Woman admits lying in fatal case that fuelled civil rights movement
It was the lynching that outraged African-Americans, spurred the civil rights movement and etched the victim’s name in history: Emmett Till.
The 14-year-old Chicagoan was visiting relatives in the cotton country of the Mississippi Delta on August 24, 1955 when he allegedly wolf-whistled at a white woman.
Three days later his body was found in the Tallahatchie River. Till had a bullet hole in the head, an eye gouged out and other wounds. The murderers had wrapped barbed wire around his neck and weighted him down with a cotton gin fan.
It was a ghastly crime that changed the United States but the woman at the centre of it, Carolyn Bryant, long remained an enigma.
A few weeks after the murder, the then 21-year-old testified in court that Till had grabbed and verbally harassed her in a grocery store.
‘‘I was just scared to death,’’ she said.
The all-white jury cleared her husband Roy Bryant and his halfbrother J W Milam of the crime. They later publicly admitted their guilt, saying they wanted to warn other blacks. Carolyn Bryant disappeared from public view.
Now, 62 years later, it has emerged that she fabricated her testimony about Till making physical and verbal advances.
‘‘That part’s not true,’’ Bryant told Timothy Tyson, the author of a new book, The Blood of Emmet Till.
Her four-word confession, of sorts, has provided an unexpected coda to a story whose victim is commemorated annually.
Bryant spoke to Tyson, a Duke University senior research scholar, in 2007, when she was 72. The admission until now.
Bryant, who residing at was not made public is still alive and an undisclosed Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him. location, told Tyson she could not remember other details about the fleeting encounter with Till, who went into the store to buy chewing gum.
She did, however, express regret. ‘‘Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.’’
She said she ‘‘felt tender sorrow’’ for Till’s mother, Mamie TillMobley.
Bryant’s comments still leave questions over what precisely transpired in the grocery store but they do suggest that its bloody and controversial aftermath marked her.
‘‘That case went toward ruining her a long way life,’’ Tyson told Vanity Fair magazine.
Till’s mother insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago, and African-American magazine Jet published photos of his mutilated corpse, sparking revulsion and galvanising the civil rights movement.
Rosa Parks said Till was on her mind in December 1955 when she refused give up her bus seat for a white person in Montgomery, Alabama, kickstarting nationwide protests.
The killing has been the subject of a play by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, a poem by ‘‘Harlem Renaissance’’ writer Langston Hughes, and a song by Bob Dylan.
Once acquitted of murder, by a jury that deliberated for barely an hour, Bryant’s husband and Milam were protected against further prosecution by the double jeopardy rule, so they admitted the crime to Look magazine.
‘‘I’m no bully,’’ Milam said. ‘‘I never hurt a n ***** in my life. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice.
‘‘‘Chicago boy,’ I said, ‘I’m tired of them sending your kind down here to stir up trouble, I’m going to make an example of you, just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand’.’’
The case was reopened by the FBI in 2004 to see if any accomplices could be brought to justice.
In 2007, a grand jury decided that there was insufficient evidence to bring charges.