She and her husband were the owners of a small rural grocery store.
In 1955, Carolyn Bryant was a strikingly beautiful 21-year-old Mississippi woman, who had married into a rough and violent working-class family. And she seemed like pretty much any kind of Methodist church lady I've ever known in my life." "I went to her house I walked in the door. Carolyn Bryant had been at the center of one of the country's most infamous racial slayings - the killing of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. "You know I sort of pretended she hadn't said it and was getting off the phone, and then she said, 'You might know my mother-in-law, her name was Carolyn Bryant?' " A fan was on the other end raving about how much her mother-in-law loved his memoir and she wanted to meet him. Tyson's life and worldview were never the same.Ī few weeks after Blood Done Sign My Name's publication, Tyson got a phone call. His father, a Methodist minister, sided with the town's black community and was excoriated as a white traitor. Blood Done Sign My Name is a searing memoir of a racial killing in his hometown of Oxford, N.C., in 1970. Although the case is now 63 years old, a recent book has spurred the Department of Justice to reopen the investigation into his death.ĭuke professor Tim Tyson has written civil rights history books that have brought national acclaim. He was a boy from Chicago, visiting his relatives. 28, 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was gruesomely lynched in the small town of Money, Miss. The FBI has reopened the investigation into his lynching. The 14-year-old was killed in Mississippi in 1955. A plaque marks the gravesite of Emmett Till at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Ill.