IT would seem every defining moment in the history of black folk is often triggered by the death of a young blackman.
The current discourse on race relations in the US was triggered by the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old blackman in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.
The civil rights movement’s origins can be traced back to the murder of Emmett Till.
Till was born on July 25 1931 and this week he would have turned 76.
Till, who lived in Chicago, was visiting relatives in Money, a tiny hamlet in the Mississippi Delta region when, on August 24 1955, he went into a store owned by Roy and Carolyn Bryant, a married couple, and had his fateful encounter with Carolyn Bryant, then 21.
Although what happened at the store is a matter of dispute, Till was accused of flirting with or whistling at Carolyn.
Four days later, the 14-year-old was kidnapped from his uncle’s house, beaten and tortured beyond recognition and shot in the head by Carolyn’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother, John Milam.
The pair made Till carry a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to take off his clothes.
The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head and then threw his body, tied to the cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, into the river.
Three days later, his corpse was recovered but was so disfigured that Mose Wright, Till’s uncle, could only identify it by an initialed ring.
Authorities wanted to bury the body quickly, but Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley, requested it be sent back to Chicago.
After seeing the mutilated remains, she decided to have an open-casket funeral so that the entire world could see what racist murderers had done to her only son.
More than 100 000 African-Americans passed by, some weeping, some gasping and others fainting – all moved by the gruesome sight.
Jet, an African-American weekly magazine, published a photo of Emmett’s corpse and soon the mainstream media picked up on the story.
Roy and John were eventually arrested and charged with murder.
Days after the arrest, Carolyn told her husband’s lawyer that Emmett had insulted her.
But at the trial, she testified – without the jury present – that Emmett had grabbed her hand, she pulled away and he followed her behind the counter, clasped her waist and using vulgar language, told her that he had been with white women before.
An all-white jury acquitted them five days later, after taking less than an hour to deliberate.
Months later, the two men confessed to Look Magazine that they had indeed beaten and killed Till after he reportedly wolf-whistled at Carolyn.
After the FBI re-opened the case in 2004, Agent Dale Killinger spoke to Carolyn, who had divorced Bryant in 1975 and later remarried.
She repeated the story about Till she had previously testified to, telling Killinger, ‘as soon as he touched me, I started screaming’.
Lying to the FBI is a federal crime with a five-year statute of limitations.
In 2007, a majority-black grand jury in Greenwood declined to indict her, considering charges ranging from aiding and abetting murder to accessory after the fact.
The FBI closed the case.
Carolyn Bryant Donham spoke to Timothy B. Tyson, a Duke University professor – possibly the only interview she has given to a historian or journalist since shortly after the episode – who has written a book, The Blood of Emmett Till.
In it, he wrote that she said of her long-ago allegations that Till grabbed her and was menacing and sexually crude toward her — ‘that part is not true’.
Carolyn has written about her experiences in the Till case in an unpublished memoir, More Than a Wolf Whistle: The Memoir of Carolyn Bryant Donham, that will not be available for public inspection at the University of North Carolina archives until 2036 or until she dies.
Devery S. Anderson, author of Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement (2015), said: “I’ve encountered so many people who want someone be punished for the crime, to have anyone still breathing held responsible, and at this point, that’s just her.”
Much like the Till family, many African-American families are still waiting for the winds of justice to blow in the US and allow their sons to finally rest in peace.