Milam and Bryant were acquitted of the murder of Emmett Till. In this 23 September 1955, file photo, JW Milam, left, and Roy Bryant, right, sit with their wives in a courtroom in Sumner, Mississippi. That makes us feel like second-class citizens, to be treated like that.” “We’ve been waiting 65 years and still nothing. “I have never got over the shock and pain of losing Emmett, it was barbaric what they did to him, he was just a kid,” Edwards said. With one exception: Carolyn Bryant, and even she is understood to be in poor health.Īs a result, the Till family knows that if justice is ever to be done, it must be done now. Both men are dead, as are all other individuals directly linked to the events leading up to the killing.
Two white men confessed to the murder: Roy Bryant, Carolyn Bryant’s husband, and his half-brother JW Milam. What the FBI may or may not have discovered about her role in the abduction of the boy and the aftermath of the murder amounts to the final hope for resolution in the case. The FBI decided to revisit the case in 2017 in the light of new leads concerning the woman who Emmett whistled at – Carolyn Bryant. In the only trial ever to be held after Emmett’s body was retrieved from the river, the two white men who later confessed to murdering him were acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury, and spent the rest of their lives in freedom. Not a day has been spent in jail nor a penny paid in compensation.
In all those 65 years, not a single person has been held accountable for the teenager’s death. He is the adored cousin who she remembers as a “mischievous peacemaker” forever devising pranks and cracking jokes.įor the Till family, he is also the subject of a current, burning struggle for the truth. To Edwards, 88, Emmett Till’s next of kin, he is more than a legend of history. Today his name is emblazoned on history books, memorialized in movies, while the glass-topped casket which tens of thousands of mourners walked by before his burial now stands as the centerpiece of the National Museum of African American history in Washington DC. It set in train a sequence of events that led African Americans in the south to make an unprecedented stand, sparking the civil rights movement. An undated portrait shows Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old Chicago boy, who was brutally murdered near Money, Mississippi, on 28 August 1955.
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