And outside the house, Parker recalls, “My grandfather said he heard a light voice, like a woman’s voice, who said, ‘That’s the one.’”
Emmett was the one, a White woman named Carolyn Bryant alleged, who had grabbed her at the grocery store where she worked, a false accusation that led to Emmett’s abduction and gruesome lynching, which helped to energize the nascent civil rights movement.
For more than 60 years thereafter, Emmett’s family hoped Bryant would recant her story while she was still living. But Bryant died Tuesday, with her unpublished memoir doubling down on her disputed story and calling herself a “victim.” Her death leaves Emmett’s relatives with what they say is a haunting legacy of injustice.
“The woman whose lies in 1955 put the torture of Emmett in motion died today. She continued to uphold these lies and to protect the murderers until her death,” the executive director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, Patrick Weems, said in a statement. While the world saw the horrors of racism, and the real consequences of hatred, what the world will never see is remorse or responsibility for Emmett’s death.”
“Even though no one now will be held to account for the death of my cousin and best friend,” Parker said in his own statement, “it is up to all of us to be accountable to the challenges we still face in overcoming racial injustice.”
In August 1955 in Chicago, Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, put her only son on a train to visit relatives in Mississippi. She reminded Emmett to be careful around White people; Emmett, who had grown up in the big city, had not seen the horrors of lynchings that still permeated the rural South.
Emmett arrived in Money, Miss., on Saturday, Aug. 21, 1955, to stay with cousins and his great-uncle Moses Wright, who also was Parker’s grandfather. Emmett and his cousins spent the days picking cotton and swimming in the river, and a few days after his arrival, they drove to Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market to buy snacks and candy.
Emmett liked to joke, and that worried Parker. When Emmett entered the store, Parker remembered thinking, “‘I hope he got his language right,’” recalled, Parker, the author of the new book “A Few Days Full of Trouble: Revelations on the Journey to Justice for My Cousin and Best Friend, Emmett Till.” “I knew the Southern mores: ‘Yes, sir. No, sir.’”
Nothing happened while Parker and Emmett were in the store, Parker said. But a short while later, Simeon Wright, a 12-year-old cousin, went back into the store and then came back outside. Carolyn Bryant, then 21 years old and married with two children, came out, too.
“And she goes to her left and to our right,” Parker recalled. “Emmett loved to make people laugh, and so he whistled.”
Parker and his cousins were stunned. “We could have died. If there was any way possible, we would have disappeared,” he said. “We knew that he had violated the Southern mores. That was not good at all. So we all made a beeline for the car.”
What Bryant would later allege took place went much farther: that 14-year-old Emmett had grabbed her hand in “a strong grip,” then asked her on a date, then grabbed her waist.
But the youngsters didn’t yet know what she would claim had happened and, as they jumped into the car and sped away, were fearful only because of Emmett’s whistle. A car that had seemed to be following them went by without confrontation, and they felt a sense of relief.
But one of the teenage girls in the car with the boys warned, “‘This is not over. I know those people,’” Parker recounted. “‘You guys are going to hear some more from these people.’”
Emmett asked them not to tell Wright. Wednesday passed into Thursday, into Friday and Saturday.
Then, at about 2:30 that Sunday morning of Aug. 28, 1955, Bryant’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother J.W. Milam, drove to Wright’s home. Some witnesses believed Carolyn Bryant was also in the Chevrolet pickup. The White men pounded on the door. They marched Emmett out of the house into the waiting pickup.
That was the last time Parker saw Emmett.
In her unpublished memoir, “I Am More Than a Wolf Whistle: The Story of Carolyn Bryant Donham,” Bryant wrote that she pleaded with her husband and his brother not to hurt the boy.
Civil rights lawyers and members of Emmett’s family say the memoir is littered with falsehoods. “From Day One, Carolyn Bryant has lied in this case,” Jill Collen Jefferson, a civil rights lawyer in Mississippi, told The Washington Post, after the memoir was obtained by reporters.
Bryant wrote that her husband, Milam, and a friend “walked in” with Emmett and asked whether it was “him.” “I didn’t want him hurt, so I told Roy that he had the wrong person.”
Her husband “almost screamed” at her, she wrote, but she “looked straight at Emmett and said even stronger, ‘No, it’s not him. You have the wrong person, it’s NOT him.’ All I could think was, ‘Take him home, please take him home.’ I was terrified for his safety.”
Then, Bryant claimed, Emmett “flashed me a strange smile” and admitted being in the store, saying, “‘Yes, it was me,’ or something to that effect. My legs weakened, my heart was racing. I kept thinking, ‘What are you saying? Why are you saying this? Don’t you know they could hurt you?’ But the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth.” She said she begged her husband to take Emmett back home.
Emmett’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River three days later, on Aug. 31. He had been tortured and shot, beaten beyond recognition. His teeth were missing. An ear was severed. An eye was hanging out of its socket. The White men had crushed his skull and tied a cotton-gin fan to his neck with barbed wire.
Bryant and Milam were charged with murder and brought to trial on Sept. 19, 1955, in Sumner, Miss. During the trial, the defense presented Carolyn Bryant as a witness.
Her testimony, which included repeated uses of the n-word, contains contradictions. In it, she said that she rang up Emmett’s purchase at the store and that he then grabbed hold of her and made advances. When he left, she said, she ran out to her car to get a pistol, and then he whistled.
Parker said the testimony did not make sense to Emmett’s family, that he would put his hands around the White, older Bryant and come on to her so brashly. “He stuttered all the time,” Parker said. “She didn’t remember him stuttering. You can’t not know that Emmett had a stutter.”
A judge ruled Bryant’s testimony inadmissible.
In her unpublished memoir, Bryant wrote that she expected the all-White jury to find her husband and Milam guilty. She thought of herself.
“I kept thinking, ‘Where will I go? What will I do?’ I wasn’t skilled at anything except being a clerk at a store,” she said. “I was afraid that he would be convicted and sent off to prison for years or sentenced to death. The thought terrified me. What would I tell my boys … that their father was a convicted murderer?”
Bryant would not have to. The jury found the men not guilty, one in a long series of miscarriages of justice for Emmett Till to which, his family said, another was added on Tuesday.
“We hugged each other and smiles were from ear to ear,” Bryant wrote. “I turned my head slightly and caught a glimpse of Mamie Bradley’s face, but Roy snatched my arm and told me to turn back around, to stop looking back at her.”
