A gun used during the killing of Emmett Till is now on display at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. It’s a grim artifact from the 1955 lynching of a Black teenager at the hands of angry white men – a crime that galvanized the Civil Rights Movement.
“One of the reasons why this civil rights museum was created is to tell the unvarnished truth about what happened in terms of the Civil Rights Movement here in Mississippi,” Michael Morris, director of the Two Mississippi Museums, said during a news conference Thursday. “That’s our mission, and I think the acquisition of this artifact is a part of our mission.”
The Foundation for Mississippi History acquired the .45-caliber pistol and holster for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. The items came from “a Mississippi family that is not connected to the case,” the department said in a press release Thursday, the 70th anniversary of Till’s lynching.
The gun was once owned by J.W. Milam, one of the two white men charged with murder in Till’s death and acquitted by an all-white jury weeks after the killing. The weapon was later owned by someone else.
Acquisition of the gun happened under the condition that those who most recently had the weapon would remain anonymous, said Morris, who oversees the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and the adjoining Museum of Mississippi History. Morris did not disclose other terms.
“We thought we had a moral obligation to go out and try to acquire it,” Morris said. “Once we got acquisition of it, the question became: Should we put it on display? And we didn’t think that this was the kind of artifact that we wanted to just put away in a drawer somewhere.”
The gun and holster were added to an exhibit that tells the story of Till’s lynching.
Nan Prince, the department’s director of collections, said the gun is “a very hard thing to see.”
“This weapon has affected me moreso than any other artifact that I’ve encountered in my 30-year museum career,” Prince said. “The emotions that are centered around it are hard, and a hard thing to see and a hard thing to convey.”
In August 1955, 14-year-old Till traveled from Chicago to the Mississippi Delta to visit his cousins. Till and other young Black people went to buy snacks one day at Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market in the tiny community of Money. Till’s cousin Simeon Wright later said he heard Till whistle at the white storekeeper, Carolyn Bryant, as they left.
Days later, a group that included Carolyn’s husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother Milam kidnapped Till from the home of Till’s great uncle, Moses Wright. They took Till to a barn, where they beat, tortured and shot him. Milam is believed to have used the .45 to pistol-whip and fatally shoot Till.
The group dumped Till in the Tallahatchie River, using barbed wire to attach a 75-pound cotton gin fan to him. Till’s body was discovered three days later, decomposed beyond recognition except for his father’s ring on one of his fingers.
Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago so people could see what had been done to her son, and Jet magazine published a photo of his brutalized body.
An all-white jury in Mississippi acquitted Milam and Bryant of Till’s murder in September 1955. Months later, Milam and Bryant admitted their involvement to Look magazine.
In World War II, Milam served as a lieutenant in the Army Air Force and brought back the Ithaca Model M1911-A1 .45-caliber pistol, which has the serial number 2102279.
Morris said the department notified Till’s relatives about the Department of Archives and History’s acquisition of the gun. The department’s press release said Wheeler Parker, a cousin who was in the home when Till was kidnapped, thanked the department for acquiring and displaying the artifacts.
“I think it’s good because it brings closure,” Parker said. “I hope you guys can find the ring and cotton gin.”
Filmmaker Keith Beauchamp discovered the existence of the .45 pistol while working on his 2005 documentary, “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till.” He shared the email with FBI agent Dale Killinger, who investigated the Till case.
The owner of the weapon had kept it in a safety deposit box in a Greenwood bank, according to Wright Thompson’s book, “The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.”
During the FBI’s 2005 investigation into the case, the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office in Illinois did an autopsy that found Till’s cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head.
This announcement about the department’s acquisition of the gun comes a week after the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board released more than 6,500 pages of documents on Till’s case.
It’s the second murder weapon in possession of the Department of Archives and History. The first is the .30-06 rifle used in 1963 to kill Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers, which can be seen at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.
Mississippi Today’s Jerry Mitchell contributed to this report.
