美国国家公共电台 NPR A Brutal Lynching And A Possible Confession, Decades Later

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A Brutal¹ Lynching And A Possible Confession², Decades Later

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

A young man named Emmett Till was lynched in August of 1955 in the small town of Money, Miss. He was 14 years old, an African-American boy from Chicago who was visiting his relatives. The case is decades old, but a recent book has spurred the Department of Justice to reopen another investigation³. NPR's Wade⁴ Goodwyn reports.

WADE GOODWYN, BYLINE⁵: Duke professor Tim Tyson has written two civil rights history books that have brought national acclaim⁶, but as the 59-year-old trundles around his large vegetable garden next to his house in Durham, N.C., Tyson still seems very much the small-town, country boy.

TIM TYSON: Well, you know, the squirrels have it coming. They ate over half of my crop last year, and I'm afraid the Lord called some of them home this year. I buried them in the garden. (Laughter). I thought it poetic⁷ justice.

GOODWYN: Tyson's first book, "Blood Done Sign My Name" is a searing memoir⁸ of racial murder in his hometown of Oxford⁹, N.C., in 1970. His father, a Methodist minister, sided with the town's black community and was excoriated¹⁰ as a traitor¹¹ to the white race. Tyson's life and worldview were never the same. A few weeks after publication, the author got a phone call. A fan was on the other end raving¹² about how much her mother-in-law loved his memoir and how she wanted to meet him.

TYSON: You know, I sort of pretended she hadn't said it and thanked her very much and was getting off the phone. And then she said, you might know about my mother-in-law. Her name was Carolyn Bryant.

GOODWYN: Indeed, Tyson did. Carolyn Bryant had been at the center of one of the country's most notorious racial murders, the lynching of Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta¹³.

TYSON: I went to her house. I walked in the door. She gave me a big hug. She served me poundcake and coffee. And she seemed like pretty much any kind of Methodist church lady I've ever known in my life.

GOODWYN: But in 1955, Carolyn Bryant was a striking 21-year-old who'd married into a rough and violent working-class family. She and her husband, Roy, owned a small rural grocery store that catered¹⁴ to local sharecroppers. On August 24, Carolyn was behind the counter when Emmett Till walked in with some friends to buy bubble gum. Tyson says what happened next remains¹⁵ a matter of dispute.

TYSON: We do know a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago visiting his relatives in Mississippi had some kind of harmless encounter with a white woman, and her kinsmen¹⁶ came in the middle of the night, snatched him away from his family at 2:30 in the morning - drunk men with guns - dragged him off, tortured him to death in a tool equipment shed in unspeakable ways and threw his dead body in the river.

GOODWYN: Authorities charged Carolyn Bryant's husband and her brother-in-law with Till's murder. In Bryant's statement to her lawyer, Carolyn described Till as sassy and disrespectful, that when he left the store he turned around and said, bye, baby. But back in Till's hometown of Chicago, his mother, Mamie Till Bradley, held an open casket funeral for her son. Jet magazine was there and published a big story along with a devastating¹⁷ photo of the badly mutilated child lying in repose¹⁸.

African-Americans across the country were horrified¹⁹ and infuriated by what they saw. The powerful NAACP and the Brotherhood²⁰ of Sleeping Car Porters took up the case. The angry and organized reaction across the nation reverberated²¹ back to Mississippi. So when Carolyn Bryant took the stand to testify in her husband's murder trial, her story had changed from what she told her lawyer.

TYSON: She essentially²² told the age-old story of the black-beast rapist. And it was a well-worn story that Southerners, black and white, have heard for a long time.

GOODWYN: Bryant's story evolved. On the stand, she claimed the boy manhandled her and bragged²³ he'd had sex with white women before. The all-white jury took about an hour to find the defendants²⁴ not guilty. Five decades later, Carolyn Bryant, now Carolyn Bryant Donham, told the Southern author she admired so much that what she testified to on the stand that day was a lie.

TYSON: She started muttering, well, they're all dead now, anyway. She said of the attack - of the assault, of the sexual part - she said that part's not true.

GOODWYN: Carolyn Bryant eventually moved from Mississippi to North Carolina, where she lives with her daughter-in-law, Marsha Bryant. In an interview with NPR, Bryant denied her mother-in-law had recanted to Tyson, saying what she said on the stand is what she said all along. She didn't change her story.

JIM COLEMAN: You would have thought that some of these things would have been put to bed.

GOODWYN: Jim Coleman is a law professor at Duke University. Coleman says the Justice Department reopened the Till case once before, back in 2004, but a Mississippi grand jury declined to take any further legal action. After this latest Till book was published, the FBI quietly reopened the case, asking for and receiving Tyson's notes and research this summer. Coleman is curious about the Justice Department's motives²⁵.

COLEMAN: I don't see anything that would be accomplished²⁶ by a federal reopening of the case other than the publicity²⁷ of the Justice Department having to reopen the case.

GOODWYN: The Justice Department declined to comment to NPR about this latest investigation. The year after Till was murdered, Bryant's husband and brother-in-law admitted in a magazine article that they indeed had murdered the child but claimed the boy deserved it. The case did more than shame the nation. It motivated to action an entire generation of black organizers.

CHARLES COBB: I can remember even now standing²⁸ on street corner looking at that photograph with my friends of his body.

GOODWYN: In 1955, Charles Cobb was the same age as Emmett Till, 14 years old. By 1962, Cobb left Howard University where he was a student and headed for the Mississippi Delta and became an organizer for SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating²⁹ Committee.

COBB: Those of us who made our way into the civil rights movement in the 1960s call ourselves the Emmett Till generation.

GOODWYN: The men who murdered an African-American child from Chicago in order to further terrorize the local black community believe they had served the cause of white supremacy³⁰ well, but in fact, they'd done anything but. Though it would take another decade, Tyson says the seeds of the Voting Rights Act were actually planted in Mississippi in 1955 in the blood of Emmett Till. Wade Goodwyn, NPR News

[POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: In this story, both online and in the audio, we incorrectly say Blood Done Sign My Name was Tim Tyson's first book.]

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