Civil Rights Division Emmett Till Act (Cold Case Closing Memoranda)
Emmett Till
In 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black youth visiting family in Mississippi, was murdered by white men after the wife of one of the men claimed that Till had propositioned her. Till, who was from Chicago, Illinois, visited relatives near Money, Mississippi, during the summer of 1955. On August 24 of that year, he entered Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market and had an interaction with Carolyn Bryant, the wife of the store’s owner. Accounts differ as to precisely what happened during that encounter. Black witnesses who had accompanied Till to the store reported—both near the time of the incident and more recently—that Till’s behavior was limited to whistling at Bryant as she left the store. Bryant, however, alleged that Till was physically aggressive towards her and that he propositioned her. What is clear from all accounts is that Bryant suffered no physical harm and that Till’s conduct was likely perceived by many in the white community to violate their unwritten code, prevalent in the Jim Crow South, that Black men were forbidden from initiating interactions with white women. Four days later, Till was forcibly abducted from his relatives’ home by at least two men. His brutally beaten body was found three days later in the Tallahatchie River. Because there did not appear to be a basis for federal jurisdiction given the limited scope of the civil rights statutes in effect in 1955, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) did not investigate Till’s murder at that time. Mississippi state authorities, however, arrested two men: Carolyn Bryant’s husband, Roy Bryant, and her brother-in-law, John William (J.W.) Milam. They were indicted for murder and tried by a local, all-white jury, which quickly acquitted them. Following their acquittal, the men admitted to a journalist that they murdered Till in part because of his earlier actions toward Carolyn Bryant. Both Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam are now deceased.
Lamar Smith
On the morning of August 13, 1955, Lamar Smith, an African-American World War I veteran active in voter registration drives, was shot and killed outside the Brookhaven, Mississippi, courthouse. The victim had worked on the campaign of a man running against the incumbent in a county supervisor race. The run-off election for the supervisor was to take place days after the shooting. Three white men, Noah Smith, Mack Smith, and Charles Falvey, were arrested for the shooting. According to an August 17, 1955 Daily Worker article, a state Coroner’s Jury heard testimony for four hours on the night of August 16 and then ruled that the victim had died as a result “of a gunshot wound in an altercation with Noah Smith, Mack Smith and Charles Falvey and probably other parties unknown.