Michael Rosa, 37, of little Itta Bena, Mississippi, lost a research paper he wrote as a college student. “I wish I had been a more serious student then. I wish I had realized what he had written and the significance,” he said.

Rosa remembers turning in her paper and then forgetting about it until this fall, 15 years later, when she took a graduate class in political science.

Once again, you have been asked to write a research paper and it is due in two weeks.

Both tasks? Write about a significant incident in Mississippi black history.

If Rosa could figure out how to get her hands on the article she wrote in 1994 about Emmett Till, an article that included a personal interview with one of Till’s killers, Roy Bryant, the task would have a more personal meaning today, she said.

“Back then, we didn’t have computers, printers or photocopiers. But I wish I could get the original paper back. That would certainly help with this task,” he said.

Rosa has a fascinating story to tell, even if she can’t bring back the most important student paper she’s ever written, probably the most historically important paper she’ll ever write.

Rosa was studying black history at Valley State University, the small historically black college near her hometown in the heart of the Mississippi Delta in 1994 when a black history professor issued the first assignment coming close to the project she is currently trying to finish.

For the first time, Rosa knew early on that she wanted to write about Till, a 14-year-old Chicago student who was murdered while visiting relatives in the Delta in 1955. The event is said to have sparked the modern civil rights movement and is a piece of history that has gained interest in recent years as the FBI investigated this civil rights cold case.

This fall, Till’s original coffin was moved to the Smithsonian museum for protection and eventual display, after the Chicago cemetery where his body is buried was subject to grave robberies. Till’s grave was unscathed, but his original coffin was found abandoned in an old shed.

In addition, the race for historical research is on in Mississippi as the state prepares to move into the future, with a new commitment that its schoolchildren learn the truth about their state’s civil rights past. The classroom program is the result of a law passed in 2006 by the Legislature and is planned to be implemented statewide for the 2010-2011 school year.

Rosa knew about Till because the murder was so shocking that it made international news in 1955, just a year after the US Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education declaring the end of segregated schools. Till’s murder took place near Rosa’s hometown.

Till, visiting relatives in the Delta, allegedly whistled at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, who with her husband ran a small grocery store in Money, a nearby cotton village even smaller than Itta Bena.

Rosa was working on her first school assignment in 1994 when her cousin, Pete Walker, asked her about her work. It turned out that Rosa’s grandfather, “probably a Klansman”, had broken Till’s killers out of jail in nearby Greenwood.

“My grandfather, Landy Walker, lived in the same small town as Phillips, near Money. It was a small community and everyone helped each other, so that’s probably why my grandfather did this,” Rosa said.

The cousin told Rosa that he could help him with his investigative work by giving him the chance to meet first hand Roy Bryant, who with JW Milam killed the young visitor. They were never convicted, but later confessed to a reporter for a national magazine.

The two traveled to Ruleville, about 30 miles northwest of Itta Bena, where Rosa remembers meeting Bryant at his watermelon stand on the corner of the highway heading west toward Cleveland.

“He was cordial when I told him about my article. Then he went into great detail. He was giving his personal opinion about what happened that night – he didn’t really mention JW Milam (Till’s second killer) or anyone else, but he told me I realized that I hadn’t changed a bit since that night.

“He used the N word over and over, maybe 100 times, when he was telling me what happened. He first said, after his wife told him what Till had done, that he was just going to yell at the kid. But he said Emmett made some comments that pushed him overboard. So they killed him.”

Bryant told Rosa that he was very drunk that night and said that they killed Till and tied a gin fan around his neck while they were still in Drew. “It looked like Till was either dead or unconscious when they did that to him.”

Talking to Bryant was “…like talking to a cold-blooded killer. He showed absolutely no remorse. It was like he could vividly remember what happened that night.”

Rosa remembers that Bryant said that his wife, Carolyn, was with the men. “He said he came home to the store and she said Until [using a derogatory term] he had “come on with her”. Bryant said she went with him and Milam to her uncle’s house. [Rev. Moses Wright] kidnap Till and have her identify him, point him out.”

Rosa remembers Bryant explaining that Emmett Till was killed “because he didn’t understand where the hell he was, that he was in the South” and “because he wasn’t scared at all, like he should have been.”

Bryant was a bitter man who was angry at the white community for refusing to do business at his watermelon stand, Rosa said. “Bryant claimed that Milam ‘got all the money’ from the magazine interview. He died two weeks after we spoke.”

A racist grandparent can easily poison your family’s beliefs for generations to come. But the cycle was broken for Rosa, she says, because her grandmother made a difference. Rosa’s mother worked long hours and her maternal grandmother, “a kind soul”, took care of her.

The family was poor and lived on the outskirts of the city’s black side, where Rosa “saw racism on a daily basis growing up.”

Other white children went to the private white academy in town. But Rosa lived 100 feet from the public school and decided to go there, from elementary school to high school.

“Some of the white families got together and offered to pay my tuition at the white school. They didn’t want to see me go to public school with black children. I was the only white student.”

A neighbor once offered to pay for her education through college, if she switched to the private academy. “I told her ‘no’ and she said, ‘…well, at least don’t associate with any of them.'”

Rosa knew, since she was a child, that he did not want to “be like that.”

Recently, as a mentor at the public school, the administrator asked Rosa if she had any ideas on how to reach white children and get them to attend public school.

“It’s hard. When I was a kid, one side of town was completely white. Now there are only three white families left. Everyone else has moved to the country and homeschools or sends their kids to Pillow Academy in Greenwood.”

Meanwhile, Rosa said she plans to sit quietly and try to think and remember as much as she can about the interview she had with Roy Bryant all those years ago.

“I really remember most of what he said, very vividly. It’s an important story and I want to be able to pass it on to others.”