Staring down at the distorted and barely recognizable remains of her fourteen-year-old son is Mamie Till supported by her financé Gene Mobley who gazes directly at the camera.  This September 1955 black and white photo of Emmett Till and his family was named by Time Magazine in 2016 as one of the 100 most influential photos of all time.  First featured in Jet Magazine, it was this photo that inspired what became known as the “Till Generation” to join the nascent civil rights movement.  Yet for nearly five decades the state of Mississippi and the Mississippi Delta, where Till was murdered, did nothing to commemorate the event.  University of Kansas Professor Dave Tell, author of Remembering Emmett Till, argues that we can’t understand the memory of Emmett Till in the Delta without considering the built and natural environment.  From the Tallahatchie River where Till’s body was dumped to the Sumner courthouse where his killers were acquitted, the buildings and natural features of the Mississippi Delta have had a profound impact on the memory of Emmett Till.

Sandwiched between the Mississippi and Tallahatchie Rivers in the northwest corner of the state, it was the rich alluvial soil left by the flooding of the rivers that made the Mississippi Delta the heart of the American cotton kingdom—the country’s leading export well into the second half of the nineteenth century.  The fate of Delta towns like Sumner, and the memory of Emmet Till, were equally dependent on the flooding of the Tallahatchie River.  It was because the flooding of the river cut off part of Tallahatchie county from the county courthouse in Charleston that a duplicate courthouse was built in Sumner.  If the courthouse where Till’s murderers were tried and acquitted came into existence it was because of the flooding of the Tallahatchie River.

As the Delta’s cotton fortunes declined the courthouse and the official business it generated became the lifeline for the town of Sumner.  Neighboring towns like Webb, the birthplace of Emmett Till’s mother Mamie, which lacked a similar resource, fell into poverty and disrepair.  But in 1947 when a bridge was built over the Tallahatchie River, Sumner’s courthouse became redundant and the town risked suffering the fate of Webb.  Even at the time of the 1955 trial of Till’s killers, journalists were already commenting on the dilapidated condition of the courthouse.  After five decades of silence about the Till murder and trial, it was the desire to restore the courthouse that provided the incentive to commemorate the Till murder in the Mississippi Delta.

Saving the Sumner courthouse meant different things to the different people who formed the eighteen member Emmett Till Memorial Commission in 2006 (now called the Emmett Till Interpretive Center).   For the nine black members of the commission, led by Jerome Little, President of the Tallahatchie County Board of Supervisors, restoring the courthouse was about racial justice and reconciliation.  For the white members, first and foremost among them the wealthy planter Frank Mitchener Jr, saving the courthouse meant saving the town of Sumner.  In the end it was Frank Mitchener’s long-time friendship with then US Senator for Mississippi Thad Cochran (1978-2018) that helped secure the first of two $750,000 earmarks for Till commemoration in Tallahatchie county.  

While the motivations of the members of the Emmett Till Memorial Commission may have diverged along color lines, Dave Tell stresses that we can’t overstate the significance of this initiative.  For fifty years silence reigned supreme on the story of the Emmett Till murder in the Delta.  Now, for the first time, prominent citizens were talking about this painful and difficult past across racial lines.  For the first time the homes of white planters were opening to black men from the community.  Two of the black committee members actually grew up as sharecroppers on plantations owned by white committee members—including Jerome Little raised on Mitchener’s family plantation.  Together they have been responsible for most of the commemorative work on Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta.  

The drive to generate funds to restore the Sumner courthouse led to exaggerated claims about the significance of the Emmett Till murder trial.  While there is little doubt that the shocking photos of Till’s brutalized body at his funeral in his native Chicago inspired many to join the civil rights movement, there is no evidence that the trial had a similar effect.  But in repeated grant and funding applications this was the claim made by the Emmett Till Memorial Commission (ETMC). In the signage to the memory of Emmett Till that the ETMC concentrated in Tallahatchie county the claim was also repeatedly made that it was the trial that sparked the civil rights movement.  By inflating the significance of the Sumner courthouse and by concentrating and embellishing the signage to Till’s memory in the same county, the EMTC exaggerated and distorted the memory of Tallahatchie county in the larger story of the civil rights movement.  

Although the ETMC is, strictly speaking, a memory commission, in this instance, the work of the commission was as creative as it was recollective. They created a past for Tallahatchie County in order that they might restore the courthouse, save their town, and remember Till. In this sense, the first task of commemoration was to make Tallahatchie County worthy of remembrance.  Dave Tell, Remembering Emmett Till.

If Tallahatchie county was excessively remembered, neighboring Sunflower county was largely forgotten in the memorial work on the murder of Emmett Till.  Despite the fact that Tallahatchie county was only what Dave Tell describes as the “accidental site” of the Till trial, it is filled with memorials and commemorative work.  Sunflower country, where Till was beaten, shot and killed, still has no memorials.  Dave Tell explains that from the time of the trial and the Look Magazine article featuring the admission of guilt by Till’s murderers, Sunflower country has largely been erased from the memory and maps of the Till murder.  

