The transcript had been supposedly “lost” and is the only publicly known record of the trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, the two men involved in Till’s murder. “The transcript presumably records the defense argument that prosecutors had not proved that the body was Emmett’s, and that there was therefore no proof of his murder,” notes a New York Times article. Both Bryant and Milam were acquitted of the charges and died free men. FBI agents in Jackson, Mississippi, have not disclosed, however, how the transcript—described as “a copy of a copy of a copy”—was found.

The brutal lynching of Emmett Till and the case surrounding his murder helped sparked the civil rights movement that brought down Jim Crow segregation in the United States.

On Aug. 24, 1955, while visiting family in Mississippi, Emmett Till and his cousins went into a local store in the town of Money. According to Till’s cousin, Emmett whistled at a young white woman behind the counter, Carolyn Bryant, who ran the store with her husband Roy Bryant.

Four days later, Roy Bryant and his brother, J.W. Milam, went to the home where Emmett Till was staying, and took him away at gunpoint. Bryant and Milam whipped him with a .45 caliber pistol, shot him in the head, and tied a 75-pound fan from a cotton gin around his neck with barbed wire. They then threw his body into the Tallahatchie River. His mutilated body was discovered several days later by men fishing in the river.

Till’s killers, Roy Bryant and Milam, were arrested and tried for murder, but acquitted in just one hour by an all-white jury. Several months later in an interview with William Huie published in the Jan. 24, 1956, issue of Look magazine, they confessed to his murder. J.W. Milam told Look, “We were never able to scare him.” Huie writes that Till would not back down and said to Milam and Bryant, “You bastards, I’m not afraid of you, I’m as good as you are.” Milam, who pulled the trigger, said, “Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless.”

The body of Emmett Till was so disfigured that Mamie Till, Emmett’s mother, identified the body of her son by the ring he wore around his finger. At an open casket wake in Chicago, more than 50,000 people viewed the body and saw the reality of racial violence inflicted on Blacks.

Lynchings—the mutilations, hangings, and burnings of Blacks—were a part of the reign of terror and extralegal violence carried out against Black men and women all over the United States. They were a method used to drive Blacks off the land, to “teach a lesson” to “uppity” potential Black leaders, and anyone else who challenged Jim Crow segregation.

According to the U.S. Justice Department, the documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, released last year, and other new information indicate that Bryant and Milam had accomplices in the murder who may still be alive, including Carolyn Bryant.

The FBI now plans to exhume the body of Emmett Till and perform an autopsy to find the cause of death. Bertha Thomas, a cousin of Till’s, told the Associated Press, “They had over 40 years to do this, and my major question to the FBI, the Department of Justice and the anybody else involved, is why now?”

The Till case is not the only prominent lynching case that has recently been reopened. On Jan. 7, 2005, Klansmen Edgar Ray Killen, 79, who was responsible for the murder of three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—in Neshoba County, Mississippi, in 1964 was charged with three counts of murder, 40 years after their killings. The three young activists were involved in organizing Blacks to vote as part of a nationwide “Freedom Summer” campaign.  
 
 
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