You have heard the story about Carolyn Bryant claiming that Emmett Till “wolf whistled at her” and supposedly grabbed her arm. This incident supposedly happened at Bryant’s grocery store. Then, Roy Bryant and his half brother J. W. Milam decided to get their revenge on some uppity black boy. They kidnapped, tortured, and killed Emmett Till. You all know that an all white male jury acquitted Roy Bryant and Milam of the murder of Till.
But what happened to Bryant and Milam? I got curious to see if the three people responsible for Till’s death lead lives with no repurcussions. And while all of the villains in this case lived many more years that Till was denied, life wasn’t all wine and roses.
See there was this little problem for the Bryant’s. Their store dependend upon the local blacks who made up the majority of their customers, and their black customers boycotted the Bryan’ts grocery. The store wasn’t exactly rolling in cash before Emmett Till’s murder, so the black boycott helped kill off the store.
And what made the black boycott stick was the vile interview that Bryant and Milam gave to Look nagazine. Both were paid $4000 to describe how they tortured and killed Till. In fact, it appears that there were enough local whites who were put off by the interview that white ended up boycotting the Bryant grocery as well. And the locals would not provide anymore financial support to the murderous pair.
Less than a month after their trial, Look magazine paid Bryant and Milan $4,000 for their murder stories, published in its January 1956 edition. In “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” the men explained in graphic detail how they kidnapped, beat, and killed Emmett Till, before dumping his body. Why? Because local Black residents had already forced the families into unsustainable poverty since Till’s death.
Despite reopening the family business immediately after their verdicts, Bryant and Milan could not even make $100 after as long as three weeks. That is because Black residents refused to frequent their store, choking off almost all of their income.
The local white community also financially starved Milan and Bryant, almost before the end of their trial. Friends who had contributed to their defense funds financially cut off both men. Banks also refused to grant loans to the Bryants to seed and manage key crops.
The Bryants eventually sold their store and moved to Texas.
As for Milam, he didn’t have any land, and he couldn’t obtain a loan. However, he eventually found enough money to buy a farm which he tried to rent out. Once again, black workers shunned Wilam, and the local whites demanded higher wages to work for Milam.
Milam’s bottom eventually fell out. Quite deliciously, Milam finally was reduced to working for three years effectively as an enslaved laborer doing menial jobs on local plantations. He eventually got heavy equipment work but that, too, was short-lived.
Milam remained intimately connected to the court, going from conviction to conviction for writing bad checks, committing assault and battery, and using stolen credit cards.
Milam never recovered from his Till haunting. When doctors diagnosed Milam with spinal cancer, he was forced into early retirement. Spine cancer is a rare, aggressive, painful, and severely debilitating disease, and it lived up to all of that for Milam. He suffered that way until he finally fell to his disease at the close of 1981.
On December 31, to be precise.
And the Bryants in Texas?
After the collapse of the family business and their shunning by Tallahatchie County, the Bryants moved to Texas. Once there, the family could barely survive on Roy’s odd jobs, where he cleared a scant seventy-five cents a day. Roy would later commit—then get caught at—welfare fraud to survive.
Emmett Till haunted the Bryant family even in Texas. Roy tells the story of a time he saw a fellow former Mississippi resident, having recognized his Tallahatchie County license plates. Roy waved and called out. On hearing Roy’s name, the person drove away without so much as speaking to him.
Roy lived in increasing hermitage and fear. Despite publicly confessing his murder in gruesome detail, Roy suddenly began denying he even knew of the Till slaying. His voice would become a growl at the mention of Emmett Till’s name. “He’s been dead 30 years and I can’t see why it can’t stay dead,” he would say.
The Bryants evenually divorced, and Roy Bryant died of cancer in 1994. In his final years, Roy Bryant was afraid that someone would kill him for his murder of Till, so he ended up living like a hermit.
As for Carolyn, she tried to write a book that claimed she was a victim of Emmett Till. The book suffered a backlash and went no where. She admitted that she lied about the incident with Till, then she claimed that she never recanted. Finally, she died in a hospice of cancer.
And why did the local whites turn on the Bryants and Milam? I can only speculate. I think the locals believed it was OK to commit the murder as long as the Bryants and Milam didn’t trumpet what they did to the rest of the world. When it become apparent that the pair had really murdered Till, it brought scrutiny from those uppity Northernors. And the locals were not happy with the rest of the world thinking they were all racist murderers.
Yes, I know that sounds insane. But it reminds me of a line I heard from an old gothic horror movie that I had recently seen. The murderer was a sadistic individual from a wealthy, preeminent family in 1880’s Baltimore. A wealthy relative of the killer had her jewels stolen by said killer because he was on the run While the family could accept a killer in the family, they didn’t want the scandal of their black sheep relative being a thief, so the relative paid local detectives to keep that fact under wraps.
It’s as good as explanation as any.
Anyway, it’s not real justice for Till, but the black community didn’t take his murder lying down.
NOTE: I apologize for the many grammatical errors that are in this diary. It was late at night when I wrote it, and to be honest, I didn’t think it would get this much attention.