Learn how your ad can appear here! Get Your Vision Board Iphone/Ipod App and start moving toward your dreams today! Books by this Author 301+ Ways to Get Ahead: Business Success from Home If you want to kiss your boss good-bye, this book could be your ticket to a home-based business. Lots and lots of examples of possible home-based activities are included along with stories of real people from across the county who have their own businesses, from accountants to zen instructors.   How Branson Got Started How Branson Got Started is the captivating story of how a small Missouri town -- less that 5,000 people -- has become the world's live entertainment capital.   Internet Success with Fred This is a very good introduction to the Internet. If you're smart enough to get this book, you won't need another because you'll learn by doing.   The Emmett Till Book What happened to cause a young African American student's lynching in the Mississippi Delta? When Emmett "BoBo" Till threatened Mississippi's rigid Jim Crow laws this fourteen-year-old paid with his life. Till's murderers were set free yet his death spurred Rosa Parks to take her important stand in Montgomery. In this 50th anniversary, the case has finally been reopened with new and intriguing information.   Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited Discover unresolved Mississippi murders - untold stories of the civil rights era. Susan Klopfer's "Where Rebels Roost" reveals new information about unique, persevering and brave people -- many who were murdered and forgotten.   Feature Articles: - In Defense of Maurice Clarett... Click here for more >>

Now a senior resident of Drew in Sunflower County near the plantation where 14-year-old Till was killed, an old woman who asks to remain anonymous remembers the summer of her seventeenth year when her white parents let early-morning visitors stay in their home for the night.

J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, the latter her mother’s relative by marriage, were loud and nervous that early morning, she said.

Mrs. "Brown" had invited me over to her home one afternoon to tell her story. Earlier in the week, she'd stopped in to visit with a black restaurant owner in Drew, telling him that she felt it important to share her story with him and others in this small Yazoo-Mississippi Delta town.

"It's finally the right time," she told him. Now she began to share the same story with me.

“My parents didn’t tell me then what was going on at the time. J.W. had a full brother, Bud, and I am very sure he was with them, too. I was in my bedroom but I could hear their voices.”[1]

"Mrs. Brown" said that years later her father told her that Milam and Bryant let him know what they had done to Emmett Till.

“They knew the law was looking for them. They also said that Carolyn Bryant was with them when they killed Emmett Till. I don’t know when Bud joined them. I think they caught up with him later. He was a nicer person than his brother and I don’t think he would have killed someone – I hope not.”

When she awoke at sunrise that same morning, all three men had left her parents' home. “I never knew what happened to them after they left our house. I think they knew the law was going to catch up with them. And I think they felt safe, since most of the officers were covering for them, anyway. I don’t know if they turned themselves in, let themselves be found or if they were picked up by the sheriff and charged.

“I still can’t believe how they put our family in such danger; there was so much turmoil after Emmett Till was killed. People in Drew – black and white – were threatening to kill each other’s entire families. Some were threatening to kill as many as ten members of another person’s family as payback.”[2]

Even though her parents hid the killers of Emmett Till and never turned them in, the Drew woman denies their involvement.

“I know that my parents would have never covered for them. The men came to our house and sat there all night. Later my parents told me what was going on. But I would never want anyone to think that our family helped them out.”

Mrs. Brown stated that "most white people in Drew and Ruleville felt the same way."

“After the trial, the only support Milam and Bryant got came from the Klan because they were members. Most people didn’t want to have anything to do with them; they had killed a 14-year-old child, after all. Maybe they didn’t mean to do it, but they did kill him.”

Only one hundred days before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, Emmett Till was brutally murdered at the age of 14 while visiting his cousins in the Mississippi Delta. One of his friends recalled, "Emmett was a funny guy all the time. He had a suitcase of jokes that he liked to tell."

But Till crossed a line in the deeply segregated South, and made a pass at a white clerk, on a dare from his friends. "I'm going to make an example of you -- just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand," one of his murderers later said.

The two men who were tried for the murder were acquitted by an all white, all male jury after only 67 minutes of deliberation. One juror told a reporter that they wouldn't have taken so long if they hadn't stopped to drink soda pop. (The men later told Life Magazine the story, and confessed. Nevertheless, they were never tried again.)

Emmett's mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, was a young, black, single working mother who lived in Chicago. She literally refused to let Mississippi officials seal the lid on her son's coffin, obtaining a court order for the return of his body and demanding that the padlocked coffin that arrived be opened so people could witness first-hand the savagery wrought on her son.

Although the torture of seeing her beautiful son mutilated was nearly unbearable, she wanted everyone to "Let the people see what I have seen."

Later she would recount, "I want the world to see this, because there's no way I can tell this story and give them the visual picture of what my son looked like."

Millions saw the photographs of Emmett's body taken at his funeral by Jet magazine photographer David Jackson. Newspapers around the world carried the story, and it became a focal point of shock and anger.

When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man, launching the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott and the modern civil rights movemen, she had Emmett Till in mind.

Blacks had previously been arrested, and even killed, for disobeying bus drivers. But Rosa Parks would later say that she was thinking about Emmett Till as she kept her eyes on the prize.

----- Notes

[1] A story appearing September 3, 1955, in the Jackson Advocate suggested that three white men were, in fact, involved in the kidnapping, marking “the first suggestion that more individuals were involved in the abduction than either Milam or Bryant let on,” according to Christopher Metress, editor of a comprehensive book on the Emmett Till incident. [2] Interview by Susan Klopfer on March 4, 2005, with a Sunflower County resident who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation. “Just a few years ago, our minister and his family were threatened when the minister tried to talk about church integration. They were almost run out of town.” Bud was probably with the group, as she suggested. Dr. TRM Howard’s version of the kidnapping and murder appeared in a small booklet in February 1956, Time Bomb: Mississippi Exposed and the Full Story of Emmett Till. The author was Olive Arnold Adams, the wife of Julius J. Adams, the publisher of the New York Age, but Howard was her main source. He also wrote the forward.” In addition to Time Bomb, a series of articles appeared in the California Eagle, a black newspaper in Los Angeles. “The author was a mysterious white Southern reporter who wrote under the pseudonym of Amos Dixon. Dixon put forward essentially the same thesis as Time Bomb but offered a more detailed description of the possible roles of Loggins, Hubbard, and Collins. He also alleged that another brother of Milam and Bryant, Leslie Milam (now dead) took part in the crime,” wrote David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito (“Why It's Unlikely the Emmett Till Murder Mystery Will Ever Be Solved,” History News Network, 4/26/04). ---