The Emmett Till Memorial Commission has done more for the memory of Emmett Till than any other organization in the world. Since its founding in late 2005, the Commission has transformed the landscape of Tallahatchie County. They have created a 9-site driving tour (10 sites if you count the Interpretive Center in Sumner) and renovated Sumner‘s Tallahatchie County Courthouse, the site of the 1955 Till trial.

Now known as the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, the memorial commission was formed when economic opportunism momentarily aligned with the pursuit of racial justice.

Tallahatchie County has had two courthouses since the early 20th century. The second courthouse (in Sumner) was built because the Tallahatchie River was prone to flooding and residents on the west side of the county were cut off from their courthouse in Charleston.

In 1947, however, the county built a modern bridge over State Highway 32, eliminating the need for two courthouses.

As resources became increasingly scarce as the cotton economy tanked in the second half of the 20th century, the county could no longer afford to maintain two courthouses. All resources went to Charleston.

As resources went to Charleston, the Sumner courthouse began to fall into disrepair. Some observant journalists noticed this disrepair as early as 1955. By the turn of the 21st century, the Sumner courthouse was on the verge of being condemned. Had this happened, Sumner‘s entire legal industry would have been pushed out, and the town would have been devastated. Thus it was that Harvey Henderson (a lawyer who once defended Till‘s murderers) approached local architect Richard Dickson about saving the courthouse. While there was not tax money to repair the courthouse, there was grant money to restore the courthouse to its 1955 condition. When his job was on the line, Harvey Henderson jump-started the push to restore the courthouse and remember Emmett Till.

But it was not all opportunism. The idea for an Emmett Till commission was pushed by Jerome Little, the first black president of the county‘s Board of Supervisors. Along with Willie Williams, Bobby Banks, Robert Grayson, John Wilchie, Susan Glisson, and Betty Pearson, Jerome Little steered the nascent organization toward social justice.

While there were some, like Henderson, who cared only about saving the town, the ETMC was always driven by a strong contingent of folks seeking racial justice. It was the racial justice wing of the Commission that organized a press conference in the fall of 2007.

It was a well-publicized and dramatic affair. With the Till family in town from Chicago and dignitaries on hand from across the region, the Emmett Till Memorial Commission offered a formal apology for the county‘s role in the Till murder.

Beginning in 2008, the Commission began building the Tallahatchie Civil Rights Driving Tour, putting up signs by the courthouse and around the county at various Emmett Till sites.

For over 17 years now, the Commission has been working to commemorate Till‘s murder. More importantly, the Commission uses the murder to pursue racial justice in the 21st century. They offer youth internship programs, video-making seminars, tours, racial justice training, and community development opportunities.

Emmett Till Interpretive Center

The Nonprofit That Told Till's Story

During the Till trial of September 1955, embalmer Harry D. Malone was an important witness for the defense. He testified that the body was in such poor condition that it must have been in the Tallahatchie River for at least ten days. This, of course, meant that the body could not be Emmett Till and the defendants could not be guilty. Along with Sheriff Strider’s testimony, Malone’s narrative was a key factor in the jury’s official rationale for acquitting J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant.

However, in his closing remarks to the jury, prosecutor Robert Smith argued that Malone did not personally embalm the body and therefore was not in a position to judge either its condition or the amount of time it was in the river. Although Smith did not suggest an alternative, many believe that Till’s body was actually prepared by Malone’s black assistant Woodrow Jackson.

If it was Woodrow Jackson who embalmed the body in Tutwiler (and most historians now agree it was), this means that a key witness for the defense was lying on the stand. The acquittal was built on a false narrative.

Woodrow Jackson is an elusive figure in the history of the Till case. Not until the twenty-first century did he begin to appear in accounts of the murder. The reason he so rarely appeared in history is obvious: his presence in the Till story would undermine the supposed innocence of the murderers, whose acquittal required Malone as the primary embalmer instead of Jackson.

To right this wrong, the Emmett Till Interpretive Center has invested in the memory of Woodrow Jackson. When he passed in 2007, they issued a formal recognition of his role embalming the body. And when they commemorated the Tutwiler Funeral Home in 2008, their sign betrayed no hint of controversy: “On August 31, 1955, Woodrow Jackson prepared Emmett Till’s body here at the Tutwiler Funeral Home.”

Tutwiler Funeral Home

The Body’s Last Stop in Mississippi

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 

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 

 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.

East Money Church of God

The Story of Till’s Murder Nearly Died Here

East Money Church of God in Christ

The strongest argument in favor of the theory that Till was thrown off this bridge and recovered at Graball Landing is its intuitiveness. This site is immediately adjacent to both J. W. Milam’s home (where Till’s clothes were burned) and the Glendora Cotton Gin (where Till’s murderers could have easily secured the fan with the help of Milam’s neighbor Elmer Kimbell, who worked at the gin). Because the murderers were in a race with daybreak to dispose of the body as quickly as possible, they certainly would have appreciated the proximity of this bridge. Heightening the credibility of this theory is the fact that this road was closed permanently sometime in 1955.

Beyond the intuitive convenience of the theory, the Black Bayou Bridge theory has a strong advocate in Glendora Mayor Johnny B. Thomas. Thomas has used the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center (a Till museum just up the road) to advocate for this theory for years.

Thomas has a vested interest in this site. In 2010, the Mississippi Development Authority advised him that Emmett Till tourism represented the best chance at economic development for the town. The more the story of Till’s murder centers on Glendora, the more tourists will have reason to come, and the more economic development will follow.

