OCEAN SPRINGS, Miss. – The widow of one of two men acquitted in the civil rights era murder of Chicago teenager Emmett Till in Money, Miss. has died.
Mary Milam will be laid to rest following a Saturday funeral at the Ocean Springs Chapel of Bradford. Authorities had accused her late husband J.W. Milam and his half-brother, Roy Bryant, of beating Till, shooting him in the head, weighing down his dead body and dumping it in a river in 1955. His body was found by a fisherman.
The 14-year-old was visiting family in the Delta over the summer and had whistled at Bryant’s wife just a few days earlier. An all-white jury acquitted both Milam and Bryant, but they later confessed in a magazine report.
Mary Milam was 87. Her husband, J.W. Milam, died in1980.
