Historical Recreation of the Emmett Till Murder
The play, the Carolyn Bryant Project re-creates one of the greatest miscarriages of justice perpetrated on African Americans in the Jim Crow South.
Emmett “Bobo” Till, a 14-year old Chicago youth, walked into a store in Money, Mississippi to purchase 5-cents worth of bubble gum from Carolyn Bryant, a 21-year old, white mother of two. Within a few days of this interaction, Till’s beaten and bloated body was found tied to a cotton-gin fan in a shallow part of the Tallahatchie River. Bryant’s husband Roy and his brother JW Milan would be acquitted of Till’s murder by an all-white male jury, only to confess to the murder a year later in a Look Magazine article.
What happened in those fateful minutes shared between Bryant and Till in the store? Creators Nataki Garrett and Andrea LeBlanc compile historical transcripts, video imagery, and re-imagined encounters to expose what lies beneath the exchange between Carolyn Bryant and Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, in a play called The Carolyn Bryant Projecté
The Carolyn Bryant Project. Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Nov-9 til Nov 22,
Free-online: centerfornewperformance.org/streaming.