Body of Chicago Lad, 14, Taken from River in Mississippi
GREENWOOD, Miss. — The body of a 14-year-old kidnapped Chicago boy was found floating Wednesday in the Tallahatchie River near here.
Police said the youth Emmett Louis Till, 6427 St. Lawrence, had been shot in the head. A cotton gin pulley had been tied around the body with barbed wire.
THE BODY of the Negro youth was found by a fisherman at a spot 15 miles north of Money, Miss., where the boy was kidnapped from his uncle’s home early Sunday.
Two white men are being held on kidnapping charges in the case. They said they released the boy without harm.
Sheriff George Smith said the two men would be charged with murder.
He said he also was investigating a report that three men were in on the abduction.
The men are Roy Bryant, a storekeeper, and his half-brother, J.W. Milan.
They said they took the boy from uncle’s home because he allegedly made “ugly remarks” to Bryant’s wife last Wednesday in Bryant’s store.
The Boy’s body was found shortly after a Chicago attorney asked the FBI to step into the search for the boy.
Told of the finding of the body, the attorney, William Henry Huff go the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said in Chicago he telegraphed the governor of Mississippi demanding a full investigation into the slaying.
“I must urge you to take every necessary step to clear up this ghastly crime,” Huff said he telegraphed Gov. Hugh White.
“Those who do nothing to bring such criminals to justice are by their inaction parties to the crime.”
A WITNESS to the store incident was Wheeler Parker, 16, of 7524 W. 64th St., Chicago, a cousin of the slain boy.
He said that the Till youth whistled at Bryant’s wife.
Bryant said he took the Till boy from the home of the boy’s uncle Mose Wright, but released him when his wife said the boy was not the one who made the remarks.
The boy was vacationing with the uncle. His mother, Mrs. Mamie E. Bradley of the St. Lawrence address, is a voucher examiner for the Air Force.
IN NEW YORK, a NAACP spokesman said that the case appeared to “qualify as a lynching,” the Associated Press said.
Greenwood, near where the boy’s body was found, is in the heart of the great Mississippi “Delta” country, a land of vast cotton fields and slow moving streams where strict segregation of whites and Negroes has existed for years.
