Emmett Till
Excerpted From The Little Book of Lynching
By Meg Langford
CHAPTER SIX
EMMETT TILL, PART 1
"For the whole world to see ... "
Google Images; Emmett Till
“The small boy has morphed into a large, bloated mass of flesh after days in the water. The face has been beaten so badly that it--he--does not even look like a human being anymore, unless one could say with some degree of accuracy that the face on the corpse resembles that of the Elephant Man. This looks like the face of a monster, but herein lies the irony: this body, this boy, was not the monster. He was the victim of monsters.”
--“Wigger” Author’s Reaction
“Have you ever sent a loved son on vacation and had him returned to you in a pine box, so horribly battered and water-logged that someone needs to tell you this sickening sight is your son -- lynched?”
--Mamie Bradley, Mother of Emmett Till
The Murderer Milam’s confession:
“Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless. I’m no bully; I never hurt a nigger in my life. I like niggers -- in their place -- I know how to work ’em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain’t gonna vote where I live. If they did, they’d control the government. They ain’t gonna go to school with my kids. And when a nigger gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he’s tired o’ livin’. I’m likely to kill him. Me and my folks fought for this country, and we’ve got some rights. I stood there in that shed and listened to that nigger throw that poison at me, and I just made up my mind. ‘Chicago boy,’ I said, ‘I’m tired of ’em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I’m going to make an example of you -- just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.’ ”
Excerpted from ‘Look’ Magazine,
January 24th 1956
Available on emmetttillmurder.com
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Among the many moving and significant tributes to Emmett Till are two documentaries, both noteworthy, but available for view on YouTube at no cost. The first documentary, “The Murder of Emmett Till” was produced by Stanley Nelson for broadcast on PBS. The other is entitled “The Untold Story of Emmett Till,” and was produced by Keith Beauchamp after ten exhaustive years of research. I highly recommend both, for anybody who wants a deeper understanding of the American experience and the true fight for freedom and justice in this great country.
Please note that all quotations in this chapter ending with ‘03 refer to the 2003 PBS documentary, while all quotations ending in ‘05 are attributable to the 2005 Keith Beauchamp documentary. The author is grateful to have been able to cite from these films the keen insights into the hearts and minds of those involved in the Emmett Till murder and its aftermath.
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Mamie Till was a single mother, and it seemed that she was always destined to be so. And it further seemed that it was her destiny to keep her son Emmett right by her side, safe in her heart, until she died at the gentle old age of 81. For you see, her son Emmett was brutally murdered when he was just fourteen years old. Yet one could say that if anything, Emmett’s death brought the two of them closer than ever. She would spend her life fighting for his memory, and for the cause of civil rights. Her personal role in this fight was instigated by Emmett’s horrific and untimely death.
Mamie did well for herself and her family from the very beginning. Her family made a wise decision to leave Mississippi in 1922, when Mamie was just one year old, and they made a home for themselves in Chicago. As a young girl, Mamie attended Argo Community High School, which was predominantly white, and she went on to be only the fourth black student to graduate from that school. She was, in fact, the first black student to make the A Honor Roll. When she was eighteen, she met Louis Till, they were married, and nine months later, Emmett came along.
Emmett never knew his father, who served in World War II. In 1945, when Emmett was only four, Mamie got word that Louis Till had died in Italy. All she received of his possessions was a signet ring inscribed with his initials.
Although Emmett was stricken with polio at the age of five, he recovered fully except for a slight stutter. By all accounts, Emmett Till loved life. He loved telling jokes, and was even known to pay people to tell him jokes.
“When we first met, we were in gym in Mr. Long’s gym period. I remember Emmett raising his shirt up to about his naval and making his belly roll just waves of fat, we laughed and laughed, it just broke us up, the whole gym went crazy. He was that kind of kid.”
--Richard Heard, Emmett’s childhood friend, 2003
Emmett always pitched in with the chores. He loved to fix his mother pork chops and cornbread. Mamie recalled that Emmett once told her, “If you can go out and make the money, I can take care of the house.” This was welcome news for a woman raising a child alone. “It was just like I was carrying a load and I laid it down,” she said. Emmett’s dream was to become either a policeman or a baseball player.
Emmett, nicknamed Bobo, was surrounded throughout his youth by a large and loving family. He attended the all-black McCosh Elementary School not far from his home. The solidly middle class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side where he grew up was a city of new hope, in which black-owned establishments thrived. Good paying jobs were available for the thousands of new immigrants fleeing the oppression of the southern states. Although blacks and whites were segregated, it was a fertile time for black businesses. There were black-owned and operated insurance companies, tailors, pharmacists, barbers, beauty salons and nightclubs that regularly hosted performers like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughn.
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The year was 1955, and a visit to the bayou world of Mississippi to visit his mother’s family seemed exotic and exciting to the young thirteen year old boy. By the time he was ready for the trip, he had just turned fourteen--the bloom of youth. Smart, charming, and known as a natty dresser, he did not seem too self-conscious about his lisp. But before this young Negro boy was allowed to go on his journey, his family warned Emmett in no uncertain terms: black-white relations were a far different matter in the South than they were in Chicago. And Emmett made it clear to his mother that he understood. After all, the Southern legacy of lynchings and the torture that preceded them were legendary, the stuff of very real horror stories.
“For blacks in those days, it was against the law to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to white folks. You could be beaten and even killed for saying just ‘yeah’ and not calling him by his name … We couldn’t get a drink of water, no matter how thirsty we were. Unless we found that colored water fountain, we couldn’t get a drink of water out of the fountain …Our school time was maybe 3 to 6 months a year, and we had no busses, we had to walk to school there, four or five miles, whatever…”
--Charles Evers, brother of Medger Evers, 2005
(Medger Evers would later attend the infamous murder trial that arose out of one small boy’s vacation to the Mississippi Delta.)
“I had a cousin that was living in Mississippi, and he was walking down the sidewalk downtown, and he didn’t get off the sidewalk, and a man slapped him and knocked him off the sidewalk, and he got up--and instead of killing the man like he wanted to, he just started walking and never stopped until he got to Memphis, and then he never stopped until he got to Chicago.”
Ernest Withers, Till murder trial photographer, 2003 interview
“My brother was beaten almost to death in Jackson, just because he went to Walgreen’s and sat down to have a Sundae. They beat him unmercifully. No matter how wealthy you were as a black, those who had any money, it was no different, you were just another nigger.”
--Charles Evers, brother of Medger Evers, 2005
The day before Emmett left, Mamie gave him Louis Till’s signet ring, one of the few possessions she had from her dead husband. The next day, Mamie and Emmett waited at the train station. When she kissed him goodbye, she could not possibly have known that it would be the last time she would ever see her son alive:
“Oh, that day will live in infamy, so far as I’m concerned. I got up that morning and for some reason we could not get out of that house. We could hear the whistle blowing as we got to the steps, he tore up the steps, and I said ‘Wait at minute, you didn’t kiss me goodbye! Where are you going? How do I know you’ll ever see me again?’ And he said ‘Oh mama!’ He really scolded me! But Emmett turned around, came back and gave me a kiss…and then he gave me his watch, and he said ‘Here, take this watch, I won’t need it where I’m going,’ and I said ‘O.K., I’ll wear it’ and I put it on, and I said ‘What about your ring?’, because I’d given him his daddy’s signet ring for the first time, and he said ‘Well I’m gonna show this off to the fellas.’ ” -- Mamie Till, 2005
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THE HEAT SETTLES IN…
It is a sixteen hour train ride to Money, Mississippi and Emmett Till has arrived at the house of his great uncle, Mose Wright, where he beds down with a bevy of cousins. The tiny town of Money is a mere whistle-stop in the heart of Delta cotton country. It’s not a town, really, just one street with a half a dozen stores.
At one end sits Bryant’s Grocery. Roy Bryant, a twenty-four year old ex-soldier, owns the store; he and his wife live behind it with their two little boys in a couple of cramped rooms. This small general store would suddenly change Emmett’s life--then end it.
Cut to: A few days pass. It is the 21st of August, 1955. A hot, humid Wednesday.
After a long day of working the cotton fields, the boys--old Mose Wright’s grandsons and grand nephews--all head to Bryant’s General Store. The boys go in one and two at a time, which is the proper decorum for young blacks patronizing a small store run by a white person. Emmett Till goes inside to buy some bubble gum. Behind the counter is Carolyn Bryant, the white wife of the proprietor.
What happened after that is a matter of conjecture, depending on whom you ask, on what version you get. Some said it was as innocent as the fact that Till’s lisp turned some letters into whistling sounds, others said he simply whistled at her or might have casually called her “baby” or some slang of endearment. But by Carolyn Bryant’s account, Till actually put his arm around her and asked her for a date, and bragged about his experience with white women--Till, who had just turned fourteen. But a relative of Till’s who saw what actually happened tells of what she saw transpire:
“He asked for two cents worth of bubble gum. He put the money into her hand and she jumped her hand back.”
--Ruthie May Crawford, Emmett Till’s cousin, eyewitness to the incident, 2003
One of the great frustrations that occurs when researching the atrocities of America’s racist history is that there is no real record of what actually happened in so many of these crimes. But even the most rudimentary common sense indicates that many people simply lied outright about what led up to these lynchings.
Investigators, particularly those who came down from the North when lynchings were reaching epidemic proportions, often proved that witnesses had lied, but by then it was obviously too late for the poor tortured, deceased victim. And nothing usually happened to the witnesses or participants whose lies had led to an innocent man--or woman’s--death.
Regarding Emmett Till, it is my belief that after being warned repeatedly about the delicacy of black-white relations in the South, and being an intelligent young man by all accounts, it is hardly conceivable that, in broad daylight, Till would actually put his arm around a married white woman and ask her for a date, as Carolyn Bryant alleged he did.
“When white women was on the streets, you had to get off the street, that was the way of life. And all a white woman would have to say was ‘that nigger kind of looked at me or sassed me’, so we’re talking about a way of life that, in this part of the country, was enforced by law.”
--Emmett Till’s cousin, witness to the kidnapping, 2003
But whatever the misunderstanding was that transpired in Bryant’s store, it marked Emmett Till for death.
Carolyn’s husband, Roy Bryant, was away for a few days, working a job elsewhere, but when he got back, he immediately began investigating, nosing around, asking questions … until Saturday night, August 28th, 1955. Roy Bryant was determined to seek revenge on the uppity black boy who had supposedly insulted his wife.
His investigation led him to the home of old Mose Wright, where Emmett Till lay sleeping upstairs. Roy had enlisted the help of his half-brother, J.W. Milam, to help him “teach that boy from Chicago a lesson.” By the time they knocked on old Mose Wright’s front door, it was well past midnight. Mose Wright vividly recalls what happened next:
“Sunday morning about two-thirty, I heard a voice at the door, and I said ‘Who is it?’ And he said, ‘This is Mr. Bryant. I want to talk with you and the boy.’ And when I opened the door, I saw a man with a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other. And he asked me, ‘Did I have a boy there from Chicago?”, and I said I have, and they said ‘I want the boy who did all that talk.’ ”
--Mose Wright, 2003
Emmett’s cousin, sleeping in the same bed with him, recounted, decades later, the horror he felt at his cousin’s abduction:
“The house was as dark as a thousand midnights. You couldn’t see, it was like a nightmare … I mean, someone comes and stands over you with a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other, and you’re just sixteen years old. This is a terrifying experience.”
--The Reverend Wheeler Parker, cousin to Emmett Till, 2003
Meanwhile, Mose Wright begged the two white men not to take the boy. Mose’s wife offered to pay the white men money. But the two men were determined to take Emmett Till off into the night. When those in the house tried to stop them, they were told they would be killed if they got in the way. Mose Wright, his wife, and the rest were told that the white men were just going to beat some sense into Emmett, then let him go.
Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam drove around for hours, stopping in various locations to pistol whip a terrified Emmett Till. When and where they castrated him is still a matter of conjecture. At one point, their stop was public enough to evoke the curiosity of a passerby: the acquaintance noted all the blood in the truck bed, and the two men bragged that they “had just killed a deer.”
