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ix Preface Fourteen-year-old Emmett Louis Till left his mother’s Chicago home on August 20, 1955, to vacation with his great-uncle Moses Wright and his family in Mississippi.1 Till spent several uneventful days playing with his cousins and learning to pick cotton. At the end of the week, he and some relatives traveled to the nearby whistle-stop town of Money, Mississippi, to shop. Reports about what happened differ, and each story has contributed to the Emmett Till lore, but it is commonly agreed that Till bought bubble gum and then whistled at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who was tending the Bryant family store while her husband was out of town making deliveries. Three days later, in the predawn hours of Sunday morning, August 28, Roy Bryant, J. W. Milam, and likely others traveled to Mose Wright’s house in Leflore County and kidnapped Emmett Till. They allegedly took him to the Sunflower County plantation managed by Milam’s brother, Leslie, and proceeded to beat him without mercy. Sometime during this process, Till was shot in the back of the head.2 Later, the perpetrators took the body to the Tallahatchie River and dumped it into the water along with a seventy-five-pound cotton gin fan, which was tied to the body with barbed wire.3 On August 31, a fisherman saw Till’s feet sticking up out of the water and contacted the Tallahatchie County sheriff’s office. The sheriff, H. C. Strider, in turn, retrieved the body and attempted to bury it in an unmarked grave at a local cemetery.4 Till’s relatives stopped the burial and ensured that the body was returned to Chicago, where his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted that the pine box containing her son’s remains be opened. She inspected the body and confirmed that it was indeed that of Emmett Till. Subsequently, Mamie Till-Mobley held a public open-casket wake and funeral. Her efforts memorialized the lynching and turned the public ’s critical eyes toward the state of Mississippi. Bryant and Milam, who had been questioned and arrested on August 29, 1955, were indicted by x Preface a grand jury and stood trial on the charge of murder. During the brief trial, the jury heard testimony from black Mississippians who, fed up with business as usual, risked life and limb by naming white perpetrators in a white-on-black crime. Equally endangered, the black Chicagoan Mamie Till-Mobley traveled to the heart of Dixie to testify for the prosecution. The defense presented testimony from Sheriff Strider and expert witnesses , all of whom claimed that the body was too decomposed to have been in the river for only three days and that it was too large to be that of a fourteen-year-old boy. The defense also called Carolyn Bryant to the witness stand, but the presiding judge, Curtis Swango, dismissed the jury during her testimony and later ruled that it would not hear her account of the incident. Finally, both sides rested, and the jury retired to discuss the case. After roughly an hour of deliberation, it returned a verdict of not guilty, but Bryant and Milam still faced kidnapping charges. In November 1955, the two men appeared before a grand jury in Leflore County on the charge of kidnapping, but they were never indicted. They returned to their lives after the trial. This brief historical narrative only scratches the surface of the intrigues, deceptions, horrors, and legacies surrounding the case. To this day, there are many conflicting stories circulating about the death of Emmett Till. Surely, very few, if any, living persons know exactly what happened throughout the saga. Amid the countless assertions and outright lies about events surrounding the lynching, it is nearly impossible to find the actual, objective truth as many scholars would define it. However, the argument that I present in this book rests on the assumption that any “truth” that we might find about the incident is of necessity subjective and that the many people who were influenced by the lynching and the subsequent events created their own memories of the case. For most, these memories, and, thus, their “truth” of Emmett Till, were based on the actual coverage, and their recollections of the coverage, in national and local print media sources. Doubtlessly, the Till lynching engendered an unprecedented media firestorm with regard to race relations in the United States. The death of Emmett Till brought the full...

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