The Story of Emmett Till: Facts vs. Racist Fairy Tales

[Previously:

“Read the Entire, Classic, 3,200-Word, January, 1956 Look Magazine Report by Willliam Bradford Huie, on the Murder of Emmett Till, Based on His Killers’ Confessions, Plus Letters to the Editor”; and

“Memorial to Mark What Would Have been Emmett Till’s 80th Birthday; fox news Perpetuates Lies of the Till Myth.”]

By Nicholas Stix

Contrary to a fox news “thing” published on July 25th, Emmett Till was not “lynched,” and his killers, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, did not murder him for “allegedly offending a White woman.” They also did not murder him for “whistling at a White woman,” the most popular and enduring whopper of the Till lies.

Another, more recent Till lie, has been the assertion that the White woman at the center of the case, Mrs. Carolyn Bryant, has since recanted her testimony in the trial of her husband, Roy, and J.W. Milam.

And I do not believe that Till’s face was mutilated by the beating Bryant and Milam dished out to him, as opposed to having been partially eaten by aquatic creatures during the three days in which his corpse lay submerged in the Tallahatchie River.

Till wasn’t “lynched,” because his murder was not pre-meditated, and was not a mob action.

Bryant and Milam had planned on beating Till to a pulp, and then extracting an apology from him for what he’d done to Mrs. Bryant. But Emmett Till was defiant. He refused to apologize.

He was his father’s son. Louis Till had been hanged by the U.S. Army of Occupation in Italy for being a convicted serial rapist and murderer. (Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a single rape was a capitol crime.)

negro men in our armed forces had gone hogwild, raping and murdering White women and other civilians in Italy and France, such that the vast majority of enlisted men executed for said crimes were black. This punishment deeply offended some White leftists, such as French painter-interpreter Louis Guilloux, and fake historian Alice Kaplan (The Interpreter). Guilloux and Kaplan both insinuated that the racist black monsters should have gotten free rapes and murders.

Note that in 2006-2007, Kaplan, then a professor at Duke, wholeheartedly supported the railroading of three White lacrosse players for the non-existent rape of career criminal and racist rape-hoaxer, Crystal Gail Mangum. Kaplan has no interest in justice. Rather, she feels great loyalty to black criminals, and great enmity to innocent Whites. In a twisted, 2005 Chicago Tribune op-ed which served only to lay bare Kaplan’s evil hatred of America and Whites, she asserted, “very few people know about the tragedy of Emmett Till’s father, Louis Till.”

In fact, nobody knows of “the tragedy” of Louis Till, because there was no such tragedy, except as regards Louis Till’s victims.

Kaplan’s very lede is a bald-faced lie: “Emmett Till's tragedy is so deeply engraved in our national consciousness that there is scarcely an American alive today who can’t evoke it in all its details...”

Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam kidnapped and beat Emmett Till, because of what they had learned from witnesses, all of them negro.

The witnesses were cousins of Till, and their friends, who had taken him to the Bryants’ store. He had made a point of lagging behind in the store, after the others had left, and putting his hands on Mrs. Bryant.

When Till’s cousin dragged him out of the store, Mrs. Bryant was right behind them, hustling out to her car, where she retrieved her pistol to protect herself against Till.

When Mrs. Bryant left the store, Till reportedly whistled at her, and called her “Baby.” (Mrs. Bryant had thought that the fat Till was a grown man.) If that is true, it had no effect on Mrs. Bryant, who had already decided to fetch her gun, based on what Till had done inside the store. (She would later say that he had put his hands on her and demanded sex from her, in lewd terms.)

The following passage is from the Life magazine article that William Bradford Huie wrote, including the confessions the recently acquitted murderers had given him, for the then-royal sum of $3,150. The scene is in front of the Bryant family convenience store. “Bobo” was Till’s nickname.

“Bobo bragged about his white girl. He showed the boys a picture of a white girl in his wallet; and to their jeers of disbelief, he boasted of success with her.

[Till had grown up with the White girl in Chicago, but she was not his girlfriend. The only way he could have “had” a White girl or grown woman, as he repeatedly claimed, to negroes and Whites alike even in his last seconds of life, would have been to have raped her, the way his father had.]

“‘You talkin’ mighty big, Bo,” one youth said. “There’s a pretty little white woman in the store. Since you know how to handle white girls, let’s see you go in and get a date with her?”

“You ain’t chicken, are yuh, Bo?” another youth taunted him.

Bobo had to fire or fall back. He entered the store, alone, stopped at the candy case. Carolyn was behind the counter; Bobo in front. He asked for two cents’ worth of bubble gum. She handed it to him. He squeezed her hand and said: “How about a date, baby?”

She jerked away and started for Juanita Milam. At the break between counters, Bobo jumped in front of her, perhaps caught her at the waist, and said: “You needn’t be afraid o’ me, Baby. I been with white girls before.”

At this point, a cousin ran in, grabbed Bobo and began pulling him out of the store. Carolyn now ran, not for Juanita, but out the front, and got the pistol from the Milam car.

Outside, with Bobo being ushered off by his cousins, and with Carolyn getting the gun, Bobo executed the “wolf whistle” which gave the case its name:

THE WOLF-WHISTLE MURDER: A NEGRO “CHILD” OR “BOY” WHISTLED AT HER AND THEY KILLED HIM.