But quite apart from matters of tourism, Thomas does have an interesting story. He claims that his father was Henry Lee Loggins — Milam’s “right hand” man who was widely rumored to be personally involved in the murder.

According to African American journalist James L. Hicks, Loggins and Levi “Too Tight” Collins (both black men) were forced by J. W. Milam to participate in the torture and murder of Emmett Till before being jailed in Charleston on trumped up charges to keep them away from the investigation. Defense attorney J. J. Breland later confirmed that Loggins and Collins were held on false charges to prevent them from testifying.

Although Loggins publicly denied all involvement his entire life (most publicly on 

), there are rumors that he made a deathbed confession to his son. If true, it means that Thomas’s claim that the body was thrown over this bridge might be based on Loggin’s personal involvement.

Black Bayou Bridge

Till's Body May Have Been Dropped in the Water From This Bridge

According to the so-called “confession” penned by journalist William Bradford Huie in the January 24, 1956 issue of 

, Emmett Till was beaten in a shed behind J.W. Milam’s house in Glendora, taken to a steep bank on River Road, shot in the head, and dumped into the Tallahatchie River weighted down by a 75-pound blast wheel from a cotton gin. For decades, Huie’s account functioned as the definitive word on what happened to Emmett Till in his final hours.

We now know that Huie’s account was wrong. Till was tortured and killed in a seed barn on what was once the Milam Plantation.

Huie’s story leaves out the explosive eyewitness testimony of 18-year-old Willie Reed, a black plantation worker walking to a local store early on Sunday morning, August 28. Reed saw Milam’s 1955 Chevrolet pickup arrive on the Plantation with Emmett Till and two guards in its bed and four white men in its cab. Reed then heard screams coming from the plantation’s small seed barn, which was managed by Milam’s brother and Bryant’s half-brother, Leslie.

There is a reason Huie eliminated Reed’s testimony from his story. 

refused to print the story without signed consent and release forms from every named participant in the murder. Unsurprisingly, Huie could only obtain such forms from the two men (Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam) who had already been tried and were therefore no longer in legal jeopardy. Leslie Milam had not been tried, he did not sign a release form, and he could not be implicated in Huie’s story. So Huie moved the murder to an abandoned spot of riverbank in Tallahatchie County, thus eliminating the roles of Willie Reed (witness) and Leslie Milam (accomplice). Although it is wrong, Huie’s story has been so influential that 

 map published on the Till murder between the publication of 

 article in January 1956 and 2005 left the Milam Plantation off the map entirely.

Remarkably, among the many Till commemorative sites and signs dotting the Delta landscape, this terribly important place continues to exist in a memory void. There is not a single plaque, marker, or memorial at the still-standing seed barn.

But things are beginning to change. Led by civil rights legend Gloria Dickerson, the town of Drew is beginning the process of commemorating the site. On August 28, 2022 — the 67th anniversary of the murder — hundreds of townspeople attended the first ever commemorative ceremony at the barn.

Seed Barn

The Long-Forgotten Murder Site

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 

 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.

Wright Residence

Where Till’s Story Begins (According to the Prosecution)

A new monument featuring Mamie Till-Mobley was unveiled on April 29th, 2023. Situated in front of Argo Community High School, just west of Chicago in Summit, IL, the Mamie Till-Mobley and Emmett Till Memorial captures the story of a mother in the act of becoming one of the twentieth century’s most important civil rights activists. The memorial captures Mamie’s resolute dignity — head held high, arm outstretched, smile on her face — as she fought for justice after the 1955 lynching of her 14-year-old son Emmett in Mississippi. It reminds the public of her tireless work confronting racism and summons them to carry on her work today.

For over 40 years, Mamie fearlessly toured the country sharing Emmett’s story and rallying support for legislation against lynching. She returned repeatedly to Argo High School, her alma mater, to implore students to use their voices for change. Her relentless activism continued until her death in 2003 at age 81.

Now, in a monument designed by Chicago artist Sonja Henderson, Mamie resumes her watch outside Argo High. The memory of Mamie’s prophetic voice fills the space, continuing to push the country towards change.

The centerpiece of the memorial is a statue of Mamie standing behind a richly adorned podium, surrounding the statue are a series of miniature obelisks, each of which connect Mamie’s influence to sites around Chicago and around the country. One obelisk points visitors to Robert’s Temple Church of God in Christ — the site of Till’s funeral. Another points visitors to courthouse in Mississippi where Till’s murderers were acquitted. Still another points to his boyhood home, just .3 miles away. Together, the monument and the obelisks remind us that Mamie’s power may have started in Chicago, but it coursed across the nation.

The podium behind which Mamie stands is a work of art all its own. On its north side, a base-relief sketch portrays the seed barn on the Millam plantation in Mississippi where Till’s brutal lynching occurred. Henderson protects the observer from the scene’s horror by strategically placed cotton plants that obscure but unmistakably invoke the racial violence that occurred.

A base-relief vignette on the front of the podium celebrates the beauty, innocence, and humanity of Mamie and Emmett. It features a small pond with two unattended fishing poles symbolizing the eternal lives of Mamie and Emmett. A rarely seen photograph of Emmett rests at the center of the scene, portraying his youthful innocence and, as Henderson explains, positions his death as the catalyst for Mamie’s subsequent career as a civil rights activist.

