The EconomistNovember 16th 2019 United States 392 tioned and assaulted her, though many
years later she said that was untrue. Out-
side the shop stands a roadside sign which
says Bryant’s Grocery marks the first step in
a sequence of events that was to lead to
Till’s torture, murder and the American
civil-rights movement itself.
Paradoxically, putting up the sign con-
tradicts the stance taken by lawyers acting
for the Till family at the time. In court, they
tried to suppress the episode at the grocery,
fearing (rightly, it turned out) that Mrs Bry-
ant’s story would be taken by the all-white
jury as evidence that Till had broken one of
the sexual taboos of the south.
The condition of the building is testi-
mony to a continuing reluctance to con-
front that historic racism. Bryant’s is a ruin.
Hurricane Katrina tore the roof off in 2005.
The shop front and rafters had collapsed by
- A “disgrace” to the local community,
said one visitor who offered to buy the site.
Its neglect stands in sharp contrast to
the building next door: Ben Roy’s gas (pet-
rol) station. Whereas Bryant’s has been left
to rot, the gas station has been lovingly re-
stored with a grant from the state of Missis-
sippi to something like its condition in the
1950s. The garage has no connection with
the events of Emmett Till’s murder but res-
toration was justified on the specious
grounds that people may have sat on the
porch discussing it (which is unlikely: lo-
cals ignored the story for decades). The
contrast between Bryant’s and Ben Roy’s,
argues Dave Tell of the University of Kansas
and author of a new book, “Remembering
Emmett Till”, shows that, in the Delta, it is
easier to commemorate the charm of rural
nostalgia than the ugly facts of lynching.
Both buildings and the village of Money
have been bought by the Tribble family, de-
scendants of one of the jurors who acquit-
ted Emmett Till’s killers. Over the years,
they have rejected a stream of offers to re-
store Bryant’s. At the moment, according to
Jerry Mitchell of the Clarion-Ledger, a Mis-
sissippi newspaper, they are trying to get
the National Park Service to buy the ruin for
$4m, but that is many times its value and
the park service rarely buys properties. In
2018, surveying the wreck, a relative of Em-
mett Till said of the Tribble family “they
just want history to die.”
They are not the only ones. The state of
Mississippi has done little to keep Till’s
history alive. Commemoration has been
left to a local group, the Emmett Till Memo-
rial Commission (etmc), founded in 2006
with the aim of using commemoration to
promote racial reconciliation; it has nine
black and nine white board members.
Lacking money or statewide influence, it
has had to raise cash however it can. In
practice, that has meant accommodating
historical accuracy to other requirements.
Emmett Till was killed by Mrs Bryant’s
husband, Roy, two half-brothers, J.W. and
Leslie Milam, a brother-in-law, Melvin
Campbell, and at least three other men.
They beat the 14-year-old literally to a pulp
before gouging out one eye with a penknife
and shooting him. The photograph of his
mutilated face turned the killing into a
cause célèbre in Chicago, where the picture
was published. Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam
were arrested and acquitted at a trial in
Sumner, 30 miles north of Money. To add
insult to barbarity, they admitted they had
killed Till in a magazine, Look; they were
paid $3,150 for the story.Contested connections
In 2006 the courthouse where their trial
took place was dilapidated and its restora-
tion became the first test of the etmc’s abil-
ity to use other aims to advance its goals of
commemoration and racial reconciliation.
These mixed aims caused problems from
the start. “All of the blacks”, said one com-
missioner, “focus on how horrible the
crime was, and the need for acceptance of
responsibility.” A white member said “we
see this Till thing as a way to get funds to re-
store the courthouse.” The building has
been beautifully restored and is still work-
ing. The etmc offered an apology to the Till
family on behalf of the county. But the in-
terpretative centre, which was supposed to
teach about the murder and reconciliation,
is a dusty shell, itself in need of restoration.
It is a similar story at Glendora, a small
town 16 miles south, which has by far the
largest collection of memorials, including
an Emmett Till museum. They reflect the
efforts of the long-serving mayor, Johnny
B. Thomas, to bring business to his pover-
ty-stricken town. Glendora is one of the
poorest towns in the impoverished Delta
(“our Haiti,” says one local). There is even
an ngo, Partners in Development, devoted
to combating poverty in Haiti, Guatemala,Peru—and Glendora. In 2009 the Missis-
sippi Development Authority sent a team
of economists to the town. After describing
it as a place with “no hope”, they said its
only viable asset was civil-rights tourism.
Mr Thomas enthusiastically set about pro-
viding sites for the hoped-for visitors.
The Till museum was financed using
money from the us Department of Agricul-
ture meant for rural broadband services in
rural areas. The redirection of funds may
perhaps be justified: Glendora has no
broadband but the museum is still going.
The trouble is that the town has so little to
do with Till’s history. One of the murderers
lived there, but his house disappeared de-
cades ago. The town’s other claimed con-
nections—that Till’s body was thrown into
the river there, weighed down by a chunk of
farm machinery from a local factory tied
round his neck with barbed wire—have not
withstood scrutiny. Efforts to enroll Glen-
dora’s museum on America’s National Reg-
ister of Historic Places have been rejected.
To judge by the number of memorials,
Glendora was the birthplace of the civil-
rights movement. In reality, these sites re-
flect Mr Thomas’s efforts to combat the
poverty of his town.
The lynching of Emmett Till did help
launch the civil-rights movement in Amer-
ica. A later black leader, the Rev Jesse Jack-
son, said Rosa Parks, the first lady of civil
rights, had told him that she refused to give
up her bus seat to a white man, precipitat-
ing the first large protests against segrega-
tion, because “I thought of Emmett Till and
couldn’t go back”. To reflect this national
significance, Patrick Weems, the executive
director of the etmc, wants the National
Park Service to take over the sites. Local ef-
forts have run up against multiple pro-
blems. But they testify to the refusal of Em-
mett Till to go away. 7A memorial marred by hate