I had been anxiously awaiting Timothy Tyson’s book on Emmett Till since 2008—from the moment I heard that he had interviewed Carolyn Bryant. It wasn’t long before this was all the buzz among Emmett Till scholars because Tyson told several people, including me, that he had scored a prize the rest of us could only dream about. In the interim, I plugged away on my own book and pieced together Carolyn’s life and role in this case as best I could from other sources and from people who knew her. This last Tuesday I finally received my copy of The Blood of Emmett Till and finished it by Thursday night.
Because media coverage of the book disclosed the fact that not only had Tyson interviewed Carolyn Bryant, but she also admitted that she had lied about during her court testimony regarding Emmett Till’s actions in the Bryant Grocery on August 24, 1955. This set off a near hysteria, with people vowing to boycott the book, and accusing both Tyson and Bryant of profiting off of Till’s murder. Talk of “blood money” has been heard everywhere. As you can see in the reviews included here on Amazon, some people gave the book a one-star rating and declared that they would not read it.
This reaction has been unfortunate, and giving poor reviews to a book one has not even read not only negatively impacts its rating on Amazon unfairly, in this case it makes inaccurate assumptions about the author and his motives.
It is important to note, first of all, that Carolyn Bryant is not profiting off this book. Tyson interviewed her twice, in the same way authors interview any important source for a non-fiction book. And it is important to note that she, through her daughter-in-law, Marsha Bryant, sought him out, not the other way around. Carolyn, with Marsha’s help, began working on her own memoir at least a decade ago, but gave up on it in 2010 after the death of her son Frank. She has since given the manuscript to Tyson to be tucked away in an archive, along with his own interview notes with her, where they will be sealed until 2036. When scholars eventually see the manuscript it will be an unpublished, unfinished draft, and Bryant will likely have passed away. That being the case, she is obviously not interested in making money off the death of Emmett Till. Tyson’s book is an important, solid contribution to the literature and should be read by anyone interested in the case. Bryant’s interviews and memoir hardly dominate the text; in fact, they are almost peripheral. She reveals very little, in fact, and what she does say had either already been revealed in her interviews with the FBI in 2004, or fleshed out by scholars examining earlier documents. In Tyson’s defense, any author writing about murder or any other type of human tragedy profits off those stories. People write about Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, the Holocaust, etc. Tyson’s profits are no more “blood money” than that received by beloved authors too numerous to mention.
Now—on to the book. When I first opened it, I was immediately struck by what it did not contain. There was no front matter, in other words, no foreword, introduction, or preface. He simply opens with chapter one and digs right in. Although I was hoping for the full backstory to his interviews with Bryant as an introduction of some sort, he includes this information within the body of the text. I was also surprised that there are no photographs in the book at all, other than the one of Tyson on the back flap of the dust jacket. Maybe he assumed that people interested in reading the book were already familiar with the people and places that make up the Emmett Till story, but for those who are not, a photo section, instead of a forced Google search, would have been preferred by any reader.
One of the strongest parts of the book, to me, was Tyson’s description of Chicago as anything but a paradise for its black citizens, many of whom were transplants from the South. He paints a vivid picture of racism in the windy city that rivaled the South, except for its de facto nature. In other words, Emmett Till should have entered Mississippi with enough experience with racism to have already learned a lesson or two on his own. Tyson’s closing chapter, “Killing Emmett Till,” is a powerful lesson in how far, or how little we have come in race relations, and how, in taking one step forward, we have routinely taken a few steps back. This chapter alone is a must for anyone who thinks racism is a thing of the past. The legacy of Emmett Till is well thought out here and deserves attention.
Tyson includes three chapters on Mississippi civil rights history, which to me, was overkill. He includes lengthy biographies of Amzie Moore, Medgar Evers, and Gus Courts, all of whom were important in the struggle and thus places the atmosphere prior to the Till murder in context. However, he could have done all of this in one chapter. In this long section, Till is rarely even mentioned. I found myself wanting to move on to the meat of the story but waded through this material anyway.