A third vignette is on the south side of the podium. Co-created by Henderson and Chicago artist John Weber, the base relief completes the story, recounting Till’s funeral at Robert’s Temple on Chicago’s South Side. When Emmett's mutilated body was shipped home to Chicago, Mississippi authorities ordered the casket sealed. Yet Mamie demanded it unsealed, insisting, as the monument reminds us, “let the people see what I've seen.“ That bold act, along with the open-casket funeral and chilling photos in Jet magazine, catalyzed outrage across America.

Behind the podium, Mamie stands, courageous, yet peaceful, determined to achieve justice for her son and all who face the specter of racial injustice. Under her right hand, on the podium, lies a copy of Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Bill which was signed into law by President Joe Biden on March 29th, 2022, an achievement that reflects the enduring legacy of Mamie’s efforts.

The Henderson-designed memorial received recognition and commendation from the 117th U.S. Congress “as a catalyst for immediate and continued education of students at Argo Community High School as well as members of the Argo-Summit community around the issues of social justice and civil rights.”

From Argo High, Mamie’s spirit cries out for justice. Her immortalized figure insists the work begun here long ago must continue, demanding her heirs — today's youth — carry forth the movement to which she dedicated her life.

Students pass beneath Mamie's resolute gaze, heading inside to classes where they matriculate, carrying hopes for the future — a future cut too short for young Emmett. In Mamie and her son, the past now walks tall beside students, linked arm in arm with each new generation, marching towards greater equality.

A New Monument of Mamie Till-Mobley Was Unveiled in 2023

Mamie Till-Mobley Monument

The story told in the ETHIC museum is unique on two counts.

First, while virtually every 20th-century history of Till’s murder suggests that the murderers dropped the body in the Tallahatchie River, the commemorative work in Glendora suggests that Till was dropped into a tributary known as the Black Bayou from a bridge on the south side of Glendora. According to this account, the bayou then carried Till’s body for 3 miles to the Tallahatchie River, where it was recovered near Graball Landing.

Second, while no historian has been able to claim with certainty where the murderers obtained the fan they used to weigh down Till’s corpse, the Glendora museum claims that the fan was stolen from this site, the Glendora Cotton Gin, presumably by Elmer Kimbrell, a gin employee and the next-door neighbor of confessed murderer J.W. Milam.

While these variations on the finer points of Till’s story are contested, to Glendora residents they are matters so weighty that it seems as if the very future of the town hinges on where Till’s body was dropped in the water and what fan weighed it down.

In 2010, the Mississippi Development Authority sent a team of economic development experts to Glendora. Their charge was to devise a plan to rescue the town from poverty — a tall order. Glendora is marked by breathtaking poverty with a median household income 70% below the state average.

The team struggled to find solutions. Aside from the unrealistic suggestion that the town turn the snake-infested land along the bayou into “riverfront property,” their only other proposal was that Glendora capitalize on its connection to the Till murder. More commemoration, they said, would bring tourists; tourism would beget economic development. The viability of this suggestion, of course, turned on a version of Till’s story that maximized the relevance of Glendora.

None of this was news to Glendora Mayor Johnny B. Thomas. Since at least 2005, he had been promoting a Glendora-centric narrative of the murder in which Till’s body was dropped in the Black Bayou tied with a fan from the local gin.

While these are both plausible claims, Thomas’s efforts have been undermined by a consistent antagonist: the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH).

The MDAH has invested more funds into Till’s commemoration than any other organization. It restored the Tallahatchie County Courthouse, the site of the Till trial, and even invested more than $200,000 in the controversial restoration of Ben Roy’s Service Station in Money.

The agency, however, is not convinced that Till’s body was dropped from the Black Bayou Bridge. Nor does the organization believe that the fan was stolen from the local gin. It has thus rejected every grant application the town has ever submitted. Locals are quick to point out that the MDAH funded the white memorial in Money (despite its implausability) but denied the all-black town of Glendora (despite its plausability).

Mayor Thomas (and the entire town of Glendora) was in a bind. They had one state agency (the MDA) telling them to invest in Till commemoration and a second state agency (the MDAH) blocking their every attempt to do so.

While some people might give up, Mayor Thomas got creative.

By leveraging the poverty of the town, he has obtained grant money from other sources. The work began on Sept. 27, 2005. On that day, the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded a Community Connect Broadband Grant to Glendora. Funded at $325,405, the grant was intended to bring broadband connectivity to Glendora. Thomas used the grant to both provide broadband 

 build the first version of the ETHIC museum. In April 2010, he received an IMLS grant to professionalize the museum.

The USDA grant program was intended to alleviate poverty. The Mayor’s ingenuity and creativity was able to bend those dollars to create a much-needed museum.

And yet, questions remain unanswered. Was Emmett Till actually dropped from the Black Bayou Bridge? Was the fan stolen from a local gin? Was Elmer Kimbrell involved?

Perhaps. But it is impossible to separate the truthfulness of these claims from the poverty of the townspeople. Thomas has leveraged the town’s poverty to build a museum, and the museum, in turn, supports Glendora’s plausible-but-unverifiable theories of the murder.

Had Glendora been wealthy, Thomas would have had no claim on federal dollars, and there would be no museum. But Glendora is not wealthy. And for this reason, stories about Kimbell, the gin, and the bridge continue to circulate, supported by nothing but the poverty of the town.

In 2008, this site was one of four Glendora sites added to the Tallahatchie Civil Rights Driving Tour created by the Emmett Till Memorial Commission.

Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center

The ETHIC Museum

On September 19, 1955, at 9:25 am, the trial of J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant for the murder of Emmett Till opened in this courthouse. It was a sensational, five-day trial. For the first time in history, the Northern press descended on a Mississippi trial. To this day, locals recall the spectacle that was the Till trial: the microphones, the cameras, the reporters, and the stifling heat of the second-floor courtroom. With approximately 400 people crowded into the small space (sitting in aisles and hanging out of windows), temperatures inside exceeded ninety degrees. For all these reasons, celebrated journalist David Halberstam, who attended the trial as a reporter for a West Point, MS newspaper, called the trial “the first great media event of the civil rights movement.” 

The trial lasted a scant five days. It would have been even shorter, had the black press not managed to secure an extended recess on the second day of the trial. Baltimore Afro-American reporter James Hicks, Medgar Evers, and Mound Bayou’s Dr. T. R. M. Howard rounded up five witnesses that claimed (correctly) that Till was beaten (and possibly killed) by J. W. Milam and others in a barn outside of Drew, MS. Drew was 20 miles southwest in Sunflower County, and, if the witnesses were correct, the trial would have to be moved to the neighboring county. Judge Curtis Swango called a recess to investigate the possibility. In the end, the witnesses were not believed and the trial was not moved.

On Friday, September 23, the all-white jury took only 67 minutes to deliberate before returning a verdict of not guilty. It was widely reported that the only reason it took them as long as it did was that they drank some Cokes in order to make it appear as if they were struggling with the decision.

The Cokes notwithstanding, the jury did not struggle to reach a verdict. They believed (or at least they said they did) the testimony of Sheriff H. C. Strider, Harry D. Malone, and Dr. L. B. Otken — all of whom argued that the body could not be positively identified as Emmett Till. The body was so badly decomposed by the time it was retrieved from the Tallahatchie River, these men argued, that the race of the body could not be determined. And, if the race of the body could not be determined, there was no way to verify that the body was Emmett Till. Thus were the murderers acquitted.

The testimonies of these men are deeply suspect. Malone never saw the body (although he claimed he did), and Strider changed his mind in dramatic fashion. A month earlier, when the Sheriff pulled Till’s body from the water, he marked the death certificate “colored” and sent the body to Chester Miller’s Century Burial Funeral Home — the black funeral home in Greenwood. His later suggestion, under oath, that the body was so decomposed that its race could not be determined was nothing more than a lie to secure an acquittal.

On July 1, 1972, the Tallahatchie County Board of Supervisors announced that the Courthouse in Sumner would be renovated by Yazoo City architect Jack DeCell. In the name of modernization, and at a cost of $235,000, the chairs were replaced with pews, the sash windows were replaced with solid glass, interior walls were added to the courtroom to shrink the space by over 800 square feet, and the courtroom was painted purple. The renovations were so dramatic that some locals believe the DeCell renovation was intended to bury all memory of Till’s murder. Those who believe this are quick to note that it was during the DeCell renovation that the cotton gin fan that once anchored Till’s body was lost.

In 1990, the Sumner courthouse was listed on the state register of historic places. Curiously, the historic places nomination makes no mention of the Till murder. The courthouse is nominated only for architectural reasons. The courthouse, the state claimed, is one of a very few remaining examples of Richardsonian Romanesque architecture. For some, this focus on architecture and the complete silence on the famous trial seemed like yet another attempt to forget Till’s murder.

Beginning in 2005, the Emmett Till Memorial Commission set out to undo the work of DeCell and the historical nomination. By renovating the courthouse to its 1955 condition, the Commission shifted the primary narrative of the courthouse. It was no longer about architecture; it was about race, memory, and justice. In this spirit, the Commission organized a formal apology to the Till family from the county in 2007.

In 2015, the space reopened, both as an operating courthouse and a living memorial to the Till murder. The renovation was done by Belinda Stewart Architects of Eupora.

Sumner Courthouse

The Trial, the Architecture, the Controversy

Although Mound Bayou is 42 miles away from Sumner, it played an essential role in the Emmett Till trial. The town provided protection for witnesses, a home base for the black press, and a refuge for Till’s mother Mamie Till-Bradley. Without Mound Bayou, we might still not know what happened to Emmett Till.

Mound Bayou was home to the legendary Mississippi activist Dr. Theodore Roosevelt Mason (T.R.M.) Howard. Although he is generally remembered for his 1951 founding of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, Howard’s civil rights credentials were vast. He organized a non-violent movement in the Mississippi Delta four years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott (and three years before Emmett Till’s murder), he organized annual civil rights rallies, and he stoked Medgar Evers’ nascent activism by hiring him for his Magnolia Life Insurance Company. 

His charismatic style meant that threats on his life were common. In the years before Till was murdered, Howard already had a $1,000 price tag on his life. He traveled with armed bodyguards, and his home featured twenty-four-hour-a-day armed protection. The sheer security of the Howard home explains why so many African Americans stayed with him when they came to Mississippi for the Till trial. Mound Bayou may have been 42 miles away from Sumner and the trial, but it offered unsurpassed safety. This is why Till’s mother Mamie Till-Bradley, Michigan Congressman Charles C. Diggs, and other African Americans used the Howard home as their base camp.

