by Chris Crowe
For the poor children of sharecropping families, the center of social activity in Money was Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, a small white-owned store on Old Money Road that catered to local Black sharecroppers and field workers. People young and old hung out on the store’s front porch playing checkers, listening to music, and swapping stories. When they got thirsty or needed a snack, they could go inside and buy a cold RC cola or some penny candy. That night, Carolyn Bryant, a twenty-one-year-old mother of two young boys, worked behind the counter alone. Her husband, Roy, was on the road, hauling a load of shrimp from New Orleans to Brownsville, Texas.
When Emmett and his cousins arrived around 7:30, a small group of people had already gathered at Bryant’s Market, and before long, Emmett was the center of attention, telling stories about life in Chicago. At one point, he pulled out his wallet and started showing off some of the pictures he had with him, suggesting that a white girl in one photo was a friend of his. His bragging drew a big reaction from the local crowd, and one of the boys pointed at the store and challenged Emmett: “You talkin’ mighty big, Bo. There’s a pretty little white woman in there in the sto‘. Since you Chicago cats know so much about white girls, let’s see you go in there and get a date with her.”
The flashpoint of the Emmett Till case: Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market in Money, Mississippi
The kids from around Money knew that Carolyn Bryant had won a couple of local beauty contests, making her one of the best known young white women in the area. All the Mississippi boys knew the risks of talking to her or even looking her in the eye. Asking her on a date would be unimaginable!
The mixing of races, especially a Black man with a white woman, was the strongest and most fiercely enforced Jim Crow taboo. The local boys had all heard stories of Black men getting beaten or killed for being too friendly with a white woman. Even an innocent glance could be taken the wrong way, and a white woman’s accusation of being “molested” by a Black man or boy would be all the evidence local white men needed to use violence to “teach the boy a lesson.”
Because he had been raised in the North, Emmett didn’t appreciate the seriousness of this Southern taboo, and at the time, standing there goofing off with his friends on that store’s front porch, he either forgot or ignored the warnings his mother had given him before he left Chicago.
Unwilling to back down from his friends’ dare, Emmett walked into the store to buy some candy while his cousins and friends crowded against the storefront windows to see what would happen. No one could hear what Emmett and Carolyn Bryant might have said to each other, and what actually happened inside is known only to Emmett and Mrs. Bryant. Unfortunately, Emmett left no testimony, so the only accounts available are those of the young people who were at Bryant’s store that evening and the courtroom testimony of Carolyn Bryant.
In the murder trial of her husband and his half brother about a month after the incident at the store, Carolyn Bryant reported her version of what happened. She told the judge that on the evening of August 24, she was working behind the counter when a Negro male she hadn’t seen before, one who spoke with a “Northern brogue,” entered and approached the counter. No one else was in the store at the time. At five feet six inches and 160 pounds, the boy was taller and heavier than the slender, five two Mrs. Bryant, but she didn’t feel threatened at first. According to Mrs. Bryant, the boy asked for some candy, and when she held out her hand for his money, she said he grabbed it, pulled her toward him, and said, “How about a date, baby?”
Carolyn Bryant, the twenty-one-year-old “crossroads Marilyn Monroe,” who accused Emmett Till of whistling at her
Carolyn Bryant said his audacious question shocked and angered her, and she jerked her hand free and headed to the apartment in the back of the store where Juanita Milam, her sister-in-law, was. Before she made it to the apartment door, the boy stepped in front of her, put his hands on her waist, and said, “You needn’t be afraid of me, baby. I’ve been with white women before.”
At that point, one of the boy’s friends rushed into the store, grabbed him, and pushed him out the front door. Mrs. Bryant told the judge that before the boys were out of the store, the Northern boy turned and said, “Bye, baby,” to her. Furious at the boy’s rudeness, she then ran out the front door to get a pistol from her sister-in-law’s car. When the boy saw her outside, she said he whistled at her, the two-note “wolf whistle,” before his friends pushed him into their pickup and drove away.