Surrounding these chapters, he directly examines the Till case by chronicling Till’s life, his week in Mississippi, the kidnapping and murder, the murder trial, the protests that followed, and the tell-all account by J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant in Look magazine (men who did profit off the blood of their teenage victim). Any thorough account of the case must touch upon all of this, but in these particulars, the book didn't really contain much that was new. The only interviews he conducted during his research were with Carolyn Bryant and Charles McLaurin, if his bibliography is any indication. He did not interview Till’s cousins who were witnesses, any of the reporters who covered the trial, or trial witness Willie Reed before he died in 2013. He did not utilize the important William Bradford Huie collection and missed out on a treasure trove of documents originally from the files of the defense attorneys. This being the case, he was unaware that important interview notes from a September 2, 1955, interview with Carolyn that he received from reporter Jerry Mitchell were from this collection. Thus, interviews in the Huie papers just as valuable were ignored altogether.
The book is accurate overall, and thorough for its size and for what it set out to accomplish, but it contains errors—some more serious than others. For example, he says on page 10 and again on 145 that Mose Wright had known or been familiar with J. W. Milam prior to the kidnapping. This is not true. When Mose said that he “knew” him to identify him in court, he meant that he recognized him from the kidnapping. Tyson also said on page 10 that both Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam carried a pistol that night, but only Milam did; Roosevelt Crawford and Ruthie Crawford, who both witnessed the store incident, were not brother and sister, but uncle and niece (page 51); Mose did not take Wheeler Parker to the train station when Parker fled Mississippi (page 159), but Parker went to stay with an uncle in Duck Hill, who took him to the train station. He quotes Clarence Strider Jr., the son of the sheriff, and accepts his statement from Stanley Nelson’s documentary at face value, when Strider said that he provided a boat for fetching Emmett Till’s body. Newspaper and court testimony made clear, however, that boats belonging to B. L. Mims and Robert Hodges actually retrieved the body. Strider Jr. was merely a spectator. On page 146 he refers to Milam and Bryant as brothers-in-law instead of brothers (or, more accurately, half-brothers). He lists white police photographer C. A. Strickland as one of the black sharecroppers who were surprise witnesses at the trial (p. 148). He also made the common blunder of calling the Leslie Milam-managed plantation where Emmett Till was killed, as being owned by Clint Shurden, but Shurden’s plantation (which Tyson spelled as Sheridan) was a neighboring plantation, which was where Willie Reed lived. The one managed by Leslie Milam was owned by M. P. Sturdivant.
Without any documentation, he says that after the kidnapping, Mose took his wife to her brother’s house in Sumner (true), but then took her that same morning to Clarksdale where she boarded a train for Chicago (pp. 56–57). None of this is true—she stayed in Sumner and accompanied Till’s body home to Chicago, along with Crosby Smith, the following weekend. Tyson did not consult an important, although rarely cited interview with Wright in the magazine, Front Page Detective: “In about 40 minutes” after the kidnapping, “I was driving her over to her brother, Crosby Smith, at Sumner, where she stayed until she left for Chicago that Thursday night.” This story is also backed up by Wright’s son, Simeon.
Tyson’s book has been hyped in some circles as though it were a “tell all” by Carolyn Bryant. Nothing could be further from the truth, nor has Tyson heralded it as such. Bryant provided details of her early life, which was interesting, but not essential to the story. The assumption that her lies led to Emmett’s death is also untrue. It is important to understand the chronology, what Carolyn did say, and what she didn’t say, as revealed in the text. The following chronology is important:
Wednesday, August 24, 1955: Emmett Till enters the Bryant Grocery. For a minute or two, he and Carolyn Bryant are alone in the store. Upon leaving the store, Carolyn follows him out. He says “goodbye” to her. She then walks toward Juanita Milam’s car to get a gun. As she is walking, Emmett whistles at her. Carolyn told the FBI that she and Juanita kept this incident from their husbands. William Bradford Huie and T.R.M. Howard independently confirmed this account by talking to some of the kids that had been hanging around the store that night. Both learned that it was one of the teenagers who told Roy Bryant about the incident when he returned from carting shrimp to Texas on Saturday morning.
Sunday, August 28, 1955: Roy Bryant, J. W. Milam, and others, come to the Wright home at 2:00 a.m. and demand “the boy who did the talking at money.” Sheriff George Smith confirmed that Bryant and Milam kidnapped Emmett because he had made “ugly remarks” to Carolyn. There was no talk by either the kidnappers or the sheriff that Emmett Till had made any kind of physical assault upon Carolyn.
