Gun used in notorious Emmett Till killing joins museum collection in Mississippi
.jpg "This gun has a serial number identifying it as part of an FBI investigation into the killing of Emmett Till, according to the Two Mississippi Museums. It is believed to have been the murder weapon, historians say.")
A grim artifact of the Civil Rights Movement has found its way into the hands of Mississippi historians: the pistol used in the racially motivated 1955 murder of Black teen Emmett Till.
The Mississippi Department of Archives and History announced the unusual acquisition Thursday, Aug. 28 – the 70th anniversary of the killing – noting the gun and a holster will be displayed in Jackson by the Two Mississippi Museums.
Till was 14 when he was kidnapped and killed reportedly forwhistling at a white woman, and the case “brought nationwide attention to the racial violence and injustice prevalent in Mississippi,” according to the Library of Congress.
“The newspaper coverage and murder trial galvanized a generation of young African Americans to join the Civil Rights Movement out of fear that such an incident could happen to friends, family, or even themselves,” the library reports.
Two Mississippi Museums Director Michael Morris says it’s fair to call the artifact grim, but it’s also a “central artifact in one of the most important stories in Mississippi history and American history.”
The museum is also home to the rifle used in the 1963 assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers, an equally famous Mississippi killing associated with the movement.
“This is evidence. These objects, these guns, are reminders that lives were taken, and that’s an important way to educate people about what happened,” Morris told McClatchy News in a phone interview. “When we talk about the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi and the country, people lost their lives. Emmett Till was one of them and so many others who gave their lives for this movement.”
The pistol and holster belonged to J.W. Milam, who confessed in a 1956 magazine article to killing Till with the help of his half brother Roy Bryant, the museum reports. The article came out in “Look” magazine about “four months after an all-white jury in Tallahatchie County acquitted the men in the case,” museum officials said.
The Foundation for Mississippi History acquired the pistol and holster for donation to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. The donors were a “Mississippi family that is not connected to the case,” officials said.
A serial number on the gun matches that of a weapon included as evidence in an FBI investigation of the killing, the museum notes.
The gun is now part of an exhibit that tells the story of Till’s killing, “from the teen’s entry into Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market to his murder.”
“After purchasing bubble gum at the grocery store in Money, Mississippi, Carolyn Bryant, the wife of Roy Bryant, accused Till of whistling at her,” the museum reports. “Till was taken from his uncle’s home in the middle of the night on Aug. 28, 1955, and was not seen again until his body was found floating in the Tallahatchie River, tied to a gin fan, and disfigured from torture and lynching.”
Mississippi historians began collecting artifacts of the Civil Rights Movement back in the 1960s, and the Old Capitol Museum is credited with mounting the nation’s first permanent civil rights exhibit, Morris said.