Then, they drove to a crag above the Tallahatchie River and shot Emmett Till dead.
Finally, they tied his body to a seventy-five pound cotton gin fan, submerging him in the swampy waters below. And thus ended the short, tragic life of Emmett Till.
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Emmett’s body surfaced in a matter of days, about a mile down the Tallahatchie. It was found by some young boys fishing. And that was when Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till, got the call in Chicago.
Even though she is being interviewed fifty years after receiving the call informing her that Emmett’s body has been found in the Tallahatchie River, one can see from her eyes that she remembers the awful moment as though it was yesterday.
“Those words were like arrows sticking all over my body. My eyes were so full of tears until I couldn’t see, and when I began to make the announcement that Emmett had been found--and how he was found--the whole house began to scream and to cry. And that’s when I realized that this was a load that I was going to have to carry. I wouldn’t get any help carrying this load.”
--Mamie Till, 2003
Of course, Mamie was to receive help, a vast outpouring of help, but who can doubt that whatever she went through from that moment on cannot be understood, can not even be imagined with any degree of accuracy, by anybody else--except those other tragic few who have lost a child too soon, and to such unfathomable violence.
Mamie recounted the hell which began that day, and which continued relentlessly:
“I called my mother when I got the news. Mother told me to come right over and she would start making calls. I got over there as quickly as I could make it and that wasn’t very long … I felt such a vibration coming from her to me until I jumped back, because it seemed I was going to take her life away from her… it seemed that her life was draining into me, and I could feel myself building up, getting strong enough to carry on.”
--Mamie Till, 2005
Then, (at least as far as your humble author is concerned), this starts to sound even more like a grisly movie plot than actual history. Sheriff Clarence Strider--who cannot help but come across more and more like the evil villain in this story--realizes that he has a problem on his hands. A big problem. Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam have all but bragged about the kidnapping, with the act of murder implicit. Their claim is that they just roughed Emmett Till up and dropped him off. And they know that nobody will care about one uppity black boy from the North.
But now that the body has literally surfaced, it is a different matter.
Strider pulls strings to make sure that the body gets buried as quickly as possible; he has seen the condition of the body and can only imagine the kind of stir that it will cause among the local blacks and those NAACP troublemakers from the North.
But meanwhile, Mamie Till is taking some of that strength imparted to her by her mother and her God, and she is making arrangements to get her boy back. Back to Chicago.
Disrespectful Sheriff Strider gets a pine box, has the body thrown in the box, fills it with lime, and hastily informs next of kin when and where the burial will be.
But, just like a movie, only a couple of hours before the funeral is set to begin--in Strider’s mind, getting this whole matter buried and done with, literally--a court order arrives at the very last minute, with instructions to stop the funeral.
Strider is forced to give up control of the corpse. He has no choice. But he only agrees to ship it from Mississippi to Chicago if it is securely padlocked, and sealed forever by the Great Seal of the Great State of Mississippi.
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Imagine that you are the mother of a murdered boy. Do you really think that a padlock and a state seal are going to stop you from seeing what happened to your son at the hands of murderers? Are you going to shrink from the opportunity to hold your child in one final embrace, from saying goodbye to your boy for the last time?
Funeral director A. A. Rayner received the body in Chicago, with instructions that the oversized coffin containing the grotesquely bloated body not be opened. Ever.
Mamie Till received word that her son’s remains had arrived in Chicago. She went to the funeral home, and was told that she could not see Emmett.
It was at that point that Mamie Till politely asked for a hammer. Because if Rayner refused to open it, she most certainly would. By any means necessary. Mamie agreed to leave the funeral home and return after three hours, so that Rayner could get a chance to “put things in order.”
The next nightmare unfolds in Mamie Till’s own words:
“When he called me, and I came back to the funeral home, about three blocks away, an odor met me that nearly knocked me out. I said what in the world was that? It was Emmett’s body. That’s how strong the smell was…Emmett covered a two or three block area.”
--Mamie Till, 2005
Then, Mamie Till describes in painstaking, agonizing detail her examination of her son’s corpse:
“I decided I would start at his feet and work my way up, maybe gathering strength as I went. I paused at his midsection because I knew he would not want me looking at him, but I saw enough that I knew he was intact. I kept on up until I got to his chin and then I was forced to deal with his face. I saw that his tongue was choked out. I noticed that the right eye was lying midway on his cheek. I noticed that his nose had been broken, like somebody took a meat chopper and chopped his nose in several places. As I kept looking I saw a hole which I presumed was a bullet hole, and I could look through that hole and see daylight on the other side, and I wondered, was it necessary to shoot him? …
…Mr. Rayner asked me, he said, ‘do you want me to touch the body up?’ I said ‘No Mr. Rayner. Let the people see what I’ve seen.’ I was just willing to bear it all, I thought. Everybody needed to know what happened to Emmett Till.”
--Mamie Till 2005
It was at this point that Mamie Till made an astonishingly brave decision, one which must have taken every iota of maternal strength she had. She insisted on an open casket funeral, so that the whole world could see what had happened to her baby. And after a shouting match with the reluctant funeral director, Emmett’s mother got her wish.
Emmett Till’s partially decomposed body and his beaten, mutilated face would be there. “For the whole world to see…”
And Mamie Till’s instincts were correct: what started out as a story in the black press became a national firestorm of headlines, as all of America saw Emmett Till, just one week ago the essence of youth, now bloated and battered beyond all recognition.
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Under the glare of the ever-widening publicity, white Mississippians began to close ranks. Even though Milam and Bryant were viewed as “white trash” by the more wealthy and “refined” citizens of Mississippi, they were, nonetheless, white men, and white folks take care of their own. Local stores collected $10,000 dollars in countertop jars for the two self-confessed kidnappers and alleged murderers. Every lawyer in the county joined their defense team, working pro-bono. The trial was to be held in Sumner, Mississippi.
But the black press countered by relentlessly covering the story, which was eventually picked up by the national press, and the atrocity spread across the country as Americans, both white and black, turned their attention to the gruesome funeral pictures:
Google Images: Emmett Till funeral.
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TRIAL OR TRAVESTY:
BORED ALREADY
Since before the Civil War, there have been few states that have fought so virulently for the political philosophy of “States Rights” as has the state of Mississippi. Long dubbed “the most southern place on earth”, Mississippi was resentful (a gross understatement) of what it considered external interference in any and all of its affairs, particularly when it came to segregation and civil rights.
After all, it was Paul Burney Johnson Jr. who, as late as 1963, ran for governor on the slogan “Stand Tall With Paul” . This was a reference to him physically blocking James Meredith’s entry onto the campus of Ole Miss during the famous stand off where the Feds had ruled that this black man clearly had a right to a university education. But Mississippi--and Paul Burney Johnson Jr.--felt otherwise. Johnson also publicly stated often during his 1963 gubernatorial campaign that “N.A.A.C.P stood for Niggers, Apes, Alligators, Coons, and Possums.” Paul Burney Johnson Jr. won that election, by the way.
(Interesting detail: as I was finishing this book, it seems that some students at Ol’ Miss thought it would be really funny to hang a noose around the neck of the statue of James Meredith that was erected on campus to commemorate this great event in the history of integration and civil rights. In 2014. Like the man says, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Then again, it is the Great State of Mississippi
Then again, we can’t blame the Great State of Mississippi for everything. It was only last year, in 2013, that students at Wilcox County High School in Georgia bucked 40 years of tradition by hosting their own racially integrated prom. 2013, and integration is still being heralded as an exciting new idea/controversial move. I just don’t know what comment to make about these two all-too-recent anecdotes.)
But back to Emmett Till’s story, and its background.
Mississippi resented, in particular, interference by Northerners and the NAACP. It was commonplace in the state of Mississippi that crimes committed by whites against blacks went unpunished. In fact, most went entirely unnoticed. And for a long time, the national media largely ignored these flagrant injustices, just as it ignored the thousands of lynchings that took place over three centuries of history in America’s South.
So America’s reaction to the Emmett Till murder came as a shock to the state of Mississippi, and particularly to the sleepy towns of Money and Sumner. The Great State of Mississippi was not at all pleased with the international spotlight being shined upon it, for it seemed that the entire world was horrified and outraged at the Emmett Till murder--and equally fascinated by the trial.
Make no mistake: The citizens of Money and Sumner had tainted the reputation of the entire United States of America, among the civilized countries of the world. The Associated Press had fielded a barrage of inquiries from Paris, Copenhagen, Tokyo--the world writ large. Quite simply, the Till case had become a major news story all around the world. It was America’s litmus test: we had fought a war to end slavery, enacted all kinds of civil rights legislation, even added amendments to the Constitution.
But it was this trial that would prove to the world just how sincere the United States of America truly was, when it came to equal rights, freedom, and justice for all.
But the proud folks of Sumner just could not grasp what all the fuss was about. Days before the trial, with Emmett’s body barely cold in the ground, the following indifferent headline appeared in the Sumner, Mississippi newspaper, with equally callous text printed below it:
Sumner Folks already bored with all this ruckus! ENOUGH IS ENOUGH, THEY SAY!
“The people of this tiny Delta town are waiting to return to their normal way of life with a stoic patience that must come only after much practice of the art of waiting…The question heard most often from the shade of the oaks on these steps of this 45 year old building of justice: ‘How come these blankety blank newspapers are making all this fuss?’ ” Newspaper excerpt, 2005 documentary
Then, as far as the citizens of Money, Sumner, and Tallahatchie County in general were concerned, matters got even worse: word got around that the uppity woman from Chicago, Emmett Till’s mother, who had shocked the world with those open casket photographs of her dead son, was actually coming down to Sumner, to attend the trial!
Decades later, Mamie Till would still speak with a tremor in her voice about the hate mail which poured in:
“…When that message made headlines, people began to send me mail by the bushel. Dirty pictures, pictures of male organs on the newspapers they were sending me, and sometimes it was very difficult to read the article …they would write different stuff on top of the print, such as bombing my house and Mayor Dailey’s house if I attended that trial, and my son ‘got just what he deserved’, and ‘there is another nigger gone.’ ”
--Mamie Till, 2005
SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY
Days later, when Mamie Till arrived in Mississippi, her reception was cold and threatening. On September 19th, 1955, less than three weeks after Emmett Till’s body had been found, the trial opened. When the day of the trial came, and Mamie Till bravely took her place at the podium in front of reporters, the local southern press could not have been more hostile in its cross examination of her. It was almost as though she was one of the accused:
REPORTER: “What do you intend to do here today?”
MAMIE TILL: “To answer any questions that the attorneys might ask me to answer.”
REPORTER: “How do you think you could possibly be of help to them?”
MAMIE TILL: “I don’t know, just by answering whatever questions that they ask me.”
REPORTER: “Do you have any evidence bearing on this case?”
MAMIE TILL: “I do know that this is my son!”
And then, when Mamie Till made the long walk up the courthouse steps to take her place among the witnesses for the prosecution, she was subjected to even crueler insults. She later recalled with a still palpable fear how she was treated at the trial of the men who murdered her son:
“I remember the first day of the trial, every window was filled with a father and his son or sons, and as I would come up the steps, they would aim the guns, right at me, and they would pull the triggers and the little caps would pop and they would say ‘pop pop pop pop pop!’ And the fathers, they thought this was the cutest thing, and the little guys were just firing away, and you know, the hair on my neck and down my back was just standing straight up. It was a frightening experience.”
--Mamie Till, 2005
Not surprisingly, the courtroom was packed with both local citizens and reporters from all over the United States, and Sheriff Strider was his good ol’ self when it came to greeting out-of-towners: Sheriff Strider consigned black reporters to a small card table on the sidelines. Strider greeted them when he passed with a cheery “Hello Niggers!” This became a daily ritual in the courtroom between Strider and his black guests.
U.S. Representative Charles C. Diggs Jr. of Michigan also came to the trial, to support Mamie Till. Upon learning that this Afro-American Congressman had arrived to witness the trial first hand, James Hicks, a reporter for the National Negro Press Association, headed for the bench to secure Representative Diggs a place in the courtroom. A deputy stopped him with a “not so fast” demeanor, and demanded to know why he wanted a seat up front. The reporter Hicks explained.