Friday, September 2, 1955. With her husband and brother-in-law now in jail on kidnapping and murder charges, Carolyn sits in the office of attorneys Sidney Carlton and Harvey Henderson. The notes from the interview say: “About 7:30 or 8 P.M. (dark) boy came to candy counter & I waited on him & when I went to take money he grabbed my hand & said ‘how about a date’ and I walked away from him and he said ‘what’s the matter Baby can’t you take it?’ He went out door and said ‘Goodbye’ and I went to car & got pistol and when I came back he whistled at me—this whistle while I was going after pistol—didn’t do anything further after he saw pistol.”
Sunday, September 18, 1955. Sidney Carlton and several reporters visit Mose Wright at Wright’s home, where Carlton tells reporters that Till, “mauled and attempted a physical attack while making indecent proposals” while Till and Carolyn were alone in the store. Carlton is clearly telling a story that had evolved from what Carolyn, Roy Bryant, and Milam had been telling prior to the murder.
Tuesday, September 20, 1955. Carlton tells reporters in the courtroom that Emmett Till “propositioned” Carolyn and then tried to “assault her” while in the store. “It got so bad that one of the other boys had to go in and get him out.” Carlton insisted that Till “mauled her and he tussled her and he made indecent proposals to her, and if that boy had any sense he’d have made the next train to Chicago.”
Thursday, September 22, 1955. Carolyn Bryant testifies in court, away from the jury, and says in addition to everything above, that Emmett stepped behind the candy counter and grabbed her by the waist.
In a paper that Tyson gave to his graduate students in 2014 and that one of them briefly placed online, Tyson says that Carolyn told him that the lie was concocted by Bryant family members and the defense attorneys. This above chronology clearly shows an evolving story, one that was not told prior to Emmett’s death. To declare that Carolyn’s lies led to Emmett’s death is simply not true. Regarding her encounter with Emmett, all she says is in reference to Emmett grabbing her by the waist, “that part’s not true.” The rest, she said, she couldn’t really remember.
Yet Carolyn’s memory of events should not simply be taken at face value either. Memory experts assure us that memory is an unreliable source of truth. On page 160, Tyson says that during the trial, “Carolyn Bryant watched in awe as Mamie Bradley testified. ‘I had all these things running through my mind,’ she recalled. ‘My husband’s going to the penitentiary, maybe for life. I have children to support.’” Carolyn, however, did not hear Mamie Bradley’s testimony. Journalists who reported the trial were clear that witnesses were sequestered until after they testified. Mamie Bradley testified earlier in the day than Carolyn or Juanita Milam. After their testimony, they joined their husbands in the courtroom. Carolyn heard other testimony, but not Bradley’s.
In summary, Tyson adds a significant work to the literature on Emmett Till and should be read, as I said above, by anyone with an interest in the case. I encourage everyone to read it. Let opinion on the book be at least informed; let conclusions be reached after a thorough examination. Don’t declare things to be true that aren’t, and don’t assume Carolyn Bryant revealed more than she did. Most importantly, don’t assume motives for either the author or his source of which there is no evidence. Tyson deserves better than some critics are allowing.
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Timothy B. Tyson’s “The Blood of Emmett Till” takes on the lynching of Emmett Till with thorough investigative journalism and historical research. This riveting and tragic story is set in one of the worst corners of America; The Mississippi Delta. In 1955, Carolyn Bryant accused 14-year-old Emmett Till of making sexual advances at her, grabbing and handling her at the waist, breaking racial codes, and wolf whistling at her. Tyson says that in 2008, she revealed to him that the sexual advances were not true and that nothing he did deserved his fate. She would later say that this revelation was never told to Tyson. However, what is true is that her husband, Roy Bryant, and his older half brother, J.W. Milam, committed a brutal, torturous, and heinous murder in the name of White Supremacy. This is a must read for those who want to understand how hate can divide a nation and cause those who harbor such evil to commit such atrocities and then go unpunished. With the recent convictions of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery’s murderers, America is slowly making much needed progress from that gloomy day in 1955.
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Top reviews from other countries
Marian Atkinson
and extremely sad that such a cruel injustice took place
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 30, 2017Raymond Comeau
Timothy B Tyson tells all about The Blood of Emmett Till , and it should open some eyes of the continued injustice to black yout
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 10, 2017
