In Mississippi, a former Miss Mississippi, a D.C. community activist, and a New York filmmaker stood alongside members of Emmett Till’s family Monday during a rally in the Magnolia state.
Till is the 14-year old-boy that traveled from Chicago to Money, Mississippi, in 1955 to visit family, and was brutally murdered there.
Organizers of the rally and family members are asking for three things. They want justice for Emmett Till’s murder. They want an apology from Carolyn Bryant Dunham, the woman who admitted to lying about Till making sexual advancements towards her and ultimately led to her husband and his half-brother killing Till. And they want racial reconciliation for the state of Mississippi.
“Emmett didn’t deserve this. As a community, we didn’t deserve this. And we’re not just going to sit back and let Carolyn Bryant get away with this,” says Airickca Gordon-Taylor, Emmett Till’s Cousin. “We want justice. We don’t want immunity. They talking about she too old. Put a rocking chair in that cell, give her some yarn and some needles and let her rock in her chair.”
At the end of the rally, organizers said they wanted the attorney general to do the right thing and re-open the Till case after Bryant-Dunham’s admission of a lie.
They also had a voter demonstration drive to register people in the state, to get lawmakers out of office if they didn’t, in their words, stand for truth and justice.
