So we’re throwing Timothy Tyson out of academia for this, right?
The press was not particularly curious about this hoax when they talked to the culprit
Dear Friend,
I imagine you saw this week’s news that the Justice Department closed the Emmett Till case. The reporting has been pretty bad, and as a result, the Twitter takes have been horrible. Everyone was in a rush to get comments from the surviving Till family lamenting that no one will ever be jailed for the famous murder, but no one seemed to grasp that this was an investigation into a wild 2017 claim from an academic-slash-author who needs to be listed with Stephen Glass and Janet Cooke.
All the pieces are out in the public and no one has picked them up yet.
On Monday the Justice Department published an FBI report that made a bulletproof case that Tyson is a liar. Tyson is an academic associated with both Duke University and the University of North Carolina and wrote the 2017 book the Blood of Emmett Till.
The marketing position of this book is that Tyson sat down with Caroline Bryant Donham, the woman who in 1955 alleged that 14-year-old Emmett Till made sexual remarks to her and grabbed her wrist while she was working the counter at a grocery store to show off to his cousins. Enraged, her husband and a male relative later tortured and murdered Till over this incident. Tyson wrote that during his 2008 interview with her, Bryant confessed that she made it all up and Till never sexually harassed her.
She didn’t, but Tyson claimed she did, and we can prove beyond a doubt that Tyson made it up.
Famously, the two murderers were found not guilty by an all-white jury, but we know they did it because they confessed in a paid magazine interview knowing they couldn’t be prosecuted a second time. This week’s stories in the New York Times, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and other major news stories all framed the story the same way - that the FBI couldn’t prove that Bryant recanted her story. This is told as a he-said, she-said problem and we can’t prove if 87-year-old Bryant is the one telling the truth or if it’s civil rights historian Tyson.
Yet, we can tell, and all the proof is public information and readily available.
CNN’s report by Laura Jarrett is the only one that bothered to say that the FBI found inconsistent statements from Tyson but unfortunately didn’t tell the reader what those inconsistencies are. Fortunately, the very, very public Notice to Close File from the Justice Department tells us exactly what they were. This document proves everything.
When this claim about Bryant recanting her long-held narrative first surfaced in 2017, Tyson’s public explanation was that he was still setting up his tape recorder when she said it, but he did take notes.
My thought was always, well, why didn’t he ask her to elaborate on it when his tape recorder was going? This claim Tyson is making is something that will end up in the history books about this major event, and the only evidence is going to be one guy's word for it? This can’t be an acceptable academic standard.
The FBI agents who investigated the claim did historians a favor. They also were able to listen to the tapes and read all of his notes. Tyson would have us believe that she dropped this bomb on him and he not only failed to ask her any follow-up questions, but when she later told her version of events where Emmett Till comes into the store, she told the version where he says crude things and grabs her. Tyson just sits there and never objects.
Let’s rewind a bit. This in-person interview was back in 2008. The impression I got is that Bryant and her adult daughter contacted Tyson because they were writing about the event and he was a local historian who specializes in the civil rights movement. He interviewed her and did some editing on her draft, but his editing remarks made no objections to the version of events she described. There was some disagreement about what he was supposed to do for them and he said nothing public about Bryant making a confession until his book was published in 2017.
There’s a lot more. Tyson and his assistant originally said they had Bryant's confession on tape, then later said the assistant must have lost it, then arrived upon the story that he knew his tape recorder wasn’t running when she confessed.
The FBI also noted that in a media interview about the book, Tyson said Bryant’s family was upset about the attention they were getting but had no disagreements with the facts presented in the book, yet the FBI read emails from Bryant and her family where they denied the confession happened. When asked to talk, Tyson offered to send them a copy of the book.
Before I forget, Tyson is white.
I wish New York Times writers Audra D.S. Burch and Tariro Mzezewa would have read this public report before they included remarks from Tyson where he said he took “detailed” notes from his interview with Bryant. Perhaps he could respond to the part where the FBI report read:
“The recording/transcripts of Tyson’s interviews with XXXXX do not include a recantation or provide context to Tyson’s sparse handwritten notes, and the notes themselves do not corroborate Tyson’s assertion that XXXXX recanted.”
Bryant’s name has been redacted throughout the report. Note that the FBI called Tyson’s notes “sparse” and they do not include an actual quote of Bryant confessing to having made up her story.
Look, I wasn’t there. I don’t know what actually happened in that store between Emmett Till and Caroline Bryant. You can’t prove a negative. But I do know that Tim Tyson has created an urban legend that Bryant confessed and that urban legend is everywhere. Just look on social media for the names Emmett Till, Carolyn Brant, or Timothy Tyson.
Here’s a Tweet from an account with nearly 175,000 followers:
It’s like the investigation never happened.
This one has 255,000 followers:
And if that’s not enough, here’s an account with 710,000 followers, once again painting Bryant as a liar responsible for Till’s death:
Whenever someone writes about a radioactive issue they include a neat, tidy paragraph clarifying what they aren’t saying. Such as “I am not saying he deserved it.”
They get dragged anyways, of course, because outrage ignores disclaimers.
So here’s that paragraph. Emmett Till, even if he did everything Bryant claimed he did, did not deserve to be lynched. Bryant says so herself to this day. Absolutely no one on my radar, myself included, thinks his torture and murder were justified. Neil Steinberg made this case eloquently in a piece this week called It doesn’t matter if Till whistled.
And because we all agree that Till was not accused of anything that justified his horrible death, we should be honest about what we know - and what we don’t know - about the incident between him and Bryant. The competing versions of events are Bryant’s version, a version where Till did something milder like whistling at her from outside, and a version where he had no interaction with her whatsoever.
When I read about the case in college, I became aware of one of many memorials to Till that declare he “flirted” with Bryant. This sounded like an unethical spin on unwanted advances, yet I couldn’t find a single case of a feminist group objecting to that language. Here we had a direct conflict of two competing ideas - that women never lie about sexual assault, and a claim that Bryant invented a tale to have a black boy murdered by her racist husband and his accomplice.
It looks like no one on the left wants to even address that contradiction between two of their factions.
I think what’s going on is parallel to climate change denial. The problem of man-made climate change implies a government intervention is required to solve it, so many people on the right deny that a problem exists to avoid discussing a solution. See also Covid denial among people who oppose lockdowns.
If Till never harassed Bryant - if she made it all up - then there’s no uncomfortable contradiction of values to address.
Imagine if her version is correct: A 21-year-old woman working at a small grocery store in 1950’s Mississippi is minding her own business when a stranger corners her and makes a series of crude sexual suggestions. When she hands him his change he seizes her by the wrist. She’s terrified, and another woman in the store is her only witness, but she decides not to tell her husband out of fear of what he might do. Her racist husband finds out through town gossip anyways and goes berserk. What did she do wrong?
I don’t know if those details are all true, but they are her version and they are entirely plausible. If accurate, it magnifies the horror of strangers publicly calling for her blood 66 years later.
Timothy Tyson provided something people on the left wanted - a simple, clean version of events where all of the thorny details have been cleared away. Now we know he didn’t merely lack hard evidence of his claim, but made it all up.
But the press didn’t notice and hardly anyone online is talking about his fabrication. Do other historians know that he is a fraud and a liar? Will they remove him from academia, recall his books, and treat his entire body of work with suspicion?
Witness Willie Louis also testified that 3 blackmen took part in the beating and kidnapping of Emmett....somehow never mentioned by journalists...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Louis
So Emmett liked to grab them by the p*ssy?
#BelieveAllWomen