Killing Kennedy

acquitted.
    Emmett tells his mother he understands the southern racial climate and promises to be careful. This will turn out to be a false promise.
    The teenager arrives at the small two-bedroom home of his sixty-four-year-old great-uncle Moses Wright on August 21, 1955. Three days later, on a Wednesday, he and some of his teenage relatives drift over to Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, a small mom-and-pop operation that caters mostly to local sharecroppers. It is 7:30 at night. The twenty-four-year-old owner, Roy Bryant, a former soldier, is away in Texas, hauling shrimp from New Orleans to San Antonio. His twenty-one-year-old wife, Carolyn, a petite woman with black hair and dark eyes, is running the store.
    Emmett is among eight young blacks who pull up to the store in a 1946 Ford. All are between thirteen and nineteen years old. They meet up with another group of black teens that is already playing checkers at tables on the store’s front porch. Emmett, hundreds of miles from home and trying his best to fit in, shows the group a picture of a white girl in his wallet and then brags that she was a sexual conquest.
    The crowd, which now numbers almost twenty teenage boys and girls, can’t believe their ears. Such an intermingling of the races is unheard of in Mississippi. Public restrooms, drinking fountains, and restaurants there are segregated. A black man would never even dream of shaking hands with a white man, unless the white man extended his hand first. Blacks lower their gaze when talking to whites, always showing them respect, referring to them as “Mister” or “Missus” or “Miss,” and never by their first name. So Emmett Till’s claim that he not only spoke with a white girl but also took her clothes off and lay with her is met with monumental disbelief.
    So they tell Emmett to prove it. They dare him to go inside the grocery and talk to Carolyn Bryant. Sensing danger, Emmett tries to back out. But that spurs the group on, and they begin taunting him for being chicken. Emmett surrenders. He pulls open the screen door and steps into the store. He walks over to the candy case, where he asks for two cents’ worth of bubble gum. When Carolyn hands him the gum, Emmett places his hand over hers and asks the married mother of two young boys for a date.
    Back home in Chicago, a man touching a woman’s hand might not be considered a big deal. But in the Deep South, skin-on-skin contact between blacks and whites is forbidden. When money is exchanged in stores, a black person will place it on the counter rather than into the white person’s hand. Similarly, when the change is returned, it is also placed on the counter. And Emmett didn’t just touch a married white woman, he asked her for a date.
    Carolyn pulls away, astonished. Emmett reaches for her again, this time around her waist. “You needn’t be afraid of me, baby,” he assures her. “I been with white girls before.”
    Angrily, she pushes him away. Emmett finally leaves the store. But he is soon followed by the furious woman, who is racing to her car to get her husband’s handgun. It’s getting late, and she now fears for her safety.
    But Emmett Till means her no harm. He is in the habit of substituting whistling for words when his stutter sets in, as he does now, whistling at Bryant. Carolyn Bryant is shocked again. And so are the black teenagers watching the scene unfold. They “knew the whistle would cause trouble,” the official FBI report will read. “And they left in haste, taking Till with them.”
    When Roy Bryant returns home and hears what happened, he wastes no time in conducting his own personal criminal investigation. On August 28, at 2:30 A.M ., he bangs on the door at the home of Emmett’s great-uncle, Moses Wright. Roy is accompanied by his friend, J. W. “Big” Milam.
    Big Milam is twelve years older than Roy Bryant. He is a hulking, extroverted Mississippian who quit school after the ninth grade and fought the Germans in World War II. Each man carries a Colt .45 handgun—a revolver for Bryant and an automatic for Milam. The men force Moses to take them to “the nigger who did the talking.”
    A frightened Moses leads the two men into a small back bedroom, where Emmett and three cousins share a bed. Big Milam shines a flashlight in the boy’s face. “You the nigger who did the talking?”
    “Yeah,” comes the response.
    “Don’t say yeah to me. I’ll blow your head off. Get your clothes on.”
    Moses