One summer day in 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was abducted and murdered in Mississippi. And on January 24, 1956, Till’s killers told their side of the story in exchange for a $4,000 payout – equivalent to $40,000 today.
But their “confession” was hardly the truth.
Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were paid by Look Magazine to detail the “true story” of how they murdered Till. But the article didn’t just discuss how they tortured the teenager and then weighed his body down in in the Tallahatchie River with a cotton-gin fan.
The article described Till boldly harassing Carolyn Bryant in a store. It claimed the killers only meant to “scare some sense into him,” and that Till, defiant, declared his love for “having” white women until the very end.
Essentially, they presented only the killers’ side of the story.
But Bryant admitted she had lied – meaning the entire story was made up. Even worse? No one involved in Emmett Till's murder has been held accountable to this day. Even the criminal "justice" system came up short on punishments.
True justice would be ensuring that Till's family wants for nothing, and that nothing like this would ever happen again. But this white supremacist system isn't interested in justice. Black children keep dying, and we're forced to fight for them alone while the killers get paid to lie about what they’ve done.