We're using augmented reality, a new approach to digital storytelling. Read about how to use it on your phone or tablet here. If you want to skip it for now, you can view an alternate immersive experience instead.

MONEY, Miss. — Along the edge of Money Road, across from the railroad tracks, an old grocery store rots.

In August 1955, a 14-year-old black boy visiting from Chicago walked in to buy candy. After being accused of whistling at the white woman behind the counter, he was later kidnapped, tortured, lynched and dumped in the Tallahatchie River.

The murder of Emmett Till is remembered as one of the most hideous hate crimes of the 20th century, a brutal episode in American history that helped kindle the civil rights movement. And the place where it all began, Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, is still standing. Barely.

Today, the store is crumbling, roofless and covered in vines. On several occasions, preservationists, politicians and business leaders — even the State of Mississippi — have tried to save its remaining four walls. But no consensus has been reached.

Some residents in the area have looked on the store as a stain on the community that should be razed and forgotten. Others have said it should be restored as a tribute to Emmett and a reminder of the hate that took his life.

As the debate has played out over the decades, the store has continued to deteriorate and collapse, even amid frequent cultural and racial reckonings across the nation on the fate of Confederate monuments. At stake in Money and other communities across the country is the question of how Americans choose to acknowledge the country’s past.

“It’s part of this bigger story, part of a history that we can learn from,” said the Rev. Wheeler Parker, 79, a pastor in suburban Chicago and a cousin of Emmett’s who went with him to Bryant’s Grocery that day. “The store should be one of the places we share Emmett’s story.”

(The Justice Department quietly reopened the Emmett Till case last year after Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white shopkeeper, recanted parts of her story.)

In and around the Delta, the memory of Emmett’s murder lingers.

The cotton gin from which the 75-pound fan that was tethered to his neck with barbed wire was stolen is now a small museum. There are informal tours of the abandoned bridge where his body was likely tossed into the river. The barn where he was brutally beaten is unmarked, but its owner allows the occasional visitor.

Emmett Till with his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, circa 1950. Everett Collection, via Alamy

And, on a larger stage, his story is the subject of upcoming feature films and books.

But not everybody sees the memorials the same way. Several historical markers put up to commemorate Emmett have repeatedly been vandalized, shot down and replaced.

To nurture racial reconciliation in the area, the Emmett Till Memorial Commission was founded in 2006. It restored the courtroom in Sumner where Emmett’s killers — Roy Bryant, the owner of the store in the 1950s, and his half brother, J.W. Milam — were acquitted. Outside, a marker commemorating Emmett stands steps from a monument honoring Confederate soldiers.

Ray Tribble, who sat on the jury of all-white men who acquitted Mr. Bryant and Mr. Milam, purchased the building that was once Bryant’s Grocery in the 1980s. He died in 1998. The store has been in the Tribble family ever since.

The family has all but refused to restore or sell the property. And it continues to wither away.

Drag image to explore The remnants of Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, in Money, Miss.

‘Tear Off the Scab’

Willie Williams and Donna Spell grew up about eight miles from each other in the Delta. They are 10 years apart in age. He learned about Emmett Till as a child. She learned about him as an adult. Mr. Williams is black. Ms. Spell is white.

Mr. Williams said his parents told him about Emmett’s story “as a way of being careful.” Ms. Spell said Emmett’s horrific death was not a story “my parents would have told their children.”

The two first met at a church event. Today, they both sit on the Emmett Till Memorial Commission, where they have since become friends.

“I did a lot of listening. And what I heard was a lot of pain,” said Ms. Spell, a longtime English teacher. “To move forward we’ve got to tell the story. We’ve got to tear off the scab and keep telling it.”

In 2006, the Emmett Till Memorial Highway was dedicated along a 32-mile stretch of U.S. 49 East. A year later, the commission presented an official apology to the Till family in the courthouse where the killers were acquitted.

Drag image to explore The Emmett Till Memorial Commission restored the courtroom in Sumner where Emmett’s killers were acquitted. The courtroom was segregated during the trial in 1955.

“Our community had been running from this since 1955,” said Patrick Weems, co-founder of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, a museum across from the courthouse that was started by the group.

The commission has since placed 11 historical markers at sites related to Emmett’s murder. One of them sits on a lonely dirt road next to rows and rows of cotton fields near Glendora, Miss. It’s a purple sign marking the nearby riverbank where Emmett’s body was recovered.

The sign has had to be replaced three times because of bullet holes and vandalism. Other civil rights markers in Mississippi have also been targeted — two years ago, vandals scraped the words and text off the Bryant’s Grocery marker, and “KKK” was once scrawled across the highway sign.