Mrs. Bryant immediately went back into the store and told Juanita what had happened. In court, Carolyn Bryant said that although the rude and uppity behavior of the Negro boy scared and angered her and her sister-in-law, they decided not to say anything about the incident to their husbands. They both knew that if their menfolk heard about what had happened, there would be big trouble.
The eyewitness accounts from the young people who were outside the store cannot, of course, provide any information about what Emmett said inside, but they can describe what happened when he came out. Two of Emmett’s cousins, Curtis Jones, the boy who traveled to Mississippi with him, and Wheeler Parker, were there that evening and have spoken about what happened at Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market on the night of August 24, 1955.
Curtis Jones said he was playing checkers with an old man on the store’s front porch when Emmett went into the store. “Next thing I know,” he said, “one of the boys came up to me and said, ‘Say, man, you got a crazy cousin. He just went in there and said ”Bye, baby“ to that white woman.’ This man I was playing checkers with jumped straight up and said, ‘Boy, you better get out of here. That lady’ll come out of that store and blow your brains out.’” Jones’s reaction was typical of many teenage boys who have had brushes with danger. “It was kind of funny to us,” he said. “We hopped into the [truck] and drove back to church. My grandfather was just about completing his sermon.”
Interviews with other witnesses confirm Jones’s account of that evening’s events. Most also add that when Emmett left the store, he whistled at Carolyn Bryant. Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, heard those reports, but she didn’t believe that her son would have been foolish or bold enough to whistle at a white woman. A few weeks after his death, she explained that what had sounded like a wolf whistle was probably just Emmett’s attempt to whistle out a sound to clear his stutter. In an interview many years later, Mrs. Bradley said that the boys who had been at the store told her that when Emmett came out of Bryant‘s, he was asked, “How did you like the lady in the store?” He reportedly whistled his approval to the boys, not at Mrs. Bryant.
With the lack of recorded testimony from anyone other than Carolyn Bryant and with the various accounts of what came to be known as the “wolf whistle” incident, it’s impossible to know exactly what was said and done in a small country store fifty years ago, but evidence suggests that Emmett Till did say “Bye, baby” and whistle while at Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market.
As the boys sped away from the scene in Wright’s pickup, they were giddy with excitement about what their “crazy” cousin had just done and about their close call with being shot at by Carolyn Bryant. When they were a safe distance from the store, however, they began to realize the seriousness of what had happened. They knew the chances were good that even if Mrs. Bryant or her family didn’t find a way to punish Emmett, Uncle Mose would punish him—and maybe his cousins too—when he found out about Emmett being disrespectful. Recalling that drive back to the church, Wheeler Parker said, “Emmett begged us, he said, ‘Don’t tell [Uncle Mose]. I don’t want you to tell him.’ So we decided we wouldn’t tell him. There was a girl there, and she said, ‘You’re going to hear some more about this. I know those type of people; you’re going to hear some more.’” But they heard nothing threatening from the Bryants or other whites that night or Thursday or Friday, so Emmett and his cousins assumed the incident had been forgotten.
They couldn’t have been more wrong. Nothing like this had ever happened in
the sleepy little farm town, and talk about what Emmett had done at Bryant’s store blew through the county like a dust storm. Black residents who heard about the “wolf whistle” at Bryant’s store could talk of little else, and within two days nearly everyone in the county—Black and white—knew the sensational news. Most of the Blacks who lived near Money could hardly believe that anyone would be brave or crazy or stupid enough to do what people were saying Emmett Till had done. Mose Wright and his wife, Elizabeth, learned about the incident the day after it happened, and fearing the worst, considered sending Emmett home on the next available train; however, when two days passed without threat of reprisal, they too assumed that the incident had been forgotten.
But what had taken place at Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market that Wednesday night hadn’t been forgotten at all. A long fuse had been lit, and it would smolder for three days before it finally ignited an explosive and violent reaction that would focus the attention of the entire nation on a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago and a rural county in the Mississippi Delta.
