Video After The Jump
On August 28, 1955, 14-year old Emmett Till was murdered in the town on Money, Mississippi, after a white woman named Carolyn Bryant claimed he had flirted with her.
Till had gone to a store where Bryant worked to buy two cents worth of bubble gum. Bryant later told her husband, Roy Bryant, that the black teenager wolf-whistled at her.
Three nights later Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam abducted Till from his great-uncle's house, where he was staying during a visit from Chicago.
Till was beaten, mutilated and shot before being thrown into the Tallahatchie River. His badly mutilated body was pulled from the river 3 days later.
At the boy's funeral his mother, Mamie Till Bradley, insisted on leaving the casket open because she wanted the world to see what had been done to her son.
Milam and Roy were subsequently arrested and stood trial for the murder. An all-white, 12-man jury acquitted them in September 1955.
The men would later admit to murdering Till, knowing they couldn't be retried because double jeopardy prevented them from standing trial for the same crime twice.
Vanity Fair reports that in a new book titled "The Blood of Emmitt Till," Carolyn Bryant confessed to author Timothy Tyson in 2007 at the age of 72, that she lied about Till flirting with her.
“That part’s not true,” she told Tyson. "Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”
Bryant didn't apologize for causing the death of an innocent 14-year, but said she "felt tender sorrow.”
Feeling "tender sorrow" doesn't cut it in my book. In 1955 Bryant was well aware of what would happen to a black male in Mississippi, that was accused of unwanted advances on a white woman.
"The Blood of Emmitt Till" will be released January 31.
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