It was the image of Emmett Till’s disfigured body, lying in an open casket for the world to see, that helped galvanize a movement. He had been beaten, but bullets also played a role in his death in 1955, fired from a weapon that was widely thought to be lost.
Now, the gun that is believed to have been used in 14-year-old Emmett’s murder — an Ithaca .45 caliber pistol — is on display at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, mounted in a display case.
The museum is set to announce the acquisition on Thursday, exactly seven decades after Emmett was killed in a Mississippi barn by two white men who were angered by allegations that he had whistled at a white woman in a grocery store while visiting from Chicago. The gun is going on display less than a week after the federal Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board released thousands of pages of documents related to the case.
“Now we have an artifact that we can clearly pinpoint to what happened in the barn,” said Daphne Chamberlain, a civil rights historian who works at the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, Miss. She added, “If this artifact is out there, what else is out there that has not yet been disclosed to the public or to a cultural institution for historic preservation?”
Photographs of Emmett’s body, which circulated after his mother insisted on an open casket and allowed Black journalists to document his funeral, helped to set in motion the civil rights movement.
But there was little justice for his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, and her family. Two men were tried for the killing — Roy Bryant, whose wife, Carolyn, claimed that Emmett had whistled at her in their family’s grocery store, and his half brother, J.W. Milam — but they were quickly acquitted by an all-white jury. They later confessed to the beating and murder in an interview with Look magazine, which paid them for their story.
The two perpetrators are now dead, as are Carolyn Bryant Donham (who remarried twice) and several other witnesses who were called during the trial in 1955.
President Biden established a national monument in 2023 to Emmett and his mother, who devoted her life to seeking justice for her son. The monument, consisting of three sites in Illinois and Mississippi, came about after years of gunshot vandalism to historical markers placed along the river where his body had been dumped.
The gun’s whereabouts first came to light in 2004 when Keith Beauchamp, a filmmaker working on a documentary about Emmett, received an email with details about it. Mr. Beauchamp declined to say in an interview who had sent him the email, but said that he had spoken with the person.
Mr. Beauchamp turned the information over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which reopened its investigation into the murder and later exhumed Emmett’s body.
Dale Killinger, the case agent who oversaw the F.B.I. investigation in 2004, said he had interviewed the owner of the gun, took the weapon into evidence and had it tested for fingerprints and whether it matched lead that was found in Emmett’s body. The results were inconclusive, he said, and the gun was returned.
The gun is believed to have once belonged to Mr. Milam, who served in the Army during World War II, according to a redacted F.B.I. report, and to have been the weapon that was used to both whip and shoot Emmett
Museum officials declined to say who gave the gun to the museum, saying only that it had been in the care of a Mississippi family not directly connected to the Till case. The officials said the family has been in communication with the surviving members of Emmett’s family.
Mr. Killinger declined to say whether he knew who had possession of the gun over the decades, citing the confidentiality of his federal investigation in 2004.
Nan Prince, the museum’s director of collections, called the gun “a troubling and rare artifact.” She added that “it moved me immediately, knowing what had happened, what had precipitated the use of this item.”
There is some unease about the gun being on public display and under state ownership, with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in charge of in charge of the Two Mississippi Museums, which includes the civil rights museum. Mr. Beauchamp, the documentarian, called it “a fine line between educating people using artifacts and spectacle,” adding, “It doesn’t give Black America closure.”
But the museum also displays the gun used in the assassination of the civil rights leader Medger Evers in Jackson. Museum officials and others who have followed the Emmett Till case closely say that possession and display of the weapons — along with other painful symbols of American racism, like a Ku Klux Klan robe — allow for appropriate context and a physical reminder of accurate history.
“There are not a lot of objects that are still around that related to his murder,” Michael Morris, who oversees both the Museum of Mississippi History and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, said of Emmett. “This is another object that needs to be around for generations of Mississippians to understand the state.”
The federal records released last week include hundreds of letters that people sent to the F.B.I. after the two men were acquitted, pleading for federal intervention, as well as correspondence related to the government’s refusal to intercede.
Patrick Weems, executive director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, said that while the records did not reveal any surprises, they added to the understanding of what happened to Emmett and the seismic aftermath.
“This is another layer of the story, more texture than revelation,” Mr. Weems said. “You had the public calling on the F.B.I. and they were not willing to get involved.”
He added, “But there is still so much we don’t know.”
For example, Mr. Weems said, some researchers believe that Mr. Bryant and Mr. Milam were not the only people involved in the crime.
The records, available on the Civil Rights Cold Case Records portal, represent only a portion of the documents on the Till case held by the federal government. The board expects to release thousands more pages, possibly including material from the federal investigations in 2004 and 2017, by January 2027.
Those investigations did not yield new charges.
Emily Cochrane is a national reporter for The Times covering the American South, based in Nashville.
Audra D. S. Burch is a national reporter, based in South Florida and Atlanta, writing about race and identity around the country.
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