Then, the first deputy called a second, to whom he said, “This nigger said there’s a nigger outside who says he’s a Congressman!”
“A nigger Congressman?” the second deputy asked incredulously, before bursting into laughter. The deputies summoned their boss, Sheriff Strider, who told Hicks, “I’ll bring him in here, but I’m going to sit him at the niggers’ table.”
It was hot as hell in that courtroom--perhaps a foreshadowing of what was in store down the road for Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam--and a jury was quickly convened. Not surprisingly, the jury was composed of all white men.
In a darkly humorous twist of fate, the prosecution was quick to dismiss any potential juror who knew Bryant or Milam, lest such jury members be tempted to vote for acquittal, while in hindsight, when the trial was over, it came out that almost everybody who knew the Bryant-Milam clan (for they were half brothers), generally and unilaterally hated them, so a jury full of people who knew the brothers might actually have helped Emmett Till’s cause.
THE DEFENSE GANGS UP ON A GRIEVING MOTHER:
Without going through the entire transcript of the trial here, suffice it to say that the two defendants--Roy Bryant, husband of the woman in the general store, and J.W. Milam, Bryant’s half brother--both ADMITTED to kidnapping Emmett Till. (There were too many witnesses for any plausible denial.) But the defendants’ angle was to insist that they had just roughed up Emmett Till and then let him go free.
The crux of their argument was even more unconscionable, and will be revealed shortly.
As for Mamie Till, she testified that the body she had examined and buried was indeed her son. It was during cross examination that the true ugliness of the defense’s strategy emerged. Milam’s and Bryant’s attorneys assaulted Mamie Till mercilessly with hostile questions, and then presented the main argument for the defense:
The corpse pulled from the Tallahatchie River was not Emmett Till!
As Mamie Till would recount after the trial, “They summed up by saying ‘Isn’t it true that you and the NAACP got your heads together and you came down here, and with their help you all dug up a body, and you have claimed that body to be your son. But isn’t it true that your son is in Detroit, Michigan with his grandfather right now?’”
--Mamie Till, 2003
Matters got worse still. The evil Sheriff Strider testified that the body pulled from the river was a white man, not a black man (such was the extent of decomposition), and that the body had been stolen by a gang of blacks with the plan to profit from the scheme. In a cruel twist of logic, it was further stated on the witness stand that the body was so decomposed (so decomposed that it could not be positively identified as Emmett Till), that the only way it could have been in such a state was for it to have been in the water a lot longer than three days--for Emmett Till had been dumped just 72 hours before he was found and examined by the local coroner. And as for the pinkie ring, the ring which was all that remained of Emmett Till’s father, the ring that Emmett’s great uncle, Mose Wright, used to identify the corpse--why, these scheming darkies could easily have slipped that ring on the corpse’s finger before officials could get a look at the body.
And why this elaborate plot, according to Roy and J.W.’s attorneys, on the part of these black hoodlums? It was one of the oldest gambits in the world, claimed the defense: profit on death insurance.
Mamie Till later expressed her rage at how she was treated on the stand:
“What they accused me of was unconscionable. They tried to make me confess that I had conspired with others to get double indemnity on Emmett’s five cent and ten cent insurance policies.”
--Mamie Till, 2005
But in terms of high drama during the Emmett Till trial--a trial which was being watched by the entire world--there can be no doubt that the two most dramatic and historically noteworthy moments of the trial came with the damning testimony of two black men, one of whom was a surprise witness for the prosecution. It may be difficult for us to grasp this in present times, but in testifying against alleged murderers Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, these two brave witnesses were in essence signing their own death warrants.
But testify they did.
The first black to testify was Mose Wright, Emmett’s great uncle, who had been there on the night that Emmett Till was taken by gunpoint from the house, never to return. When asked by the prosecution if he could identify the man who took his nephew, Mose stood up from his chair, “straight as an arrow,” dramatically pointed across the courtroom at J.W. Milam, stared at him with steely, unblinking eyes, and stated in a strong, unwavering voice, “THAR HE.” Even veteran reporters who had covered the Bruno Hauptman trial and other equally sensational events said they had never seen anything as brave and spellbinding as this brief but damning testimony.
As an odd footnote to history, one black photographer, Ernest Withers, covertly broke the rule that there were to be no pictures taken while trial was in session. Yet so iconic was the photo, one can only be secretly glad that the rule was broken. One need only Google Images Mose Wright to see the infamous pointing finger that represents one of the bravest moments in the history of the struggle for civil rights in this country.
(In a gross miscarriage of justice, there were two other Afro-American witnesses who could have and should have testified, but did not: two bullied black boys who were alleged to be in the truck with Milam and Bryant, helping to restrain poor Emmett, had been secreted away by Sheriff Strider, hidden away in a distant jail cell, and could be found by nobody who might have found their eyewitness testimony useful.)
But the second black witness who did take the stand and bravely managed to testify was the prosecution’s surprise witness. And it was only after northern reporters and representatives from the NAACP (who could see how badly the trial was going for the prosecution), went out on their own looking for witnesses, that this surprise witness emerged from the shadows.
Willie Reed, the nineteen year old son of a sharecropper, had witnessed something on that dark night. And terrified though he was, they were able to persuade him to testify. For it was this young man who happened to be at the farm where stood the barn to which Bryant and Milam took Emmett, for the purpose of pistol whipping him within inches of his life.
And Willie Reed testified to the horrific things which he had heard that night. He swore that it was indeed J.W. Milam who he had seen around the barn, then he heard two men beating someone under a tarp: Willie testified to the agonized howls of a young boy screaming “Mama, God have mercy, God have mercy!”
It was said that you could hear the blood of all the white men in the courtroom boiling in their veins, as these two black witnesses had the audacity to testify these damning recollections to the jury ... and for the whole world to hear. Not surprisingly, both black defendants did not stay in Sumner long enough to be victims of the Klan’s rage, which no doubt would have been visited upon them.
Moments after his testimony, Willie Reed was spirited away from the courthouse, out of Sumner, and taken away north to Chicago. There he promptly suffered a nervous breakdown. However, the same strength which imbued his testimony no doubt imbued his spirit; he went on to live a long life, and to be a part of both the PBS Documentary and the Beauchamp film in 2005. He has about him the glint and steely strength of a man who has done the right thing in the face of dire danger, and lived to tell about it.
Mose Wright, the great uncle of Emmett Till, would have a story of his own to tell, in years to come. He went back to his house--the home from which Emmett was abducted on that terrible night--with the intention of staying just long enough to bring in his cotton crop. Surely he must have been desperate for the money this was going to bring, so that he could relocate his life. (His wife had already left town, to the safety of Chicago.) But the night after he testified, he woke up from a dream, a kind of a warning as he would later describe it, and he spent the long night driving around in his truck, finally ending up in the parking lot of his church. He stayed there till dawn.
Only the next morning did he find out from a neighbor that a pack of white men had been nosing around his property all night, shining flashlights in windows, perhaps entering unlocked windows and doors. There can be no doubt that Mose Wright’s punishment for his courageous testimony would have been just as sadistic as Emmett Till’s fate, had he stayed in his home that night.
Mose Wright packed a suitcase, got on a train, went north, and never looked back.
The trial took just five days.
In his closing speech, the lead defense attorney warned members of the jury that their ancestors would turn over in their graves if Milam and Bryant were found guilty: “Every last Anglo Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men.”
Reporters overheard jury members laughing and joking from behind closed doors. Did I mention that several of the jury members were drinking beer throughout the trial?
And even in spite of all the aforementioned admissions and testimony, all of the evidence notwithstanding, Milam and Bryant were acquitted.
After 67 minutes of deliberation.
One jury member joked, “It wouldn’t have taken us that long if we hadn’t all stopped for a bottle of pop.”
Outside, guns were fired into the air, once the jury’s decision was announced: Bryant and Milam were free. An ebullient Sheriff Strider was smug about the outcome: “I hope the Chicago niggers and the NAACP are satisfied.”
************
EMMETT TILL
by James A. Emaneul
I hear a whistling
Through the water.
Little Emmett
Won't be still.
He keeps floating
Round the darkness,
Edging through
The silent chill.
Tell me, please,
That bedtime story
Of the fairy
River Boy
Who swims forever,
Deep in treasures,
Necklaced in
A coral toy.
A WREATH FOR EMMETT TILL
By Marilyn Nelson
Rosemary for remembrance, Shakespeare wrote.
If I could forget, believe me, I would.
Pierced by the screams of a shortened childhood.
Emmett Till's name still catches in my throat.
Mamie's one child, a boy thrown to bloat,
Mutilated boy martyr. If I could
Erase the memory of Emmett's victimhood,
The memory of monsters...That bleak thought
Tears through the patchwork drapery of dreams.
Let me gather spring flowers for a wreath:
Trillium, apple blossoms, Queen Anne's lace,
Indian pipe, bloodrot, white as moonbeams,
Like the full moon, which smiled calmly on his death,
Like his gouged eye, which watched boots kick his face.
Pierced by the screams of a shortened childhood,
my heartwood has been scarred for fifty years
by what I heard, with hundreds of green ears.
That jackal laughter. Two hundred years I stood
listening to small struggles to find food,
to the songs of creature life, which disappears
and comes again, to the music of the spheres.
Two hundred years of deaths I understood.
Then slaughter axed one quiet summer night,
shivering the deep silence of the stars.
A running boy, five men in close pursuit.
One dark, five pale faces in the moonlight.
Noise, silence, back-slaps. One match, five cigars.
Emmett Till's name still catches in the throat.
CHAPTER TEN
EMMETT TILL, PART II
"I CAN'T SEE WHY HE CAN'T STAY DEAD!"
YOUR AUTHOR’S NIGHTMARES--A CONFESSION
Some ghosts are more restless than others. Some spirits are harder to silence than others. When I read the story of Emmett Till, or when I am drawn once again to watch the old news footage of the grisly crime … from the moment after that body is dragged out of the Tallahatchie River, beaten and bloated and unrecognizable, always in my mind’s eye, during my dreams, I see Emmett Till watching the aftermath of his own death, much like the glorious young child in “Lovely Bones.” Or I see his smiling face and dapperly dressed child’s person, whole and healthy, questioning along with the reporters, mingling with mourners at the funeral, standing vigil in the courtroom. In my dreams, it is as though the ghost of Emmett Till is hanging around to learn exactly why he was murdered--to see if perhaps there is some sense that his spirit can make of it after death, if he lingers around long enough. It is as though Emmett Till is waiting among the throng, the gathering, the mob, the masses, like a black and white ghostly image inserted into old documentary footage of a black and white crowd scene.
In my nightmare, it is just like Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump, showing up in the John F. Kennedy footage or the Dick Cavett show with John Lennon, or that chivalrous moment when Forrest comes to a young black girl’s aid in the famous George Wallace desegregation newsreels--but in my dream, this ghostly insertion is not achieved through the magic of CGI, but rather the unrelenting haunting of a child who does not understand why his mortal existence was snuffed out at so young an age, and why such sadistic terror and brutal torture had to inform the last minutes and hours of his unstained yet unsustained life . . .
*************
It has generally been agreed upon that Emmett Till’s death has taken on a mythical quality, rather like the Kennedy assassination, or the murder of the three civil rights workers in that same sovereign state of Mississippi just nine years later. Perhaps part of that mythic quality has to do with the very young innocence of Emmett Till, thrust up against such evil and merciless bullies. Or perhaps it was the starker truth that those murderers at the heart of it--what Joseph Conrad might have called “The Heart of Darkness,”--had escaped Lady Justice.
But for whatever amalgam of reasons, Emmett Till’s story just would not die. A 1991 book written by Stephen Whitfield, another by Christopher Mettress in 2002, and Mamie Till-Mobley's own memoirs the next year all posed questions as to exactly who all was involved in the murder and cover-up. And around the same year that the aforementioned Beauchamp movie premiered, PBS aired their own installment of “The American Experience” titled “The Murder of Emmett Till.”
