The woman who claimed a black teenager named Emmett Till whistled at her, along with grabbing and verbally assaulting her, now says she fabricated parts of her testimony. The accusations made by Carol Bryant led to Till’s 1955 murder by a pair of Bryant’s enraged white acquaintances.
In the new book, The Blood of Emmett Till, Bryant says the more sensational aspects of her claims were fiction. Bryant now admits that claims of Till’s verbal and physical advances were simply not true. The book by historian Timothy B. Tyson is being released tomorrow and excerpted in Vanity Fair magazine.
The acquittal of those charged with Till’s murder sparked outrage and is regarded as one of the igniting factors of the civil rights movement.
For a NY Times review of ‘The Blood of Emmett Till‘, click here.
