Country United States GNIS feature ID 673728 Local time Thursday 1:47 AM | Time zone Central (CST) (UTC-6) Elevation 42 m | |
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Weather 3°C, Wind NE at 6 km/h, 60% Humidity | ||
Money is an unincorporated Mississippi Delta community in Leflore County, Mississippi, United States near Greenwood. It has a population of less than 100, down from 400 in the early 1950s when a cotton mill operated in the community. It is on a railroad line and located along the Tallahatchie River, a tributary of the Yazoo River in the eastern part of the Mississippi Delta. Money is part of the Greenwood, Mississippi micropolitan area and has the ZIP code 38945.
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Map of Money, MS 38930, USA
It is notable as the site of the 1955 lynching murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till by white men, an event that gained nationwide attention. The suspects were acquitted by an all-white jury in 1955. They sold their story to LIFE magazine the next year and admitted their role in a 1956 interview.
History
This rural area was developed for cotton cultivation. A post office called Money was established in 1901. The community was named for Hernando Money, a United States Senator from Mississippi.
Murder of Emmett Till
Money became infamous for the murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy from Chicago, who was visiting his uncle Moses Wright in August 1955. Till was wrongly accused of flirting with Carolyn Bryant, a white woman working alone at Bryant's Grocery, a store which she owned with her husband Roy Bryant. In 2008 Bryant revealed that she had fabricated details of the encounter that she testified to.
Later Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, abducted, tortured and murdered Till because of the rumor that he had flirted with Bryant's wife. The pair were arrested and tried for the murder, but were acquitted by the all-white jury. Several months later, they confessed to the killing in an interview with William Bradford Huie published in the January 1956 issue of LIFE magazine.
Till's mother, Mamie Till Bradley, insisted on an open casket funeral in Chicago. She wanted people to see what had been done to her son, who had been badly beaten before his death. She allowed news photographs of his body to be published. National awareness was heightened of lynching in the South and the oppression and violence against blacks under Jim Crow. Many Southern historians suggest that the Emmett Till murder sparked a level of outrage that helped galvanize the civil rights movement of the 1960s, by drawing national attention to injustices in the South.
In popular culture
A wooden bridge crossing the Tallahatchie River at Money was referred to in Bobbie Gentry's 1967 hit song "Ode to Billie Joe." The November 10, 1967 issue of Life contained a photo of Gentry crossing the bridge. That bridge collapsed in June 1972 after being burned by vandals and has since been replaced.