The death of Emmett Till resurfaced back into the public sphere last week with the bombshell revelation that the woman who was at the center of the horrendous saga, Carolyn Bryant, admitted to fabricating much of her account of happened. A new book titled The Blood of Emmett Till, written by Timothy Tyson, a senior research scholar and historian at Duke University, quotes Bryant as saying, “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”
I think all of us would agree with her latest statement.
Till was a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who was visiting relatives in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, during the summer of 1955. He was kidnapped under cover at night, mercilessly beaten, shot, and thrown into the Tallahatchie River for having the audacity to flirt with a woman. Let’s clarify that, he was a teenage Black boy who had the audacity to flirt with a White woman, and a Southern one at that.
Bryant asserted that Till had grabbed her while making lewd, crude and profane comments as well as whistled toward her. She testified to this before an all-White jury during the trial of her husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam. In a compelling article for Vanity Fair magazine, Sheila Weller passionately highlights the grim, repressive, restrictive, and terrorizing reality for Black people in the South during this largely oppressive era.
Anyone with any knowledge of American history knows that an all-White, all-male Southern jury in mid-20th century Mississippi had absolutely no intention of convicting two White men for the crime of murder of a young teenage Black boy, despite overwhelming evidence of their guilt.
In fact, in closing arguments, the defense made the case that, as White, Anglo-Saxon men, they had a “conscientious” duty to render a not-guilty verdict. Several months later, after their acquittal in January 1956, Bryant and Milam gave an interview to Look magazine in which they were paid for their story and admitted their guilt. Milam passed away in 1981 and Bryant died in 1994. Today, Carolyn Bryant is 82 years old and her family has kept her whereabouts secret.
Though it happened more than half a century ago, Till’s murder was a prime example of how Black men have long been targets of pathological paranoia, hatred and malice from many segments of society. Black men have been see as particularly dangerous to the safety of White woman.
