Retracing The Murder of Emmett Till

so i've once again met up with my buddy lamont lamont at large and uh actually kudos to him because he's the one who said that we should come down to money mississippi which is where we are and document the murder of emmett till this is right around the anniversary of his death and for those of you who might not know this story fourteen-year-old emmett till was visiting family in rural money mississippi he was from chicago things were very different up north compared to the jim crow south 1955 and it was in this grocery store this is what is left of the bryant grocery store and it's in here where his problems started which ultimately led to his murder now there's a lot to this story there's a ton of history and even some discrepancies about where certain things happen but lamont and i are going to take you to all of the locations the barn or the shed where he was probably killed but certainly beaten we're here at the grocery store we're going to try to find the bridge or the bank where his body was thrown over all of the important areas where things happened a very tragic story and a very famous one so we really wanted to come down here and pay our respects and see what it looks like now i mean it's many years later it happened in 1955 and we're here to show you now you can still see the steel frame of the original door i mean this place has been uh deteriorating for some time so if you were here in 1955 you would have seen a regular store open for business groceries candy in fact that's exactly where emmett till was with his cousin and some of his cousin's friends this store was owned by carolyn and roy bryant it was called brian's grocery they lived out back and or they lived in the back part of this building the front was the store and when all this happened roy bryant was not here he was away so it was just carol and bryant 21 years old so while emmett's cousin and his friends were hanging out on the porch out here some of them were coming coming in and out of the store buying soda buying candy and emmett apparently went in to buy some bubble gum we don't really know exactly nobody really knows exactly what he did um originally carolyn uh claimed that he grabbed her and he said some obscenities yeah originally the story goes that emmett whistled at carolyn bryant a couple of because his friends kind of dared emmett to say something to her or whistle and she claimed that emmett grabbed her by the waist and brought her to him and says in so many words hey baby i do you know how many women i've been with years later in 2008 in an interview she admitted that she had made that part up that emmett till had never grabbed her that he had never set any uh obscenities or anything like that now apparently the kids were afraid that she was going to grab a pistol out of her car so they took off they jumped in the pickup truck and they were they were out of here um and then it seemed to have blown over in their mind they didn't hear anything about it for the next couple days and that's where this story brings us to another location all right so this is the location it's not the house but it's the location to moses wright's house now moses wright was emmett till's great uncle so after the grocery store incident a couple days went by everything blew over uh emmett asked his cousin and his friends not to say anything to moses because he knew moses would be upset about that they didn't hear anything about it everything was fine three days later when roy bryant came home roy bryant is the husband to carolyn who was at the store who claimed that she was accosted by emmett he showed up here at 2 a.m with his half brother j w milam reverend wright answers the door and they asked where's that chicago boy so he asked well what's this concerning and he told him that the chicago boy emmett till uh had uh insulted and grabbed his wife he goes in there to wake up emmett till uh roy follows him into the room tells emmett as he's waking up he's sleeping in the bed with his cousin he says get up and put on your shoes and emmett's just waking up is wondering what's going on uh roy has a flashlight in one hand and he has a 45 in the other so tells him to get his shoes on and they had begged uh roy and jw to not mess with emmett to not to leave him alone they told him they would pay him whatever they want and he said in very disrespectful words but basically what he said is he's tired of blacks from outside of the south coming down here and causing trouble and that's where they marched them to the truck and that was the last time any of this family ever saw him alive i'm sure it's hard for any of us to imagine what it must have been like being 12 13 14 years old which is how old all those boys were and having these grown men show up at their door 2 o'clock in the morning wake them up uh hat with guns and flashlights shining the lights in your face very scary situation lamont found a new friend here so after roy and jw basically kidnapped emmett they brought him up to what used to be a uh plantation and it's this existing barn right here or shed whatever you want to call it it's this garage right here [Music] wow now that is surreal so this is a private residence now it's no longer a working plantation or anything like that so um the people gave us permission to come in here and see what it looked like and uh be able to film in here what do you think lamont it's very surreal for something uh so uh infamous and to be at the place where it happened yeah yeah no it's it's uh very surreal is the right word absolutely so no one's really sure if he was actually killed in here or if he was just beaten very very badly and possibly killed later on on the side of the river and nobody knows how long they had him here but according to people that have witnessed his body uh his all his most of his teeth was knocked out uh one of his eyes was gouged out and he was missing an ear so you can only imagine that they tortured that boy and uh beat him just to a bloody pulp and actually when they were preparing his body for the funeral the top section of the skull fell out just like a cabbage is how it falls out wow that was torture yeah one interesting thing to note is during this beating in here a man named willie reed happened to be walking by who knows where the road was at the time it's it's very different than it was in 1955 but he happened to be walking by and he heard the screams and he heard the sounds of someone being beaten very badly and someone screaming and he would later testify and we will get to that when we go to the courthouse so later after jw milam came out and see uh willie was close to what you know had possibly heard or see something and he walks up to him and he says hey did you see or hear anything and willie says nope and he said good call yeah i think that was the general uh that's what he said yeah i think that's right or something yeah okay moving onward to the site the bridge the abandoned bridge now where they dumped emmett's body into the river all right we're making our way onto an abandoned bridge here this thing has been abandoned for clearly a long long time this is the black bayou bridge the river was way more than what it is today yeah now it's believed that after roy and jw beat emmet they brought him it's believed that they brought him to this bridge there are some varying opinions as to where they actually dumped him dumped his body uh but some people believe that it was this bridge here the only issue that lamont and i have with that is it's it's a very windy river the tillamook is very windy and it's it's it's it's like two miles and it's a couple miles between here and the point where his body was reportedly to have been found yeah and as you can see there's a lot of trees that brush in the river for a body to get