USA TODAY US Edition

Did Emmett Till have a white ‘girlfriend’?

Schoolmate remembers beautiful eyes, nice smile

- Jerry Mitchell

Girl in long-lost photo carried by teen murdered in 1955 finally identified

CHICAGO – For more than six decades, a mystery swirled around the Emmett Till case, a mystery involving the photograph of a white girl.

Till, 14, who was black, was abducted Aug. 28, 1955, and murdered after supposedly whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in a grocery store in Money, Mississipp­i.

J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant were acquitted in his murder but confessed in an infamous Look magazine story in

1956 by journalist William Bradford Huie. Although the exchange between Till and Carolyn Bryant, Roy Bryant’s wife, was the basis of the case against Milam and Roy Bryant, Huie’s story offers an additional reason for Till’s death.

Till’s murderers “killed him because he boasted of having a white girl and showed them the picture of a white girl in Chicago,” Huie told filmmakers for the

1987 documentar­y “Eyes on the Prize.” Who was this girl? Did she even exist?

Sixty-three years later, the answer is yes. Her name is Joan Brody. She gave her first interview about Till at her condo in the northern suburbs of Chicago.

In “Eyes on the Prize,” Till’s cousin Curtis Jones mentioned that Till had a “picture of some white kids that he had graduated from (elementary school with) … female and male.”

The documentar­y’s producer, Henry Hampton, told NPR that Till showed this photo of his classmates to his Mississipp­i peers, pointing to the white girl and saying she was “his girlfriend. In fact, it was his classmate.”

Upon hearing the audio interview of Hampton, Brody said, “That had to be me.” She was the only white girl in Till’s class. She sat next to Till, who was 13. She was 12. “He had beautiful eyes,” she recalled.

At their graduation, she joined other students on a stage where photos were apparently taken, she said. Brody never saw Till again. Till’s killers pistol-whipped him so severely that parts of his skull fell out.

A photograph of his mutilated face ran in the Chicago Defender, Jet magazine and publicatio­ns around the world, yet many Americans have never seen it because mainstream publicatio­ns considered it too graphic to print. Brody saw the photo online. The men that killed him, she said, “were worse than animals.”

“He had his whole life ahead of him – to be gone just like that,” she said. “And for what reason?”

She wiped away her tears. “He could have been president,” she said. “He was just a nice kid with a nice smile.”

 ?? AP ?? Emmett Till was murdered in 1955.
AP Emmett Till was murdered in 1955.

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