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Tragic events followed the arrival of Emmett "Bobo" Till at the Bryant Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Mississippi on 24 August 1955. Four days later, Till, a fourteen year-old African American youth from Chicago, was kidnapped and murdered because he allegedly whistled at, or otherwise flirted with the woman behind the counter, twenty-one year-old Carolyn Bryant. Within a month, the woman's husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother, J. W. Milam, were tried and acquitted in a Tallahatchie County courtroom.
Emmett Till had just arrived in Mississippi four days earlier with a cousin, Wheeler Parker Jr. They had accompanied Till's uncle (and Parker's grandfather), Moses Wright, back to Wright's home on a cotton plantation in Leflore County for a two-week visit. Till, described as a fun-loving prankster, lacked any real understanding about segregation, Jim Crow laws, and the southern caste system that kept blacks "in their place."
On that fateful Wednesday evening, Till and several others piled into Moses Wright's 1946 Ford and drove three miles west, to Money, a whistle-stop town with only a few stores and a cotton gin. The earliest sources say those with Till were Maurice Wright, 16, the driver; Wright's brother Simeon, 12; Wheeler Parker, 16; and Parker's cousin, local teenager Thelton "Pete" Parker, 19; neighbor Roosevelt Crawford, 12, and his niece, Ruth Crawford, 18.1
Just what happened while Emmett Till was at the store that evening has been the subject of much debate, faulty memory, and even wishful thinking. Therefore, an examination of the earliest sources is crucial. Most are newspaper stories based on interviews with some of Till's cousins who were with him that night. Others come from interviews with Till's uncle Moses Wright and local law officers. Most were published within days of the incident.
Later, in January 1956, Look magazine published an account of Till's murder, written by journalist William Bradford Huie, based on Huie's interviews with Milam and Bryant, by then acquitted and protected from further prosecution. In the same interview, Carolyn Bryant told Huie her version of the encounter with Till inside the store, an account that matched her court testimony.2 Huie also details Till's actions before he went inside. Not until he published a fuller account in his book, Wolf Whistle, in...