Bryant's Grocery & Meat Market — Money, Mississippi

Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market in the small Delta town of Money, Mississippi, is where 14-year-old Emmett Till reportedly made a comment to white shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant on 24 August 1955. Four days later, Carolyn's husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam abducted Till from his great-uncle's home, beat him savagely, shot him, and threw his body into the Tallahatchie River tied to a cotton gin fan. His mother Mamie Till-Mobley insisted on an open casket at his Chicago funeral so the world could see what had been done to her son. The photographs circulated internationally and became one of the galvanising events of the American Civil Rights Movement.

The acquittal of Bryant and Milam by an all-white jury — despite their later confessing to the killing in a protected magazine interview — is one of the most documented miscarriages of justice in American history. The murder of Emmett Till directly influenced the consciousness of a generation of Black Americans. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in Montgomery just months later; she later said she was thinking of Emmett Till. The connection to music runs through the entire tradition of blues, soul, and protest song — the Delta and the Civil Rights Movement are inseparable contexts.

The Bryant's Grocery building still stands but has deteriorated significantly and is privately owned. A historical marker is located near the site. The Emmett Till Interpretive Center in nearby Sumner, Mississippi, provides extensive historical context. The site is of profound historical and cultural significance — the kind of place where the conditions that produced American music, and the costs of those conditions, are made immediate and unavoidable.