How to get away with murder, Jim Crow style...

Get the Point!

Ever since I first saw the infamous Jet magazine feature of Emmett Till's lynching and grotesque remains way back in 4th grade, I have spent the past 42 years as a history lover, double history major, law student, lawyer, history professor, and writer alternately amazed and appalled by arguably the most notorious miscarriage of justice in U.S. criminal justice history. 

Last week, Carolyn Bryant, the former wanna-be model, turned grocery store clerk, turned wife and mother, turned murderer, died at the age of 88.

Faces of Death: (From left) Till’s killers J.W. Milam, Roy Bryant, and Carolyn Bryant

I have wrestled with what to say about her over the past several days and in the absence of any new words, I repost an old article of mine from 2021 that still sums up how I feel about Bryant, a killer who died comfortably in her bed instead of a state prison cell where she belonged:

Will Carolyn Bryant finally be held accountable for the murder of Emmett Till?

Carolyn Bryant (right) celebrates with her husband, Roy, and Brother-in-Law J.W. Milam's acquittal for lynching Emmett Till in September of 1955…

Yes, we've witnessed this nightmarish scenario before: The United States Department of Justice makes a grand pronouncement that it is “investigating” the brutal lynching of Emmett Till, 14, the Chicago boy who was abducted from his grandfather Mose Wright's home in Money, Mississippi by Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam in August of 1955. Bryant and Milam, half-brothers, then savagely beat, shot, and tossed Till's lifeless remains into the Tallahatchie River to fester.

Mother Mamie Till, who died in 2003, allowed Jet magazine to take this photo in 1955 to show the world what the Bryants and J.W. Milam did to her 14-year-old son….

Right on cue, after several years passed in the “investigation,” the Justice Department then issued another pronouncement, this one holding that no charges would be pressed against the lone surviving human responsible for Till's death, Carolyn Bryant, Roy Bryant's former wife—and the person whose lies set the young Till's demise in motion.

Yes, we saw the same George W. Bush Justice Department that opened the Till investigation in 2004, close it in 2007 after finding that there was "insufficient corroborating evidence" to charge Carolyn Bryant with murder.

More recently, we saw the Donald J. Trump Justice Department launch an investigation into the Till murder in 2017, this one focusing on Carolyn Bryant's recantation of her infamous accusations that Till whistled and made sexual advances towards her, only to witness four years pass with zero charges levied and, on cue, the recent pronouncement that the Joe Biden Justice Department would close the case due to a “lack of evidence.”

Well, last I checked, confessions are considered "admissions" (hence-“evidence") in state and federal courts in each and every jurisdiction in America; back in 1955, a 20-year-old Carolyn told the court that Till grabbed her hand and after she pulled away and walked behind the store counter, that he “clasped my waist, and, using vulgar language, said that he had been with white women before.”

But in 2017, a then 82-year-old Carolyn Bryant admitted to Duke University history professor Timothy B. Tyson that her prior testimony “wasn't true” and while claiming that she could not exactly remember what happened, concluded her interview by saying that “nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.” Bryant, mind you, left that sentence incomplete, as it should have read, “nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him through me and by my husband, Roy, and his Brother J.W.”

Last June, CBS News reported that a 1955 arrest warrant for Carolyn Bryant was found in the basement of the old courthouse near Money, Mississippi. Bryant was NOT arrested…

Cognizant of the quote “you can indict a ham sandwich” from Tom Wolfe's classic novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, I do strongly suggest that Bryant's admissions to Professor Tyson were enough to get her indicted as a principal to murder in state court because, as the old saying goes, ‘murder stays murder,’ which means that there's no statute of limitations on state murder charges.

And yet, while the State of Mississippi has made some strides in race relations over the decades, I know with substantial certainty that no prosecutor is going to seek to indict this elderly woman and lock her up, no matter how much she deserves it for ending Till's life and forcing his mother, Mamie Till, to mourn her baby's death for the remainder of her days. 

Mamie Till circa 2003

Now, some of my deeply religious friends will conclude that Carolyn Bryant will "get her due on God’s judgment day," but that doesn't move me much at all because as a historian who has always LOVED reading about Nazi Hunters who worked (and still work) to get Nazis locked up even if they are 90-plus-years old and in poor health, I hate it that here in America, those who beat, raped, and murdered Black people during the Jim Crow era did so with relative impunity. 

Indeed, such historical inequities remind, yet again, how Black lives never really mattered to a great many supposedly "Pro-Life" Christians in these United States, including the twelve white men pictured above who served on the Bryant/Milam murder jury. Those jurors, despite ample evidence, chose to acquit the dastardly duo after a little over an hour of deliberations, with one juror remarking after the infamous verdict that, “it wouldn't have taken that long if we hadn't stopped to drink a soda pop, to make it look good.”

Lest we forget…