New Emmett Till account ‘emotional and electric’
Witness admits she lied in the famous 1955 case that led to the murder of 14-year-old black boy
In his emotional and electric new book, Timothy B. Tyson exhumes the body of Emmett Till, bringing to the fore not just a bludgeoned 14-year-old African American boy, but a symbol who stands today as a precursor to America’s civil rights movement.
Tyson, author of Blood Done Sign My Name (about another race murder, this one involving a neighbour), synthesizes an extraordinary amount of previous material, fashioning it into a page-turning, all-too-typical Southern murder story. It’s a tale he begins in 2008, in the living room of Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman whose words sentenced Till to death, where she finally admits to lying.
She was Carolyn Bryant then, tending the small-town Mississippi country store she owned with her husband, Roy. On Aug. 24, 1955, after a day of doing chores with his cousins, Till walked into the store and . . . what, exactly? Bryant claimed he assaulted her. Those with Till said he merely whistled at her.
“It seems whatever happened in that store made her more mad than fearful,” Tyson concludes. What she told her husband is unknown, but on Sunday, Aug. 28, at 2:30 a.m. he and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, kidnapped Till from his uncle’s house. Three days later, his battered body was being fished out of the Tallahatchie River.
“Nothing that boy did,” Bryant Donham says to Tyson at one point, “could ever justify what happened to him.” But as to what “that boy did,” she can’t say: “I want to tell you,” she insists. “Honestly, I just don’t remember. It was 50 years ago. You tell these stories for so long that they seem true, but that part (that Till assaulted her) is not true.”
Despite the ugly but predictable outcome — Milam and Roy Bryant were acquitted by an all-white male jury — this is a story full of brave men and women, none more so than Till’s mother Mamie. She allowed her boy’s bloated and bashed face to be photographed for Jet Magazine and insisted on having an open-casket funeral.
“Let the people see what they did to my boy,” she said, which they did, in the thousands, then millions. Then, less than four months later, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala. bus to awhite man. And 60 years after that, Till’s name was shouted out by black protesters outside the White House, along with that of Michael Brown, who was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.
“Emmett’s murder would never have become a watershed historical moment,” Tyson rightly opines, “without Mamie finding the strength to make her private grief a public matter.”
Still, he finds it hard to be optimistic. “America is still killing Emmett Till, and often for the same reasons that drove the violent segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s.”
A powerful, necessary book. James Macgowan is a frequent contributor to The Star’s book section.