“In my opinion, the guilt begins with Mrs. Bryant.” With those words Mrs. Mamie Till-Mobley lay the blame for her 14-year-old son’s lynching in Mississippi on Carolyn Bryant, the white woman who testified in 1955 that Emmett Till made an advance on her.
Till’s lynching was a spark that helped ignite the civil rights movement. And until recently, historians widely agreed on this point: Emmett Till did what Bryant accused him of and, in doing so, violated a social more of the Jim Crow South, unjust as those mores were and appalling as his punishment remains. In other words, they believed Bryant. As historian John David Smith told PBS in 2003, “Till crossed the line of white propriety; he committed what whites considered a betrayal of racial lines. Till insulted Bryant’s wife and insulted the very bases of white racial control and hegemony.” Or so Carolyn Bryant claimed.
Now in her 80s, Bryant has changed the story she told under oath. In 1955, she said Till whistled at her, grabbed her by the waist and “verbally threatened her.” But last year, she told Duke University Timothy Tyson “that part’s not true.” In Tyson’s book, The Blood of Emmett Till, Bryant is quoted as saying that “nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”
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