Beginning on the evening of Sunday, September 18, 1955, Howard’s home became far more than a base camp. Around midnight on the 18th, a young black plantation worker named Frank Young arrived at the Howard home claiming that he had direct evidence linking J. W. Milam, Roy Bryant, and four others to the murder. He also broke the then-shocking news that Till had been killed in Sunflower County. This was timely information. A widely-recognized liability of the prosecution’s case was their inability to locate the site of the murder. Just six days earlier, defense lawyer J. J. Breland had predicted an acquittal based, in part, on the inability of the prosecution to determine the murder site.

Young put these anxieties to rest. He told Howard that, at approximately 6 am on August 28, Till had been conveyed via a pickup truck crowded with four white people in the front and three African Americans in the back (including Till) to the seed barn on the Milam Plantation. Operated by J. W. Milam’s brother Leslie, the Milam Plantation is located about three miles west of Drew in Sunflower County. Young then told Howard that witnesses heard desperate screams emanating from the same barn; that they saw J. W. Milam emerge from the barn for a drink of water; that the screams gradually faded; and that a body was taken from the barn, covered with a tarpaulin, and placed in the back of a truck. He further assured Howard that this entire story could be vouchsafed by five Black witnesses: himself, Willie Reed, Add Reed, Walter Billingsley, and Amanda Bradley.

It is difficult to over-estimate the significance of Young’s account or its potential to challenge what people thought they knew about Till’s kidnapping and murder. It directly implicated far more people than J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant — who were the only defendants that week. It also implicated Leslie Milam, a fourth unknown white man, and two unknown Black men who were in the back of the truck with Till.

If Howard had any doubts about the veracity of Young’s story, he would have been reassured when, on the same night, A

 reporter James Hicks showed up directly from his experience at King’s Place in Glendora. Hicks’s story about Levi “Too Tight” Collins and Henry Lee Loggins fit perfectly with Frank Young’s tale. With the two stories combined, Howard now knew the identities of the two unknown Black men in the back of the truck.

The next evening (after the first day of the trial was complete), Howard called a strategy meeting at his home in Mound Bayou. Present at the meeting were NAACP officers Medgar Evers and Ruby Hurley and three influential members of the Black press: James Hicks, L. Alex Wilson (

). Although Hurley, Booker, and Hicks wanted to go public with the story immediately, Howard prevailed upon them to hold the story until the safety of the five witnesses could be assured. They agreed to contact the state’s lawyers through a trusted member of the white press, the 

Porteous came immediately and met the group at Howard’s Magnolia Mutual Insurance Company. They made a plan: Porteous would invite District Attorney Gerald Chatham and his assistant Robert Smith to a second meeting at Howard’s home at 8 pm the following day. Medgar Evers and his NAACP colleagues would don cotton-picking clothes and go undercover as sharecroppers to bring the witnesses to the meeting. Once everyone was assembled, Howard would tell Young’s story, produce the five witnesses, and prevail upon the lawyers to stop the trial and move it to Sunflower County.

The meeting never happened. After Porteous conveyed the news to Chatham and Smith during Tuesday’s lunch recess, officials from Sunflower County headed to the Milam Plantation and inadvertently scared the witnesses. When the witnesses failed to show up for the meeting, the Black press and white legal establishment joined forces in what Simeon Booker later called “Mississippi’s first interracial manhunt.” By 3 am on Tuesday, September 20, the team of Hicks, Booker, Porteous, Featherstone, and Leflore County Sheriff George Smith had made contact with each of the five witnesses. Howard assured the witnesses they would be kept safe (Willie Reed moved in with Howard that night) and promised each of them jobs in Chicago in exchange for their testimony.

On Thursday, September 22, 1955, Willie Reed left the home of T. R. M. Howard and proceeded to Sumner, where he testified that Till was beaten on the Milam Plantation near Drew by J. W. Milam. It was a remarkable act of bravery. Although the jury chose not to believe him — dismissing his testimony as “just a good story” — the FBI has confirmed that Reed was one of the few people in the trial who was actually telling the truth.

After testifying, he returned briefly to the plantation. He then walked six miles to a pre-arranged meeting point, from whence he was taken one final time to the Howard home. From there he was taken to Memphis by Congressman Charles C. Diggs where, with only the clothes on his back and one extra pair of pants, he boarded a flight for Chicago. He never returned.

Mound Bayou

 The Activists and Journalists Who Stayed in Mound Bayou Were the Only Ones Telling the True Story of Till's Murder. No One Believed Them

Emmett Till’s funeral began shortly after his body came home to Chicago. The A. A. Rayner Funeral home opened its doors for the initial viewing on Friday, September 2. On Sunday, Till's body was moved to the Robert’s Temple of the Church of God in Christ for a deeply emotional service. The church remained open for two days as a steady stream of people came to pay their last respects — one hundred thousand of them, according to the police estimate. After final prayers on Tuesday morning, fifty cars followed Emmett’s hearse to the burial ground at Burr Oak Cemetery.

In midcentury Chicago, death was just as segregated as life. Burr Oak Cemetery was founded in 1927 in Alsip, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, financed by prominent south-side businessmen as a final resting place for African-Americans. Famous contemporaries of Emmett Till were buried there including heavyweight boxing champion Ezzard Charles, songwriter/producer Willie Dixon, gospel singer Roberta Martin, and Dinah Washington, “the queen of the blues.”

