The Blood of Emmett Till 1 NOTHING THAT BOY DID The older woman sipped her coffee. "I have thought and thought about everything about Emmett Till, the killing and the trial, telling who did what to who," she said.1 Back when she was twenty-one and her name was Carolyn Bryant, the French newspaper Aurore dubbed the dark-haired young woman from the Mississippi Delta "a crossroads Marilyn Monroe."2 News reporters from Detroit to Dakar never failed to sprinkle their stories about l''affaire Till with words like "comely" and "fetching" to describe her. William Bradford Huie, the Southern journalist and dealer in tales of the Till lynching, called her "one of the prettiest black-haired Irish women I ever saw in my life."3 Almost eighty and still handsome, her hair now silver, the former Mrs. Roy Bryant served me a slice of pound cake, hesitated a little, and then murmured, seeming to speak to herself more than to me, "They''re all dead now anyway." She placed her cup on the low glass table between us, and I waited.
For one epic moment half a century earlier, Carolyn Bryant''s face had been familiar across the globe, forever attached to a crime of historic notoriety and symbolic power. The murder of Emmett Till was reported in one of the very first banner headlines of the civil rights era and launched the national coalition that fueled the modern civil rights movement. But she had never opened her door to a journalist or historian, let alone invited one for cake and coffee. Now she looked me in the eyes, trying hard to distinguish between fact and remembrance, and told me a story that I did not know. The story I thought I knew began in 1955, fifty years earlier, when Carolyn Bryant was twenty-one and a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago walked into the Bryant''s Grocery and Meat Market in a rural Mississippi Delta hamlet and offended her. Perhaps on a dare, the boy touched or even squeezed her hand when he exchanged money for candy, asked her for a date, and said goodbye when he left the store, tugged along by an older cousin. Few news writers who told the story of the black boy and the backwoods beauty failed to mention the "wolf whistle" that came next: when an angry Carolyn walked out to a car to retrieve the pistol under the seat, Till supposedly whistled at her. The world knew this story only because of what happened a few days later: Carolyn''s kinsmen, allegedly just her husband and brother-in-law, kidnapped and killed the boy and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River.
That was supposed to be the end of it. Lesson taught. But a young fisherman found Till''s corpse in the water, and a month later the world watched Roy Bryant and J. W. "Big" Milam stand trial for his murder. I knew the painful territory well because when I was eleven years old in the small tobacco market town of Oxford, North Carolina, a friend''s father and brothers beat and shot a young black man to death. His name was Henry Marrow, and the events leading up to his death had something in common with Till''s. My father, a white Methodist minister, got mixed up in efforts to bring peace and justice to the community.
We moved away that summer. But Oxford burned on in my memory, and I later went back and interviewed the man most responsible for Marrow''s death. He told me, "That nigger committed suicide, coming in my store and wanting to four-letter-word my daughter-in-law." I also talked with many of those who had protested the murder by setting fire to the huge tobacco warehouses in downtown Oxford, as well as witnesses to the killing, townspeople, attorneys, and others. Seeking to understand what had happened in my own hometown made me a historian. I researched the case for years, on my way to a PhD in American history, and in 2004 published a book about Marrow''s murder, what it meant for my hometown and my family, and how it revealed the workings of race in American history.4 Carolyn Bryant Donham had read the book, which was why she decided to contact me and talk with me about the lynching of Emmett Till. The killing of Henry Marrow occurred in 1970, fifteen years after the Till lynching, but unlike the Till case it never entered national or international awareness, even though many of the same themes were present.
Like Till, Marrow had allegedly made a flirtatious remark to a young white woman at her family''s small rural store. In Oxford, though, the town erupted into arson and violence, the fires visible for miles. An all-white jury, acting on what they doubtless perceived to be the values of the white community, acquitted both of the men charged in the case, even though the murder had occurred in public. What happened in Oxford in 1970 was a late-model lynching, in which white men killed a black man in the service of white supremacy. The all-white jury ratified the murder as a gesture of protest against public school integration, which had finally begun in Oxford, and underlying much of the white protest was fear and rage at the prospect of white and black children going to school together, which whites feared would lead to other forms of "race-mixing," even "miscegenation." As in the Marrow case, many white people believed Till had violated this race-and-sex taboo and therefore had it coming. Many news reports asserted that Till had erred--in judgment, in behavior, in deed, and perhaps in thought. Without justifying the murder, a number of Southern newspapers argued that the boy was at least partially at fault.
The most influential account of the lynching, Huie''s 1956 presumptive tell-all, depicted a black boy who virtually committed suicide with his arrogant responses to his assailants. "Boastful, brash," Huie described Till. He "had a white girl''s picture in his pocket and boasted of having screwed her," not just to friends, not just to Carolyn Bryant, but also to his killers: "That is why they took him out and killed him."5 The story was told and retold in many ways, but a great many of them, from the virulently defensive accounts of Mississippi and its customs to the self-righteous screeds of Northern critics, noted that Till had been at the wrong place at the wrong time and made the wrong choices. Until recently historians did not even have a transcript of the 1955 trial. It went missing soon after the trial ended, turning up briefly in the early 1960s but then destroyed in a basement flood. In September 2004 FBI agents located a faded "copy of a copy of a copy" in a private home in Biloxi, Mississippi. It took weeks for two clerks to transcribe the entire document, except for one missing page.
6 The transcript, finally released in 2007, allows us to compare the later recollections of witnesses and defendants with what they said fifty years earlier. It also reveals that Carolyn Bryant told an even harder-edged story in the courtroom, one that was difficult to square with the gentle woman sitting across from me at the coffee table. Half a century earlier, above the witness stand in the Tallahatchie County Courthouse, two ceiling fans slowly churned the cigarette smoke. This was the stage on which the winner of beauty contests at two high schools starred as the fairest flower of Southern womanhood. She testified that Till had grabbed her hand forcefully across the candy counter, letting go only when she snatched it away. He asked her for a date, she said, chased her down the counter, blocked her path, and clutched her narrow waist tightly with both hands. She told the court he said, "You needn''t be afraid of me. [I''ve], well, ----with white women before.
" According to the transcript, the delicate young woman refused to utter the verb or even tell the court what letter of the alphabet it started with. She escaped Till''s forceful grasp only with great difficulty, she said.7 A month later one Mississippi newspaper insisted that the case should never have been called the "wolf whistle case." Instead, said the editors, it should have been called "an ''attempted rape'' case."8 "Then this other nigger came in from the store and got him by the arm," Carolyn testified. "And he told him to come on and let''s go. He had him by the arm and led him out." Then came an odd note in her tale, a note discordant with the claim of aborted assault: Till stopped in the doorway, "turned around and said, ''Goodbye.
''"9 The defendants sat on the court''s cane-bottom chairs in a room packed with more than two hundred white men and fifty or sixty African Americans who had been crowded into the last two rows and the small, segregated black press table. In his closing statement, John W. Whitten, counsel for the defendants, told the all-white, all-male jury, "I''m sure that every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men, despite this [outside] pressure."10 Mamie Bradley,I Till''s mother, was responsible for a good deal of that outside pressure on Mississippi''s court system. Her brave decision to hold an open-casket funeral for her battered son touched off news stories across the globe. The resultant international outrage compelled the U.S. State Department to lament "the real an.