Greene County Democrat

Tag: Mamie Till-Mobley

  • Newswire : Honoring Emmett Till

    By: Blackmansstreet.today.com
     Emmett Till would have been 84 this year.

    On August 28-30, the Emmett Till Interpretive Center will be hosting Remembering Emmett, a series of programs commemorating 70 years since Emmett Till’s murder and Mamie Till-Mobley’s courage in sharing her son’s beaten corpse with the world. 

    The programs will be held on the campus of Mississippi Valley State University with a concluding event on August 30 in Drew, Mississippi.
    For more information and to register for the event, visit 
    https://tillapp.emmett-till.org/items/show/1

    Emmett Louis Till, a 14-year-old Black boy who was visiting from Chicago, was abducted and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of whistling and touching Carolyn Bryant, a White woman, in her family’s grocery store. 

    Outraged, Roy Bryant, Carolyn’s husband, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, abducted Till and tortured him to death. 

    The two men were indicted and tried in September 1955. During the three-day trial, prosecutors presented courageous testimony from Moses Wright, Till’s great-uncle, who witnessed his abduction, and Willie Reed, an African American sharecropper who overheard Bryant and Milam torturing Till. An all-white jury set the men free.


    Following the trial, Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market went out of business when locals boycotted the store. 

    The remaining structure barely stands today, and is just four crumbling brick walls with trees growing inside of them. 

    A sign was installed in 2011 to signify that the location was part of the Mississippi Freedom Trail. 

    Since then, the marker has been destroyed by bullet holes, and a second sign was vandalized in summer 2017. Despite efforts to revitalize the dilapidated property as a true Civil Rights landmark, the current owners are unwilling to sell the building to preservationists. 

    The brutality of Till’s murder and the acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. 

    Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.


    Five decades later, according to a new book, she confessed to a Duke University historian, “That part’s not true.” that never touched for whistling at her. Carolyn Brant died at 88 on April 27, 2023.

    Till became an icon of the civil rights movement.
    July 25 of this year marked what would have been Emmett Till’s 84th birthday and the two-year anniversary of the monument’s designation.
     

  • Newswire: The 1955 lynching became a catalyst for the civil rights movement. Mississippi unveils Emmett Till statue near where white men kidnapped and killed Black teen decades earlier

    By The Associated Press

    photo of Emmett Till

    GREENWOOD, Miss. (AP) — Hundreds of people applauded — and some wiped away tears — as a Mississippi community unveiled a larger-than-life statue of Emmett Till on Friday, not far from where white men kidnapped and killed the Black teenager over accusations he had flirted with a white woman in a country store.
    “Change has come, and it will continue to happen,” Madison Harper, a senior at Leflore County High School, told a racially diverse audience at the statue’s dedication. “Decades ago, our parents and grandparents could not envision that a moment like today would transpire.”
    The 1955 lynching became a catalyst for the civil rights movement. Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago so the world could see the horrors inflicted on her 14-year-old son. Jet magazine published photos of his mutilated body, which was pulled from the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi.
    The 9-foot (2.7-meter) tall bronze statue in Greenwood’s Rail Spike Park is a jaunty depiction of the living Till in slacks, dress shirt and tie with one hand on the brim of a hat.
    The rhythm and blues song, “Wake Up, Everybody” played as workers pulled a tarp off the figure. Dozens of people surged forward, shooting photos and video on cellphones.
    Anna-Maria Webster of Rochester, New York, had tears running down her face. “It’s beautiful to be here,” said Webster, attending the ceremony on a sunny afternoon during a visit with Mississippi relatives. Speaking of Till’s mother she said: “Just to imagine the torment she went through — all over a lie.”
    Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black residents of any state, now about 38%. Democratic U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, whose district encompasses the Delta, noted that Mississippi had no Black elected officials when Till was killed. He said Till’s death helped spur change.
    “But you, know, change has a way of becoming slower and slower,” said Thompson, the only Black member of Mississippi’s current congressional delegation. “What we have to do in dedicating this monument to Emmett Till is recommit ourselves to the spirit of making a difference in our community.”
    The statue is a short drive from an elaborate Confederate monument outside the Leflore County Courthouse and about 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the crumbling remains of the store, Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, in Money.
    The statue’s unveiling coincided with the release this month of “Till,” a movie exploring Till-Mobley’s private trauma over her son’s death and her transformation into a civil rights activist.
    The Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., the last living witness to his cousin’s kidnapping, wasn’t able to travel from Illinois for Friday’s dedication. But he told The Associated Press on Wednesday: “We just thank God someone is keeping his name out there.”
    He said some wrongly thought Till got what he deserved for breaking the taboo of flirting with a white woman, adding many people didn’t want to talk about the case for decades.
    “Now there’s interest in it, and that’s a godsend,” Parker said. “You know what his mother said: ‘I hope he didn’t die in vain.’”
    Greenwood and Leflore County are both more than 70% Black and officials have worked for years to bring the Till statue to reality. Democratic state Sen. David Jordan of Greenwood secured $150,000 in state funding and a Utah artist, Matt Glenn, was commissioned to create the statue.
    Jordan said he hopes it will draw tourists to learn more about the area’s history. “Hopefully, it will bring all of us together,” he said.

