The story of Emmett Till is considered to be the catalyst of the civil rights movement in the 1950s.
Till was a 14-year-old from Chicago visiting a family member in Mississippi when he was kidnapped and brutally murdered by two white men after being accused of making inappropriate advances and whistling at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman at a market in the small town of Money. Those men were eventually acquitted, and that case is said to have influenced civil rights leaders like Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to take action.
Conversations surrounding Till’s legacy still ring today as Carolyn, who is in her late 80s, is still alive and has never been criminally charged.
Fast forward nearly 70 years later, an active warrant from 1955 was discovered in June 2022 for Carolyn and the two men involved in Till’s death. However, in August 2022, a Leflore County grand jury determined charges will not be filed against Carolyn after the warrant was found.
Recently, Till’s cousin Priscilla Sterling filed a lawsuit against a Mississippi sheriff to press him to follow through with the arrest warrant for Carolyn, now Carolyn Donham.
This is not the first attempt to prosecute Carolyn Bryant. The Department of Justice also made two attempts in both 2007 and 2018 but neither ended with her being charged.
READ THE LATEST LAWSUIT: Emmett Till 2023 Lawsuit
Carolyn’s husband Roy Bryant and another man J.W. Milam were accused of kidnapping and brutally murdering Till then dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River in 1955. Till’s body was found and shipped back to his hometown. His mother Mamie Till-Mobley pushed for the coroner to let her see her son’s brutalized body, which was grossly disfigured. Till-Mobley held an open-casket funeral so that press and other people could see what was done to her son.
The images of his unrecognizable body set off a national firestorm of outrage, which helped Till-Mobley push for justice.
“I want you all to stand by me because it’s going to be a fight and if you stand by me, I’ll stand by you,” she said to a group of supporters in the 1950s.
Roy Bryant and Milam were eventually arrested and put on trial in front of an all-white jury. They were acquitted, and that injustice fueled the already brewing outrage. The two men later admitted to killing Till in a magazine interview.
Davis Houck is a professor at Florida State University, and he has taken a strong interest in Till’s case. He started accumulating historical articles on the case after visiting Money in the early 2000s.
“The story at that point comes to life,” Houck said. “You’re in Money, Mississippi. You’re seeing the Tallahatchie River.”
Houck told News4JAX that FSU’s interest in the case began in the 1960s when a graduate student interviewed all jury members.
“He gets these guys talking. Every one of them tells him the same thing. We knew [Roy Bryant and Milam] did it. That was never in doubt. We knew they murdered him. But [the jury] was never going to convict two white guys [for] killing a Black kid,” Houck said about white supremacy in the South at the time. “He nearly raped Carolyn Bryant, which of course is a lie. She lied on the witness stand.”
News4JAX traveled to Drew, Mississippi, not far from Money, to visit the barn that is believed to be where Till was tortured and killed by the men.
It was the first time Sunflower County officially recognized the barn as the site where he was killed. People traveled from all over the county to honor Till.
“It died off for a long time. I heard about it growing up as a kid because my mom talked about him all the time. Then the story. A lot of people in Drew had never heard of Emmett Till. I have because they were really active in the movement and talked about Emmett Till at home,” Drew resident Gloria Dickerson said. “Now we’re trying to bring it back.”