The famous documentary by filmmaker Keith Beauchamp, a work almost a decade in the making, asserts that as many as fourteen people may have been involved, including Carolyn Bryant Donham, who has since remarried. (Mose Wright had heard someone in the front yard with "a lighter voice" affirm that Till was the one they were looking for, before Bryant and Milam drove away with Till.) Even Sixty Minutes did a piece on Emmett Till in 2005.
It was this undying drumbeat, largely led by Emmett Till’s mother, that finally pressured federal authorities to act. Where the state of Mississippi had circumvented any true justice--as has so often been the case in the Magnolia state--the United States Department of Justice would step in, dig up the past, and try to atone for this egregious miscarriage of jurisprudence.
*************
JUSTICIA CUNCTATOR EST JUSTICIA DENEGO
Among many other still urgent issues, there was the lingering question of who was buried in that casket? After all, the cornerstone of the Bryant-Milam defense was that it was not Emmett Till’s decomposed body that had been found in the Tallahatchie River that grim day. And so the Feds finally decided to exhume the body.
In 2004, the United States Department of Justice announced that it was reopening the case to determine whether anyone other than Milam and Bryant was complicit.
LONG STORY SHORT:
It was with some degree of disappointment for the Till family and their supporters that, in the end, after all the avenues had been explored and the new investigation had been completed, the Justice Department decided not to press charges against anyone else that might have been involved, beyond the now deceased Bryant and Milam.
Yet it was also understandable. The two killers who acted alone during the worst part of the torture and murder were dead from cancer. Witnesses were dead, evidence had been contaminated, paper trails were lost. And as for the possible participation in the murders by two young black boys--well, to paraphrase one person close to the case, “if, in the dead of night, in some hidden place deep in the woods, you bully one black boy into holding down another black boy whom you intend to murder, was the boy really a willing accomplice?”
And as for Carolyn Bryant, who began the entire lynch mob atmosphere with her accusations, there was not enough evidence to indict her after all these decades. But she lives in a kind of forced seclusion, fearful of opening her front door, lest the endless stream of curiosity seekers--and seekers of vengeance--decide to exact their own kind of justice for Emmett Till. Her fame, in which she once seemed to have basked for the cameras, during that infamous trial, has made her basically a prisoner in her own home. This is, at least to my way of thinking, rather gratifying.
So it would appear that the investigation into the murder of Emmett Till is over. As the Latin maxim goes, "justicia cunctator est justicia dedego". Justice delayed is justice denied.
But where jurisprudence sometimes let us down, the arts lift us up. It is abundantly clear, from the ongoing outpouring of movies, plays, poems, and songs that have been written about this poor child, this civil rights martyr, that his story will go on forever. Playwright Janet Langhart has even written a beguiling piece of theatre in which Emmett Till and Anne Frank meet up in some afterworld, pondering their fates and trying to make sense of them.
Moreover, Emmett Till serves as a kind of watchdog from beyond the grave: When the spate of aforementioned "contemporary lynchings" hit the media, those parties demanding--and sometimes achieving--more aggressive investigation into the deaths, always invoke the name of Emmett Till. When the Trayvon Martin verdict was announced, similarities to the Emmett Till trialed rippled throughout the country. When Rapper Lil Wayne wrote obscene lyrics regarding sexual violence, and likened it to the pistol whipping given to Emmett Till, people were rightly outraged, and Pepsi-Cola dropped him.
And when one of the lone witnesses in the original Emmett Till trial, Willie Louis, passed away a few days ago--again, just as I was writing this--once again Emmett Till's voice rose from the grave, reminding us of this horrifically brutal crime and its unjust outcome. Reminding us to be ever vigilant.
And when Veronique Pozner, mother of the youngest victim of the Sandy Hook shootings, insisted, as had Mamie Till, that the coffin be open at the funeral service, so that all the world could see the body of her dead child Noah, just six years old and shot eleven times, once again the haunting of our nation continued.
Emmett Till was reburied after being exhumed for the investigation, and his original casket will be available to be seen at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., when it opens in 2015.
LAST LINGERING QUESTIONS REMAIN:
One truth that has become abundantly apparent to me in the last two years is that the history of lynching in the American South has been well documented. One might ask, why rehash it, then? I choose to do so for two critical reasons.
1.) It is my aim not only to examine the heinous acts themselves, but to attempt to get into the mindset of those who not only participated in the atrocities, but who stood by and idly watched, not only content to do nothing, but even enjoying the torture, egging it on, and feeling that one more dead black man was indeed a good thing. Hence, I leave this chapter on the re-opening of the Emmett Till trial with some comments made by the citizens of Sumner, Mississippi at the time of the murder and original trial. It is a grim glimpse into the mob mindset during those times. I include them here because they have been made available to us through the tenacity and tirelessness of filmmaker Keith Beauchamp, and those at PBS, and “60 Minutes." But more importantly, I include them because I think we have to ask ourselves: does human nature really change that much, over a few short decades?
2.) I wanted to answer the Scary Question: did the mob and did the accused sound eerily like the rantings of the present day Appomattoxins, as shared in my earlier chapters? The answer frightens me. This is, after all, my hometown.
THE EMMETT TILL MURDER TRIAL--
EXCERPTS FROM THE MOB:
“We are used to doing things normal around here, and they just tried to run the thing. They thought they could run over the judge and the sheriff and everybody over there. They thought they could just take over, but they didn’t.”
--Anonymous citizen interviewed
“I’m almost convinced from the very beginning of this that this was by a Communistic front.”
--Anonymous citizen interviewed
“I can’t understand how a civilized mother could put the dead body of her son on public display.”
--Anonymous citizen interviewed
“Listen, I’ll tell you right now if they gets justice, they’ll turn them loose. If I was on the Grand Jury, that is what I would do!”
--Anonymous citizen interviewed
“We never have any trouble until some of our southern Niggers go up north and the NAACP talks to them and they come back home. If they would keep their nose and mouths out of our business, we would be able to do more in enforcing the laws of Tallahatchie County and Mississippi.” --Sheriff Clarence Strider
“Isn’t that just like a nigger, to swim across the Tallahatchie with a gin fan tied around his neck?”
-a popular barbershop joke at the time
These were the reactions of the whites. The blacks of Money and Sumner were understandably terrified, and all but mute on the subject. One reporter managed to get a black man on camera, and he quizzed the young Negro about the murder:
REPORTER: “Young man, do you think these two men should be indicted?”
YOUNG BLACK CITIZERN: “I really don’t know, sir.”
REPORTER: “What do you mean ‘you don’t know’ ?”
YOUNG BLACK CITIZEN: “Uh, I don’t know if they should or not.”
REPORTER: “Have you studied the case by reading the papers, perhaps?”
YOUNG BLACK CITIZEN: “Yes sir.”
REPORTER: “And you don’t know whether they should be indicted?”
YOUNG BLACK CITIZEN: “No sir.”
REPORTER: “Thank you very much.”
*************
Few people in this life have an opportunity to find out exactly what their soul is worth. But Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam did, when “Look Magazine”, just four months after the murder of Emmett Till, offered them $4000 to tell the true story of what happened that night. Not $4000 dollars each, mind you. But $4000 to split between the two of them--about the price of a new truck, back then.
That’s what it cost Roy and J.W. to sell their souls to the Devil.
The “Look” interview was published on January 24th, 1956, and it purported to be the true story of what happened that night, and how they came to murder poor fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. They not only admitted to the murder in the interview, but did so in graphic, arrogant, blood-curdling detail.
Under the Double Jeopardy law, of course, they could not be retried for the killing.
The article is both terrifying and disgusting, for several reasons.
Firstly, even though they could not be tried again for murder, they had to find some way to go on living in this world (both were haunted by death threats for the rest of their lives, not surprisingly), so we can assume that whatever version of the murder they gave in that “Look” interview, heinous as it was, was not nearly as horrific as the true torture, beating, mutilation, and murder must have been.
Secondly, according to the Roy and J.W. “Look” interview, they were actually goaded into beating and murdering the barely fourteen year old boy because, according to them, he was bragging about his prowess with the ladies, and his extensive experience with white women, even after eyewitnesses had testified to hearing Emmett in that barn screaming in pain and begging for his life.
Does anybody actually believe that this terrified child was bragging about his prowess and experience with white women, after all of the beating and pistol whipping and terrorizing, through this long, torturous night? Yet they both maintain that Emmett continued his sexual “backtalk” right up until the moment they shot him off the cliff, right into the Tallahatchie. Roy and J.W. had to spin it so that in certain circles, they would be heroes. Many white Southerners would no doubt read the “Look” interview and agree that Roy and J.W. had no choice but to kill the uppity, arrogant black boy.
And in case you are wondering, as your author is, if these two monsters ever experienced one iota of human sentiment that night, of normal reaction to what they were doing--as in, did they feel even one moment of remorse? Or guilt? Or fear?
Indeed they did, as J.W. Milam confessed in the “Look” article:
“The captors ordered the badly bruised Emmett back into the truck. They drove to the Progressive Ginning Company. ‘When we got to that gin place, it was daylight,’ Milam recalled, ‘and I was worried for the first time. Somebody might see us and accuse us of stealing the fan.’ ”
Feeling fear. That they might be caught stealing a gin fan.
*************
But that “Look” interview was published in January of 1956, and Emmett’s mother was to live another half a century. Happily, it was Emmett’s mother who would have the last word: she would spend the next fifty years carrying on work and educational projects in memory of her son, and founding the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation.
However it is worth noting that one of the murderers had one last moment to bask in the sunshine of publicity when he was interviewed, once again, on August 25th, 1985. This follow-up interview was conducted jointly by Joe Atkins of the Jackson Daily News and Tom Brennan of the Clarion Ledger.
(The interview is in italics, Bryant’s comments within the interview are in bold italics.)
We learn in the article that Roy Bryant still has his little store, but does not have his little wife. She divorced him and moved on. In his general store, he cheerfully waits on Negroes, saying “I don’t mistreat a man because he’s black any more than I do a white man,” he says. “I treat a man like I want to be treated.”
The rest of Bryant’s words in the interview are almost beyond belief:
Roy Bryant’s voice becomes a growl at the mention of Emmett Till.
“He’s been dead 30 years and I can’t see why he can’t stay dead,” he says.
Roy Bryant wants his privacy and worries that some young black might seek belated vengeance. He possesses such loyalty from friends that one of them nearly slugged a television reporter who recently tried to interview him.”
And lastly, when asked by the interviewers what he remembers about kidnapping Emmett Till, about all the details of what happened the night of Till’s murder--Bryant’s response: “he grumbles darkly that he isn’t making a dime out of renewed publicity about Emmett Till’s slaying. He says his memory could be jogged ‘for a bunch of money.’ ”
*************
So there it is:
Four hundred pounds of enraged testosterone, ganging up on a little boy, helpless and alone. A White on Black Hate Crime, no question about it.
And egged on by a woman with the power to intercede, to stop it all. But who instead remains indifferent. Smugly smiling.
And yes, the guilty are charged. And yes, there is a trial. But it is a sham of a trial, in a town that has made clear its utter contempt for Negroes.
And nothing bad happens to any of the self-confessed guilty. Not the male attackers. And not the woman who allowed it all to happen.
The Emmett Till Story.
*************
So here it is:
Four hundred pounds of enraged testosterone, ganging up on a little boy, helpless and alone. A White on Black Hate Crime, no question about it.
And egged on by a woman with the power to intercede, to stop it all. But who instead remains indifferent. Smugly smiling.
And yes, the guilty are charged. And yes, there is a trial. But it is a sham of a trial, in a town that has made clear its utter contempt for Negroes.
And nothing bad happens to any of the self-confessed guilty. Not the male attackers. And not the woman who allowed it all to happen.
“But didn’t I just read this?” you are asking yourself. “Isn’t this the Emmett Till Story? Is the writer repeating himself?”
Yes. No.
Yes, it was the Emmett Till Story, but it is also the Cequan Haskins Story. And it happened in my backyard. (So to speak.) It happened in Appomattox, the small town of 1700 people that I call home. That I moved to, in hopes of finding peace.
Instead, I found the Cequan Haskins Story. A grim reminder of Emmett Till. And I have found so much more.
Look Magazine Article and Letters to the Editor
One Year Later: What's Happened to the Emmett Till Killers?