caught on yeah and if you have a 75 pound fan industrial gin fan around your neck how it pop how is it that you're going to float all the way down there yeah unless this river was a lot higher and maybe the water was rushing a lot faster but as you can see the water is moving at a decent clip but not not enough to carry a 52 miles it seems more likely that where uh they found him which is where we're going to go next is probably where they dumped his body as well i mean a 75 pound fan it's a lot of weight i just don't think you're going to be doing too much floating down the river i i don't know but this is what it looks like here yeah you get a good view the water is flowing pretty good today but who knows what it was doing in 1955 all right now we're going to take you just a couple miles downstream and show you an area where it is believed that his body was recovered again i mean it's this is it's so long ago now and there are so many different conflicting uh opinions and and different people saying you know even people that were there they uh their their ideas vary as to where things were and you know where he was found and where he was unfortunately dumped so we're a couple towns over now and this is glendora mississippi this is one of the sites where it is believed that emmett till's body was recovered out of the river there is some discrepancies with that because over the years different people have told different stories but it is believed that his body was recovered by fishermen right down this trail [Applause] all right we have come to the side of the the river right around here where his body was found there's been a lot of speculation on exactly where he was found so there truly is no exact location but from us looking up the information online presumably we're gonna say that this was the location i think one of the reasons why they think this is the location uh is because the banks are very steep here they're pretty tall and very steep you could you know kind of easily throw a uh a body down into this water it was it was a cotton gin fan was tied with barbed wire around his neck yeah a barbed wire around his neck with a 75 pound fan that they stole from a local cotton gin not too far up the road from that grocery store is this dilapidated church look at this this is all that's left of it this was the church where moses wright used to preach that was emmett till's uncle or great uncle and after they found emmett's body this is the church that they brought him to and tried to have the funeral here however being that he was from chicago his mother had his body brought back up to chicago but this is where they wanted to have the funeral now there's really not much left to this uh i was gonna maybe show you inside but it's it's completely i mean all that's left is just the cement walls there is a cemetery up here just a little ways which i'll show you because although his body is not here his grave is not here it may well could have been buried here [Applause] so this is what's left of the cemetery right next to the church right over there [Music] i wanted to show you this really quick so after they found emmett's body in the river roy and jw were arrested for his murder and the five-day trial happened right here the tallahatchie courthouse in sumner mississippi now an interesting thing about this courthouse is it has been restored at least the upstairs courtroom has been restored back to how it looked in 1955 during that trial so we're going to head inside and show you exactly what that courthouse looked like in 1955 wow that's amazing so obviously this was a very scary time for black people down here in the south and most of them were just used to keeping their mouths shut but fortunately there were a couple who did speak up and actually did testify in court in this courtroom one of which was willie reed who testified hearing the screams and the sounds of emmett till being beaten in that barn or in that shed so in this courtroom is where reverend wright testified for the prosecution that j.w milam and roy bryant came in the middle of the night to kidnap and ultimately kill emmett till and with that hardcore of evidence given to the court uh surprisingly enough a jury of 12 white men found jw and roy not guilty and they could not be tried for the murder again after they were exonerated they sometime after about six months after they did an interview with look magazine where they fully admitted killing emmett till and dumping his body but they could not be tried again due to double jeopardy um and it was a small sum of money that they got from it was a little over three thousand dollars that they got paid which you know today's inflation would not about 35 000 not very much money at all to admit that you are a killer yeah but they didn't care because they couldn't get tried again anyway there's nothing that could be done yeah pretty crazy so this is the last location in the video here this is in tuttweiler mississippi this is the funeral home or what is left of the funeral home where they brought emmett's body and prepared it to be brought to chicago like i said earlier in the video he was from chicago he was just down here visiting so they wanted to originally they wanted to bury him down here but his mother who was in chicago wanted him to be brought up there so they prepared his body in this funeral home and shipped his body up into uh up to chicago now what was the explain what happened they he was completely enclosed in in the casket and they were instructed not to open it he was so badly beaten the shape of his corpse was beyond reproach and yet she still wanted everybody in the in the country and in the world to see what they did to her son and one thing that struck me about what she said in the interview is that emmett had the nicest smile the the nicest teeth she had ever seen in her life and she always prided her son in brushing his teeth you can see in the pictures that he was very well cared for young man and when she seen his teeth knocked out that was one of the first things she looked she looked at him was his teeth and they were all gone yeah and i believe she's even uh she even said in some interviews that uh she looked on the side of his head and she could see straight through from the other side they had shot shot him in the head interestingly enough this story is really credited for helping start the american civil rights movement because this story inspired rosa parks and history was made after that and a little note about roy and jw the black community boycotted their grocery store and eventually it it closed down and ended up in the state that you saw early in the video you have anything else you want to add uh no that's it just a you know part of our nation's history that should be taught should be shown you know and we we teach history unless we're doomed to repeat it so i agree yeah i agree glad we came here this was very interesting so big thanks to uh lamont for suggesting this this is this was a real history lesson this was a very important video to do and i yeah i told him i said let's let's go do it let's go show the locations of what happened and i'm glad that i came yeah no i'm i'm really glad you suggested it so we're going to get out of here hope you enjoyed this hope maybe you learned something because i know i did i'll see you in the next video peace out thanks for watching oh and subscribe to lamont at large the link is below thank you you

Channel: Mobile Instinct

Views: 717,267

Rating: 4.9153271 out of 5

Keywords: emmett till murder, where was emmett till killed, who killed emmett till, emmett till mississippi, mobile instinct, lamont at large, money mississippi murder, true crime emmett till

Id: 8lu-WTwnqEg

Length: 22min 50sec (1370 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 27 2020