— Mississippi Freedom Trail —
Front
Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till came to this site to buy candy in August 1955. White shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant accused the black youth of flirting with her, and shortly thereafter, Till was abducted by Bryant's husband and his half brother. Till's tortured body was later found in the Tallahatchie River. The two men were tried and acquitted but later sold their murder confession to
Look magazine. Till's death received international attention and is widely credited with sparking the American Civil Rights Movement.
Rear
Bryant Grocery and Meat Market On August 21, 1955, Emmett Till and his cousin, Wheeler Parker, both from the Chicago area, arrived in Money for a short vacation visit with their great-uncle, Moses "Mose" Wright. Three days later, Emmett Till and his cousins came to this site, then Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market, to purchase candy. Till was fourteen years old. Although the boys had been warned not to test the Jim Crow code, Till may have whistled at or otherwise offended Carolyn Bryant, the young white store attendant. On August 28 at around 2:30 in the morning, store owner Roy Bryant, Carolyn's husband, and his half brother, J.W. Milam, kidnapped Till from his great-uncle's home three miles east of Money. According to the FBI, they brought him back to this store before driving him to the Shurden Plantation in Sunflower County where he was beaten and shot with a .45 caliber pistol. His murderers secured a 75-pound gin fan to his neck with barbed wire and dropped his body into the Tallahatchie River. The next day, Milam and Bryant were arrested on charges of kidnapping. Three days after his abduction, Till's body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River.
Emmett Till's mother, Mamie Till, insisted that her son's body be returned to Chicago for an open-casket funeral. Milam and Bryant were indicted on September 6 by a grand jury for kidnapping and murder of Till. The trial began on September 19 in Sumner, Mississippi. Sharecropper Moses Wright dramatically identified Milam and Bryant as the kidnappers, and Mamie Till testified that the body was that of her son. On September 23, a jury of twelve white men acquitted both defendants after deliberating only sixty-seven minutes. They would have taken less time, according to one jury member, if they had not stopped to drink sodas. In January 1956,
Look magazine published an interview with Milam and Bryant in which both confessed to having murdered Emmett Till. The two were never retried because of constitutional law regarding double jeopardy.
News of the murder and the trial that followed outraged black and sympathetic white Americans, and the case became a catalyst for the American civil rights movement. One hundred days after the last day of the trial of Till's murderers, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give her seat to a white man on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, precipitating the Montgomery bus boycott. When asked why she did not go to the back of the bus after being threatened with arrest, she said she thought of Emmett Till, and she couldn't go back.
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