Emmett Till-69 Years and Still No Justice
What elese could I do. He thought he was as good as any white man- J.W. Millam when asked why he killed emmett Till - J.W. Milam on the killing of Emmett Till
On August 28, 1955, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam (both white men) abducted a 14-year-old Emmett Till (black teen) from his great-uncle’s home in Money, Mississippi. The men drove Emmett to a storage shed on Milam’s property in Drew, Mississippi, where they took turns torturing and beating him with a pistol, before forcing him to load a 74-pound fan into the back of their pick-up truck. The men then drove Emmett to the edge of the Tallahatchie River, they ordered him to remove his clothes, and shot him in the head. Once the child was dead, Bryant and Milam chained the fan to his corpse and rolled it into the river.
EMMETT was accused of being to familiar with the white lady.
Facts:
On September 23 the all-male, all white jury (both women and blacks had been banned from serving in the jury) acquitted both defendants after a 67-minute deliberation; one juror said, "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have taken that long.”
In 1956 Bryant and Milam sold their story to “Look Magazine” and publicly admitted in a that they had tortured and murdered Emmett Till. It should be noted that they were protected against Double Jeopardy. They received $4,000 for the story. Today that is equivalent to $44,298 today.
Did Carolyn Bryant help the murderers. I’m inclined to believe she did.
What happened to the murdering brothers:
J.W. Milam rented 217 acres of land in Sunflower County. However, because no Black people would work for him, he was forced to hire white workers to whom he had to pay higher wages. Milam went from one menial plantation job to another. He and his wife Juanita briefly moved to Orange, Texas, but returned to Mississippi after only a few years. Once back, J.W. had several run-ins with the law, before ultimately dying of an unknown form of cancer in 1980.
Roy Bryant's path wasn't very different from his brother's. He and his wife Carolyn (the lying wife) lost their store after a boycott by the Black community. (Yes you do need your black customers). The couple moved to Indanola, Miss., where he got a job as a mechanic. He later attended welding school in Inverness, Miss. Bryant worked as a welding jobs before finally returning to the grocery business. He took over a small store in Ruleville, where he lost his permit to handle food stamps for a year after allowing customers to use them for non-food items. He died of an unknown cancer in 1994
This is the history that needs to be told. This is the history they are trying to hide. Ignorance Is not blest. Ignorance allows the torture and murder to be repeated.
References:
Whitfield, Stephen (1991). A Death in the Delta: The story of Emmett Till. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-4326-6. OCLC 23941005
Till-Mobley, Mamie; Benson, Chris (2003). Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America. New York: Random House. ISBN 1-4000-6117-2. OCLC 52208468
Anderson, Devery S. "A Wallet, a White Woman, and a Whistle: Fact and Fiction in Emmett Till's Encounter in Money, Mississippi" (PDF) The Southern Quarterly (July 2008)
CellyBlue-I Do know This!
CellyBlue -- I do know this!: With a properly motivated Justice Department, the "Double-Jeopardy" bar would apply ONLY to: (1) The same charges; (2) In the same jurisdiction.
So, today, for example, I believe that after such an abortion of a State murder-trial with a bigoted trial jury occurred, on charges of murder and torture, the defendants could be remanded to United States District Court on charges at least of violation of the Civil Rights Act.
I believe, though, that the civil-rights violations are based on the 1964 Act. I don't know whether such prosecutions rely at all on post-Civil-War-era acts.
Having lived through the 1950s -- a vivid, living memory to me -- I fear the MAGA-Fundamentalist-racist-CULT has reimagined Jim Crow in a way they hope to impose through Project 2025 in a new Trump Presidency.
The memories that CellyBlue bring us are ones I lived through that were in the nightly CBS and NBC news, and, I am very afraid, we have to be very, very diligent to prevent re-enactment in America in this era. Racism is more on the surface today, more plain-and-outspoken than in my memory since the 1960s. We are not living in a good time.
That is why voices like those of CellyBlue need to be part of our daily morning coffee and breakfast, so we unite, as Joyce Vance reminds us, "We are in this together."
I don’t fully believe in karma, but in this cast it may apply.