For more than 50 years, nothing marked the remote spot in northwest Mississippi where 14-year-old Emmett Till's body was pulled from the
Tallahatchie River in 1955, after he was dragged from a relative's home in the middle of the night and brutally lynched.
A sign marking the spot where Till's mutilated body was pulled from the
Tallahatchie River has been torn down, riddled with bullets and replaced twice since 2007.
Located on the banks of the
Tallahatchie River, these rustic, two- to four-room cabins take guests back to when so many great Blues artists were shaping the music scene.
"One of those alternatives is a pilot project to pump groundwater from a well to be drilled near the
Tallahatchie River, pipe the water two miles to the west and reinject it to recharge the aquifer.
Days after the accusation, her husband and brother-in-law kidnapped Till from his great-uncle and great-aunt's house in the middle of the night, tortured him, shot him in the head, and then dumped his body in the
Tallahatchie River. Both men admitted to abducting Till but insisted at trial that they had returned him safely to his great-uncle's home later that night.
In the summer of 1955, a 14-year-old black boy named Emmett Till was abducted at gunpoint by white men in Money, Mississippi, then beaten, shot in the head, and thrown into the
Tallahatchie River. Till, who lived in Chicago and was in Mississippi visiting relatives, was killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman in a store.
Till's bloated, mutilated body soon bubbled up in the
Tallahatchie River; these murders were so common in Mississippi, and so overlooked elsewhere, it might have gone unaddressed.
It covered the
Tallahatchie River, the Turkish coast
But by Glendora, the silence had become more pointed, more a response to the exhumation, not of Tills physical body, but the relations that had buried it, bound to a steel ventilator fan, in a tributary of the
Tallahatchie River.
In the wee hours of the night, two white men kidnapped Emmett from his family's home, mercilessly beat him, took him to the banks of the
Tallahatchie River and shot him in the head, then tied the metal fan of a cotton gin around his neck with barbed wire and pushed him in.
We know about Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old Chicago boy, who on a visit to Mississippi, had the temerity to speak to--or maybe whistle at--a white woman and was then taken from his uncle's barn, beaten, one of his eyes was cut out, and then shot through the head and his body weighted down by a 70-pound cotton gin and barbed wire before being dumped into the
Tallahatchie River.