It was warm even for early September when Emmett Till’s body was laid to rest in Burr Oak. Two hundred people gathered at the gravesite for one last round of tears and prayer and remembrance. His ground level marker read simply, “Emmett Till, In Loving Memory” along with the dates of his birth and death, and a tiny photo of him from Christmas, 1954. As the decades passed, Mamie Till-Mobley was increasingly dissatisfied with the conditions and upkeep of the grounds. Till’s gravesite was often flooded, the headstone was broken by mowers, the picture was in tatters, and the vase designed to hold flowers would no longer stand upright. She longed to move the body to the beautiful Oak Woods Cemetery and established a fundraising campaign to make it happen.

In 2001, however, Burr Oak Cemetery came under new management. Under the direction of Carolyn Towns, the cemetery satisfied Till-Mobley with a promise to build a museum called the “Emmett Till Historical Museum.” The museum would honor the legacy of Emmett and provide a final resting spot for him, Till-Mobley, and her long-time husband Gene Mobley. It never came to pass.

In May 2004, nearly fifty years after his burial, the FBI reopened the Till case. The Cook County Medical Examiner set up a tent at Burr Oak Cemetery and exhumed Till’s body. The forensic exam determined that the body in Burr Oak Cemetery was in fact the body of Emmett Till. While this may seem obvious, it is important to remember that there was a dispute over the identity of the body that, in 1955, provided the jury the legal cover with which to acquit the murderers. Although Sheriff H. C. Strider indicated that Till was “colored” on the death certificate, he testified in trial that the body was so decomposed that he could not identify its race. This was willed ignorance, designed to provide a legal mechanism to let the murderers walk free. With this background, the 2005 exhumation takes on new importance. The forensic exam marked the end of Strider’s racist lie.

Three days after the FBI exhumed the body, they set the body in a new coffin and, in a private ceremony, reinterred the body. Because the long-promised Emmett Till Historical Museum had not yet come to pass, the family understood the reburial as a temporary measure. When the museum was complete, they believed Till’s body would be moved once more.

In July 2009, Carolyn Towns was charged with dismembering remains, reselling occupied plots, and stealing over $100,000 from the cemetery. She pled guilty to a range of charges in 2011 and began a twelve-year prison sentence in November of that year.

Although Till’s plot was not harmed by Town’s scheme, she had not cared for Till’s casket. Following the exhumation, the original casket sat in a neglected storage shed and was occupied by a family of possums. When it was discovered in 2009, the Till family took possession of the casket, had it restored at A. A. Rayner and Sons funeral home, and made plans to give it to Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Beautifully refurbished, that original coffin where Emmett’s body lay while one-hundred-thousand mourners passed by, where the famous photograph of his brutalized face was taken, where he rested for fifty years, now forms the centerpiece of the most moving display in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D. C. With the coffin front and center, the visitor enters a room designed to look like the Roberts Temple did in September 1955.

While the original coffin has moved to Washington, D. C., Till remains in Burr Oak Cemetery, where he was first buried in 1955. The headstone is small and relatively unadorned, the museum remains unbuilt, but the gravesite is peaceful and open to public viewing.

Till's Final Resting Spot Has Never Been Without Drama

Burr Oak Cemetery

Hours after Till’s body was discovered protruding from the Tallahatchie River, Mississippi authorities began to bury the body — and the story — in a rural cemetery at a rural church deep in the Mississippi Delta. Had Till’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley not intervened and reclaimed her son’s body, Till’s lynching may have been recorded in the history books alongside the likes of George Lee and Lamar Smith. Like Till, Lee and Smith were lynched in Mississippi in the summer of 1955. Unlike Till, their stories have been largely forgotten. The difference in their respective fates can be traced to Mamie Till-Mobley’s demand that the “world see“ what happened to her son. It was at Robert’s Temple Church of God in Christ that the world saw. As Yvette Johnson wrote in the 

, Mamie Till-Mobley changed the world with the open-casket funeral.

Upon arriving back in Chicago on the morning of September 2, 1955, the first stop for Till’s body was the A. A. Rayner Funeral home which, in 1955, was located at the corner of 41st and Cottage Grove. The casket arrived locked, sealed with the state seal of Mississippi, and accompanied by orders that the casket was not to be opened. If Mississippi authorities could not bury the body in a nameless cotton field, they hoped their seal would keep Till’s story under wraps. It did not work.

Till-Mobley disregarded the order and insisted that the casket be opened. It was at A. A. Rayner Funeral Home that she uttered the famous phrase: “Let the world see what they did to my boy.” Following Mamie’s wishes, Rayner placed the body in the front room of their facility in a glass-topped casket. Over the next two days, as many as fifty thousand people would visit the funeral home to pay their respects.

Among the throngs at the funeral home was the photographer David Jackson. Jackson was a photographer for Johnson Publications, and Till-Mobley allowed him to be on the podium at the twelfth street station when Till’s body arrived. He then accompanied the body to Rayner and, when Till-Mobley opened the casket, he took a picture and published it in Johnson Publication’s leading outlets: 

. In a way that words could never do, Jackson’s photograph captured the sheer violence visited on the body — and especially the face — of Emmett Till. Although the brutality of the picture is difficult to describe, the words of John Edgar Wideman come close. He described a face “crushed, chewed, [and] mutilated.” A face “with all the boy, all the human being battered out of it.” Jackson’s photograph transformed the Till murder from one more 1955 Mississippi lynching into the unforgettable spark of the civil rights movement. Delta activist Amzie Moore may have put it best, claiming that the photograph made Till’s murder “the best advertised lynching I had ever heard.”

