| Last week, the woman, Carolyn Bryant, who accused Emmett Till of improper advances at a family store in Money, Miss. — leading to the murder of the 14-year-old — died. Till's 1955 death helped energize the nascent civil rights movement. Post reporter DeNeen L. Brown wrote Byant's death and what Till's family remembers. Read an excerpt below:  Carolyn Bryant poses for a photo in 1955. (AP/Gene Herrick) | The Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., one of the last living witnesses of his cousin Emmett Till's abduction by White men in Mississippi, remembers that fateful August 1955 morning being as dark as a thousand midnights. Outside the house, Parker recalls: "My grandfather said he heard a light voice, like a woman's voice, who said, 'That's the one.'" Emmett was the one, a White woman named Carolyn Bryant alleged, who had grabbed her at the grocery store where she worked, an accusation that led to Emmett's abduction and gruesome lynching, which helped to energize the nascent civil rights movement. For more than 60 years thereafter, Emmett's family hoped Bryant would recant her story while she was still living. But Bryant died Tuesday, with her unpublished memoir doubling down on her disputed story and calling herself a "victim." Her death leaves Emmett's relatives with what they say is a haunting legacy of injustice. "The woman whose lies in 1955 put the torture of Emmett in motion died today. She continued to uphold these lies and to protect the murderers until her death," the executive director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, Patrick Weems, said in a statement. While the world saw the horrors of racism, and the real consequences of hatred, what the world will never see is remorse or responsibility for Emmett's death." |
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