CHAPTER SIX
EMMETT TILL, PART 1
"For the whole world to see ... "
Google Images; Emmett Till
“The small boy has morphed into a large, bloated mass of flesh after days in the water. The face has been beaten so badly that it--he--does not even look like a human being anymore, unless one could say with some degree of accuracy that the face on the corpse resembles that of the Elephant Man. This looks like the face of a monster, but herein lies the irony: this body, this boy, was not the monster. He was the victim of monsters.”
--“Wigger” Author’s Reaction
“Have you ever sent a loved son on vacation and had him returned to you in a pine box, so horribly battered and water-logged that someone needs to tell you this sickening sight is your son -- lynched?”
--Mamie Bradley, Mother of Emmett Till
The Murderer Milam’s confession:
“Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless. I’m no bully; I never hurt a nigger in my life. I like niggers -- in their place -- I know how to work ’em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain’t gonna vote where I live. If they did, they’d control the government. They ain’t gonna go to school with my kids. And when a nigger gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he’s tired o’ livin’. I’m likely to kill him. Me and my folks fought for this country, and we’ve got some rights. I stood there in that shed and listened to that nigger throw that poison at me, and I just made up my mind. ‘Chicago boy,’ I said, ‘I’m tired of ’em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I’m going to make an example of you -- just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.’ ”
Excerpted from ‘Look’ Magazine,
January 24th 1956
Available on emmetttillmurder.com
************
Among the many moving and significant tributes to Emmett Till are two documentaries, both noteworthy, but available for view on YouTube at no cost. The first documentary, “The Murder of Emmett Till” was produced by Stanley Nelson for broadcast on PBS. The other is entitled “The Untold Story of Emmett Till,” and was produced by Keith Beauchamp after ten exhaustive years of research. I highly recommend both, for anybody who wants a deeper understanding of the American experience and the true fight for freedom and justice in this great country.
Please note that all quotations in this chapter ending with ‘03 refer to the 2003 PBS documentary, while all quotations ending in ‘05 are attributable to the 2005 Keith Beauchamp documentary. The author is grateful to have been able to cite from these films the keen insights into the hearts and minds of those involved in the Emmett Till murder and its aftermath.
************
Mamie Till was a single mother, and it seemed that she was always destined to be so. And it further seemed that it was her destiny to keep her son Emmett right by her side, safe in her heart, until she died at the gentle old age of 81. For you see, her son Emmett was brutally murdered when he was just fourteen years old. Yet one could say that if anything, Emmett’s death brought the two of them closer than ever. She would spend her life fighting for his memory, and for the cause of civil rights. Her personal role in this fight was instigated by Emmett’s horrific and untimely death.
Mamie did well for herself and her family from the very beginning. Her family made a wise decision to leave Mississippi in 1922, when Mamie was just one year old, and they made a home for themselves in Chicago. As a young girl, Mamie attended Argo Community High School, which was predominantly white, and she went on to be only the fourth black student to graduate from that school. She was, in fact, the first black student to make the A Honor Roll. When she was eighteen, she met Louis Till, they were married, and nine months later, Emmett came along.
Emmett never knew his father, who served in World War II. In 1945, when Emmett was only four, Mamie got word that Louis Till had died in Italy. All she received of his possessions was a signet ring inscribed with his initials.
Although Emmett was stricken with polio at the age of five, he recovered fully except for a slight stutter. By all accounts, Emmett Till loved life. He loved telling jokes, and was even known to pay people to tell him jokes.
“When we first met, we were in gym in Mr. Long’s gym period. I remember Emmett raising his shirt up to about his naval and making his belly roll just waves of fat, we laughed and laughed, it just broke us up, the whole gym went crazy. He was that kind of kid.”
--Richard Heard, Emmett’s childhood friend, 2003
Emmett always pitched in with the chores. He loved to fix his mother pork chops and cornbread. Mamie recalled that Emmett once told her, “If you can go out and make the money, I can take care of the house.” This was welcome news for a woman raising a child alone. “It was just like I was carrying a load and I laid it down,” she said. Emmett’s dream was to become either a policeman or a baseball player.
Emmett, nicknamed Bobo, was surrounded throughout his youth by a large and loving family. He attended the all-black McCosh Elementary School not far from his home. The solidly middle class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side where he grew up was a city of new hope, in which black-owned establishments thrived. Good paying jobs were available for the thousands of new immigrants fleeing the oppression of the southern states. Although blacks and whites were segregated, it was a fertile time for black businesses. There were black-owned and operated insurance companies, tailors, pharmacists, barbers, beauty salons and nightclubs that regularly hosted performers like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughn.
************
The year was 1955, and a visit to the bayou world of Mississippi to visit his mother’s family seemed exotic and exciting to the young thirteen year old boy. By the time he was ready for the trip, he had just turned fourteen--the bloom of youth. Smart, charming, and known as a natty dresser, he did not seem too self-conscious about his lisp. But before this young Negro boy was allowed to go on his journey, his family warned Emmett in no uncertain terms: black-white relations were a far different matter in the South than they were in Chicago. And Emmett made it clear to his mother that he understood. After all, the Southern legacy of lynchings and the torture that preceded them were legendary, the stuff of very real horror stories.
“For blacks in those days, it was against the law to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to white folks. You could be beaten and even killed for saying just ‘yeah’ and not calling him by his name … We couldn’t get a drink of water, no matter how thirsty we were. Unless we found that colored water fountain, we couldn’t get a drink of water out of the fountain …Our school time was maybe 3 to 6 months a year, and we had no busses, we had to walk to school there, four or five miles, whatever…”
--Charles Evers, brother of Medger Evers, 2005
(Medger Evers would later attend the infamous murder trial that arose out of one small boy’s vacation to the Mississippi Delta.)
“I had a cousin that was living in Mississippi, and he was walking down the sidewalk downtown, and he didn’t get off the sidewalk, and a man slapped him and knocked him off the sidewalk, and he got up--and instead of killing the man like he wanted to, he just started walking and never stopped until he got to Memphis, and then he never stopped until he got to Chicago.”
Ernest Withers, Till murder trial photographer, 2003 interview
“My brother was beaten almost to death in Jackson, just because he went to Walgreen’s and sat down to have a Sundae. They beat him unmercifully. No matter how wealthy you were as a black, those who had any money, it was no different, you were just another nigger.”
--Charles Evers, brother of Medger Evers, 2005
The day before Emmett left, Mamie gave him Louis Till’s signet ring, one of the few possessions she had from her dead husband. The next day, Mamie and Emmett waited at the train station. When she kissed him goodbye, she could not possibly have known that it would be the last time she would ever see her son alive:
“Oh, that day will live in infamy, so far as I’m concerned. I got up that morning and for some reason we could not get out of that house. We could hear the whistle blowing as we got to the steps, he tore up the steps, and I said ‘Wait at minute, you didn’t kiss me goodbye! Where are you going? How do I know you’ll ever see me again?’ And he said ‘Oh mama!’ He really scolded me! But Emmett turned around, came back and gave me a kiss…and then he gave me his watch, and he said ‘Here, take this watch, I won’t need it where I’m going,’ and I said ‘O.K., I’ll wear it’ and I put it on, and I said ‘What about your ring?’, because I’d given him his daddy’s signet ring for the first time, and he said ‘Well I’m gonna show this off to the fellas.’ ” -- Mamie Till, 2005
************
THE HEAT SETTLES IN…
It is a sixteen hour train ride to Money, Mississippi and Emmett Till has arrived at the house of his great uncle, Mose Wright, where he beds down with a bevy of cousins. The tiny town of Money is a mere whistle-stop in the heart of Delta cotton country. It’s not a town, really, just one street with a half a dozen stores.
At one end sits Bryant’s Grocery. Roy Bryant, a twenty-four year old ex-soldier, owns the store; he and his wife live behind it with their two little boys in a couple of cramped rooms. This small general store would suddenly change Emmett’s life--then end it.
Cut to: A few days pass. It is the 21st of August, 1955. A hot, humid Wednesday.
After a long day of working the cotton fields, the boys--old Mose Wright’s grandsons and grand nephews--all head to Bryant’s General Store. The boys go in one and two at a time, which is the proper decorum for young blacks patronizing a small store run by a white person. Emmett Till goes inside to buy some bubble gum. Behind the counter is Carolyn Bryant, the white wife of the proprietor.
What happened after that is a matter of conjecture, depending on whom you ask, on what version you get. Some said it was as innocent as the fact that Till’s lisp turned some letters into whistling sounds, others said he simply whistled at her or might have casually called her “baby” or some slang of endearment. But by Carolyn Bryant’s account, Till actually put his arm around her and asked her for a date, and bragged about his experience with white women--Till, who had just turned fourteen. But a relative of Till’s who saw what actually happened tells of what she saw transpire:
“He asked for two cents worth of bubble gum. He put the money into her hand and she jumped her hand back.”
--Ruthie May Crawford, Emmett Till’s cousin, eyewitness to the incident, 2003
One of the great frustrations that occurs when researching the atrocities of America’s racist history is that there is no real record of what actually happened in so many of these crimes. But even the most rudimentary common sense indicates that many people simply lied outright about what led up to these lynchings.
Investigators, particularly those who came down from the North when lynchings were reaching epidemic proportions, often proved that witnesses had lied, but by then it was obviously too late for the poor tortured, deceased victim. And nothing usually happened to the witnesses or participants whose lies had led to an innocent man--or woman’s--death.
Regarding Emmett Till, it is my belief that after being warned repeatedly about the delicacy of black-white relations in the South, and being an intelligent young man by all accounts, it is hardly conceivable that, in broad daylight, Till would actually put his arm around a married white woman and ask her for a date, as Carolyn Bryant alleged he did.
“When white women was on the streets, you had to get off the street, that was the way of life. And all a white woman would have to say was ‘that nigger kind of looked at me or sassed me’, so we’re talking about a way of life that, in this part of the country, was enforced by law.”
--Emmett Till’s cousin, witness to the kidnapping, 2003
But whatever the misunderstanding was that transpired in Bryant’s store, it marked Emmett Till for death.
Carolyn’s husband, Roy Bryant, was away for a few days, working a job elsewhere, but when he got back, he immediately began investigating, nosing around, asking questions … until Saturday night, August 28th, 1955. Roy Bryant was determined to seek revenge on the uppity black boy who had supposedly insulted his wife.
His investigation led him to the home of old Mose Wright, where Emmett Till lay sleeping upstairs. Roy had enlisted the help of his half-brother, J.W. Milam, to help him “teach that boy from Chicago a lesson.” By the time they knocked on old Mose Wright’s front door, it was well past midnight. Mose Wright vividly recalls what happened next:
“Sunday morning about two-thirty, I heard a voice at the door, and I said ‘Who is it?’ And he said, ‘This is Mr. Bryant. I want to talk with you and the boy.’ And when I opened the door, I saw a man with a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other. And he asked me, ‘Did I have a boy there from Chicago?”, and I said I have, and they said ‘I want the boy who did all that talk.’ ”
--Mose Wright, 2003
Emmett’s cousin, sleeping in the same bed with him, recounted, decades later, the horror he felt at his cousin’s abduction:
“The house was as dark as a thousand midnights. You couldn’t see, it was like a nightmare … I mean, someone comes and stands over you with a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other, and you’re just sixteen years old. This is a terrifying experience.”
--The Reverend Wheeler Parker, cousin to Emmett Till, 2003
Meanwhile, Mose Wright begged the two white men not to take the boy. Mose’s wife offered to pay the white men money. But the two men were determined to take Emmett Till off into the night. When those in the house tried to stop them, they were told they would be killed if they got in the way. Mose Wright, his wife, and the rest were told that the white men were just going to beat some sense into Emmett, then let him go.
Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam drove around for hours, stopping in various locations to pistol whip a terrified Emmett Till. When and where they castrated him is still a matter of conjecture. At one point, their stop was public enough to evoke the curiosity of a passerby: the acquaintance noted all the blood in the truck bed, and the two men bragged that they “had just killed a deer.”
Then, they drove to a crag above the Tallahatchie River and shot Emmett Till dead.
