Certainly an agenda here.
Who pushed the woman into making this admission? She says that she does not remember anything else about the evening. Maybe that is the way it happened. But reaching back 60 years to this event to inflame race tensions now, makes me a little suspicious.
Yes, it was a horrific crime.
Even if what she said at the time was true, it did not justify the murder. The action of the Jury was abhorrent, no matter whether she told the truth or lied.
Amen
Because one suggests that either she hated that kid and wanted him killed, or she was afraid of her husband and he was acting jealous, so she made herself out to be a victim so he wouldn't go after her.
The other suggests she didn't want to be left raising 2 kids while her admittedly violent and frightening husband was in jail. Or he intimidated her into testifying for him. (Or she did it because she loved her husband, but given that they divorced later, that seems least likely.)
“Certainly an agenda here.”
Yep. Emmet’s corpse gets trotted out on a regular basis, and the story has been changed more than once.
The “poor lil Emmet brutally murdered for merely whistling at a white woman” story was the official one for decades.
Subsequently, another version came out, that Emmet’s mama had sent him to stay with Mississppi relatives because she couldn’t control him in Chicago.
He was very “mature” for a 14 year old. Bragged to Mississippi kids that he’d “been with” (dated) white women, and he “bet” he could “date” Mrs.
Bryant.
Mrs. B was working alone at her family’s store, according to this version, while her husband was deer hunting. Emmet made inappropriate remarks, walked behind the counter, and grabbed her. His friends became alarmed and fled, followed by Emmet.
(This was according to statements Emmet’s black friends later made to investigators, after Emmet’s body was found. Very important detail, no? And it was ostensibly the statements made by Emmet’s own friends that resulted in the acquittal of Bryant and the other white men.
Mrs. Bryant later told investigators she had been sufficiently fearful Emmet might return, that she retrieved her husband’s handgun from her car.
HOWEVER, she claimed she did not mention the incident to her husband because she knew how he would react. She only told him “the truth” because he asked her, after he heard townspeople gossiping, suggesting Mrs. B might have encouraged Emmet.
That’s when he and his friends went and got Emmet.
Bryant’s defense was that he was protecting his wife / wife’s honor.
In this version of the Emmet Till story, it was the statements of Emmet’s black Mississippi friends that corroborated Bryant’s story, resulting in his acquittal.
If we accept that racist attitudes of the 1950s rationalized vigilante justice, we must also acknowledge that certain protective attitudes toward women, attitudes now considered outdated and paternalistic, also played a part in this story. And once we consider that, we must also question whether Mr. Bryant would have reacted any differently had Emmet Till been white.
But now we have a civil rights historian rewriting the story again. I haven’t read the book, but the author, Timothy Tyson, has apparently written several books, and it appears that white people are demons and black people are saints in all of them.