Day 7 -- Money, MS and Vicinity

Bryant Grocery Store, Unnamed Cemetary, Tallahatchie County Courthouse, Barn in Sumner County/ETHIC Museum, Bridge over the Black Bayou


How do I put on this blog the experience of today? Whatever I put here will not be able to capture the experience. What we saw amounted to very little. We saw an old grocery store that is so run down that you see more vines than bricks on it's roofless four walls. We stepped through an overgrown plot of land on the side of a farmer's field where a few headstones were hidden in the grass. We went in an old sheet metal barn that used to be a cotton gin. We stood on a bridge that long ago was closed to cars and looked down into the Black Bayou which drains into the Tallahatchie River. We poked through a county courthouse whose better days were long, long ago. Besides one person at the county courthouse, we were the only visitors to these sites. Yet, each of these places moved us significantly.

These places tell the story of 14-year old Emmett Till who in the summer of 1955 traveled from his home in Chicago to visit his cousins in Money, Mississippi. Not knowing the culture of the Jim Crow south, a whistle in the direction of Carolyn Bryant at Bryant Grocery store triggered a sequence of events that night that found young Emmett kidnapped, tortured, murdered and dumped in the Black Bayou. Emmett's mother insisted on an open casket back in Chicago and for the first time the nation took notice of the horror and injustice blacks were suffering in the south. That reality struck the nation again when the all white jury acquitted the two men (who later sold their story of guilt to Look Magazine for $4,000) in just 67 minutes (which included a soda break). This tragic event was the trigger for this nation to begin paying attention to the Civil Rights movement. Please add one more book to your summer reading list. Read Getting Away with Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case by Chris Crowe. (It isn't too long and it even has pictures.) You will be shocked and saddened as you get a serious dose of the evils which were being perpetrated in the name of racism and prejudice in our nation.

Being at these sites moved our minds and our hearts in ways that all the reading and studying of this event had tried to do. Speaking with the man whose father was one of the murder's most trusted employees and was commanded, as a black employee with no rights or authority, to dump Emmett's body in the bayou was another moving moment as we heard how that broke his father for the rest of his life. History came alive today in a powerful and painful way.