    Till and Parker had traveled from Chicago to spend the summer of 1955 with relatives in the deeply segregated Mississippi Delta. On Aug. 24, the two teens took a short trip with other young people to the store in Money. Parker said he heard Till whistle at shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant.
    Four days later, Till was abducted in the middle of the night from his uncle’s home. The kidnappers tortured and shot him, weighted his body down with a cotton gin fan and dumped him into the river.
    Jordan, who is Black, was a college student in 1955 when he drove to the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner to watch the murder trial of two white men charged with killing Till — Carolyn’s husband Roy Bryant and his half brother, J.W. Milam.
    An all-white, all-male jury acquitted the two men, who later confessed to Look magazine that they killed Till.
    Nobody has ever been convicted in the lynching. The U.S. Justice Department has opened multiple investigations starting in 2004 after receiving inquiries about whether charges could be brought against anyone still living.
    This year, a group searching the Leflore County Courthouse basement found an unserved 1955 arrest warrant for “Mrs. Roy Bryant.” In August, another Mississippi grand jury found insufficient evidence to indict Donham, causing consternation for Till relatives and activists.
    Although Mississippi has dozens of Confederate monuments, some have been moved in recent years, including one relocated in 2020 from the University of Mississippi campus to a cemetery where Confederate soldiers are buried.
    The state has a few monuments to Black historical figures, including one honoring civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer in Ruleville.
    A historical marker outside Bryant’s Grocery has been knocked down and vandalized. Another marker near where Till’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River has been vandalized and shot. The Till statue in Greenwood will be watched by security cameras.
    Jordan won applause when he said Friday: “If some idiot tears it down, we’re going to put it right back up.”

  • Emmett Till’s accuser admits it was all a lie

    emmett-till

    By Stacy M. Brown (The Washington Informer/NNPA Member)

    More than six decades after the horrific, racially-motivated murder of Emmett Till, the White woman who accused the Chicago teenager of verbally and physically accosting her in Money, Miss., in 1955, has admitted she lied, according to a new book.

    Till had allegedly whistled at and groped Carolyn Bryant, a 21-year-old White woman, while at a country store in the small town.

    After the encounter, Roy Bryant, Carolyn’s husband, and J.W. Milam tracked young Emmett down, kidnapped him, tortured him, shot him, and then tied his battered body to a cotton gin fan using barbed wire and dumped him in the muddy Tallahatchie River. Later, the two men were acquitted of the murder by an all-White, all-male jury after an hour’s deliberation. Till’s brutal killing and photos of his open casket at his funeral helped spark the Civil Rights Movement.

    During the trial, Carolyn Bryant testified that Emmett, who was 14, had made physical and verbal advances toward her, a sensational claim that increased tensions surrounding the case. She testified that Emmett had grabbed and threatened her inside the store – and that he had used an “unprintable” word when he told her he had been intimate “with White women before.”

    But according to a 2007 interview, newly revealed in the book, “The Blood of Emmett Till,” Carolyn Bryant admits that it never happened.

    “That part’s not true,” she told writer Timothy Tyson, according to “Vanity Fair,” though she claimed she could not recall what happened the rest of the evening at her husband’s country store, where Emmett stopped by briefly on Aug. 24, 1955, to buy two cents worth of gum.

    Till was shot in the head and was found with barbed wire wrapped around his neck; one of his eyes was gouged out. “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him,” she is quoted as saying. Bryant’s testimony was out of the earshot of the jury, but helped to frame the case publicly.

    “I was just scared to death,” she said in court. The two killers later admitted their guilt, after their acquittals.

    Emmett Till’s murder became the flashpoint in the American Civil Rights Movement. Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett’s mother, had even insisted on an open casket at his funeral, leading to photographs of his battered corpse being spread across the country, which helped focus public attention on what was happening in the heart of the country.

    In 2004, the FBI reopened the case to see if any accomplices could be hauled to court, but a grand jury decided three years later that there was insufficient evidence to pursue charges.

    The young Carolyn Bryant went into hiding after the murder trial — divorcing and marrying twice more — and remained mum on the case until she gave the interview with Tyson, the “New York Post” reported.

    Bryant is now known as Carolyn Bryant Donham. Donham told Tyson that she “felt tender sorrow” for Emmett’s mother, who died in 2003, but Tyson doesn’t mention if Donham expressed guilt or apologized.

    Civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks has said she thought about Emmett when she refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., a few months after his death.

    The shocking crime was memorialized in the arts and literature; in Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s play “Dreaming Emmett,” a Langston Hughes poem, and a song by Bob Dylan.

    The whereabouts of the now-82-year-old Donham are unknown.

    The Washington Informer is a member publication of the National Newspaper Publishers Association. Learn more about becoming a member at http://www.nnpa.org.