born and raised in Mississippi, didn’t believe him, and they dared him to ask the white woman behind the counter in the store, Carolyn Bryant, for a date. He didn’t ask her for a date, but he did go into the store and buy candy. It was later alleged that as he left, he said, “Bye, baby” to her, even that he put his arms around her.
Simeon Wright, who was present that day, reported in a Smithsonian Magazine interview that Emmett was in the store for less than a minute and didn’t say anything to the woman or touch her. Wright said that in the span of time Emmett was in the store, there was no time for him to do so, and that because Bryant was behind the counter, Emmett certainly didn’t put his arms around her, as she later claimed. Then, as Wright and Emmett left the store together, Carolyn Bryant came out and headed to her car, and all parties agree that Emmett did whistle at her. According to Wright, Emmett was trying to impress his companions, telling them: “You guys might be afraid to do something like this, but not me.” He had no idea how dangerous that was, until he saw the nervous reaction of his cousin and friends.9
But later, Bryant elaborated on this brief exchange, claiming that he had “grabbed her, made lewd advances, and then wolf-whistled at her as he sauntered out.”10 Much later, in 2017, Bryant admitted she had lied, exaggerating what happened that fateful day to make it seem that Emmett had far overstepped the expected boundaries of relations between whites and blacks. But at the time, no one thought to question her story. If a white woman claimed an African American boy was being disrespectful to her, who was anyone to believe otherwise? No matter what a black man or boy might say to counter her claims, no one in the South would believe them.
When Roy Bryant, Carolyn’s husband and the store’s proprietor, returned from a business trip on August 27 and his wife told him the lie of what Emmett had done to her, he called upon his brother-in-law, J. W. Milam, to help him set things straight. Early in the morning of August 28, 1955, they went to the home of Emmett’s great uncle, Mose Wright. Holding a gun to show Wright they meant business, they demanded to see Emmett, and despite Wright’s pleas, they pulled Emmett out of bed and led him to their car. Though it’s not certain exactly what happened, they likely drove the terrified teenager around in their car and then took him to a tool shed behind Milam’s residence, where they beat him so severely that his face was barely recognizable, and shot him in the head. Then, they drove him to the Tallahatchie River, presumably already dead or dying, and threw him in the water.
Three days later, Emmett’s disfigured corpse was recovered, but his face was so smashed in that Simeon Wright could only identify his body by an initialed ring he wore. After that, events moved quickly, turning what might have seemed like just another murder of a black boy into a rallying cry for the civil rights movement.
Though authorities wanted to bury Emmett’s body quickly, his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, asked the authorities to send it back to Chicago. His remains were so horrifically mutilated that she opted to have a funeral with an open casket covered by a glass top, so that she could show the world what the murderers had done to her young son. Though the service was only initially written about in Jet, a weekly magazine geared toward an African American audience, the accompanying photo of Emmett’s corpse was so shocking that soon the mainstream media wrote about the story as well, and as they say, the rest is history. The outrage was so great that it inspired civil rights leaders to use it as a rallying cry.
Meanwhile, the Southern wheels of justice rolled on as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened—and, really, nothing had. At the trial, in a segregated courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, only a few witnesses described Emmett Till going into the store, and Wright identified the defendants as the men who took Emmett away. But the all-white jury rendered a not-guilty verdict in less than an hour because “the state had failed to prove the identity of the body.”11
In fact, after the two killers were acquitted and no longer subject to double jeopardy, they even justified the killing in an interview with Look magazine as an honor killing in defense of white supremacy in the South. As Milam stated in the interview, in which neither he nor Bryant showed any remorse, he had “intended only to beat the teen,” presumably to gain his submission to and acceptance of the way things were in the South. But then the pair decided to kill him, because “he showed no fear—and refused to grovel.”12
In 1956, J. W. Milam told Time magazine that Emmett Till was hopeless, and that he “liked niggas in their place . . . I know how to work ’em.” In this case, Emmett had decided on not showing the expected deference, so Milam had decided, “it was time a few people got put on notice.” The racist stated, “As long as I live, and can do anything about it, niggas are gonna stay in their place.”13
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