Black Lives, White Lies and Emmett Till - by the NYT Editorial Board

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD FEB. 6, 2017

The history of the American South is littered with lynchings and burnings of black citizens that went unpunished, either because the authorities could not rouse themselves to charge the killers or because all-white juries reflexively exonerated them.

The case of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago who was kidnapped, mutilated and killed while visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1955, stands out in this long bloody history, both for its savagery and because the episode pushed the country to confront, at last, the racial terror that had long defined black Southern life.

That period comes painfully alive in “The Blood of Emmett Till,” a new book by the historian Timothy Tyson in which Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman who accused Emmett of assaulting her, says she lied. This admission is a reminder of how black lives were sacrificed to white lies in places like Mississippi. It also raises anew the question of why no one was brought to justice in the most notorious racially motivated murder of the 20th century, despite an extensive investigation by the F.B.I.

Emmett Till was visiting the hamlet of Money in August 1955 when he encountered Ms. Bryant in a store she owned with her husband. Something during a transaction made her take offense, though what remains unclear. Days later, the killers kidnapped Emmett from his uncle’s home, tortured him and shot him in the head. They then tied a heavy cotton gin fan to his neck with barbed wire and dumped him into the Tallahatchie River.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/opinion/black-lives-white-lies-and-emmett-till.html?emc=edit_th_20170206&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=57435284