For more than six decades, a mystery has swirled around the Emmett Till case, a mystery involving the photograph of a white girl.
Till, 14, who was black, was abducted Aug. 28, 1955, and murdered after supposedly whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in a grocery store in Money, Mississippi.
J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant were acquitted in his murder but later confessed in a now-infamous 1956 Look magazine story by journalist William Bradford Huie. Although the exchange between Till and Carolyn Bryant, Roy Bryant’s wife, was the basis of the case against Milam and Roy Bryant, Huie’s story offers an additional reason for TIll’s death.
Till’s murderers “killed him because he boasted of having a white girl and showed them the picture of a white girl in Chicago,” Huie told filmmakers for the 1987 documentary “Eyes on the Prize.”
The years have passed, and the long-lost photograph has remained an enigma.
Who was this girl? Did she even exist?
Now, 63 years later, the answer is yes, and her name is Joan Brody. Brody gave her first-ever interview about Till recently to a Clarion-Ledger reporter and others recently at her condo in the northern suburbs of Chicago.
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