Well, you've covered the legacy of the civil rights movement...

MITCHELL: Oh, yeah.

KELLY: ...For so many years and from all kinds of directions. What do you think is going on here? Why would a sign marking Emmett Till and the place where he was pulled from a river - why would that resonate with students today, prompt this kind of action today?

MITCHELL: You know, that sign has really drawn a lot of hatred. It seems there are some of these signs and events that seem to engender a lot of anger, you know, backlash. And I think that's kind of what we're witnessing in this country as a whole right now. There is a certain amount of backlash. It's kind of this idea of we want to take it back or we want to - this is ours. It's almost like wanting to say, you know, you have this icon or this symbol, and we don't like it. And so we're going to take it back or we're going to deface it or we're going to erase it. Which is really fascinating when you think about it. You know, like, we don't like this history, so we're going to try to erase it.

KELLY: The we you're talking about there is white people, and you're linking this to the broader, you know, rise we have seen of certain white nationalist, white supremacist groups.

MITCHELL: Yeah. I think there's been - within recent years, I mean, the - those groups have been emboldened to be able to speak more boldly that, you know, kind of some of their white nationalist or white supremacist views and things like that and be bold about it.

KELLY: That's Jerry Mitchell. He runs the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting.

Jerry Mitchell, thank you very much.

MITCHELL: Thanks for having me, appreciate it.

KELLY: And an update on the sign. Officials took it down last week. It was damaged, as we heard, by bullet holes. They say a new sign designed to better withstand attacks will be installed soon.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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Emmett Till Memorial Sign To Be Replaced After Being Defaced

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This week a photo of three students posing with guns in front of a sign commemorating Emmett Till went viral. NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with journalist Jerry Mitchell, who reported on the photo. MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST: It has been almost 64 years since the body of Emmett Till was pulled from the Tallahatchie River in northwest Mississippi.

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Senators sponsor two bills honoring Emmett Till

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Senators sponsor two bills honoring Emmett Till

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https://www.supertalk.fm/mississippi-senators-cosponsor-two-bills-honoring-emmett-till/

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Mississippi senators cosponsor two bills honoring Emmett Till - SuperTalk Mississippi

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This week, the United States Senate took action on two bills that will honor the late Emmett Till, who was killed in 1955 by white supremacists in Money, Mississippi. The first bill, S.450, was unanimously passed on Monday, posthumously presenting a Congressional Gold Medal to Till and his mother, M…

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Emmett Till's cousins would like to see authorities explore new questions surrounding his 1955 murder.

Those questions arose because Carolyn Bryant Donham has admitted she lied when she testified that Till touched her - a lie she repeated to the FBI a decade ago.

"Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him," Donham was quoted as saying.

Bryant admitted her lie to Tim Tyson, author of the new book, "The Blood of Emmett Till," but she never gave a reason why.

"There needs to be a revisiting of the evidence in light of this revelation," said Till's cousin, Deborah Watts of Minneapolis.

In a letter to Assistant Attorney General Thomas Wheeler, U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson called for an investigation: "The facts known to us today affords (the Department of Justice) an opportunity to bring some justice to an innocent 14-year-old boy."

In 1955, an all-white jury acquitted Donham's then-husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, of murdering Till - only for them to confess months later to Look magazine they had indeed beaten and killed the Chicago teen.
RELATED: Could lies about Emmett Till lead to prosecution?
Watts, board president of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, praised Donham for her courage in daring to speak now.

"I hope she's trying to clear her conscience," said Wheeler Parker of Chicago, who rode on the train with Till from Chicago to Mississippi in 1955. "My job as a pastor is to get people to clear their consciences and get right with God."

He said he has long supported the idea of giving Donham immunity from prosecution in exchange for her telling everything she knows.

"The Bible says you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free," he said. "I'm like a bird who's been in a cage. I'm halfway out of the cage now. That would get me all the way out."

Parker said he supports the Justice Department looking again at Till's slaying, but "I don't know what else they could do."

He praised the relentless work of FBI agent Dale Killinger on the case, saying, "He did as thorough a job as you can do, unless she's willing to do more talking."

Donham has written about her experiences in the Till case in an unpublished memoir, "More Than a Wolf Whistle: The Memoir of Carolyn Bryant Donham."

That won't be available for public inspection at the University of North Carolina archives until 2036 or until she dies, but authorities could subpoena her words.

That happened in 1988 when a grand jury subpoenaed an interview that one-time Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers gave the Mississippi Department of Archives and History with the understanding it wouldn't be public until his death.

Months later, a jury convicted Bowers of ordering the 1966 murder of Vernon Dahmer, and he was sentenced to life in prison.

Parker would like to see authorities get their hands on the memoir - something he wants to read. "You can't bring Emmett back, but knowing the truth can set you free," he said.

Watts agreed, saying she and other relatives want to know really happened to Till that fateful day of Aug. 28, 1955, where he was beaten and shot to death.

"However we can acquire truth in a legal sense, we would want that," she said. "We would want prosecution, if warranted, but if not, we want the truth."

More than anything, Till's mother wanted the truth, she said. "Mamie wasn't interested in anyone going to jail."

So far, local and federal authorities aren't commenting.

Alvin Sykes of Kansas City, president of the Emmett Till Justice Campaign, whose work helped lead to the FBI reopening the case in 2004, said Wednesday, "We have engaged in communications with appropriate authorities and are waiting for the appropriate response at the appropriate time."

Immunity is one possible option, he said. "Sometimes you can get further in the pursuit of truth outside of a prosecution than you can inside."

Before the 1955 trial of her then-husband ended, Donham took the witness stand and testified outside the presence of the Tallahatchie County jury that Till grabbed her, asked for a date and said he had been "with white women before."

After the FBI reopened the case, Killinger spoke to Donham, who divorced Roy Bryant in 1975 and later remarried.

She repeated the story about Till she had previously testified to, telling Killinger that "as soon as he touched me, I started screaming."

Notes obtained by The Clarion-Ledger reveal that Carolyn Bryant gave a different story when she spoke first to defense lawyers in 1955, saying Till "insulted" her, but mentioned nothing about touching her.

In 2007, a majority-black grand jury in Greenwood declined to indict her in connection with the killing after considering a range of charges from aiding and abetting murder to manslaughter to accessory after the fact.

Myrlie Evers, whose husband, Medgar, investigated the Till killing, said she believes the case deserves another examination.

"I think America needs to look into the end results of this travesty and see what can be done in the future to prevent a replay of it," she said.

Parker said the lie that Till was a "sexual predator" has staying power.

Not that long ago, he said visited a school where a white student told him that Till had "misbehaved and did something he shouldn't have done."

If Donham would tell the truth, "she could clear the air on a lot of things," he said. "She's made a good start."
Contact Jerry Mitchell at (601) 961-7064 or jmitchell@gannett.com. Follow him on Facebook or Twitter.

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Emmett Till's cousins would like to see authorities explore new questions surrounding his 1955 murder. Those questions arose because Carolyn Bryant Donham has admitted she lied when she testified that Till touched her - a lie she repeated to the FBI a decade ago.