Note: This is one of seven archival stories about the murder of Emmett Till that we are republishing as part of a reflection on our coverage from the period. The other six stories can be found here.
Greenwood, Miss. — A 14-year-old Negro boy from Chicago has been murdered apparently because he made an “ugly remark” to a white woman.
His body, beaten, bullet-pierced and weighed down with iron and barbed wire, was found by a fisherman Wednesday in the swift, muddy waters of the Tallahatchie River.
He was Emmett Louis Till, who had come to Mississippi to visit an aunt and uncle and had been missing since early Sunday.
He was the only child of Mrs. Mamie E. Bradley of 6427 S. St. Lawrence, Chicago. His father, Lewis, an Army veteran of the African and Italian campaigns, died in Europe in 1945.
Two half-brothers were in jail here charged with kidnapping and Dist. Atty. Stanny Sanders of Greenwood said they would soon be charged with murder. The suspects are Roy Bryant, about 35, a storekeeper in the village of Money, and J.W. Willem, about 45, a clerk in the store.
Officers of the two counties are seeking Bryant’s wife — the white woman to whom the boy allegedly uttered the “ugly remark” Aug. 24 in the Bryant store.
A neighbor said she had not been seen in Money this week, and law enforcement officers said they had no idea where she was.
She is charged with kidnapping.
The Bryant’s have two sons, Roy Jr., 3, and Lamar, 1.
In New York, Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, called the killing a “lynching.” He demanded action by Mississippi officials. “It would appear from this lynching,” Wilkins said, “that the state of Mississippi has decided to maintain white supremacy by murdering children.”
Scoffs at Charge
Gov. Hugh White of Mississippi scoffed at the Wilkins charge and said of the NAACP, “They’re in the press all the time, that gang.” Said Mrs. Bradley, the boy’s mother, in Chicago: “Someone is going to pay for this. The entire State of Mississippi is going to pay for this … He didn’t do anything to deserve that.”
Said Tom Shepard, editor of the Greenwood Commonwealth: “We don’t approve of anything like this. The people are horrified by it, by the barbarity of it. We just don’t believe in things like that. It’s a blemish on our state. And it’s something that’s very, very unwelcome. Our race relations are the best in the world.”
Emmett had not been seen alive since about 2 a.m. Sunday, when two or three armed men appeared at the home of Moses Wright, a tenant farmer, and his wife Elizabeth, near money in Leflore. County.
There had been reports that only two men appeared at the Wright home but Deputy Sherwood W. A. Shanks of Greenwood said the number was now thought to be three. “I think we’ll know who the third man was before it’s over,” he said.
The man asked for “the boy from Chicago,” entered the house and came out with Emmett.
Wright asked where they were taking his nephew. “Nowhere if he’s not the right,” one of the men replied.
They took the boy to the car and asked the woman in the car if he was the boy who had made “the ugly remark.” She said he was. The men dragged Till into the car and drove off.
Bradley and Milam said they questioned the boy and released him in front of Bradley’s store.
The body of the boy was found by Floyd Hodges, 17, who was running a trotline in the Tallahatchie River, where he discovered it in a drift of logs and weeds near the bank in Tallahatchie County, about 12 miles north of Money and 25 miles north of Greenwood.
Sheriff Called
Hodges called Sheriff H. C. Strider.
“We found a cotton gin fan weighing about 150 pounds, tied around his neck with a piece of wire,” said Sheriff Strider. “We found a bullet hole one inch above his right ear. The left side of his face had been cut up or beat up—plumb into the skull.”
The river joins the Yalobusha near here and forms the Yazoo, which empties into the Mississippi. The Tallahatchie is about 100 yards wide. Its rapid waters may have taken the body some distance by Sunday morning.
Deputy Shanks said nobody knew where the murder was committed. Officials were debating whether the murder warrant should be issued in LeFlore or Tallahatchie county.
Penalty is Death
The kidnapping warrant was issued in Leflore. The penalty for kidnapping and murder is death in the state’s new gas chamber in the prison at Parchman.
Witnesses said young Till entered Bryant’s store with several other Negro youths Aug. 24. Officials said they did not know what he said to Bryant’s wife, and reports conflicted on this point.