Finally, they tied his body to a seventy-five pound cotton gin fan, submerging him in the swampy waters below. And thus ended the short, tragic life of Emmett Till.
************
Emmett’s body surfaced in a matter of days, about a mile down the Tallahatchie. It was found by some young boys fishing. And that was when Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till, got the call in Chicago.
Even though she is being interviewed fifty years after receiving the call informing her that Emmett’s body has been found in the Tallahatchie River, one can see from her eyes that she remembers the awful moment as though it was yesterday.
“Those words were like arrows sticking all over my body. My eyes were so full of tears until I couldn’t see, and when I began to make the announcement that Emmett had been found--and how he was found--the whole house began to scream and to cry. And that’s when I realized that this was a load that I was going to have to carry. I wouldn’t get any help carrying this load.”
--Mamie Till, 2003
Of course, Mamie was to receive help, a vast outpouring of help, but who can doubt that whatever she went through from that moment on cannot be understood, can not even be imagined with any degree of accuracy, by anybody else--except those other tragic few who have lost a child too soon, and to such unfathomable violence.
Mamie recounted the hell which began that day, and which continued relentlessly:
“I called my mother when I got the news. Mother told me to come right over and she would start making calls. I got over there as quickly as I could make it and that wasn’t very long … I felt such a vibration coming from her to me until I jumped back, because it seemed I was going to take her life away from her… it seemed that her life was draining into me, and I could feel myself building up, getting strong enough to carry on.”
--Mamie Till, 2005
Then, (at least as far as your humble author is concerned), this starts to sound even more like a grisly movie plot than actual history. Sheriff Clarence Strider--who cannot help but come across more and more like the evil villain in this story--realizes that he has a problem on his hands. A big problem. Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam have all but bragged about the kidnapping, with the act of murder implicit. Their claim is that they just roughed Emmett Till up and dropped him off. And they know that nobody will care about one uppity black boy from the North.
But now that the body has literally surfaced, it is a different matter.
Strider pulls strings to make sure that the body gets buried as quickly as possible; he has seen the condition of the body and can only imagine the kind of stir that it will cause among the local blacks and those NAACP troublemakers from the North.
But meanwhile, Mamie Till is taking some of that strength imparted to her by her mother and her God, and she is making arrangements to get her boy back. Back to Chicago.
Disrespectful Sheriff Strider gets a pine box, has the body thrown in the box, fills it with lime, and hastily informs next of kin when and where the burial will be.
But, just like a movie, only a couple of hours before the funeral is set to begin--in Strider’s mind, getting this whole matter buried and done with, literally--a court order arrives at the very last minute, with instructions to stop the funeral.
Strider is forced to give up control of the corpse. He has no choice. But he only agrees to ship it from Mississippi to Chicago if it is securely padlocked, and sealed forever by the Great Seal of the Great State of Mississippi.
************
Imagine that you are the mother of a murdered boy. Do you really think that a padlock and a state seal are going to stop you from seeing what happened to your son at the hands of murderers? Are you going to shrink from the opportunity to hold your child in one final embrace, from saying goodbye to your boy for the last time?
Funeral director A. A. Rayner received the body in Chicago, with instructions that the oversized coffin containing the grotesquely bloated body not be opened. Ever.
Mamie Till received word that her son’s remains had arrived in Chicago. She went to the funeral home, and was told that she could not see Emmett.
It was at that point that Mamie Till politely asked for a hammer. Because if Rayner refused to open it, she most certainly would. By any means necessary. Mamie agreed to leave the funeral home and return after three hours, so that Rayner could get a chance to “put things in order.”
The next nightmare unfolds in Mamie Till’s own words:
“When he called me, and I came back to the funeral home, about three blocks away, an odor met me that nearly knocked me out. I said what in the world was that? It was Emmett’s body. That’s how strong the smell was…Emmett covered a two or three block area.”
--Mamie Till, 2005
Then, Mamie Till describes in painstaking, agonizing detail her examination of her son’s corpse:
“I decided I would start at his feet and work my way up, maybe gathering strength as I went. I paused at his midsection because I knew he would not want me looking at him, but I saw enough that I knew he was intact. I kept on up until I got to his chin and then I was forced to deal with his face. I saw that his tongue was choked out. I noticed that the right eye was lying midway on his cheek. I noticed that his nose had been broken, like somebody took a meat chopper and chopped his nose in several places. As I kept looking I saw a hole which I presumed was a bullet hole, and I could look through that hole and see daylight on the other side, and I wondered, was it necessary to shoot him? …
…Mr. Rayner asked me, he said, ‘do you want me to touch the body up?’ I said ‘No Mr. Rayner. Let the people see what I’ve seen.’ I was just willing to bear it all, I thought. Everybody needed to know what happened to Emmett Till.”
--Mamie Till 2005
It was at this point that Mamie Till made an astonishingly brave decision, one which must have taken every iota of maternal strength she had. She insisted on an open casket funeral, so that the whole world could see what had happened to her baby. And after a shouting match with the reluctant funeral director, Emmett’s mother got her wish.
Emmett Till’s partially decomposed body and his beaten, mutilated face would be there. “For the whole world to see…”
And Mamie Till’s instincts were correct: what started out as a story in the black press became a national firestorm of headlines, as all of America saw Emmett Till, just one week ago the essence of youth, now bloated and battered beyond all recognition.
************
Under the glare of the ever-widening publicity, white Mississippians began to close ranks. Even though Milam and Bryant were viewed as “white trash” by the more wealthy and “refined” citizens of Mississippi, they were, nonetheless, white men, and white folks take care of their own. Local stores collected $10,000 dollars in countertop jars for the two self-confessed kidnappers and alleged murderers. Every lawyer in the county joined their defense team, working pro-bono. The trial was to be held in Sumner, Mississippi.
But the black press countered by relentlessly covering the story, which was eventually picked up by the national press, and the atrocity spread across the country as Americans, both white and black, turned their attention to the gruesome funeral pictures:
Google Images: Emmett Till funeral.
************
TRIAL OR TRAVESTY:
BORED ALREADY
Since before the Civil War, there have been few states that have fought so virulently for the political philosophy of “States Rights” as has the state of Mississippi. Long dubbed “the most southern place on earth”, Mississippi was resentful (a gross understatement) of what it considered external interference in any and all of its affairs, particularly when it came to segregation and civil rights.
After all, it was Paul Burney Johnson Jr. who, as late as 1963, ran for governor on the slogan “Stand Tall With Paul” . This was a reference to him physically blocking James Meredith’s entry onto the campus of Ole Miss during the famous stand off where the Feds had ruled that this black man clearly had a right to a university education. But Mississippi--and Paul Burney Johnson Jr.--felt otherwise. Johnson also publicly stated often during his 1963 gubernatorial campaign that “N.A.A.C.P stood for Niggers, Apes, Alligators, Coons, and Possums.” Paul Burney Johnson Jr. won that election, by the way.
(Interesting detail: as I was finishing this book, it seems that some students at Ol’ Miss thought it would be really funny to hang a noose around the neck of the statue of James Meredith that was erected on campus to commemorate this great event in the history of integration and civil rights. In 2014. Like the man says, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Then again, it is the Great State of Mississippi
Then again, we can’t blame the Great State of Mississippi for everything. It was only last year, in 2013, that students at Wilcox County High School in Georgia bucked 40 years of tradition by hosting their own racially integrated prom. 2013, and integration is still being heralded as an exciting new idea/controversial move. I just don’t know what comment to make about these two all-too-recent anecdotes.)
But back to Emmett Till’s story, and its background.
Mississippi resented, in particular, interference by Northerners and the NAACP. It was commonplace in the state of Mississippi that crimes committed by whites against blacks went unpunished. In fact, most went entirely unnoticed. And for a long time, the national media largely ignored these flagrant injustices, just as it ignored the thousands of lynchings that took place over three centuries of history in America’s South.
So America’s reaction to the Emmett Till murder came as a shock to the state of Mississippi, and particularly to the sleepy towns of Money and Sumner. The Great State of Mississippi was not at all pleased with the international spotlight being shined upon it, for it seemed that the entire world was horrified and outraged at the Emmett Till murder--and equally fascinated by the trial.
Make no mistake: The citizens of Money and Sumner had tainted the reputation of the entire United States of America, among the civilized countries of the world. The Associated Press had fielded a barrage of inquiries from Paris, Copenhagen, Tokyo--the world writ large. Quite simply, the Till case had become a major news story all around the world. It was America’s litmus test: we had fought a war to end slavery, enacted all kinds of civil rights legislation, even added amendments to the Constitution.
But it was this trial that would prove to the world just how sincere the United States of America truly was, when it came to equal rights, freedom, and justice for all.
But the proud folks of Sumner just could not grasp what all the fuss was about. Days before the trial, with Emmett’s body barely cold in the ground, the following indifferent headline appeared in the Sumner, Mississippi newspaper, with equally callous text printed below it:
Sumner Folks already bored with all this ruckus! ENOUGH IS ENOUGH, THEY SAY!
“The people of this tiny Delta town are waiting to return to their normal way of life with a stoic patience that must come only after much practice of the art of waiting…The question heard most often from the shade of the oaks on these steps of this 45 year old building of justice: ‘How come these blankety blank newspapers are making all this fuss?’ ” Newspaper excerpt, 2005 documentary
Then, as far as the citizens of Money, Sumner, and Tallahatchie County in general were concerned, matters got even worse: word got around that the uppity woman from Chicago, Emmett Till’s mother, who had shocked the world with those open casket photographs of her dead son, was actually coming down to Sumner, to attend the trial!
Decades later, Mamie Till would still speak with a tremor in her voice about the hate mail which poured in:
“…When that message made headlines, people began to send me mail by the bushel. Dirty pictures, pictures of male organs on the newspapers they were sending me, and sometimes it was very difficult to read the article …they would write different stuff on top of the print, such as bombing my house and Mayor Dailey’s house if I attended that trial, and my son ‘got just what he deserved’, and ‘there is another nigger gone.’ ”
--Mamie Till, 2005
SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY
Days later, when Mamie Till arrived in Mississippi, her reception was cold and threatening. On September 19th, 1955, less than three weeks after Emmett Till’s body had been found, the trial opened. When the day of the trial came, and Mamie Till bravely took her place at the podium in front of reporters, the local southern press could not have been more hostile in its cross examination of her. It was almost as though she was one of the accused:
REPORTER: “What do you intend to do here today?”
MAMIE TILL: “To answer any questions that the attorneys might ask me to answer.”
REPORTER: “How do you think you could possibly be of help to them?”
MAMIE TILL: “I don’t know, just by answering whatever questions that they ask me.”
REPORTER: “Do you have any evidence bearing on this case?”
MAMIE TILL: “I do know that this is my son!”
And then, when Mamie Till made the long walk up the courthouse steps to take her place among the witnesses for the prosecution, she was subjected to even crueler insults. She later recalled with a still palpable fear how she was treated at the trial of the men who murdered her son:
“I remember the first day of the trial, every window was filled with a father and his son or sons, and as I would come up the steps, they would aim the guns, right at me, and they would pull the triggers and the little caps would pop and they would say ‘pop pop pop pop pop!’ And the fathers, they thought this was the cutest thing, and the little guys were just firing away, and you know, the hair on my neck and down my back was just standing straight up. It was a frightening experience.”
--Mamie Till, 2005
Not surprisingly, the courtroom was packed with both local citizens and reporters from all over the United States, and Sheriff Strider was his good ol’ self when it came to greeting out-of-towners: Sheriff Strider consigned black reporters to a small card table on the sidelines. Strider greeted them when he passed with a cheery “Hello Niggers!” This became a daily ritual in the courtroom between Strider and his black guests.
U.S. Representative Charles C. Diggs Jr. of Michigan also came to the trial, to support Mamie Till. Upon learning that this Afro-American Congressman had arrived to witness the trial first hand, James Hicks, a reporter for the National Negro Press Association, headed for the bench to secure Representative Diggs a place in the courtroom. A deputy stopped him with a “not so fast” demeanor, and demanded to know why he wanted a seat up front. The reporter Hicks explained.
