Money, and the Story of Emmett Till
Mississippi isn't exactly an in-demand tourist destination, but there are a few places. There is Tupelo, where the interested can visit Elvis's boyhood home; Columbus, where you can walk through the childhood home of Tennessee Williams. Rowan Oaks, the home of William Faulkner, is in Oxford , one of the better writer’s homes I have visited. One gets a sense of who Faulkner was and why his writing took on its unique style there.
In Jackson we have the home of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers, and two museums devoted to Mississippi history and civil rights. At the Evers home, visitors can see the place on his driveway where Evers was murdered, in plain view of his own living room window, where his wife and children hid after the assassin’s gunshots rang out.
Jackson also has the home of Eudora Welty, which is as elegant and understated as the writer herself was. There is Vicksburg Civil War battlefield. And Natchez, home to one of the best collections of antebellum homes in the South.
Not least is the Blues Trail, a series of markers through the Mississippi Delta that trace the development of the blues music form, bisecting the northwest corner of the state as it follows the famous Highway 61. At a Highway 61 crossroad in Clarksdale, a Blues Trail plaque marks the place where, if you believe the lore, guitarist Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to become the world’s best blues guitarist.
Just off the Blues Trail near Greenwood is a notorious and lightly visited spot, a place in Mississippi I have felt drawn to for years -- Money. Money, Mississippi isn't a town, not even a hamlet. The most it can claim to be is a place. A place that seems forever on the verge of erasing itself. There isn't as much as a road sign to tell drivers going down County Road 518 that it is there. You've probably heard the saying about a small town, don't blink, or you'll miss it. That doesn't apply to Money. Even if you didn't blink, you would still miss it. Nothing marks it at all.
And yet Money is the starting point of one of the more important chain of events in the twentieth century U.S. -- the murder of Emmitt Till. In 1955, Emmitt Till, a fourteen year old Black boy from Chicago, was visiting relatives in Mississippi for the summer. On August 24, he went with some friends to Bryant Grocery & Meat Market in Money to buy candy. While he was there, he supposedly whistled at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman and wife of the store owner. Carolyn later told the police he "menaced" her, though none of the teenagers who were with him said he did anything of the kind. There was no accusation or documentation of assault, sexual or otherwise, or proof of meaningful physical contact..
But whatever happened, Carolyn’s husband, Roy Bryant, did not intend to allow the insult, real or imagined, to stand. In retaliation, Roy and two accomplices found Till at his aunt's house in the middle of the night several days later, pulled him out of the bed, tied him up, and hauled him in the back of a pickup truck to a barn near Drew, Mississippi, where he was tortured, murdered, bound to an industrial fan with wire, and thrown into the Talahatchie river a few miles away.
And that would have been the end of it, another lynching of a black American without consequences for the murderers, one among the 4,743 lynchings reported by the NAACP to have occurred between 1882 and 1968. Except for two things. First, a Black teenager named Willie Reed saw the three criminals take Till into a barn and heard him being tortured. Reed told the police. Second, when Till's body was recovered and sent to home to Chicago, his mother, in outrage, insisted on an open casket so anyone who came would see the mangled body the murderers left behind. Thousands came, were shocked, and their shock touched off a chain of protests that continue to this day. The George Floyd demonstrations in 2020 were in many ways a continuation of the response to Emmett Till. Rosa Parks once remarked that when she decided to remain in her seat in the white section of a bus in Selma, Alabama, Emmett Till was on her mind. Emmett Till was on the mind of most civil rights activists in the sixties and seventies.
So I felt I had to go there. It was history, important history. I couldn't live within a hundred miles of Money and never at least drive by. Money, to me, is a reminder of what the people in my state were (and perhaps still are) capable of.
Some people (mostly white people) prefer to say that the Till murder and all that went with it are all just history now, better left in the dark. But I think if it were "just history" there would be no harm in talking about it. We don't avoid discussing events that happen in the past unless we think the events reflect badly on us. Slavery ended in the U.S. more than 150 years ago. If it were just history, perpetrated by people long dead who we think we have no connection to, then why not talk about it, the same way we talk about what the Nazi's did in Germany, Genghis Khan did in Asia, or Alexander the Great did when he invaded the Middle East?
Things we leave in the dark are things we are embarrassed about. If we cover them up, that makes us complicit.