For black Chicago, however, the Jackson photograph was only the beginning. On Sunday, September 4th, the body was moved to the Robert’s Temple Church of God in Christ — the home congregation of Mamie Till and her mother Alma. The two-thousand seat auditorium was filled to capacity for the funeral, and several thousand more listened to the 90-minute service on loudspeakers set up outside the church. The sermon was given by Bishop Louis Ford, who used the funeral to call on President Eisenhower to “go into the Southern states and tell the people there... that unless the Negro gets full freedom in America, it is impossible for us to be leaders in the rest of the world.” He closed the sermon by announcing that the burial would be delayed until Tuesday and the body would lay in state for the next two days.

The following 48 hours saw an estimated one-hundred thousand mourners file past the body.

In 1991, Robert’s Temple Church of God in Christ underwent a major renovation. The iconic cross-shaped marquis was removed, a tan brick facade was installed over the top of the original storefront, an angular roofline hid the original curved profile, a drop-ceiling was installed, and the balcony was removed.

On March 29, 2006, Robert’s Temple was designated as a Chicago Landmark. The small plaque on the west side of the building is the only visible acknowledgement of the church’s key role in the Till story.

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It Was in Chicago That the Emmett Till Lynching Became a World-Wide Story

Robert's Temple Church of God in Christ

On August 24, 1955, Emmett Till arrived at Bryant’s Grocery around 7:30 pm along with several cousins and friends. The primary attraction was the checkers game on the front porch. With his companions thus engaged, Till followed his cousin Wheeler Parker into the store.

When Wheeler came out of the store, Simeon Wright went in. Twelve years old, Wright grew up in the Mississippi Delta, knew the rules of the Jim Crow South, and didn’t want to leave his Chicago cousin alone with white shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant.

When Simeon entered the store, he saw nothing inappropriate. Contrary to the story later told in court by Carolyn Bryant, Till did not grab her or put his arms around her. He did not proposition her. He did not ask her for a date or call her “baby.“ He simply paid for his items and left the store.

Shortly after the cousins left the store, Carolyn Bryant came out too, heading for her car. That is when it happened.

Emmett whistled at Carolyn Bryant. As Simeon Wright remembers it, “It was a loud wolf whistle, a big-city ’whee wheeeee.’“

Although historians have debated whether or not Till actually whistled, those who witnessed the event have always insisted that he did. Critically, Till’s cousins Simeon Wright and Wheeler Parker (both eyewittnesses) insist that Till whistled.

The whistle violated the norms of the Jim Crow South, and Wright and Parker both knew it. It had broken an “unwritten law“ that governed the interactions of black men and white women. Worried, they hurried Till away from the store as fast as possible.

The unwritten laws of the Jim Crow South were enforced through lynch mobs and vigilante violence. In this case, Carolyn’s husband Roy, his half-brother J. W. Milam, and an array of accomplices kidnapped Till, tortured him, shot him, attached his body to a cotton-gin fan with a length of barbed wire, and dropped his body in a river.

It is entirely fitting that, in 2020, when the US House of Representatives finally passed a federal antilynching bill, it was named the Emmett Till Antilynching Act.

For nothing more than a whistle, Till experienced the full fury of the Southern lynch mob. His innocence was answered by unimaginable violence. Indeed, the violence was so intense that it suggests a desperate effort to uphold the fading norms of white supremacy.

The effort did not work. Virtually every historian agrees that the Till murder jump-started the civil rights movement.

While the brutal murder may have galvanized the movement, the grocery store has been allowed to fall into ruin. After the acquittal, the black sharecroppers that once kept Bryant’s Grocery in business refused their patronage, and the store was put up for sale less than a month after the trial. For the next three decades, the building was maintained as a country grocery by different owners — first as Wolfe’s and then as Young’s Grocery and Market.

Since the early 1980s, the site of Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market has been owned by the Tribble family. Ray Tribble was a juror in the 1955 Till trial, and his children now own the site. In 2011, the Tribble family led the charge to renovate the adjacent gas station, Ben Roy’s Service Station. Although Ben Roy’s has no civil rights history, the family was able to leverage its proximity to Bryant’s Grocery to obtain money set aside for civil rights restoration. Unfortunately, the restored Ben Roy’s makes no mention of Till, the civil rights movement, or Bryant’s Grocery.

Several parties have offered to buy the property from the Tribbles in the interest of restoring it as a memory site. As of 2019, the Tribbles have refused to sell the property for less than $4 million. While the world sees Bryant’s Grocery as the origin of the civil rights movement, the Tribbles apparently see it as potentially valuable commercial property.

Bryant'S Grocery Store

The Long-Ignored Site Where the Civil Rights Movement Started

Bryant's Grocery Store

Graball Landing sits at the confluence of the Tallahatchie River and the Black Bayou. Many locals believe that it is the site where Till’s body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River. Since April 2008, the site has become the focus of national controversy as the Emmett Till Memorial Commission’s (ETMC) attempts to commemorate the landing have been met by repeated vandalism.

It is difficult to say with certainty where the body was recovered. In 1955, there was widespread agreement that the body was found near Pecan Point, a few miles downstream from this spot. In 2006, the FBI concluded that Till’s body was discovered several miles downstream at a spot where the Tallahatchie River briefly dips into Leflore County. After being pulled into a boat, the body was then brought to Fish Lake Landing (very near Pecan Point) where it was finally removed from the water.

Regardless of whether or not Graball Landing is the correct site, the local belief in the validity of this site has made the landing a nationally recognized (and nationally contested) memory site.

