Today, Explained - Open casket, reopened case

Episode Date: July 18, 2018

One of the most brutal murder cases in American history has been reopened. The Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery explains how Emmett Till’s family might finally find justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sean, it's good to see you. Good to see you, Kainaz. Did you get a lot of feedback from people who found out that you were engaged by listening to our show yesterday? Well, now I know who listens to your show. They also now know about getquip.com slash explained. Yeah. When I moved to D.C., I couldn't wait to visit the newest Smithsonian Museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Once you get in, you take an elevator down.

And when it opens, it's dark. There's lots of people in tight spaces. It's designed to make you feel like you're on a slave ship. As you make your way back up to the ground level, the museum begins to open up. There's light. There's space. Things never really get crowded, except in one place. There's a long line to get into a room where you can see Emmett Till's casket. People want to be reminded of how where you can see Emmett Till's casket. People want to be reminded

of how brutal we can be. Last week, we got another reminder. The Justice Department is taking another look at one of the nation's most horrific crimes of racial violence. The 1955 murder of Emmett Till. Abducted and murdered by two men after a woman claimed that Emmett Till, who was 14 years old, whistled at her and grabbed her. The Justice Department told Congress in a report that it's reinvestigating the 1955 killing after receiving new information. Wesley Lowry wrote about the renewed investigation for the Washington Post. Emmett Till was a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who in 1955 was visiting family members in Money, Mississippi, which is in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.

Emmett and a few cousins had gone into the Bryant grocery store where he had an encounter with a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, who was working behind the counter. You know, they'd gone in to buy snacks or bubble gum. And there are different versions of the story. Even some of Emmett's cousins say maybe he had whistled at her. Other people had alleged, including Carolyn Bryant, during the trial later on that he had grabbed her, made some type of sexually suggestive remark to her. Later on, two men, believed to be Roy Bryant and J.W. Millam, who is Carolyn Bryant's brother-in-law,

show up at the home where Emmett Till was staying and essentially abduct him. They take him to a shed a few miles away where he's beaten, where he's shot, potentially tortured, and his body dumped in the Tallahatchie River and was found a few days later. By the time they found Emmett's body, it was so disfigured. The body was so badly damaged that we couldn't hardly just tell who he was, but he happened to have on a ring with his initial,

and that cleared it up. There was an investigation and there was a trial. Roy Bryant, Carolyn Bryant's husband, and J.W. Millam, the brother-in-law, were put on trial for the killing of Emmett Till. Every available seat is occupied in the courtroom of this 45-year-old courthouse. It was a trial that was covered by the entire national media. Folks parachuted in. Never has this quiet little cotton growing community of Mississippi seen so much publicity and so much excitement as in the past few days as this trial begins to unfold.

There was a ton of courtroom testimony really focused on what Emmett had potentially said and whether or not it could be proven that these were the two men who had abducted him and then if they had been involved in his killing. There is no direct evidence that these defendants killed Amy Taylor. This was a court proceeding and a trial that folks from the very beginning did not expect much to come out of. What do you intend to do here today? To answer any questions that the jurors had been visited by local officials, including some Klan officials, to make sure they were going to vote the right way on this.

And so there was the expectation from the very beginning that these two men would be acquitted of this crime. And ultimately, they were acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury. Thus, the defendants, Milam and Bryant, are free men in this community of Sumner, Mississippi. Not long after that, both men gave an interview to a journalist, to Look Magazine, in which they essentially admit to having killed Emmett Till. And so, on the one hand, they've gone to trial, insisted upon their innocence and have been cleared legally and judicially. They can no longer be tried for this murder. And so here you had these men kind ofrated under the lie or the suggestion that the man being killed or the men being killed were sexual predators, were violent, were murderers, were rapists. But for this to happen, 1955 is not that long ago to happen so relatively recently in such a gruesome way to a child who at the worst had said something suggestive, you know, not had physically done anything.