Several historical markers have been erected to honor Emmett. One of them, a purple sign marking the nearby riverbank where his body was recovered, has been repeatedly vandalized.

On a recent afternoon, one of the commission’s damaged signs rested on the floor of the museum. Mr. Weems leaned over it as he ran his fingers across the jagged holes.

“It’s been a struggle to keep those signs up,“ Mr. Weems said, “but we think it’s part of the front line of this tug of war between memory and how we negotiate our past and future.”

[For more coverage of race, sign up here to have our Race/Related newsletter delivered weekly to your inbox.]

Drag image to explore The riverbank where Emmett’s body was recovered.

Confronting History

Susan Glisson has worked with a half-dozen Mississippi towns on racial healing, including in Sumner with the Emmett Till Memorial Commission. After she retired as director of the University of Mississippi’s William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, she founded Sustainable Equity, a consulting firm focused on facilitating racial dialogue at universities, police departments, corporations and municipalities.

“When it works, we are able to get past the perspective of ‘I didn’t do it, I don’t know anybody that did it,’ and find the ways to honor the victims,” Ms. Glisson said.

When it doesn’t work, she went on, the resistance is stark: communities fracture, landmarks are neglected, significant events are lost or forgotten. These moments of tension and reckoning have buckled across America as small towns confront their racist histories.

In northwest Florida, an all-black town was wiped off the map by racial violence during the Rosewood massacre in 1923. The one house that survived — where black residents hid to escape the slaughter — is now owned by an 85-year-old Japanese widow, Fujiko Scoggins. Her daughter and son-in-law, both real estate agents, are selling the home.

A small heritage group wants to convert it into a Rosewood museum and garden, but hasn’t secured funding. Neighbors warned Ms. Scoggins’s son-in-law not to sell the house to black buyers, presumably to stop any commemoration of the massacre.

The historical marker and road sign have been repeatedly vandalized. “The message is they don’t want Rosewood or the massacre to be remembered,” said Sherry Dupree, founder of the Rosewood Heritage Foundation and a tour guide.

In Monroe, Ga., a racially violent chapter is commemorated annually. Two African-American married couples were murdered by a white mob near the Moore’s Ford Bridge, after a dispute with a farmer in 1946.

Since 2005, a group of actors and activists have gathered each year to re-enact what happened that July night. “The people in town pretty much ignore it now every year,” said Cassandra Greene, who directs the performances. “But it’s important to keep doing it as a reminder of racial injustices.”

Memorials have the power to invite meaningful race conversations, Ms. Glisson added, but the key is addressing stubborn attitudes, stereotypes and assumptions that have been hardened and passed down over generations. The difficulty is getting beyond feelings of recrimination and guilt.

‘It’s Been Complicated’

The price of Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, according to one Mississippi newspaper, is $4 million, but it’s hard to know more because the family has largely refused to talk publicly about it. Numerous messages and emails sent to the Tribbles for this story went unreturned.

In 2011, the family was awarded a $206,000 state civil rights grant to restore a gas station next to the store. At the time, the project’s architect described the store restoration as the next phase. Since 2015, Mr. Weems has negotiated with family members, to no avail.

There’s talk in town of a replica being built on state property across the street by one of the production companies filming movies about the Emmett Till case. That may be the only solution.

“It’s been complicated working with the family,” Mr. Weems said. “We have had off and on discussions with the Tribbles for about three years and it seems as if every time we get close, they move the goal post.

“And I still don’t know what they want,” he added. “I don’t know if it’s money or they want control of the story that’s told, which has direct legacy implications for their father. I am hopeful that one day they can see a positive legacy by reclaiming the past.”

Today, fewer than 100 people live in Money and most of the property, including the old Bryant’s Grocery store, is owned by the children of Ray Tribble.

Drag image to explore The barn where Emmett was brutally beaten is unmarked, but the owner allows the occasional visitor.

As early as 2004, local business and civic leaders reached out to the Tribble family in hopes of turning the store into a museum dedicated to Emmett or civil rights, or both, even in its current state of disrepair.

That same year, the roof caved in. Then Hurricane Katrina rumbled through in 2005, destroying much of what remained. Back then, the Tribble family agreed to work to rebuild the store. “We want to restore it,” Mr. Tribble’s son, Harold Ray Jr., told The Clarion Ledger in 2007. “It’s a part of history and it’s about to fall down.”

Nothing has been done. And every day, the store slips closer toward oblivion.

“Here is this ruin that a storm could blow over, and yet it’s still here,” said Dave Tell, an author and professor working on a new book about the Emmett Till case.

“The store is this great analogy to the story of Emmett Till, both long neglected, but both refuse to go away.”