Outrage over the brutal lynching of Till helped spark the civil rights movement that brought down Jim Crow segregation in the United States.

Last year the FBI reopened an investigation into the case when a documentary brought to light new evidence about Till’s murder. No one was ever convicted for the crime.

Fourteen-year-old Till was kidnapped and lynched in 1955 while visiting relatives in Mississippi. He together with his cousin had gone into a local store on August 24 in the town of Money. Till whistled at a young white woman behind the counter, Carolyn Bryant, who ran the store with her husband Roy.

Four days later Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam dragged Till out of bed in the middle of the night from the home of his uncle, Moses Wright. He was taken away and then severely beaten, tortured, and lynched. Almost all of his teeth were knocked out, and the right side of his head beaten in. The killers tied a 75-lb cotton gin fan around Till’s neck to weigh down his body and threw him into the Tallahatchie River. Three days later his severely bloated body was found.

State authorities in Mississippi were complicit in shielding the murderers. Money sheriff H.C. Strider and the prosecutor, Gerald Chatham, declared at the time that there was little evidence against Bryant and Milam and that the case was “circumstantial” because the disfigured and mutilated body could not be formally identified as that of Emmett Till. Milam and Bryant admitted to taking Till from his uncle’s home the night of August 28, but said they had let him go unharmed. Both were acquitted by an all-white jury in a trial lasting just one hour. Carolyn Bryant, who is still living, was never tried as an accomplice in Till’s murder.

Reporting on the case, the Militant noted in its Sept. 26, 1955, issue that Carolyn Bryant “accompanied the lynchers in the middle of the night to the cabin of Moses Wright,” and “identified him as ‘the one.’” When the case went to trial she could not be “found.”

Keith Beauchamp, whose documentary on the case helped spur the new investigation, believes as many as five of those involved in the murder are still alive.  
 
 
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