Seventy years after the brutal lynching of Emmett Till, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum has acquired and placed on public display the pistol believed to have fired the fatal shot that ended the 14-year-old’s life. The acquisition, announced on August 28, 2025, marks a poignant and challenging moment in the ongoing effort to confront and preserve the most painful chapters of American history.
Emmett Till, a Black teenager from Chicago, was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi in the summer of 1955. What began as a lighthearted attempt to make his cousins laugh—whistling at a white shopkeeper, Carolyn Bryant—unleashed a nightmarish sequence of events. According to NPR, just days after the incident at Bryant’s Grocery, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, arrived at the home of Till’s great uncle in the dead of night. Armed with a pistol and a flashlight, they demanded the Chicago boys. Wheeler Parker Jr., Till’s cousin and the last living eyewitness, recalled, “They walked in my room with a pistol in one hand, a flashlight in the other. I just kind of closed my eyes waiting to be shot.” But the men left him and found Till in another room. “They took him, and that was the last time we saw him alive.”
Till’s mutilated body was later discovered in the Tallahatchie River, weighted down by a cotton gin fan tied with barbed wire. The sheer brutality of his murder—he was pistol-whipped, tortured, shot, and dumped—shocked the nation. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on an open casket funeral, forcing the world to confront the horror of racial violence in America. As Michael Morris, executive director of Two Mississippi Museums, told NPR, “He was brutally tortured, but he was also shot before he was dumped into the river. This weapon just allows us to tell a fuller story about what happened to him.”
The newly acquired artifact is a .45-caliber Army issue pistol, stamped United States Property. Its leather holster bears the carved initials “J. M.,” for J.W. Milam, and the name Tippo, the Delta town where Milam lived before serving in World War II. The gun, as described by curator Nan Prince of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, “is a hard item to see. I’ve been in this field for a long time, and I’ve never had an artifact affect me quite like this…especially when you know how it was used and just the hatred that must have led to its use that night.”
The FBI, which reopened the Till case in the early 2000s, confirmed that the serial number on the gun matches their case files. The weapon had not been entered into evidence during the original trial, where an all-white jury acquitted Milam and Bryant. Yet, the men later confessed to the killing in an interview with Look magazine. The gun itself spent decades locked away in a safety deposit box in Greenwood, Mississippi, owned by the descendants of a crop-duster pilot who had inherited it from his father. Its existence and provenance were revealed in Wright Thompson’s 2024 book, The Barn, which chronicled the search for the weapon and its journey into state hands. As Thompson recounted in The Atlantic, “Goodwin thought the gun needed to be in a museum, where it could teach a lesson, rather than just floating out there, its menace remaining somehow alive.”
The Foundation for Mississippi History purchased the gun and donated it to the state archives. Now, it sits in the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, part of the Two Mississippi Museums complex built with $90 million allocated by the state legislature. The museum’s exhibit, which includes a video narrated by Oprah Winfrey about Mamie Till-Mobley’s courage, aims to tell the full story of the lynching and its reverberations through American history. A statue of Emmett Till was also unveiled in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 2022, further cementing his legacy in the state’s landscape.
For those closest to the tragedy, the gun’s public display represents both pain and progress. Parker, now 86, told NPR, “It’s an ugly story. It’s not a pretty story. Any way you cut it and look at it, it’s sad. But we need to tell the story.” He added, “I think it gives validity to it. I think it’s a good thing. It helps bring closure, as far as I’m concerned.”
The timing and context of the acquisition are especially significant. As debates rage nationally over how American history should be taught and remembered, Mississippi officials have emphasized their commitment to telling the truth, even when it is uncomfortable. Katie Blount, director of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, noted, “The stories of Mississippi history are the central stories in American history.” She described how the department has long worked to preserve sites and artifacts linked to Till’s murder, releasing documents and setting up permanent civil rights exhibits as early as 1984. “We are today just doing what the department has always done, which is telling in a very even, balanced, and accurate way the stories that make up our state.”
This commitment stands in contrast to recent federal pressures. As The Atlantic reported, the Smithsonian Institution and other museums have faced calls from the Trump administration to edit or downplay difficult episodes in American history. Yet, in Mississippi—a state with a deeply complicated past—there appears to be bipartisan support for confronting that history head-on. The museum’s existence owes itself to the efforts of both liberal and conservative leaders, united in the belief that the truth must be preserved.
Wright Thompson, reflecting on the broader meaning of the gun’s display, observed, “The acquisition of the gun matters then, in Mississippi especially, because during a summer when all the political momentum favors rewriting history, there are still people here telling the truth about the past.” He sees the exhibit as an act of “institutional hope,” a sign that Mississippians, across race and political lines, are choosing remembrance over erasure. “Installing J.W. Milam’s pistol in a museum is an investment in that aspiration, the work of a state strong enough to look its past in the eye; humble enough to pray for the arc to still bend, even a little, toward justice.”
As visitors file past the glass case containing the faded blueish nickel pistol, they are confronted not just with an object, but with the weight of memory and the challenge of reckoning. In a year marked by political and cultural battles over history, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum’s new exhibit stands as a testament to the enduring power—and necessity—of facing the truth, no matter how difficult.