Around 4:00 .M. on Friday, twenty-four-year-old ex-paratrooper Roy Bryant returned home from his trip to Texas. He went straight to bed and slept for several hours before going to work at his store later that afternoon. Soon after he arrived, a Black customer told him about the lurid “talk” that was going around Money and the nearby plantations regarding his wife and a boy from Chicago.
This news of the “talk at the store” infuriated Bryant. As a racist white Southerner, he expected Blacks to know their Jim Crow place, especially when it came to white women. Bryant immediately confronted his wife with what he had heard; she admitted that the rumor was true and begged him to forget about it. But Bryant could not forget it. His own fury and the racist code of the South dictated swift and strong action to defend his wife’s honor. Even local Blacks who had heard about the incident wondered why Bryant hadn’t dealt with the boy from up North already. Everyone who had heard about the encounter between Emmett Till and Carolyn Bryant expected some sort of retaliation against Emmett, a whipping, at the very least.
Nothing had happened, of course, because Roy Bryant had been out of town, but now that he was back and knew about the “molestation” of his wife, he believed he had to do something about the uppity boy from Chicago. He found out that Emmett was staying with Mose Wright in a sharecropper’s shack out on G. C. Frederick’s place, about three miles from Money. Bryant had no car of his own, so he had to wait until Saturday night when his thirty-six-year-old half brother, J. W. “Big” Milam, came to the store. Bryant told Milam what had happened and asked to borrow Milam’s car because, “I gotta go over there and whip that niggah.” Milam offered not only to loan his car but to ride out to Wright’s shack with Bryant to help him work the boy over. After agreeing to meet later that night, Milam went home, filled his car with gas, and packed his pistol and a flashlight for the night’s dirty work. He drove back to Money around 2:00 A.M. to pick up Bryant.
That same Saturday night, Emmett, Curtis, and Wheeler drove to Greenwood, the largest city in the county, to party at a juke joint. They didn’t return to Mose Wright’s home until well after midnight. Exhausted from a long day and a late night out, the boys went to bed in one of the back bedrooms and quickly fell asleep.
What happened next was reported by Mose Wright in a television interview shortly after the trial:
“Sunday morning about two-thirty, someone called at the door. And I said ‘Who is it’ and he said ’This is Mr. Bryant. I want to talk with you and the boy.‘ And when I opened the door, there was a man standing with a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other hand.”
Wright’s wife, Elizabeth, knew trouble had come knocking. “When I heard the men at the door,” she said, “I ran to Emmett’s room and tried to wake him and take him out of the back door into the cotton fields. But they were already in the front door before I could shake him awake.”
The two men forced Wright to lead them into the back bedroom where Emmett was sleeping. They woke him, made sure he was the boy “who done the talkin’ at Money,” and, after letting him get dressed, took him outside to their car.
“They marched him to the car,” Wright told reporters, “and they asked [someone] there, ‘Was this the right boy?’ and the answer was, ‘It is.’Bryant and Milam then pushed Emmett into the car and drove off.
Emmett Till’s great-uncle, Mose Wright, outside the Tallahatchie County courthouse waiting to testify in the case
That was the last time Mose Wright saw Emmett Till alive.
Only two sources contain details of what happened after the men left Wright’s home: murder trial transcripts, which disappeared a few years after the trial, and the posttrial interviews Bryant and Milam had with journalist William Bradford Huie. Portions of the courtroom testimony can still be found in archives of local and national newspapers that covered the trial and in Hugh Stephen Whittaker’s 1963 master’s thesis about the Emmett Till murder. Excerpts from the Huie interviews appeared in Look magazine and Reader’s Digest; Huie published a full account in his book Wolf Whistle and Other Stories. Because the killers may have been protecting others involved in the kidnapping and murder, their version of the story cannot be assumed to be completely accurate. The following account is based on information from all these sources; where the sources don’t agree, the trial testimony takes precedence over the nformation from Huie’s interviews.
