On Sunday, August 28, 1955, just hours after Till was killed, Leflore County Sheriff George Smith arrested murderer Roy Bryant and booked him into the jail at the Leflore County Courthouse in Greenwood. J. W. Milam was arrested the following day, turning himself in at the courthouse as he worried that his younger half-brother would “shoot off” his mouth and blow their story.

Nearly one week later, the two men were moved more than 50 miles west to the Mississippi River community of Greenville. The Sheriff decided to move Milam and Bryant for fear that they would be lynched by out-of-town black men seeking revenge for the kidnapping (and now murder) of Emmett Till. Smith had received a good bit of mail with Chicago postmarks threatening to kill both men. While these threats were unfounded, Smith took the extreme step of calling out the local National Guard to protect the courthouse and Milam and Bryant. The irony of white law enforcement calling on white national reserves to protect white men from an imagined black threat could not have been lost on locals.

Not long after an 18-member grand jury hearing held in Sumner issued indictments for kidnapping and murder on September 6, Milam and Bryant were moved once again, this time to a jail in the Tallahatchie County community of Charleston. Because law enforcement mistakenly believed that the murder had occurred in Tallahatchie County (because the body had been brought ashore north of Philipp), and because the murder charge trumped the lesser charge of kidnapping, the trial was held in Tallahatchie County.

After the 12-member all-white, all-male jury declared Milam and Bryant not guilty on September 23, a second grand jury was convened at the Leflore County Courthouse in early November; its charge was to determine if the two men should be indicted on the initial charge of kidnapping. Remarkably, despite confessions that Milam and Bryant had forcibly taken a boy (Till) from the Wright house, the grand jury did not issue an indictment, effectively ending the state’s case against the murderers. Local rumor persists that a cabal of plantation owners coaxed the grand jury into not indicting the men—despite testimony by Moses Wright and Willie Reed, both of whom fled back to Chicago once the proceedings concluded.

The nation turned its eyes to the Leflore County Courthouse once again in February 2007. Dale Killinger and his FBI colleagues compiled vast mountains of evidence and expected to secure an indictments against Carolyn Bryant (there is no statute of limitations for manslaughter in Mississippi) and Henry Lee Loggins. But the racially mixed grand jury convened by District Attorney Joyce Chiles did not return an indictment. The long wait for justice continues.

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In the September 1955 trial of Emmett Till’s killers, the precise role of the Wright homestead was hotly contested. The prosecution argued that the murder started here, at the Wright home, the site of the kidnapping. The defense argued that the murder began at Bryant’s Grocery, three miles to the west. While this may seem like an arcane or irrelevant debate, the fate of the accused hung in the balance. The prosecution argued that the Till case began when, in the early morning hours of Sunday, August 28, a car approached the Wright house in the pitch-black night; that car contained at least four people, two of whom were the accused half-brothers J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant. Upon entering the home armed with flashlights and .45 caliber handguns, the men went from room to room looking for Till; they eventually found him in a bed sleeping next to Wright's youngest son, Simeon, aged 12. After threatening to kill Wright if he said anything, the men took Emmett and drove toward Money. By starting their story at the Wright residence, the prosecution was trying to distinguish the kidnapping and murder from the events, three days earlier, at Bryant’s Grocery. At the grocery, Till whistled at the white shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant. The prosecution knew that if the murder began at Bryant’s Grocery, then Carolyn would testify and the murder would begin to look like a “justifiable homicide”—a fitting punishment for a black boy who insulted a white woman. The counsel for the defense argued that the Wright residence was not as significant. In their view, the murder began at Bryant’s Grocery. In the interest of getting Carolyn Bryant on the witness stand, they argued that the events of Bryant’s Grocery formed the “essential background for a later happening.”  Judge Curtis Swango ruled in their favor. While he mandated that the jury leave the room, he allowed Bryant to tell her story. She testified that Till forcibly held her hand, asked her for a date, grabbed both of her hips, and propositioned her with “unprintable words.”  The jury did not need to be in the room. They heard Bryant’s tale by other means, and they acted on it. Nine of the twelve jurors later confided that they voted to acquit the murderers not because they believed the men were innocent (they did not) and not because they doubted the identity of the body (the argument of the defense), but rather because of what happened at Bryant’s Grocery. It is, then, a matter of some irony that the state of Mississippi has commemorated Bryant’s Grocery but not the former Wright residence. By doing so, they have endorsed the argument of the defense (that freed the killers) while ignoring the pleas of the prosecution. According to Simeon Wright, the family’s residence was destroyed by a tornado in 1971.

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After Till’s body was found, local law enforcement was anxious to bury the body and, they hoped, the story. Within hours of the body’s retrieval, a grave was dug at the East Money Church of God in Christ. Till’s great uncle Crosby Smith interrupted the digging. He arrived with a deputy sheriff and announced that Till’s mother, Mamie Till, insisted that her son’s body be returned home to Chicago.  When the body arrived in Chicago the following day, September 2, Mamie Till demanded that funeral director A. A. Rayner open the casket; she wanted to see her son. Rayner eventually opened the casket and Mamie Till began the torturous process of identifying her only child.  So badly disfigured was the body that she had to rely on Till’s hair, teeth, and ears to make a positive identification. What she did next changed the course of history: she invited black photographer David Jackson to take pictures of the corpse—notably the boy’s mutilated face—and allowed several black newspapers and Jet Magazine to print them.  As she would say for the rest of her life, “Let the world see what I’ve seen. . . . The whole nation had to bear witness to this.”    Emmett Till had recently turned 14 years old when he became a household name in 1955. A generation of young black boys and girls saw the grisly photographs in the pages of Jet and elsewhere.  This was the generation who would change Mississippi forever through organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality; activists would often trace the origins of their activism to seeing the corpse of Emmett Till.  Had his body been quietly interred in this humble plot off of Darfield Road, the history of race in America would have looked very different.

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