That was the sum of the facts on which most newspaper readers based an opinion.

The Negroes drove away; and Carolyn, shaken, told Juanita. The two women determined to keep the incident from their “Men-folks.” They didn’t tell J. W. Milam when he came to escort them home.

By Thursday afternoon, Carolyn Bryant could see the story was getting around. She spent Thursday night at the Milams, where at 4 a.m. (Friday) Roy got back from Texas. Since he had slept little for five nights, he went to bed at the Milams’ while Carolyn returned to the store.

During Friday afternoon, Roy reached the store, and shortly thereafter a Negro told him what “the talk” was, and told him that the “Chicago boy” was “visitin’ Preacher.” Carolyn then told Roy what had happened.

Once Roy Bryant knew, in his environment, in the opinion of most white people around him, for him to have done nothing would have marked him for a coward and a fool.

To this day, propagandists have promoted the racial fairy tale, whereby Emmett Till was “lynched” for whistling at a White woman.

Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, told what I believe to be two additional lies: 1. That her son could not whistle, and had merely made some sort of sound which those nearby misinterpreted as a whistle; and 2. That she had given him “a talk” about how he was to conduct himself around White Southerners in Mississippi.

Emmett Till had spent a week around his cousins and their friends. They knew he’d whistled at Mrs. Bryant. But it didn’t matter, anyway. Till’s mother was responding to one lie—that her son was murdered for whistling at a White woman—with two of her own. Mrs. Carolyn Bryant had decided to get her gun, before Till whistled at her.

And as for “the talk”: In the late 1990s, black supremacists began asserting that all black parents gave their sons “the talk,” about how to act while in the presence of White policemen, whom the black supremacists asserted were more dangerous to young black males than black street thugs. Never mind that black thugs are over one hundred times more likely to murder young black males than White policemen are. Note that in the period since we began hearing of “the talk,” it has become stereotypical for black males to defy White policemen, and indeed all White authority figures. Thus, it is much more likely that all this rhetoric about “the talk” is just a cover story for black parents telling their sons to defy White authority figures, and I suspect that that is what Emmett Till’s mother really told him.

The recantation that never was. In the 2017 book, The Blood of Emmett Till, Duke University history professor, Timothy Tyson, asserted that in an interview with him ten years earlier, Mrs. Carolyn Bryant Donham had recanted her trial testimony. While Mrs. Donham refused to speak with the media, in 2018 her family denied that she had recanted anything.

[“Bombshell Quote Missing from Emmett Till Tape,” by Jerry Mitchell, Clarion-Ledger, August 21, 2018.]

“Professor” Tyson donated his tape recordings to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill library archives. The archives reported that Tyson’s tape recordings contained no recantation. He wrote in his notebook that Mrs. Donham had recanted, and asserted that he had not yet turned on his tape recorder when she did, but that story won’t float. If you’re interviewing someone who was involved in the making of history, and that person tells you the most Earth-shattering statement she could possibly make, but you haven’t yet engaged your tape recorder, you turn it on, and ask her to repeat herself.

Note that the only thing Tyson had to sell his book proposal was his claim that he had gotten Mrs. Donham’s recantation. Otherwise, it contained nothing new on the case.

Tyson’s defamation incited murderous, racist hatred nationwide against Mrs. Donham. He could have gotten her killed. The following passage was the lede in a “thing” in the black supremacist newspaper, The Washington Informer:

“The white woman who fabricated accusations of sexual advances that resulted in the gruesome death of black teen Emmett Till in 1955 will likely avoid prison.

“A 2007 confession to author Timothy Tyson made public last month in a Vanity Fair article revealed that now-82-year-old Carolyn Bryant Donham lied about the allegations that likely prompted Till’s death.

“The recent revelation of Donham’s false allegations caused outrage and a petition on change.org has been directed to the NAACP to bring charges against Donham.”

[“Petition Seeks Charges Against Emmett Till Accuser,” by Tatyana Hopkins, Washington Informer, February 8, 2017.]

Timothy Tyson is a fraud. And he had priors. Like Alice Kaplan, in 2006-2007, Timothy Tyson had supported the Duke Rape Hoax.

That Emmett Till had put his hands on, and demanded sex from Mrs. Bryant, would have been a mitigating factor in the murder trial, had Till’s killers been convicted. However, that would have been more than offset by the aggravating factors of the killers’ kidnapping and aggravated assault. Thus, Bryant and Milam should have hanged.

Meanwhile, in Emmett Till, the apple did not fall far from the tree. I believe that Emmett would have had a criminal career much like that of his father, replete with the rape and murder of White women.

Thus, while I am convinced that Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam should have hanged for murdering Emmett Till, I feel no compassion for Till, and believe that the murder of Emmett Till surely saved White females from being raped, and probably saved White women’s lives.

(I had planned for a few years on pitching a monograph on Emmett Till to Jared Taylor, not knowing that Jared had resolved to silence me, waste my time, cheat me out of money for my work, and to engage lesser writers to write articles on the same subjects on which I’d written the seminal works of the present era (e.g., the nation of islam’s Zebra Murders—Clark Howard’s book appeared over 40 years ago), so as to bury my superior work. So much for Jared’s commitment to truth or excellence.)