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Bryant
& Milam's 1956 Confession
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The
Emmett Till Murder Trial: An Account
by
Douglas
O. Linder (c) 2012
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"They murdered that boy, and to hide
their dastardly act, they tied barbed wire to his neck and to a heavy
gin fan and dumped him into the river for the turtles and the fish."
--Prosecutor Gerald
Chatham
When, on December 1,
1955, Rosa Parks refused to obey an order to give up her seat on a
Montgomery bus to a white person, an action that led to a boycott of
the Montgomery bus system, she had in mind a murder trial that took
place
two months earlier in Sumner, Mississippi. A fourteen-year-old
boy,
Emmett Till, had been brutally murdered and his body thrown in the
Tallahatchie River, but despite clear evidence that two white men
committed the crime, an all-white jury returned a "Not Guilty" verdict
after just an hour of deliberation. Parks wrote, "the news of Emmett's
death caused me...to participate in the cry for justice and equal
rights." The trial of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam for the murder
of
Till shook the conscience of a nation and helped spark the movement
for civil rights for black Americans. [CONTINUED]
Famous
Trials Homepage
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