Bryant's Grocery

Money is a railroad crossroads in Leflore County, named for a Mississippi senator, and Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market stood on a corner beside the tracks. On the evening of 24 August 1955, Emmett Till, fourteen and visiting from Chicago, went in with cousins and other Black teenagers from the nearby cotton fields. He was accused of whistling at Carolyn Bryant, the twenty-one-year-old wife of the owner, Roy Bryant, and what was said inside has been disputed ever since.

Days later Roy Bryant and his half-brother J. W. Milam took Emmett from the home of his great-uncle, Moses Wright, a sharecropper and preacher who lived nearby. They killed him, and his body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River. A Sumner jury acquitted both men in September 1955, and within months they described the killing to a magazine for pay.

What stands now is a collapsing shell overtaken by trees and vines, on private property, with a Mississippi Freedom Trail marker at the corner. Look from the road and do not go in. The president of the Mississippi Center for Justice has said that letting the walls fall is a way of letting the history fade. The Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner and the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center Museum in Glendora, which holds a replica of the store, keep the story in buildings that are meant to be entered.