The Emmitt Till story has been covered up for a long time. An interview of two of the killers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, appearing in a 1956 edition of _Look_ magazine included several lies intended to protect the identities of people who had escaped prosecution but were accomplices. The killers also claimed Till told them he had already had sex with other white women, and had no remorse about threatening Carolyn. The author described Till, at only 14, as “stout” and “stocky,” “well-built,” and said he “looked like a man,” even though existing photos show a relatively thin, boyish teenager. The story left the overall impression that the two men were defending the safety of white women from a dangerous criminal. These lies persist to this day, and while they are not universally believed or repeated, they confuse the story. Confusion only encourages its quiet burial.
The only way to put something safely and ethically in the past is to talk frankly about it, leave no truth uncovered, and accept whatever blame needs to be accepted or assigned. To do otherwise is to hide it, which is complicity. People of later generations who obscure the facts of a crime are, in a way, accomplices — even if they are as far away from the death of Emmett Till as we are now. They may not be enabling the crime, but they are pulling a shroud over the truth, which sometimes emboldens bad actors to commit new crimes later. One of the strongest signs that something should be faced is that no one wants to face it. Money isn’t faced. Hardly anyone goes there.
My visit to Money wasn't entirely planned. There is a book repair shop in Greenwood (businesses that repair damaged books have shrunk in number almost to the vanishing point), and my wife had a deteriorating copy of a favorite volume that she wanted to get rebound. Greenwood is barely ninety miles from where I live, and Money is only another ten miles beyond that. After living in Mississippi for so long, knowing Money was there and what it represented, it seemed time. It took me less time to get to Paris in my life than it did to get to Money. I'm not sure if that is just an example of the hometown philosophy that explains why so many New Yorkers haven't been to the Statue of Liberty — it's so close, we can go anytime, and so it is always put off until tomorrow — or if it was that same sense of embarrassment and revulsion that Southerners feel about the history of racism. Or maybe both. Probably both.
Money is on County Road 518, straight out of Greenwood. You take one of the main streets in town, cross the Yazoo River, and you are there. You leave the old part of the town, empty but oddly spruced up during a recent renewal effort, pass Greenwood Leflore hospital, which has sent me many patient transfers to Jackson over the years, through the better-appointed part of town, and directly into the cotton fields. Hidden in plain sight. There is a marker on the left side of the road in front of Bryant Grocery. Not easily noticed, because Money is completely unmarked. The plaque states the basic facts of the Till murder, has a photo of Emmitt Till, and a picture of the grocery store when it was still in good repair.
Today, it is in ruins. Several civil rights groups have approached its owners about buying the store and preserving it as a historical landmark. The store is now in the hands of the Tribble family, the children of cousins of Roy Bryant, who bought the store when it closed months after the murder. The current owners have said they would sell it for $4 million, and so it has never been sold, restored, or conserved in any way. As a result, it is covered in vine overgrowth, the roof collapsed, only the walls remaining. It is difficult to tell that it ever was a grocery store.
It is worth pausing to ponder this situation. Roy Bryant and his cousin J.W. Milam murdered Emmitt Till. This is not in doubt. After they were arrested, tried and acquitted, Bryant and Milam sold their story to Look magazine for $4000 and admitted they murdered Till. Because they had already been acquitted by a racist jury, which included a member of the Tribble family, they could not be prosecuted. Under the principle of double jeopardy, they could confess anything related to the murder with no legal repercussions. So not only was a 14 year-old boy tortured and murdered, but the murderers were able to say so in public and make a buck for their trouble.
Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam are dead, but the injustice and profiteering live on. His relatives the Tribbles want $4 million for a collapsing frame of a store in the middle of the country, in a location that would not be on any map except for what happened there. This is what lies and buried truth get you. More injustice, even 70 years later.
Such as it is with history. The Greenwood website calls the city a “epicenter” for the civil rights movement, and has a separate page about the Till murder. A statue for Till was erected in Greenwood in 2022. But while the website does address the story, the description is relatively brief, and there are no street signs or markers in town to lead visitors to the site. A driver traveling through the Delta for the first time could be forgiven for missing it entirely. There is also nothing except the plaque to mark the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. The road to the spot on the Tallahatchie River where Till’s body was found is a dirt road that can be impassable after heavy rains. The whole thing feels wanting. But the city of Greenwood isn’t entirely to blame. The fact is that anyone can come to Money if they want to. Hardly anyone wants to.
It was a cold February afternoon when we went to see Money. Along the way, we passed the grave of blues legend Robert Johnson, another worthy location, which we would stop at on the way back. I approached the area with some apprehension. It was, after all, a haunted place, haunted by history and the civil rights violence that followed for decades afterwards. Money is hardly the epicenter of the civil rights movement, but it was the spark—there were protests in response to Till’s death throughout the northern U.S. (especially in Chicago, where Till was from). Then came Rosa Parks, then Selma, then Martin Luther King, one candle lighting another until the entire country was on fire.
