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| Emmett Till’s Murder: What Really Happened That Day in the Store? | Emmett Till’s Murder: What Really Happened That Day in the Store? |
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| THE BLOOD OF EMMETT TILLBy Timothy B. Tyson291 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27. | |
| The existence of racial terror is not a singular phenomenon in our country’s national archive. Consider 2015, a feverish June night in South Carolina, when Dylann Roof, feeding off racist conspiracy theories, walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and murdered nine black parishioners. Then reach back almost 20 years before that, to 1998, when James Byrd Jr., a black man, was abducted by three white men and fatally dragged from the back of a pickup truck along unforgiving Texas asphalt. Then there is perhaps the most monstrous application of racial terror in our historical register: Aug. 28, 1955, when 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched. | The existence of racial terror is not a singular phenomenon in our country’s national archive. Consider 2015, a feverish June night in South Carolina, when Dylann Roof, feeding off racist conspiracy theories, walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and murdered nine black parishioners. Then reach back almost 20 years before that, to 1998, when James Byrd Jr., a black man, was abducted by three white men and fatally dragged from the back of a pickup truck along unforgiving Texas asphalt. Then there is perhaps the most monstrous application of racial terror in our historical register: Aug. 28, 1955, when 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched. |
| The events of that bitter morning, their motivations and ramifications, have found a meticulous, if not their most exhaustive, retelling in Timothy B. Tyson’s “The Blood of Emmett Till,” an account of absorbing and sometimes horrific detail. Comprehensive in scope, its final 60 pages alone are a catalog of notes and sources. Tyson is a senior research scholar at Duke University and the author of “Blood Done Sign My Name,” about the 1970 lynching of Henry Marrow in Tyson’s hometown, and he tracks Till’s life from Argo, Ill., to Chicago, to his last moments in Money, Miss., where — despite the hesitation of his mother, Mamie — Till had sojourned with relatives. | The events of that bitter morning, their motivations and ramifications, have found a meticulous, if not their most exhaustive, retelling in Timothy B. Tyson’s “The Blood of Emmett Till,” an account of absorbing and sometimes horrific detail. Comprehensive in scope, its final 60 pages alone are a catalog of notes and sources. Tyson is a senior research scholar at Duke University and the author of “Blood Done Sign My Name,” about the 1970 lynching of Henry Marrow in Tyson’s hometown, and he tracks Till’s life from Argo, Ill., to Chicago, to his last moments in Money, Miss., where — despite the hesitation of his mother, Mamie — Till had sojourned with relatives. |
| On a Wednesday evening in August, Till allegedly flirted with and grabbed the hand of Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who worked as the cashier at a local market. According to recovered court transcripts released by the F.B.I. in 2007, he let out a “wolf whistle” as she exited the store to get a gun from her car. Bryant later informed her husband and his half brother, who proceeded to uphold a grim tradition: Till was abducted, beaten, shot in the head and thrown into the Tallahatchie River. A 74-pound gin fan was tied to his neck with barbed wire, with the hope that he would never be found. | On a Wednesday evening in August, Till allegedly flirted with and grabbed the hand of Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who worked as the cashier at a local market. According to recovered court transcripts released by the F.B.I. in 2007, he let out a “wolf whistle” as she exited the store to get a gun from her car. Bryant later informed her husband and his half brother, who proceeded to uphold a grim tradition: Till was abducted, beaten, shot in the head and thrown into the Tallahatchie River. A 74-pound gin fan was tied to his neck with barbed wire, with the hope that he would never be found. |
| Black life in America has endured as little more than a fragile truth in the hands of white aggressors. And Tyson does well to remind us just how all-consuming racial terror can be when wielded with brute force: “Affronted white supremacy drove every blow.” | Black life in America has endured as little more than a fragile truth in the hands of white aggressors. And Tyson does well to remind us just how all-consuming racial terror can be when wielded with brute force: “Affronted white supremacy drove every blow.” |
| There are a number of facts to parse in this book — such as Till’s affinity for straw hats on churchgoing Sundays, and the sheriff’s belief that the body recovered from the river was part of an “N.A.A.C.P.-sponsored scheme” to disgrace Mississippi — but none perhaps more profoundly consequential than Bryant’s own admission to Tyson that the events that led to Till’s death didn’t happen as she had previously attested. | There are a number of facts to parse in this book — such as Till’s affinity for straw hats on churchgoing Sundays, and the sheriff’s belief that the body recovered from the river was part of an “N.A.A.C.P.-sponsored scheme” to disgrace Mississippi — but none perhaps more profoundly consequential than Bryant’s own admission to Tyson that the events that led to Till’s death didn’t happen as she had previously attested. |
| Outside private correspondence with her attorney, trial testimony and her unpublished memoir, Bryant remained tight-lipped about her interaction with Till. In 2008, in her only interview since that fateful season of death, Bryant admitted to Tyson that a crucial piece of her testimony in court was fabricated. Till never “grabbed her around the waist and uttered obscenities,” as she had avowed on the witness stand. “You tell these stories for so long that they seem true,” she confesses early in the book, “but that part is not true.” And so we are left with a sobering certainty, one that even Bryant herself is forced to concede to Tyson, more than 50 years later: “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.” | Outside private correspondence with her attorney, trial testimony and her unpublished memoir, Bryant remained tight-lipped about her interaction with Till. In 2008, in her only interview since that fateful season of death, Bryant admitted to Tyson that a crucial piece of her testimony in court was fabricated. Till never “grabbed her around the waist and uttered obscenities,” as she had avowed on the witness stand. “You tell these stories for so long that they seem true,” she confesses early in the book, “but that part is not true.” And so we are left with a sobering certainty, one that even Bryant herself is forced to concede to Tyson, more than 50 years later: “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.” |
| The sum of history is made up of recurring patterns. Each new decade has brought past sins to the fore. From Emmett Till and Henry Marrow to Amadou Diallo, Rekia Boyd and Alton Sterling. These deaths, old-world lynchings that have taken new shapes, are simply the mores and modes of a long-practiced American custom: white supremacy. “The real horror comes when your dead brain must face the fact that we as a nation don’t want it to stop,” the novelist Chester Himes wrote to The New York Post upon hearing that Till’s murderers were acquitted. “If we wanted to, we would.” | The sum of history is made up of recurring patterns. Each new decade has brought past sins to the fore. From Emmett Till and Henry Marrow to Amadou Diallo, Rekia Boyd and Alton Sterling. These deaths, old-world lynchings that have taken new shapes, are simply the mores and modes of a long-practiced American custom: white supremacy. “The real horror comes when your dead brain must face the fact that we as a nation don’t want it to stop,” the novelist Chester Himes wrote to The New York Post upon hearing that Till’s murderers were acquitted. “If we wanted to, we would.” |