*A mystery has surrounded the tragic case of Emmett Till for more than six decades and it centers on a photo of his white classmates, particularly a white girl, who Till joked was his “girlfriend” when he visited Mississippi back in 1955.
Sixty-three years later, that girl, Joan Brody, is telling her story publicly for the first time.
Till, 14, was abducted Aug. 28, 1955, and murdered after supposedly whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in a grocery store in Money, Mississippi.
J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant were acquitted in his murder but later confessed in a 1956 Look magazine story by journalist William Bradford Huie, USA Today noted.
Till’s murderers “killed him because he boasted of having a white girl and showed them the picture of a white girl in Chicago,” Huie told filmmakers for the 1987 documentary “Eyes on the Prize.”
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In the doc, Till’s cousin Curtis Jones mentioned that Till had a “picture of some white kids that he had graduated from elementary school with … female and male.”
The girl in the photo has long been an enigma… but now, 63 years later, she has been identified as Joan Brody, who gave her first interview to the Clarion-Ledger about her relationship with Till.
The documentary’s producer, Henry Hampton, told NPR that Till showed this school photo to his folks in Mississippi, pointing to a white girl and saying she was “his girlfriend. In fact, it was his classmate.”
Upon hearing the audio interview, Brody said, “That had to be me.”
She was the only white girl in Till’s class.
“He had beautiful eyes,” she recalled while confirming that the two had quite the friendly relationship. It was at their graduation where the photo was apparently taken, but Brody said, “I had no interest in it.”
She never saw Till again…but would eventually learn about the circumstances surrounding his tragic death.
“He wasn’t a smart-alecky kid,” she said. “He wasn’t a person to smart off to a white woman or any woman.”
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