Then, the first deputy called a second, to whom he said, “This nigger said there’s a nigger outside who says he’s a Congressman!”
“A nigger Congressman?” the second deputy asked incredulously, before bursting into laughter. The deputies summoned their boss, Sheriff Strider, who told Hicks, “I’ll bring him in here, but I’m going to sit him at the niggers’ table.”
It was hot as hell in that courtroom--perhaps a foreshadowing of what was in store down the road for Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam--and a jury was quickly convened. Not surprisingly, the jury was composed of all white men.
In a darkly humorous twist of fate, the prosecution was quick to dismiss any potential juror who knew Bryant or Milam, lest such jury members be tempted to vote for acquittal, while in hindsight, when the trial was over, it came out that almost everybody who knew the Bryant-Milam clan (for they were half brothers), generally and unilaterally hated them, so a jury full of people who knew the brothers might actually have helped Emmett Till’s cause.
THE DEFENSE GANGS UP ON A GRIEVING MOTHER:
Without going through the entire transcript of the trial here, suffice it to say that the two defendants--Roy Bryant, husband of the woman in the general store, and J.W. Milam, Bryant’s half brother--both ADMITTED to kidnapping Emmett Till. (There were too many witnesses for any plausible denial.) But the defendants’ angle was to insist that they had just roughed up Emmett Till and then let him go free.
The crux of their argument was even more unconscionable, and will be revealed shortly.
As for Mamie Till, she testified that the body she had examined and buried was indeed her son. It was during cross examination that the true ugliness of the defense’s strategy emerged. Milam’s and Bryant’s attorneys assaulted Mamie Till mercilessly with hostile questions, and then presented the main argument for the defense:
The corpse pulled from the Tallahatchie River was not Emmett Till!
As Mamie Till would recount after the trial, “They summed up by saying ‘Isn’t it true that you and the NAACP got your heads together and you came down here, and with their help you all dug up a body, and you have claimed that body to be your son. But isn’t it true that your son is in Detroit, Michigan with his grandfather right now?’”
--Mamie Till, 2003
Matters got worse still. The evil Sheriff Strider testified that the body pulled from the river was a white man, not a black man (such was the extent of decomposition), and that the body had been stolen by a gang of blacks with the plan to profit from the scheme. In a cruel twist of logic, it was further stated on the witness stand that the body was so decomposed (so decomposed that it could not be positively identified as Emmett Till), that the only way it could have been in such a state was for it to have been in the water a lot longer than three days--for Emmett Till had been dumped just 72 hours before he was found and examined by the local coroner. And as for the pinkie ring, the ring which was all that remained of Emmett Till’s father, the ring that Emmett’s great uncle, Mose Wright, used to identify the corpse--why, these scheming darkies could easily have slipped that ring on the corpse’s finger before officials could get a look at the body.
And why this elaborate plot, according to Roy and J.W.’s attorneys, on the part of these black hoodlums? It was one of the oldest gambits in the world, claimed the defense: profit on death insurance.
Mamie Till later expressed her rage at how she was treated on the stand:
“What they accused me of was unconscionable. They tried to make me confess that I had conspired with others to get double indemnity on Emmett’s five cent and ten cent insurance policies.”
--Mamie Till, 2005
But in terms of high drama during the Emmett Till trial--a trial which was being watched by the entire world--there can be no doubt that the two most dramatic and historically noteworthy moments of the trial came with the damning testimony of two black men, one of whom was a surprise witness for the prosecution. It may be difficult for us to grasp this in present times, but in testifying against alleged murderers Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, these two brave witnesses were in essence signing their own death warrants.
But testify they did.
The first black to testify was Mose Wright, Emmett’s great uncle, who had been there on the night that Emmett Till was taken by gunpoint from the house, never to return. When asked by the prosecution if he could identify the man who took his nephew, Mose stood up from his chair, “straight as an arrow,” dramatically pointed across the courtroom at J.W. Milam, stared at him with steely, unblinking eyes, and stated in a strong, unwavering voice, “THAR HE.” Even veteran reporters who had covered the Bruno Hauptman trial and other equally sensational events said they had never seen anything as brave and spellbinding as this brief but damning testimony.
As an odd footnote to history, one black photographer, Ernest Withers, covertly broke the rule that there were to be no pictures taken while trial was in session. Yet so iconic was the photo, one can only be secretly glad that the rule was broken. One need only Google Images Mose Wright to see the infamous pointing finger that represents one of the bravest moments in the history of the struggle for civil rights in this country.
(In a gross miscarriage of justice, there were two other Afro-American witnesses who could have and should have testified, but did not: two bullied black boys who were alleged to be in the truck with Milam and Bryant, helping to restrain poor Emmett, had been secreted away by Sheriff Strider, hidden away in a distant jail cell, and could be found by nobody who might have found their eyewitness testimony useful.)
But the second black witness who did take the stand and bravely managed to testify was the prosecution’s surprise witness. And it was only after northern reporters and representatives from the NAACP (who could see how badly the trial was going for the prosecution), went out on their own looking for witnesses, that this surprise witness emerged from the shadows.
Willie Reed, the nineteen year old son of a sharecropper, had witnessed something on that dark night. And terrified though he was, they were able to persuade him to testify. For it was this young man who happened to be at the farm where stood the barn to which Bryant and Milam took Emmett, for the purpose of pistol whipping him within inches of his life.
And Willie Reed testified to the horrific things which he had heard that night. He swore that it was indeed J.W. Milam who he had seen around the barn, then he heard two men beating someone under a tarp: Willie testified to the agonized howls of a young boy screaming “Mama, God have mercy, God have mercy!”
It was said that you could hear the blood of all the white men in the courtroom boiling in their veins, as these two black witnesses had the audacity to testify these damning recollections to the jury ... and for the whole world to hear. Not surprisingly, both black defendants did not stay in Sumner long enough to be victims of the Klan’s rage, which no doubt would have been visited upon them.
Moments after his testimony, Willie Reed was spirited away from the courthouse, out of Sumner, and taken away north to Chicago. There he promptly suffered a nervous breakdown. However, the same strength which imbued his testimony no doubt imbued his spirit; he went on to live a long life, and to be a part of both the PBS Documentary and the Beauchamp film in 2005. He has about him the glint and steely strength of a man who has done the right thing in the face of dire danger, and lived to tell about it.
Mose Wright, the great uncle of Emmett Till, would have a story of his own to tell, in years to come. He went back to his house--the home from which Emmett was abducted on that terrible night--with the intention of staying just long enough to bring in his cotton crop. Surely he must have been desperate for the money this was going to bring, so that he could relocate his life. (His wife had already left town, to the safety of Chicago.) But the night after he testified, he woke up from a dream, a kind of a warning as he would later describe it, and he spent the long night driving around in his truck, finally ending up in the parking lot of his church. He stayed there till dawn.
Only the next morning did he find out from a neighbor that a pack of white men had been nosing around his property all night, shining flashlights in windows, perhaps entering unlocked windows and doors. There can be no doubt that Mose Wright’s punishment for his courageous testimony would have been just as sadistic as Emmett Till’s fate, had he stayed in his home that night.
Mose Wright packed a suitcase, got on a train, went north, and never looked back.
The trial took just five days.
In his closing speech, the lead defense attorney warned members of the jury that their ancestors would turn over in their graves if Milam and Bryant were found guilty: “Every last Anglo Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men.”
Reporters overheard jury members laughing and joking from behind closed doors. Did I mention that several of the jury members were drinking beer throughout the trial?
And even in spite of all the aforementioned admissions and testimony, all of the evidence notwithstanding, Milam and Bryant were acquitted.
After 67 minutes of deliberation.
One jury member joked, “It wouldn’t have taken us that long if we hadn’t all stopped for a bottle of pop.”
Outside, guns were fired into the air, once the jury’s decision was announced: Bryant and Milam were free. An ebullient Sheriff Strider was smug about the outcome: “I hope the Chicago niggers and the NAACP are satisfied.”
************
EMMETT TILL
by James A. Emaneul
I hear a whistling
Through the water.
Little Emmett
Won't be still.
He keeps floating
Round the darkness,
Edging through
The silent chill.
Tell me, please,
That bedtime story
Of the fairy
River Boy
Who swims forever,
Deep in treasures,
Necklaced in
A coral toy.
A WREATH FOR EMMETT TILL
By Marilyn Nelson
Rosemary for remembrance, Shakespeare wrote.
If I could forget, believe me, I would.
Pierced by the screams of a shortened childhood.
Emmett Till's name still catches in my throat.
Mamie's one child, a boy thrown to bloat,
Mutilated boy martyr. If I could
Erase the memory of Emmett's victimhood,
The memory of monsters...That bleak thought
Tears through the patchwork drapery of dreams.
Let me gather spring flowers for a wreath:
Trillium, apple blossoms, Queen Anne's lace,
Indian pipe, bloodrot, white as moonbeams,
Like the full moon, which smiled calmly on his death,
Like his gouged eye, which watched boots kick his face.
Pierced by the screams of a shortened childhood,
my heartwood has been scarred for fifty years
by what I heard, with hundreds of green ears.
That jackal laughter. Two hundred years I stood
listening to small struggles to find food,
to the songs of creature life, which disappears
and comes again, to the music of the spheres.
Two hundred years of deaths I understood.
Then slaughter axed one quiet summer night,
shivering the deep silence of the stars.
A running boy, five men in close pursuit.
One dark, five pale faces in the moonlight.
Noise, silence, back-slaps. One match, five cigars.
Emmett Till's name still catches in the throat.
CHAPTER TEN
EMMETT TILL, PART II
"I CAN'T SEE WHY HE CAN'T STAY DEAD!"
YOUR AUTHOR’S NIGHTMARES--A CONFESSION
Some ghosts are more restless than others. Some spirits are harder to silence than others. When I read the story of Emmett Till, or when I am drawn once again to watch the old news footage of the grisly crime … from the moment after that body is dragged out of the Tallahatchie River, beaten and bloated and unrecognizable, always in my mind’s eye, during my dreams, I see Emmett Till watching the aftermath of his own death, much like the glorious young child in “Lovely Bones.” Or I see his smiling face and dapperly dressed child’s person, whole and healthy, questioning along with the reporters, mingling with mourners at the funeral, standing vigil in the courtroom. In my dreams, it is as though the ghost of Emmett Till is hanging around to learn exactly why he was murdered--to see if perhaps there is some sense that his spirit can make of it after death, if he lingers around long enough. It is as though Emmett Till is waiting among the throng, the gathering, the mob, the masses, like a black and white ghostly image inserted into old documentary footage of a black and white crowd scene.
In my nightmare, it is just like Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump, showing up in the John F. Kennedy footage or the Dick Cavett show with John Lennon, or that chivalrous moment when Forrest comes to a young black girl’s aid in the famous George Wallace desegregation newsreels--but in my dream, this ghostly insertion is not achieved through the magic of CGI, but rather the unrelenting haunting of a child who does not understand why his mortal existence was snuffed out at so young an age, and why such sadistic terror and brutal torture had to inform the last minutes and hours of his unstained yet unsustained life . . .
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It has generally been agreed upon that Emmett Till’s death has taken on a mythical quality, rather like the Kennedy assassination, or the murder of the three civil rights workers in that same sovereign state of Mississippi just nine years later. Perhaps part of that mythic quality has to do with the very young innocence of Emmett Till, thrust up against such evil and merciless bullies. Or perhaps it was the starker truth that those murderers at the heart of it--what Joseph Conrad might have called “The Heart of Darkness,”--had escaped Lady Justice.
But for whatever amalgam of reasons, Emmett Till’s story just would not die. A 1991 book written by Stephen Whitfield, another by Christopher Mettress in 2002, and Mamie Till-Mobley's own memoirs the next year all posed questions as to exactly who all was involved in the murder and cover-up. And around the same year that the aforementioned Beauchamp movie premiered, PBS aired their own installment of “The American Experience” titled “The Murder of Emmett Till.”
