Some telling details about the legacy of Emmett Till (a Black boy forcibly disappeared in Mississippi in the 1950s):
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For white Mississippians like Jeff Andrews and me, it’s possible to grow up rarely, if ever, hearing Emmett Till’s name. Slipping free of the generational guilt and shame of this particular murder—a proxy for so many acts of violence and cruelty, large and small—remains a central part of a white child’s education in the Delta, where a system of private schools arose in response to integration. “Seg academies,” they’re called. A Mississippi-history textbook taught at one in the early 1990s didn’t mention Till at all. A newer textbook contains 70 words on Till, calling him a “man” and telling the story of his killing through the lens of the damage that two evil men, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, did to all the good white folks. Half the passage is about how the segregationist governor was a “moderating force” in a time when media coverage of Till’s murder “painted a poor picture of Mississippi and its white citizens.” This textbook is still in use.
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The barn’s history would have remained secret except for a single Mississippian. Early on the last morning of Emmett Till’s life, a Black 18-year-old named Willie Reed awoke and walked toward the town of Drew on the dirt road that still runs past the Andrews place.
Reed was heading to a nearby country store to get breakfast. He saw a green-and-white Chevrolet pickup truck turn onto the path that led up to the barn. Four white men sat shoulder to shoulder in the cab; in the back three Black men sat with a terrified Black child. The child was Emmett Till.
Reed heard Till screaming in the barn. At one point, he saw J. W. Milam take a break and walk with a gun on his hip to a nearby well. Milam drank some cool water, then went back inside and the beating continued. The screams turned to moans.
The men talked about taking Till to a hospital, but they’d beaten him too badly to be saved. So much about this murder remains unknown, but FBI investigators believe a single gunshot to the head ended Till’s life in the barn. The men threw cotton seeds on the floor to soak up the blood and took the body to the Tallahatchie River. They threw Till off a bridge; a cotton-gin fan tied to his neck pulled him down.
Willie Reed went to work the next day. By then word had spread, and people were starting to talk. His grandfather begged him to stay quiet and not create trouble for the family. Reed thought over and over about whether he should tell the truth about what he’d seen and heard.
A retired FBI agent named Dale Killinger knows more about the murder of Emmett Till than anyone else alive. Killinger was the lead agent when the FBI opened a federal investigation in 2004, with the potential to finally bring charges against Carolyn Bryant for her presumed role in the murder.
I talked to Killinger on the phone one afternoon about the violence in the barn. The next time we spoke he told me that his wife had been sitting next to him during that graphic conversation, and when he’d hung up, she’d turned to him with a hollow look in her eyes and asked him why they’d done it. Even when people know generally what happened to Till, the specifics still leave them gasping.
“Rhea, don’t you understand?” he told her. “They were entertained by this.”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“They could’ve killed and tortured him anywhere they wanted to,” he told her. “They chose to take him to a barn where they could control the environment and do what they wanted. In my mind, they were entertaining themselves.”
He told me he’s imagined the sounds of that night over and over. He interviewed Leslie Milam’s widow before she died and found her evasive.
“Frances Milam was home,” he said. “She was in the house. You think she heard what was going on?”
Killinger laughed bitterly and answered his own question.“Hell yeah, she did,” he said. “It’s 1955 and you don’t have air-conditioning. So she admitted that they brought him to the farm in the middle of the night. That’s in the FBI report. So she was there and they were beating him and eventually somebody shot him in that barn in the head. You hear everything in Mississippi! You know? The windows are open. You have window screening—that’s all you have. You hear a car coming a mile away. You hear somebody getting beat in your barn! You hear a gunshot! Think about why they chose to go to that barn. They chose it because Leslie Milam controlled that space. And they could go in there and do what they wanted, how they wanted. And why would you do that? You could have taken him off in the woods and killed him if you wanted to, right? Dump the body anywhere. They went out of their way.”
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Over the decades, evidence and facts had slowly vanished. The only copy of the trial transcript disappeared, and FBI agents had to track down a copy of a copy of a copy, which a source led them to at a private residence on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The ring Till had been wearing, which had belonged to his father, vanished. In the 1970s, the Sumner courthouse was renovated and old evidence was discarded. A lawyer in Sumner looked on the curb of the courthouse and saw the gin fan that had been used to sink Till’s body sitting with all sorts of meaningless trash bound for the dump. He took it as a trophy but soon threw it away.
A recording of Roy Bryant’s account of that night in 1955 exists. The tapes are either in Mississippi or in Los Angeles, where the United American Costume Company is based. That’s the company founded by John Wayne’s personal costumer, a native of Ruleville, Mississippi, named Luster Bayless. Decades ago, Bayless decided he wanted to make a movie about the Till murder and so he arranged an interview with Bryant. A microcassette recorder captured every word as Bryant drove around the Delta, re-creating the night of the murder; it is likely the only existing description of what happened inside the barn in the final hour of Till’s life. Bryant even posed for a Polaroid in front of the store. Other than FBI agents and a few random people, nobody has heard the recording.
These tapes contain something other than facts, although they contain lots of those, too. They contain the sound of Bryant’s voice, the way his laugh sounds when he recounts torturing a child, the way he drawls his vowels, the little details that let you know a human being did this terrible thing. Locals remember Bryant as an old man, blinded by a lifetime of welding, working at a store on Highway 49 in Ruleville, eight miles from the barn.
The researcher Bayless hired, a woman named Cecelia Lusk, told me she went to the libraries at Delta State and Ole Miss and was stunned. Stories about Till had been torn out of magazines in the archives. In both of the courthouses in Tallahatchie County, she said, she found the legal file folders for the case. They were empty. “Not one sheet of paper,” she said. “Someone had removed everything. There was absolutely not one piece of paper in those folders.”
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Killinger presented his report and waited; he thought there was enough evidence for an indictment. But nothing happened. A local prosecutor tried—not hard enough, in Killinger’s opinion—to indict Carolyn Bryant for manslaughter, but a grand jury declined. That was 14 years ago. A reporter heard the news and found Simeon Wright at his local church. He said he knew he didn’t have many years left and now he knew he’d die without seeing Carolyn Bryant spend a minute behind bars. The members of the grand jury looked in the mirror, he said, and didn’t like what they saw.
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Fourteen years ago, Tallahatchie County issued a formal apology for the acquittal of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam. The state installed a green historical marker outside the courthouse. Patrick Weems’s office is across the street from that sign, so he can literally point out his window at progress. But he can also point to the repeated vandalism of signs his organization has worked to erect. There was a marker at the Delta Inn, the hotel where jurors were sequestered and where, during the trial, a cross was burned just in case any of the jurors didn’t understand what their neighbors expected of them. That marker was taken down one night by vandals and has not been replaced. A sign was placed along the Tallahatchie River, where Till’s body was found, but someone threw it in the water. A replacement collected more than 100 bullet holes until, made illegible by the violence, it came down and was given to the Smithsonian. A third sign got shot a month after it went up. Three Ole Miss students posed before the sign with guns, and one posted the photo to Instagram. The current sign is bulletproof.
Little about this murder feels safely in the past. Wheeler Parker is alive. So is Carolyn Bryant. Many of the children and grandchildren of the killers and the jurors and the defense attorneys still live in the area. The barn is still just a barn. One man claims that the truck used to kidnap Till is rusting right now on a Glendora plantation. Two of the four men suspected of being in the cab of that truck back in 1955 went unnamed in public until Killinger’s FBI report was released. Till’s ring remains missing, and the legal files remain missing.
