Seventy years after a murder that helped spark the civil rights movement, the gun believed to have killed Emmett Till is going on public display. The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson has acquired the .45-caliber pistol thought to have been used in the 1955 killing, reports NPR. The gun has the initials "JM" carved into its holster and belonged to JW Milam, one of Till's admitted killers, according to the museum. It had been in a safety deposit box for decades.
"I've been in this field for a long time, and I've never had an artifact affect me quite like this," says Nan Prince, director of collections for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. "Especially when you know how it was used and just the hatred that must have led to its use that night." In a piece for the Atlantic, Wright Thompson, the author of The Barn whose research helped relocate the weapon, describes getting the "heebie-jeebies" upon seeing it in person.
Museum officials and historians say the gun deepens the narrative of what happened that summer: Till, a Black teenager from Chicago, was kidnapped, tortured, shot, and dumped in a river after he was accused of whistling at a white woman in a grocery store. An all-white jury acquitted Milam and Roy Bryant, both of whom later gave a paid confession to Look magazine. "This is another object that needs to be around for generations of Mississippians to understand the state," the museum's Michael Morris tells the New York Times.
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