The famous documentary by filmmaker Keith Beauchamp, a work almost a decade in the making, asserts that as many as fourteen people may have been involved, including Carolyn Bryant Donham, who has since remarried. (Mose Wright had heard someone in the front yard with "a lighter voice" affirm that Till was the one they were looking for, before Bryant and Milam drove away with Till.) Even Sixty Minutes did a piece on Emmett Till in 2005.
It was this undying drumbeat, largely led by Emmett Till’s mother, that finally pressured federal authorities to act. Where the state of Mississippi had circumvented any true justice--as has so often been the case in the Magnolia state--the United States Department of Justice would step in, dig up the past, and try to atone for this egregious miscarriage of jurisprudence.
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JUSTICIA CUNCTATOR EST JUSTICIA DENEGO
Among many other still urgent issues, there was the lingering question of who was buried in that casket? After all, the cornerstone of the Bryant-Milam defense was that it was not Emmett Till’s decomposed body that had been found in the Tallahatchie River that grim day. And so the Feds finally decided to exhume the body.
In 2004, the United States Department of Justice announced that it was reopening the case to determine whether anyone other than Milam and Bryant was complicit.
LONG STORY SHORT:
It was with some degree of disappointment for the Till family and their supporters that, in the end, after all the avenues had been explored and the new investigation had been completed, the Justice Department decided not to press charges against anyone else that might have been involved, beyond the now deceased Bryant and Milam.
Yet it was also understandable. The two killers who acted alone during the worst part of the torture and murder were dead from cancer. Witnesses were dead, evidence had been contaminated, paper trails were lost. And as for the possible participation in the murders by two young black boys--well, to paraphrase one person close to the case, “if, in the dead of night, in some hidden place deep in the woods, you bully one black boy into holding down another black boy whom you intend to murder, was the boy really a willing accomplice?”
And as for Carolyn Bryant, who began the entire lynch mob atmosphere with her accusations, there was not enough evidence to indict her after all these decades. But she lives in a kind of forced seclusion, fearful of opening her front door, lest the endless stream of curiosity seekers--and seekers of vengeance--decide to exact their own kind of justice for Emmett Till. Her fame, in which she once seemed to have basked for the cameras, during that infamous trial, has made her basically a prisoner in her own home. This is, at least to my way of thinking, rather gratifying.
So it would appear that the investigation into the murder of Emmett Till is over. As the Latin maxim goes, "justicia cunctator est justicia dedego". Justice delayed is justice denied.
But where jurisprudence sometimes let us down, the arts lift us up. It is abundantly clear, from the ongoing outpouring of movies, plays, poems, and songs that have been written about this poor child, this civil rights martyr, that his story will go on forever. Playwright Janet Langhart has even written a beguiling piece of theatre in which Emmett Till and Anne Frank meet up in some afterworld, pondering their fates and trying to make sense of them.
Moreover, Emmett Till serves as a kind of watchdog from beyond the grave: When the spate of aforementioned "contemporary lynchings" hit the media, those parties demanding--and sometimes achieving--more aggressive investigation into the deaths, always invoke the name of Emmett Till. When the Trayvon Martin verdict was announced, similarities to the Emmett Till trialed rippled throughout the country. When Rapper Lil Wayne wrote obscene lyrics regarding sexual violence, and likened it to the pistol whipping given to Emmett Till, people were rightly outraged, and Pepsi-Cola dropped him.
And when one of the lone witnesses in the original Emmett Till trial, Willie Louis, passed away a few days ago--again, just as I was writing this--once again Emmett Till's voice rose from the grave, reminding us of this horrifically brutal crime and its unjust outcome. Reminding us to be ever vigilant.
And when Veronique Pozner, mother of the youngest victim of the Sandy Hook shootings, insisted, as had Mamie Till, that the coffin be open at the funeral service, so that all the world could see the body of her dead child Noah, just six years old and shot eleven times, once again the haunting of our nation continued.
Emmett Till was reburied after being exhumed for the investigation, and his original casket will be available to be seen at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., when it opens in 2015.
LAST LINGERING QUESTIONS REMAIN:
One truth that has become abundantly apparent to me in the last two years is that the history of lynching in the American South has been well documented. One might ask, why rehash it, then? I choose to do so for two critical reasons.
1.) It is my aim not only to examine the heinous acts themselves, but to attempt to get into the mindset of those who not only participated in the atrocities, but who stood by and idly watched, not only content to do nothing, but even enjoying the torture, egging it on, and feeling that one more dead black man was indeed a good thing. Hence, I leave this chapter on the re-opening of the Emmett Till trial with some comments made by the citizens of Sumner, Mississippi at the time of the murder and original trial. It is a grim glimpse into the mob mindset during those times. I include them here because they have been made available to us through the tenacity and tirelessness of filmmaker Keith Beauchamp, and those at PBS, and “60 Minutes." But more importantly, I include them because I think we have to ask ourselves: does human nature really change that much, over a few short decades?
2.) I wanted to answer the Scary Question: did the mob and did the accused sound eerily like the rantings of the present day Appomattoxins, as shared in my earlier chapters? The answer frightens me. This is, after all, my hometown.
THE EMMETT TILL MURDER TRIAL--
EXCERPTS FROM THE MOB:
“We are used to doing things normal around here, and they just tried to run the thing. They thought they could run over the judge and the sheriff and everybody over there. They thought they could just take over, but they didn’t.”
--Anonymous citizen interviewed
“I’m almost convinced from the very beginning of this that this was by a Communistic front.”
--Anonymous citizen interviewed
“I can’t understand how a civilized mother could put the dead body of her son on public display.”
--Anonymous citizen interviewed
“Listen, I’ll tell you right now if they gets justice, they’ll turn them loose. If I was on the Grand Jury, that is what I would do!”
--Anonymous citizen interviewed
“We never have any trouble until some of our southern Niggers go up north and the NAACP talks to them and they come back home. If they would keep their nose and mouths out of our business, we would be able to do more in enforcing the laws of Tallahatchie County and Mississippi.” --Sheriff Clarence Strider
“Isn’t that just like a nigger, to swim across the Tallahatchie with a gin fan tied around his neck?”
-a popular barbershop joke at the time
These were the reactions of the whites. The blacks of Money and Sumner were understandably terrified, and all but mute on the subject. One reporter managed to get a black man on camera, and he quizzed the young Negro about the murder:
REPORTER: “Young man, do you think these two men should be indicted?”
YOUNG BLACK CITIZERN: “I really don’t know, sir.”
REPORTER: “What do you mean ‘you don’t know’ ?”
YOUNG BLACK CITIZEN: “Uh, I don’t know if they should or not.”
REPORTER: “Have you studied the case by reading the papers, perhaps?”
YOUNG BLACK CITIZEN: “Yes sir.”
REPORTER: “And you don’t know whether they should be indicted?”
YOUNG BLACK CITIZEN: “No sir.”
REPORTER: “Thank you very much.”
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Few people in this life have an opportunity to find out exactly what their soul is worth. But Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam did, when “Look Magazine”, just four months after the murder of Emmett Till, offered them $4000 to tell the true story of what happened that night. Not $4000 dollars each, mind you. But $4000 to split between the two of them--about the price of a new truck, back then.
That’s what it cost Roy and J.W. to sell their souls to the Devil.
The “Look” interview was published on January 24th, 1956, and it purported to be the true story of what happened that night, and how they came to murder poor fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. They not only admitted to the murder in the interview, but did so in graphic, arrogant, blood-curdling detail.
Under the Double Jeopardy law, of course, they could not be retried for the killing.
The article is both terrifying and disgusting, for several reasons.
Firstly, even though they could not be tried again for murder, they had to find some way to go on living in this world (both were haunted by death threats for the rest of their lives, not surprisingly), so we can assume that whatever version of the murder they gave in that “Look” interview, heinous as it was, was not nearly as horrific as the true torture, beating, mutilation, and murder must have been.
Secondly, according to the Roy and J.W. “Look” interview, they were actually goaded into beating and murdering the barely fourteen year old boy because, according to them, he was bragging about his prowess with the ladies, and his extensive experience with white women, even after eyewitnesses had testified to hearing Emmett in that barn screaming in pain and begging for his life.
Does anybody actually believe that this terrified child was bragging about his prowess and experience with white women, after all of the beating and pistol whipping and terrorizing, through this long, torturous night? Yet they both maintain that Emmett continued his sexual “backtalk” right up until the moment they shot him off the cliff, right into the Tallahatchie. Roy and J.W. had to spin it so that in certain circles, they would be heroes. Many white Southerners would no doubt read the “Look” interview and agree that Roy and J.W. had no choice but to kill the uppity, arrogant black boy.
And in case you are wondering, as your author is, if these two monsters ever experienced one iota of human sentiment that night, of normal reaction to what they were doing--as in, did they feel even one moment of remorse? Or guilt? Or fear?
Indeed they did, as J.W. Milam confessed in the “Look” article:
“The captors ordered the badly bruised Emmett back into the truck. They drove to the Progressive Ginning Company. ‘When we got to that gin place, it was daylight,’ Milam recalled, ‘and I was worried for the first time. Somebody might see us and accuse us of stealing the fan.’ ”
Feeling fear. That they might be caught stealing a gin fan.
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But that “Look” interview was published in January of 1956, and Emmett’s mother was to live another half a century. Happily, it was Emmett’s mother who would have the last word: she would spend the next fifty years carrying on work and educational projects in memory of her son, and founding the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation.
However it is worth noting that one of the murderers had one last moment to bask in the sunshine of publicity when he was interviewed, once again, on August 25th, 1985. This follow-up interview was conducted jointly by Joe Atkins of the Jackson Daily News and Tom Brennan of the Clarion Ledger.
(The interview is in italics, Bryant’s comments within the interview are in bold italics.)
We learn in the article that Roy Bryant still has his little store, but does not have his little wife. She divorced him and moved on. In his general store, he cheerfully waits on Negroes, saying “I don’t mistreat a man because he’s black any more than I do a white man,” he says. “I treat a man like I want to be treated.”
The rest of Bryant’s words in the interview are almost beyond belief:
Roy Bryant’s voice becomes a growl at the mention of Emmett Till.
“He’s been dead 30 years and I can’t see why he can’t stay dead,” he says.
Roy Bryant wants his privacy and worries that some young black might seek belated vengeance. He possesses such loyalty from friends that one of them nearly slugged a television reporter who recently tried to interview him.”
And lastly, when asked by the interviewers what he remembers about kidnapping Emmett Till, about all the details of what happened the night of Till’s murder--Bryant’s response: “he grumbles darkly that he isn’t making a dime out of renewed publicity about Emmett Till’s slaying. He says his memory could be jogged ‘for a bunch of money.’ ”
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So there it is:
Four hundred pounds of enraged testosterone, ganging up on a little boy, helpless and alone. A White on Black Hate Crime, no question about it.
And egged on by a woman with the power to intercede, to stop it all. But who instead remains indifferent. Smugly smiling.
And yes, the guilty are charged. And yes, there is a trial. But it is a sham of a trial, in a town that has made clear its utter contempt for Negroes.
And nothing bad happens to any of the self-confessed guilty. Not the male attackers. And not the woman who allowed it all to happen.
The Emmett Till Story.
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So here it is:
Four hundred pounds of enraged testosterone, ganging up on a little boy, helpless and alone. A White on Black Hate Crime, no question about it.
And egged on by a woman with the power to intercede, to stop it all. But who instead remains indifferent. Smugly smiling.
And yes, the guilty are charged. And yes, there is a trial. But it is a sham of a trial, in a town that has made clear its utter contempt for Negroes.
And nothing bad happens to any of the self-confessed guilty. Not the male attackers. And not the woman who allowed it all to happen.
“But didn’t I just read this?” you are asking yourself. “Isn’t this the Emmett Till Story? Is the writer repeating himself?”
Yes. No.
Yes, it was the Emmett Till Story, but it is also the Cequan Haskins Story. And it happened in my backyard. (So to speak.) It happened in Appomattox, the small town of 1700 people that I call home. That I moved to, in hopes of finding peace.
Instead, I found the Cequan Haskins Story. A grim reminder of Emmett Till. And I have found so much more.
Look Magazine Article and Letters to the Editor
One Year Later: What's Happened to the Emmett Till Killers?