Deliberations took barely an hour, with one juror claiming the acquittal could’ve come sooner had they not stopped to have a soda. Testifying for the defense, Carolyn Bryant offered incendiary testimony accusing Emmett of grabbing and verbally threatening her. Not a month after the boy’s body was pulled from the river, an all-white jury acquitted Bryant and Milam of Emmett’s murder, despite eyewitnesses identifying the defendants and the men confessing to kidnapping the teen. His murderers then strapped a 75-pound cotton gin fan to his neck with barbed wire so it would weigh him down when they tossed him in the Tallahatchie River. Milam, rousted Emmett from his bed in the middle of the night, ordered him into the bed of a pickup and eventually beat him viciously before shooting him in the head.
Emmett had traveled there from Chicago to visit his great-uncle, who lived in the area.įour days later, on August 28, 1955, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W.
Ninety-five days after the attack, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.Įmmett’s crime? He had been accused – we now know, falsely – of flirting with and making advances at then-21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, who, along with her husband, Roy, owned a grocery store in Money, Mississippi.
Hundreds gather outside a Chicago church as pallbearers carry the casket of Emmett Till.
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