In the case of the Emmett Till murder trial, defense lawyers Sidney Carlton and John Whitten argued that the entire story unfolded in Leflore county.  Beginning with Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market where Till was accused of making sexual advances toward Carolyn Bryant to Till’s uncle Moses Wright’s home where the boy was abducted by Carolyn’s husband Roy Bryant and her brother J.W. Milam, the defense argued that Till committed his offense, was abducted, and eventually released all within a small radius within Leflore county.  The defense claimed that the body that washed up on the banks of the Tallahatchie River, despite the mother’s claim, was not that of Emmett Till.  In fact, the defense argued that it was really a corpse planted by the NAACP.  

In the Look Magazine article, published a few months after the trial by journalist William Bradford Huie, Bryant and Milam admitted their guilt and the story expanded to include Leflore and Tallahatchie county.  But in this two county story, where Till was abducted in Leflore and killed in Tallahatchie county, Sunflower country still remained absent.  Dave Tell explains that the two county story and the exclusion of Sunflower county served multiple purposes.  First it papered over the flimsy assertion that Till hadn’t been murdered and that his mother couldn’t recognize the body of her own son.  Second, it met the legal requirements of Look Magazine for publishing Huie’s story.  By limiting the account to two counties, the crime remained limited to Bryant and Milam’s stories.  Because both had already been acquitted, they could sign the waiver forms required by Look Magazine to publish the article and pay them for their participation.  Expanding the murder case to Sunflower county would require waivers from additional accomplices who had never been tried, had no legal immunity, and were unlikely to go public with their story.  

If the river and counties are part of the shifting memory of Emmett Till in the Delta so is the built environment.  The most prominent structure is Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market where Till whistled at Carolyn Bryant setting the murder in motion.  Dependent on African American customer’s, Bryant’s lost its customer base and was ultimately shuttered by the outcome of the Till trial.  From the late 1970s to the mid-1980s the structure survived and was maintained by J.L. “Bud” and Rita Young as Young’s Grocery and Market.  For most tourists, however, Young’s remained Bryant’s.  The maintained structure allowed visitors to become mental time travelers imagining what may or may not have transpired in the store between Emmett Till and Carolyn Bryant.  Dave Tell argues that this mode of thinking was very much in line with much of the scholarship which took a forensic perspective on the murder.  It was only after Young’s closed and the site fell into ruin that it recalled new memories and new ways of thinking about the murder.  The ruins now draw attention to ongoing problems of racism, forgetting, and the failure to confront the past.  

If the structure that housed the former Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market was allowed to fall into disrepair and ruin it may have been the intention of its owners.  It was Ray Tribble, a former and unrepentant jury member in the Till trial who went on to make it fortune and used it to buy up farmland around Money, Mississippi.  His three children, Annette Morgan, Harry Tribble, and Martin Tribble, purchased what remained of Bryant’s Grocery in the mid-1980s.  Dave Tell notes that the Tribble children have refused numerous offers by persons interested in restoring and preserving the structure.  According to the Mississippi Clarion Ledger, in 2018 the Tribbles were demanding $4 million for the ruins.  

However, two of the same Tribble children, Annette and Harry, purchased the neighboring Ben Roy’s Service Station in 2003.  Although it played no role in the civil rights movement, Annette and Harry applied for and were awarded a $206,360 Mississippi Civil Rights historical sites grant to restore and preserve the structure.  They were awarded the grant entirely on the basis of the claim that the neighboring Ben Roy’s would offer the ideal vantage point for visitors to the town of Money to think and talk about what happened in Bryant’s Grocery at the time of the Till murder.  In the end Ben Roy’s was beautifully and meticulously restored, while the building that housed Bryant’s Grocery was allowed to crumble.  However, the newly restored Ben Roy’s, despite the purpose of the funding, did nothing to address Mississippi’s racially charged past or the particulars of the Till murder.  Instead, it allowed visitors to escape into a fictional, mid-century modern, “Bridgerton-like” fantasy where race didn’t matter, where blacks and whites coexisted peacefully and harmoniously.  In short, Ben Roy’s, courtesy of the funding received from the state of Mississippi, contributed to the forgetting and erasure of the memory of the Till murder and trial.  

How do you best remember the life and murder of Emmett Till?  This is precisely what Dave Tell has devoted his time and energy to over the past decade.  Beyond his book, articles, and presentations, Dave Tell took the lead role in crafting and creating the Emmett Till Memory Project.  This is an app-based project that takes visitors on a guided tour, complete with maps, text, photos and audio support, of the places in Chicago and the Mississippi Delta that were most significant to the life and memory of Emmett Till.  With so many stories circulating about Emmett Till, Dave Tell explains that he has decided to use his knowledge and skills as a historian “to tell the story that resonates most deeply with those who are most impacted by it, and those are the family, the Parkers, and the folks at the non-profit (Emmett Till Interpretive Center).”