Federal investigators are reopening the Emmett Till case, which started with the kidnapping and brutal murder of a black child in Mississippi in 1955.
The Associated Press reports that the U.S. Justice Department said it would take another look at the case, closed in 2007, in a report to Congress in March.
The report does not contain details about the new information, but did coincide with the publication of a book titled “The Blood of Emmett Till.
Till, who was 14 at the time of his death, was murdered while visiting relatives in from Chicago. During the visit, Till and his cousins visited a store in Money owned by Roy and Carolyn Bryant, who said that Till grabbed her her arm, put his hands on her waist and made sexually suggestive comments.
Bryant and his brother, J.W. Milam, later kidnapped Till from his relatives’ home. Days later, Till’s body was found. He had been been badly beaten and shot. A cotton gin fan had been tied around his neck with barbed wire before he was thrown in the Tallahatchie River.
An open-casket photo of Till published in Jet magazine helped galvanize the modern civil-rights era. Roy Bryant and Milam were acquitted of the murders, but later confessed in a magazine interview.
In the new book on Till, Carolyn Bryant (now Donham) said she fabricated aspects of her testimony during her husband’s trial.
In June, Wheeler Parker, a cousin to Till and eye-witness to the events that took place in 1955, visited Mississippi for the rededication of a marker commemorating the case on the Tallahatchie River in Glendora. A previous marker was riddled with bullets in 2016.
See information from the FBI case files here. A transcript of the Bryant-Milam trial, which includes the testimony of Carolyn Bryant can be found here.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.