JACKSON, Miss. — It's been 70 years since the lynching of Emmett Till, a Black teenager from Chicago who was visiting relatives in Mississippi. White men kidnapped, tortured, shot, and dumped him in a river for whistling at a white shopkeeper. His killing drew global outrage and galvanized civil rights activists.
Now the state of Mississippi is adding to its collection of artifacts from the crime — the murder weapon.
"This is a pistol that we believe is the weapon that was used to kill Emmett Till," says Nan Prince, director of collections for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. She's in a basement conservation lab, with the gun and its leather holster carefully laid out on a rolling cart.
"It's a hard item to see," she says. "I've been in this field for a long time, and I've never had an artifact affect me quite like this…especially when you know how it was used and just the hatred that must have led to its use that night."
"It's been something that I've always wondered about for 70 years," says Wheeler Parker Jr., Emmett Till's cousin. They were close, growing up next door to one another in Chicago.
In the summer of 1955, Till, age 14, and Parker, 16, made the trip together to visit relatives in Mississippi. He is the last living eyewitness to what happened 70 years ago.
Now 86, his memories are still vivid. Parker recalls that a group of cousins had finished in the cotton fields and drove over to Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Miss. As they left, he says, Till tried to be a jokester, not understanding how dangerous that could be in the Jim Crow South.
"Pretty soon, Mrs. Bryant comes out of the store. And Emmett, being like he was — love to make you laugh — he gave her the wolf whistle."
A few days later, on Aug. 28, Carolyn Bryant's husband, Roy, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, showed up in the wee hours of the morning at the house of Till's great uncle, where they were staying. Wheeler says he heard them demanding the boys from Chicago.
"They walked in my room with a pistol in one hand, a flashlight in the other. I just kind of closed my eyes waiting to be shot," Parker recalls. But they left him there and found Till in another bedroom.
"They took him, and that was the last time we saw him alive."
Till's bloated and beaten body was later found floating in the Tallahatchie River, weighted down by a fan from a cotton gin tied around his neck with barbed wire.
Parker says it's a traumatic memory, but he's committed to keep telling the story of what happened to Emmett Till.
"It's an ugly story. It's not a pretty story. Any way you cut it and look at it, it's sad."
But he says it's important to remember, especially now, when some elected officials, including President Trump, are fighting against an unvarnished telling of America's darkest history.
"They don't want these stories told," says Parker. "It's American history. And they want to wipe it out. They want to pretend like it never happened. But we need to tell the story."
Parker welcomes news that the murder weapon will now be on display at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.
"I think it gives validity to it," Parker says. "I think it's a good thing. It helps bring closure, as far as I'm concerned."
The gun belonged to J.W. Milam, according to Prince. His initials are carved into the leather holster.
Back in 1955, an all-white jury acquitted Milam and Bryant of the crime, but the men later confessed to a Look magazine reporter. The gun was never entered into evidence, but Prince says the FBI has confirmed that the serial number on the gun matches the number the FBI had when it reopened the Till case in the early 2000s. New documents from that investigation have just been released by the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board.
The Foundation for Mississippi History purchased the gun and donated it to the state archives. It had been in the possession of a family in the Mississippi Delta who asked to remain anonymous.
"It is a significant artifact, probably the most significant artifact that's come in in my time here," Prince says.
Museum Director Michael Morris says it adds to what's known about the Till lynching.
"He was brutally tortured, but he was also shot before he was dumped into the river," says Morris. "This weapon just allows us to tell a fuller story about what happened to him."
Morris says it belongs in the state's civil rights museum because it's part of what shaped Mississippi.
"A lot of the folks that I've met through the years that got involved in the movement, they all point back to the impact of the murder of Emmett Till, and that's what galvanized them to be a part of the movement."
Till's mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, held an open casket funeral so the world could see what they'd done to her son.
"The murder of Emmett Till was a pivotal event in the history of Mississippi and the country," says Katie Blount, director of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, a state agency.
Mississippi is moving forward with history exhibits like this at a time when Trump is attacking the Smithsonian Institution and other museums for being too "woke" in the way they portray difficult American history.
Blount says she has not experienced that same backlash in conservative Mississippi, where state lawmakers allocated $90 million to build the archives' Two Mississippi Museums, including the civil rights museum that opened in 2017. Then, in his first term, Trump spoke at the dedication.
"We've always had very strong support from the Mississippi Legislature," she says. "I mean, the stories of Mississippi history are the central stories in American history."
She says it's something the archives has been doing since 1984, when it set up a permanent civil rights exhibit in the old state capitol. Then in 1998, it released a trove of documents from the state's Sovereignty Commission, a secret segregation agency that spied on civil rights activists.
"So in a sense, we are today just doing what the department has always done, which is telling in a very even, balanced, and accurate way the stories that make up our state."
Blount says the agency has long worked to preserve the artifacts and sites associated with Emmett Till's murder, but had never located the gun. Then it surfaced in a history of the case published last year called "The Barn" by Wright Thompson.
Thompson says when he found out about it, the gun was stored in a safety deposit box in Greenwood, Miss., where it had been for decades. He's relieved that the state now has it.
"I think it's really important that this thing be sort of safe in the context of a museum and not just floating out in the world," says Thompson, who lives in Oxford, Miss.
He says Mississippi telling the truth about Mississippi is a show of strength.
"In not being so scared of your past that you can't forge some brighter future," Thompson explains. "The most basic act of citizenship is to say 'this is what happened. This is who we are.'"
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