That was really mobilizing for people across the country. I believe that the whole United States is mourning with me. And if the death of my son can mean something to the other unfortunate people all over the world, then for him to have died a hero would mean more to me than for him just to have died. People who are now in their 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s, for many of them, the moment that thrust them into activism was the lynching of Emmett Till. It reminded people of the racial terror that black Americans were still subjected to in the South

and really became a catalyzing and mobilizing moment for what became the civil rights movement. On the day that the verdict came down in the Emmett Till case, all our members and all our leaders, like millions of Americans, were shocked and revolted by the fact that the state of Mississippi had seen fit to take two murderers and elevate them to the level of heroes. Roy Bryant and J.W. Millam lived their lives until they died.

Carolyn Bryant, the woman who had allegedly been come on to, lived a life essentially of secrecy. And the Till case remained this kind of pivotal historical moment. But there was not a ton of movement in the immediate aftermath. And nothing happens for an intervening number of decades. Yes. Yeah, decades. I mean, this case is something that's thought of and talked about, but there's no major legal development for decades in this case. How is it that this story has lived on, has stayed in the American psyche for so long? There's no way I can tell this story

and give them the visual picture of what my son looked like. Emmett's body, after finally being identified, and it took a while for them to actually identify the body, again, because it was so mangled, was sent by train back up to Chicago. And when it arrived in Chicago, Mamie Till Mobley, his mother, had several journalists with her, including Simeon Booker, a famed black journalist who covered the civil rights movement for Jet magazine. And he brought with him a photographer, and she had them take the photos of Emmett's body and take the photos of what the funeral processions looked like and what the casket looked like.

At the time, it was extremely controversial that you would show something so gruesome, that there was some backlash, that this was sensational or that this was unacceptable. But what Mamie Till would later write in her autobiography was that it was important for people to see what had been done to her son, that she didn't want people to be able to ignore it, to be able to go back to, you know, their lives, but for them to have to grapple with what our culture, what our society, what our nation had done to her young son. You could see his disfigured face, and you could see it next to the photo of the smiling Emmett Till before he'd been killed.

And I think that for a lot of people, that was an image they were unable to look away from and forced a level of attention and a vow of justice that perhaps might not have been seen had it not been for the seeing of these images. I think without the decision to take and disseminate those photos, we might not know Emmett Till's name. In a minute, reopening the case of Emmett Till.

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slash explained after going to getquip.com slash explained. Watch your Netflix explained with your quiet quip. Wes, it's been 63 years since Emmett Till was murdered. Why is this case being reopened now? What happened? In 2008, Carolyn Bryan Dunham, she's since remarried, gave an interview to an author and historian named Timothy Tyson. And in this interview, which he published in a book last year called The Blood of Emmett Till, Carolyn Bryant admits that that was

a lie, that Emmett Till had not grabbed her by the waist, that he had not said something suggestive to her. In a way that's more thoughtful than it sounds, but she said, I would like to tell you honestly, but I can't remember. She said, you tell these stories until they seem true, but that part's not true. And then she said, nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him. Now, this was a major recanting. The trial transcript was actually lost for decades and was finally rediscovered in the 2000s. During the trial, Carolyn Bryant had testified that Emmett Till was grabbing her by the waist, was speaking to her suggestively, so much so that many of the Mississippi papers and commentators were suggesting that this was an attempted rape, that this was a violent assault. And for her to admit so many years later that that did not happen, that it never happened, upends the very basics of the story.

Why do we think she might have made it up? Did she reveal that in the interview? She didn't. Now, there are some varying theories about this. Roy Bryant was known to be potentially abusive, and there's some thoughts about whether or not Carolyn might have faced some fear from him if she didn't go along with this story. But whether Carolyn Bryant told that lie to her husband, leading him to kill Emmett Till, or when she told that lie on the stand, ultimately leading to his killers being cleared in the crime. The fact remains, no matter what her potential motivations, no matter the circumstances, this lie is ultimately what leads to Emmett Till being killed.

Dunham is alive and living in Raleigh, North Carolina. She'll turn 84 later this month. A family member turned away a reporter after the news broke, saying, we don't want to talk to you. My father used to say, we're not punished for our sins, we're punished by our sins. It was clear that she had, this had been a big burden for her. So Timothy Tyson publishes his book last year, then what? What happened here was because Timothy Tyson was able to get a new on-the-record statement and new information from one of the primary players, it forces the FBI to reconsider the case and see, in light of this new information,

is there anything else that they should be doing? And what could happen to her? Could she get a perjury charge? At this point, the statute of limitations for perjury is up in Mississippi. And so Carolyn Bryant couldn't face charges for having lied on the stand during the trial. However, there's still the possibility that if she admitted to some type of other crime, whether it be involvement in the murder or some type of conspiracy to cover it up after the fact, that she could face some type of other crime. What would it mean to have some charges come down on this case in the South for the country?