What happened in Money was astonishingly far-reaching. And no one ever goes there.
I had read stories about how the marker along the Tallahatchie River in Glendora, where Till’s body was found, another half hour up the road, has been repeatedly vandalized. The sign has been replaced four times after being riddled with bullet holes. The current version is supposed to be bulletproof. Time will tell.
If people were willing to shoot at a marker, safety is at least a passing concern. There is nothing around Money. Anyone who pulls up to Bryant Grocery is there for one reason, to visit the site of the murder. I doubt the hundred or so people who live in the immediate area welcome the traffic. They know what we think; we think we know what they think.
We were the only ones there at the time. There is a small gravel parking lot in front of the grocery. The grocery itself still has a wire fence, obscured by a tangle of vines, and a KEEP OUT sign. The state maintains the marker and the parking space so visitors can see the grocery, but the Tribble family keeps people away from the building. That, all by itself, summarizes the state of race relations in Mississippi. Officially, perfunctory acknowledgment. On the private side, silence.
We only stayed a few minutes. There wasn't much to see. A rundown building, not recognizable as a store. A lot of kudzu. Walls that look like they would topple in a stiff wind, or maybe even a gentle one. I took photos. A few hundred yards away, there was a sign for a large corporate cotton farm. Since Emmett’s time, family-owned farms have largely passed away, replaced by increasingly mechanized corporate farms. The rural community of farm workers that could support a store in the middle of nowhere was gone, replaced by robots that plow the soil by GPS. The life Emmett Till came to visit during the summer of his 15th year is no longer in existence. The incorporation of private farms by big business is almost as much the story of Money as the Emmitt Till murder was.
Nevertheless, I think more Americans should be stopping here. The idea that nothing happened at Money is belied by the silence, by the refusal of what is now the second or third generation of a white local family to refuse to sell the store, to allow the repair of a landmark that indicts them, conserved or not. A landmark whose decaying silence allows people like me to ponder the truth. If nothing had happened here, that land would have changed hands several times since 1955. Certainly, that corporate farm would have been interested.
I walked around the grocery. Not that anything identified it as a grocery. The old sign that said "Bryant's Grocery and Meats" was gone. It may have fallen down, but I wonder if the family might have taken it down to make the building less recognizable. It was, in its current state, less accusing — if you didn’t know what it was.
There are other Emmitt Till landmarks in the area, if I had been inclined to drive. There was the marker on the Tallahatchie; there is an exhibition in Sumner at the courthouse where Bryant and Milam were acquitted after a brief trial, despite eyewitness (black) testimony. There is a museum in Glendora that features a replica of Bryant Grocery and one of the bullet-pocked plaques that had to be replaced. I hope to return to those another day, but Money was enough haunting for me. Devoting an entire day to Emmett Till was more than I was up to on that particular Valentine's Day.
On the way back, we paused at the Robert Johnson grave. Robert Johnson, according to many, was the greatest bluesman of all time; he was certainly the greatest of his day. He hardly left the Delta, and we would not know what he sounded like except that a music agent convinced him to go to San Antonio in 1936 and Dallas in 1937 to record 29 songs and 13 alternative versions in two improvised studios. Johnson sang alone with his guitar. No edits, no backups, no sound engineering. That stockpile of songs remained legendary until the 1980s, when it was remastered and released to the general public, to great acclaim. Johnson was the rare musician who had a top-selling album almost 50 years after his death.
Johnson was murdered, like Emmett Till. Legend has it that he was cornered in a bar by the angry husband of a woman he had been flirting with at a bar. According to the story, Johnson died after the husband may have given him a poisoned bottle of whiskey. May have. Like everything else in Johnson's life, his death remains hazy. Even his gravesite is in dispute, and at one point he was thought to have been buried in as many as three different places, but in the 1990s relatives of Johnson came forward to say they witnessed his burial at a church cemetery near, of all places, Money.
Johnson and Till had something in common. They were both murdered at a time and place where black people did not matter. The difference is that Johnson, murdered 20 years earlier, was not even valuable enough to merit a murder investigation. His death certificate does not record a cause of death, and the police were not interested in finding one. Whoever killed him is lost to history. Emmitt Till, though another horrifying example of how little black lives were worth in 1955, was one of the first murdered black people to break through, to have his death properly recorded, noted, and publicized. The facts were made known. And this is the difference.
