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Kind of Disturbing
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Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder 
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Emmett Till was a 14 year old black child from Chicago, Illinois who was murdered in Money, Mississippi, a small town in the state's Delta region. The murder of Emmett Till was noted as one of the leading events that motivated the American Civil Rights Movement. The main suspects were acquitted, but later admitted to committing the crime. On August 21, 1955,Emmett and his cousin were sent to stay for the summer with Emmett's uncle, Moses Wright, who lived in Money, Mississippi. Emmett's mother cautioned him to "mind his manners" with white people. Just three short days later, Emmett did not "mind his manners" with the whites and got himself into trouble. Emmett and other young teenagers went to Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market to get some candy and soda. The teenagers were children of sharecroppers and had been picking cotton all day. The market was owned by a white husband and wife, Roy and Carolyn Bryant. Emmett bragged about dating a white girl in Chicago and was goaded into flirting with Carolyn. Here, stories vary as to what Emmett actually did. Some accounts say he wolf whistled at her; others say he grabbed her hand and asked her for a date, still others say all he did was say, "Bye, baby" as he left the store. Whatever he did, his cousins hustled him out of the store and Carolyn told her sister-in-law what happened. The two women initially did not tell their husbands what had happened, but the story spread through word-of-mouth and Carolyn finally told her husband, Roy. On Sunday August 28, Roy and his brother, JW Milam, drove to Wright's house, where Emmett was staying. Roy pounded on the door until Wright opened it, and asked Wright if he had two black boys from Chicago staying with him. When Wright said he did, Bryant said he wanted to see them. Roy went up to the room where Till was sleeping with his cousin and asked him if he was "the one who'd done the talking." Till said "Yeah". Roy and JW drove Emmett to a weathered shed on a plantation in neighboring Sunflower County where they beat and shot him. A 75-pound cotton gin fan was tied to his neck with barbed wire to weigh down the body, which they dropped into the Tallahatchie River near Glendora, Mississippi. When questioned by the sherriff, both men admitted taking Emmett from his great-uncle's yard but claimed they let him go the same night. Emmett's body was found swollen and disfigured in the Tallahatchie River three days after his abduction. After the body was recovered, the brothers and the police tried to convince people that it wasn't him; that Emmett was in Chicago and that the beaten boy was someone else. Emmett's features were too distorted by the beatings and from being submerged in the water to easily identify him, but he was positively identified thanks to a ring he wore that had been his father's. His mother had given it to him the day before he left for Money. Roy and JW were arrested August 29. After Emmett's disfigured body was found, he was put into a pine box and nearly buried, but his mother, Mamie Till Bradley, wanted the body to come back to Chicago. A Tutwiler mortuary assistant worked all night to prepare the body as best he could so that she could bring Emmett's body back to Chicago. Emmett Till was buried September 6 in Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois. The same day, Bryant and Milam were indicted by a grand jury. The trial began on September 19, 1955, 24 days after the murder. Moses "Mose" Wright, Emmett's great-uncle, was one of the main witnesses called up to testify by lead prosecutor Gerald Chatham. Pointing to one of the suspected killers, he said "There he is," to refer to the man who had killed his nephew. Another key witness for the prosecution was Willie Reed, an 18-year-old high school student who lived on a plantation near Drew, Mississippi in Sunflower County. He testified that he had seen a pickup truck outside of an equipment shed on a plantation near Drew managed by Leslie Milam, a brother of JW Milam and Roy Bryant. He said that four whites, including JW Milam, were in the cab and three blacks were in the back, one of them Emmett. When the truck pulled into the shed, he heard human cries that sounded like a beating was underway. He did not identify the other blacks on the truck. On September 23 the all-white jury, made up of 12 males, acquitted both defendants. Deliberations took just 67 minutes; one juror said, "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have taken that long." Following the trial, Look Magazine paid JW Milam and Roy Bryant $4,000 to tell their story. Safe from any further charges for their crime due to double jeopardy protection, Roy admitted to journalist William Bradford Huie that he and his brother had killed Emmett. JW claimed that initially their intention was to scare Emmett into line by pistol-whipping him and threatening to throw him off a cliff. Jw explained that contrary to expectations, regardless of what they did to Emmett, he never showed any fear, never seemed to believe they would really kill him, and maintained a defiant attitude towards them concerning his actions. Thus the brothers said they felt they were left with no choice but to fully make an example of Emmett, and they killed him. In 1957 Huie returned to the story for Look in an article that indicated that local residents were shunning JW and Roy and that their stores were closed due to a lack of business. JW Milam died of cancer in 1980 and Roy Bryant died of cancer in 1994. The men never expressed any remorse for Emmett's death and seemed to feel that they had done no wrong. In fact, a few months before he died, Roy complained bitterly in an interview that he had never made as much money off Emmetts's death as he deserved and that it had ruined his life. Emmett's mother Mamie (as Mamie Till Mobley) outlived both men, dying at the age of 81 on January 6, 2003. In March 2007, Till's family was briefed by the FBI on the contents of its investigation. The FBI report released on March 29, 2007 found that Till had died of a gunshot wound to the head and that he had broken wrist bones and skull and leg fractures. More... Emmett Till Photos of Emmett Read Milam's account of what happened.
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