I think that the folks in Money, Mississippi and the area surrounding it would not necessarily be extremely happy. I think this is an era of their history they've been happy to try to bury. And I think that there would certainly be some consternation about a reopening. I think there would be some legal questions about whether or not this should be prosecuted, whether or not you're able to secure justice so many years later. Is it surprising to you at all that this is happening under the Jeff Sessions Department of Justice, one that hasn't prioritized race, one that's actually rolled back some of the civil rights initiatives from the Obama years? You know, it's not completely surprising to me.

This is a big historic case. This is the type of thing that the investigators on this case, the folks at the FBI and elsewhere who have been working on this, aren't necessarily political actors. And that they had an obligation as investigators, no matter who the attorney general was, to look into this new information. I still think it's very unlikely that these new strings were being pulled on, even when we have an attorney general who has not necessarily made these issues his priority. And what about the countless other racially motivated murder cases from the civil rights era? Are there movements on anything from the past that didn't get the attention that Emmett Till got? You know, there has been large efforts, certainly in the civil rights community, to resurface many of these cases. I think about the work that Bryan Stevenson's done with the Equal Justice Initiative and the creation of the first memorial in Montgomery, Alabama to lynching victims.

I actually visited it earlier this year and seeing the names and the locations of all these folks who had been killed. Now, in the vast majority of these cases, no one has ever been held to any legal or judicial account. But I do think that as we learn more about many of these cases, I wouldn't be surprised if there are additional cases where pressure is applied to reinvestigate and in some cases bring criminal charges in the circumstances in which they think there might be a living perpetrator still. But that said, you know, in many cases, these were killings that were done with hundreds and thousands of witnesses. And we as a society decided that we didn't care to hold those folks to justice. You went down to Money, Mississippi, right, on the 60th anniversary of Emmett Till's murder?

Yeah, I was down there in 2015, which is about 60 years after Emmett Till had been killed. I visited both the Bryant grocery store where Till and Carolyn Bryant had had this interaction, which is barely standing. It's just a wooden shell of an old store. And visited the shed where it's believed he was tortured and killed, as well as the courthouse where Roy Bryant and J.W. Millen were acquitted. Did Emmett Till's family, when you were down there with them in Money, Mississippi, did they have any sense that justice was possible in the future? Yeah.

Emmett Till's family, from the times I've talked to various members, do truly believe that one day someone will be charged in connection to this crime. They truly believe that they will one day receive some measure of justice. I think the odds for that are a little long, but I do think that it's inspiring that they are still holding out hope that a justice system that has robbed them thus far of what they're entitled to might one day come back and get it right. Wesley Lowry writes for The Washington Post.

I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained, and this is Mamie Till Mobley, Emmett's mom. She died in 2003. After we found out that he was missing, we went through the strain of that for three and a half days. And I asked God, I said, God, please let something happen. Don't let me go out like this forever because I can't stand it. I'm not bitter against any race. I'm not even particularly bitter towards the men that did this thing because I know that if they had known what they were doing, they would not have done it. And I wouldn't say that it was God's will that it happened, but he had a reason for letting it

happen. I was small. I was content. I was in six rooms, I had a car, I had a kid, nobody bothered us, and I had a good job. I thought it was sufficient to mind my own business. I didn't realize that everything was my business, that the way the people are treated all over the earth was my business. Now I know it. And I want to say that I feel that Emmett was more or less loaned to me. I appreciate the 14 years that we spent together. I'm just sorry that it was so short. Because if I had

known that we were going to be separated so quickly, I probably would have done the wrong thing trying to do the right thing. But I feel like that I did the very best that I could. And unless we can get enforceable laws, we might as well just forget everything. You have a fiancé we found out last time. Yes, that's right. On the show. I do. Was he like, I gotta go to getquip.com?

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