Alarm scares off white supremacists at Emmett Till marker

Numerous news organizations are showing surveillance videos of a white supremacist group gathered at the new, bulletproof Emmett Till marker at the spot where the young man met his demise in 1955.

The videos clearly show a group of men holding the Mississippi state flag and the League of the South flag. In one, a man can be clearly heard. “We are here at the Emmett Till monument that represents the Civil Rights Movement for blacks,” the man says. “What we want to know is where are all the white people.”

When an alarm sounds, the men scatter and run to their cars.

As investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell noted to WJTV, almost every courthouse in Mississippi has a monument to Confederate Civil War soldiers.

“I’m not sure what particular marker they’re saying doesn’t exist,” Mitchell said.

Reportedly, the group was in the process of shooting a promotional video. Their identities are unknown.

Till, 14 at the time of his death, was lynched in 1955 after he supposedly whistled at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman. The men responsible for the lynching admitted to the crime in a magazine interview after an all-white jury set them free. In 2017, Bryant admitted she made up the story.

The murder is widely regarded as the spark responsible for kindling the flame of the Civil Rights Movement.

Till’s memorial has been repeatedly vandalized and replaced.

White supremacists gathered around civil rights martyr Emmett Till’s memorial today with a Mississippi Flag & a League of the South flag to film a racist propaganda video. The Emmett Till Interpretive Center’s security cams at the now-bulletproof monument caught them. 1/ pic.twitter.com/hDIAUUi52D

— Ashton Pittman (@ashtonpittman) November 3, 2019

Another video of the white supremacy group, here is them running after our security system goes off. pic.twitter.com/Tsqgb1Vs2z

— Emmett Till’s Memory Lives (@EmmeTillcenter) November 3, 2019