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The Store Where Emmett till Is Said to Have Whistled at a White Woman
Source: The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 51 (Spring, 2006), p. 85
Published by: The JBHE Foundation, Inc
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25073442 .
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 The Store Where Emmett Till Is Said to Have Whistled at aWhite Woman
When a nigger even gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he's tired oflivin\

Preservationists Look to Protect a Piece of Civil Rights History

the summer of 1955, a young black teenager from Chicago named Emmett Till entered the Bryant Grocery & Meat Market
in Money, to buy some bubble gum. There, he is said to have whistled at a white woman A few days
In Mississippi, shopkeeper.
later, the mutilated of the young teen with a bullet hole in the back of his head was from the Tallahatchie River. A
body pulled
cotton gin fan had been tied around Till's head with barbed wire.
70-pound
The nation was shocked when of his open-casket funeral were in Jet magazine. The barbaric cruelty
photographs published
of Jim Crow became a to whites and blacks across America. A few months later, Rosa Parks began the modern civil
reality
rights movement when she refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus to a white man.
Now the Bryant Grocery sits in ruin. There is no roof or windows, and vines grow up its walls. Many in Mississippi want the
state to buy the store and make it into a monument or a museum. But the owner of the property has turned down an offer of

$50,000 for the eyesore and is holding out for a much sum.
larger
The dilapidated is owned by the
son of one of the men who sat on the all-white jury which
acquitted the two men
building
with Till's murder. Emboldened the constitutional double the two acquitted defendants
charged by protection against jeopardy,
sold their to Look magazine for $4,000. In the magazine article they admitted to the Till murder. One of the killers
story
"When a nigger even gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he's tired of livin'."
explained,
Earlier this year the Justice exhumed Till's body in an attempt to find forensic evidence that might tie addition
Department
al suspects to Till's murder. But the federal government later announced there would be no new indictments in the case.

SPRING 2006 85

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