After leaving Wright’s home, the men dropped off the woman who had been in the car, probably Carolyn Bryant, and drove around Tallahatchie County hoping to scare and intimidate Emmett. At dawn on Sunday, they drove to a shed on the plantation owned by one of Milam’s brothers. Willie Reed, the son of a sharecropper, testified in court that he saw Emmett sitting in the back of a pickup truck carrying two other Blacks and four white men, one of whom Reed identified as J. W. Milam. Reed said that later that morning he heard sounds of a beating and cries of “Mama, Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy!” coming from inside the shed, and saw Milam, carrying a pistol, leave the shed to draw water from a well. Three other white men were with him.
After the cries stopped, Reed watched as a truck backed up to the shed and three Black men helped the white men load something wrapped in a tarp into the truck. Later that day he saw the Black workers hosing blood out of the pickup’s bed.
J. W. Milam, left, and Roy Bryant accompanied by Sheriff H. C. Strider on their way to the trial
It’s not known if Emmett was dead or alive when they left the shed. According to Bryant and Milam, after beating Emmett, they took him to the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to strip. Milam claimed that even after the beatings, Emmett showed no remorse for what he had done at Bryant’s Market. That’s when Milam “decided it was time a few people got put on notice,” and he made up his mind to kill Emmett, “just so everybody could know how me and my folks stand.” When their evil deed was finished, Bryant, Milam, and whoever else was involved returned to the plantation, burned Emmett’s clothes and shoes, and then went home to bed.
Back at Mose Wright’s home, Emmett’s relatives could hardly believe what had happened that night and were frantic with worry about Emmett. “When I woke up the next morning,” said Curtis Jones, “I thought it was a dream. I went to the porch and my grandfather was sitting on the porch. I asked him, ‘Poppa, did they bring Bo back?’ He said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘I hope they didn’t kill that boy.’
“I asked him, ‘Ain’t you going to call the police?’ He said, ‘No, I can’t call the police. They told me that if I call the sheriff, they was going to kill everybody in this house.’ So I told him, I say, ‘I’ll call.’ That happened Sunday.”
Using a neighbor’s phone, Curtis called George W. Smith, the Leflore County sheriff, to report the kidnapping. Then he called his mother, Willie Mae Jones, in Chicago to tell her what had happened. Jones immediately called Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley.
Mrs. Jones was hysterical on the phone, and at first Mrs. Bradl
ey couldn’t understand what she was so upset about. When she finally heard clearly what had happened in Mississippi, Mrs. Bradley knew her son was in serious danger, but from her home in Chicago, she could do little except stay in contact with Mississippi relatives for news about her son. She also called Chicago police and asked them to pressure Mississippi authorities to look into the disappearance of Emmett Till.
“I did two things that were unexpected,” Mrs. Bradley told an audience in 1999. “I made up my bed, and I began calling every newspaper I could think of ... I had expected no response from the newspapers, but to my surprise, everyone I called responded instantly.
“It was just amazing. I think the papers and the television and the radio, it seemed like they just latched on. And when they latched on, they would just not let go.”
The phone calls worked. Around 2:00 Sunday afternoon, Sheriff Smith drove from Greenwood to Money and arrested Roy Bryant for kidnapping. Later that day, J. W. Milam was picked up and he joined Bryant in the Leflore County jail on the same charges. Both men admitted they had kidnapped Emmett from his uncle’s home, but, they told the sheriff, they turned him loose after they took him to Bryant’s store for identification and Carolyn Bryant said e wasn’t the man who had harassed her.
Bryant and Milam remained in jail while Sheriff Smith and Tallahatchie County Sheriff H. C. Strider searched for a third man involved in the kidnapping and gathered evidence to build a case against the suspects already in custody. In the days immediately after the arrests, neither the sheriffs nor Emmett’s relatives could find any trace of the missing boy.
Wednesday morning, August 31, three days after the arrest of Bryant and Milam, a seventeen-year-old white boy, Robert Hodges, fishing on the Tallahatchie River saw a pair of knees sticking out of shallow water. Not sure what he had found, Hodges contacted the Tallahatchie County sheriff’s office, and soon deputies arrived on the scene to retrieve the body. They brought Mose Wright to the river with them to identify the badly mutilated and decomposed corpse.