Bryant's Grocery

The collapsed brick shell at Money, swallowed by vines, was Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market. On 24 August 1955 a fourteen year old from Chicago named Emmett Till went in to buy sweets while visiting relatives, and Carolyn Bryant, minding the counter, afterwards said he had behaved improperly toward her, which the cousins with him disputed at the time. Four days later her husband Roy Bryant and his half brother J. W. Milam took Till from his great uncle's house before dawn, beat him, shot him, wired a cotton gin fan round his neck and put him in the Tallahatchie River. His mother Mamie Till Bradley insisted on an open casket. An all white, all male jury acquitted both men after sixty seven minutes, and months later the two sold a confession to Look magazine for four thousand dollars, safe from a second trial. The killing is reckoned one of the events that set the civil rights movement moving, and the ground stays contested. In 2017 the historian Timothy Tyson published an account in which Carolyn Bryant recanted the central accusation; the words are not on his recordings, she told the FBI she never said them, and her daughter in law, who sat in on the interviews, said the same. The Justice Department closed the case in 2021, a grand jury declined to indict her in 2022, and she died the following April. The store stands unrestored, owned by the children of a man who sat on the jury that acquitted; in 2011 that family took a hundred and fifty two thousand dollars of civil rights restoration money to restore the service station next door while the store fell in. A Freedom Trail marker is all that explains the site; the interpretation is thirty miles away at Sumner.