The ETMC first commemorated this site in 2008, erecting a sign that claimed, unequivocally, “this is the site where Till’s body was removed from the river.” Within six months, the sign was stolen and thrown into the river. This was the first instance of what would become a repeated problem: vandalism. A second sign quickly replaced the first, but it was quickly filled with bullet holes.

In 2016, NYU student Kevin Wilson happened on the shot-up sign. He posted it to Facebook and, within days, the vandalism was covered by every major media outlet in the country.

The media coverage generated intense moral outrage and a widespread demand to replace the sign. When the big-hearted Brooklyn sign manufacturer Lite Brite Neon volunteered to fabricate, ship, and install a new marker free of charge, the Commission quickly cut down the old sign to make room for the new one.

But without waiting for the Lite Brite sign to be fabricated, the ETMC bought a third a sign, identical to the first two, and dedicated it on June 21, 2018. It lasted only 35 days before it, too, was shot. And then, sometime between July 27, 2018 and September 10, 2018, three Ole Miss fraternity brothers posed in front of it with guns, trophy style. Shortly after news of the fraternity brother's publicity stunt, the ETMC took down the third sign.

The fourth sign was dedicated on October 19, 2019.

The fourth sign was crafted by Lite Brite Neon. As was widely reported in the national press, it is bullet proof. It is made from 1/2" AR500 steel and covered with a 3/4" replaceable polycarbonate plate. Weighing in at nearly 500 lbs., the sign is designed to absorb a rifle round.

Unlike the first three signs, the language on bullet-proof sign addresses the history of vandalism directly. Believing that the bullet holes are part of Till’s story too, the new sign is designed to register the history of vandalism even as it resists future attempts to desecrate the site.

The ETMC never imagined that a bullet-proof sign would solve fundamental issues of racism. And it didn‘t. On November 2, 2019, white nationalists gathered at the site to film a promotional video.

The history of vandalism and activism centered on this site led ETMC founder Jerome Little to observe that Graball Landing is both a beacon of racial progress and a trenchant reminder of the progress yet to be made.

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Locals Believe That Till Was Pulled From the River at This Site

Graball Landing

In 1923, Wiley Carthan left Mississippi on the Illinois Central Railroad, heading for Chicago. He settled just outside the Chicago city limits in the town of Argo, Illinois. Argo’s real name was Summit, but the largest corn processing plant in the world — the maker of Karo syrup, Bosco malted milk, Mazola cooking oil, and, critically, Argo Corn Starch — made Summit a company town, and locals called the place Argo. Carthan settled in and sent for his wife Alma and daughter Mamie, and the family made a life there. Mamie Carthan graduated with honors from the high school and soon married another Argo worker, Louis Till. In 1941, they had a son named Emmett.

The Argo plant shaped every facet of life in Summit. If locals called the town “Argo,” they called Argo the “university” — it was the place where boys went after high school. Emmett’s father, his stepfather, and many members of the Till family punched the clock at Argo.

Historians use the phrase “The Great Migration” to describe the early years of African American exodus out of the South to cities in the North. Of course, that movement really started with the underground railroad and continued through the rest of the 19th century. But the first mass migration came in the era of World War I and into the 1920s. For example, Chicago’s blacks made up 2% of the city’s population in 1910, 7% by 1930, and 25% by 1960.

Southern Jim Crow laws were firmly in place by 1900, depriving African Americans of the rights of citizens — voting, equal justice under law, trial by jury, etc. Few Southern blacks managed to acquire property, so share-cropping and tenancy kept most in penury. Schools, accommodations, transportation, and housing were all rigidly segregated, and black life was hedged in by a vicious system that enforced laws against vagrancy and other crimes with long sentences and brutal labor. And too, the lynching of blacks who “got out of line” added an element of terror to the indignities of Jim Crow.

Faced with such conditions, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Isabel Wilkerson has written that “nearly every black family in America had a decision to make.” And scores upon scores did “what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.” The Carthans joined the throng of what was, in Wilkerson's words, a “back-against-the wall, reluctant yet hopeful search for something better.”

The World War I economy and the prosperity of the 1920s created new opportunities in the urban North. Word of these opportunities spread on the growing popularity of the 

, a weekly newspaper with national circulation that repeatedly urged Southern blacks to leave their benighted homeland. The same railroad that carried Till to and from Mississippi carried the 

 to the rural South, bearing news of a brighter day in Chicago.

Equally important, African Americans voiced their resentment of American apartheid. The founding of the NAACP in 1909, for example, was a key moment of black politicization and resistance. The growing political resistance combined with industrial opportunities in the North lured the dispossessed to Chicago by the hundreds of thousands.

Corn Products made Argo a small boom town, attracting not only Southern blacks, but Poles, Slovaks, Russians, and Italians. African Americans got the worst jobs, but the work was steady, and the town prosperous enough to sustain a life far better than anything in Mississippi. Blacks founded their own churches, businesses, and neighborhoods. Like the town itself, Corn Products was not fully integrated but not rigidly segregated either, offering a margin of decency. Life got even better for workers when the union organized Corn Products in the late 1930s. The Argo Local of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union brought better pay, benefits, overtime, and if not equality, at least a measure of dignity and security.

Before Till took the train to Mississippi in 1955, his family had its trials: Wiley Carthan left for Detroit, Louis Till abused his wife. But the modest prosperity provided by Corn Products made Till’s hometown a more safe and secure environment than he might have experienced in Mississippi or on Chicago’s South Side.