The Beginning
Carolyn Bryant swore in 1955 that 14-year-old Emmett Till grabbed and verbally threatened her days before her husband and his brother kidnapped and brutally murdered him.
Circumstances
Suddenly, after five decades, she admitted, “she lied.”
In August 1955, Emitt was visiting family in Sumner County, Mississippi, when he entered Bryant’s country store to buy some bubble gum. Bryant’s wife, Carolyn, was working in the store and spent about one minute alone with Till before others heard him whistle at her. ( However, Vanity Fair reported, he was said to have a lisp and may not have actually whistled.)
Pissed off, Roy Bryant and his half brother, J.W. Milam, kidnapped Till and tormented him to death. The two men were apprehended and arraigned on September 1955.
During the three-day preliminary, investigators introduced testimony from Moses Wright, Till’s uncle who saw his snatching, and Willie Reed, an African American tenant farmer heard Bryant and Milam torturing Till.
The worse part is the defense claimed that the mutilated body discovered in the Tallahatchie River was not that of Emmett Till.
The Trial
Disgustingly on the stand, Carolyn Bryant asserted that Till had grabbed her and verbally threatened her. She stated that while she was unable to utter the word he had used (as one of the defense lawyers put it), “he said [he had]’”—done something – “with white women before.’” Then she added, “I was just scared to death.”
And so in less than 60 minutes, the all-white, all-male jury found the men not guilty on September 23, 1955. Every person on the jury later conceded that they believed Bryant and Milam were guilty of homicide, yet decided to clear in light of the fact that they would receive life in prison or the death penalty would be to be too cruel to even think about imposing upon white men for murdering a black kid.
The end results after the preliminary, Bryant and Milam admitted to the murdering Emmitt in a Look magazine article. Consequently, The magazine paid them some $4000 if they graphically provided details to the their snatching of Emmett Till from his uncle’s home. Read More
Conclusion
Personally, I find it disturbing that that they conceded that they gun whipped him, constrained him to undress, tied an overwhelming cotton-gin fan around his neck with security fencing, shot him, and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River.
It is still a disturbing thought— thinking about it is sixty-five years since the death of Emitt Till’s murder in Mississippi; and nothing has changed. Black men and male children are still being murdered for no reason. The only crime some black men committed was being born Black.
It is past the time that White Americans that harbor hatred toward people of color realized that you are not superior, just as we are not inferior to you because of the color of our skin.
We are human-beings, our blood run red just as yours. In fact, most of us related to each other in more ways than one. More or less of us shared White DNA. For example—I have 30% European DNA, and I have 70% African DNA.