COUNTY VIEW: The killing that started the Civil Rights movement

Two years ago, President Joe Biden signed into law the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, the statute to make lynching a federal hate crime. A few months later, a woman called Carolyn Bryant died in her late eighties. But who was Emmett Till? And who was Carolyn Bryant?
Their story begins on a steamy August night in the Deep South in 1955. Emmett Till was a 14 year old, born and raised in Chicago, and visiting his mother’s kinsfolk in Money, a small, one-horse town, in Mississippi.
Money was dirt poor, a cluster of three shops, a school and a post office. The grocery shop run by Carolyn Bryant and her husband, Roy, was the centre of social activity and catered for a clientele of equally dirt-poor customers, black sharecroppers and field workers living in shacks along farm roads.
Before leaving for his visit south, Emmett Till’s mother warned him to be careful of his manners. He was to be ever respectful to white folk, knowing his ‘place’, and never speaking out of turn. Money was not like Chicago, where black people had learned to assert themselves and develop ‘attitude’. There was none of that in Mississippi, where blacks knew who were the bosses and where any display of cheek would get rough punishment. It was a warning that fell on deaf ears.
On that August evening, Emmett joined his cousins in visiting the Bryants’ shop. Inclined to show off a little, he allegedly flirted with the attractive Carolyn Bryant, holding her hand and, it was claimed, making inappropriate comments. His young cousins became alarmed that he was overstepping the line. They were right.
Later that evening, Carolyn Bryant related the incident to her husband, Roy, an ex-soldier with a notoriously short fuse who would have little tolerance for mouthy black teenagers. Roy and his stepbrother, JW Milan, went to the house where young Till was staying and abducted him. He was taken to Milan’s tool shed, beaten and pistol whipped, then shot through the head and his body dumped in the Tallahatchie river. He was found a week later, bloated, decomposed, and with a weight fastened with barbed wire around his neck.
Murders like that were commonplace, black corpses were buried quickly and that would be the end of things. But this time, it was different. Till’s body was returned to Chicago where his mother insisted on a public funeral with an open casket, ensuring that the photos of her dead son, in all their horror, were circulated to news media across the country. For the first time, world attention was focused on American racism and the barbarism inflicted on the enslaved blacks of the Deep South.
When Bryant and Milan were brought to trial for the murder, it turned out to be the expected travesty of justice. In spite of the compelling evidence, and the torchlight of national media attention, the all-white, all-male jury found the pair not guilty after 67 minutes’ deliberation. (One juror sneeringly remarked, “if we hadn’t stopped to drink pop, it wouldn’t have taken that long.”)
A year later, the murderers provoked further outrage when, legally protected against being tried again, they brazenly admitted their guilt in a paid article for a national tabloid.
But by now, public opinion had turned against them, and the Emmett Till case had become the catalyst for a civil rights movement that would sweep all before it. The two were ostracised, their businesses went bankrupt, they left Mississippi for good. Carolyn and Roy Bryant divorced. Emmett Till’s memory lived on with statues, plaques, bridges, streets and highways named after him. He has been the subject of books, films and documentaries, and to this day, he is hailed as the inspiration behind the Civil Rights movement.