Who was Roy Bryant?

Answer 1

Roy Bryant, with his half-brother J. W. Milam, murdered a 14 year-old boy named Emmett Till after they found out he had been speaking with Roy's wife Carolyn.

After hearing about the conversation, Roy and J.W tracked down Emmett, dragged him out of the house where he was staying, threw him into the back of a pickup truck, and drove away. Over the next several hours they beat him brutally and eventually shot him.

Emmett's swollen and badly disfigured body was found a few days later. Bryant and Milam were arrested and tried for the murder but acquitted. The defense argued that the body was not that of Till (it was, but it was so badly disfigured and swollen from the time it spent in the water after Bryant and Milam dumped it that it was not simple to identify it initially) and speculated that Till was still alive. A local Mississippi newspaper even reported that Till was being hidden by his relatives or perhaps returned to Chicago for safety. Two witnesses to at least some of the beatings were locked up by the local sheriff before they could speak with the prosecutors or testify in the trial; the prosecution apparently didn't even know about them during the trial. The jury was all-white in an area known for rampant racism. There is at least one report from some years after the trial that at least some of the jurors were certain of Bryant and Milam's guilt but felt that the death penalty or life imprisonment were too much for a white person for killing a black person and that the only other verdict Mississippi law permitted was acquittal. This is partly contradicted by other reports that they acquitted because they felt that the prosecution had failed to prove that the body was that of Emmett Till.

The next year Bryant and Milan were paid between $3600 and $4000 for an interview with Look magazine. They both admitted to the murder but felt justified. Despite their confessions, they were protected from being prosecuted again by "double jeopardy". After the confession, Bryant was ostracized by his former friends and his shop (where Till spoke with his wife) went bankrupt because people (especially African-Americans) boycotted him and banks refused him loans to plant crops. Although he eventually found someone to make a personal loan to him to plant some cotton, local African-Americans refused to work for him and he had to pay higher wages to white workers. He moved to Texas and worked as a welder until he went mostly blind. His wife (the one he killed Till for speaking to) divorced him. He eventually moved back to Mississippi and opened a new store but was convicted in 1984 and 1988 of food stamp fraud. He retracted his confession but stated, in a 1985 interview "if Emmett Till hadn't got out of line, it probably wouldn't have happened to him." He died of cancer in 1994.

The murder of Emmett Till and subsequent acquittal of the perpetrators was one of the factors leading to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 which allowed the U.S. Department of Justice to intervene in local law enforcement issues when civil rights were being compromised.