Mississippi Is Not Chicago
People in the Chicago neighborhood where Emmett "Bobo" Till lived knew the
14-year-old as an attention-getter. Despite the stutter left by a bout with
polio in his infancy, he had a confident, even cocky, personality and relished
pranks and jokes. In an interview that appeared in the PBS documentary,
The
Murder of Emmett Till, childhood acquaintance Richard Heard recalled how
Emmett entertained his schoolmates one day in gym: "I remember Emmett raising
his shirt up to about his navel and making his belly roll, waves of fat
rolling and it just broke us up. The whole gym went crazy."
In early August 1955, Emmett's great-uncle, Moses "Preacher" Wright,
traveled to Chicago from Mississippi and asked Emmett's mother, Mamie Till
Mobley, if her son could spend the summer with his family. Wright also invited
two of Emmett's Chicago cousins to come on the trip.
Mamie agreed to let Emmett go but worried about how he would behave in the
South. Although Chicago was racially segregated, its racism was not of the Jim
Crow stripe.
Chris Crowe in
Getting Away with Murder quotes Mamie saying, "Emmett
was born and raised in Chicago, so he didn't know how to be humble to white
people. I warned him before he came down here; I told him to be very careful
how he spoke and to say 'yes sir' and 'no ma'am' and not to hesitate to humble
himself if he had to get down on his knees . . . I was trying to really pound
into him that Mississippi was not Chicago . . . I explained to Emmett that if
he met a white woman, he should step off the street, lower his head, and not
look up. And he thought that was the silliest thing he'd ever heard."
Mamie may have been especially protective of Emmett because he was her only
child and she had long been raising him on her own. She had divorced his
father, Louis Till, in 1943, when Emmett was only 2. In 1945, she received
word that Louis Till, a private in the military serving overseas, had died.
Sent along with the letter informing her of his death was one of his prized
possessions: a signet ring with his initials, "L.T." Mamie gave that ring to
Emmett right before she kissed him goodbye for his visit to Mississippi.
Emmett and his cousins arrived in Money, a hamlet in the Mississippi Delta
with only 55 residents on Sunday, Aug. 21, 1955.
Three days later, on a Wednesday evening, Emmett and his cousins were in
church listening to Moses Wright preach. Restless and bored, the boys made an
early exit from the church, took Wright's car, and drove to Bryant's Grocery &
Meat Market.
The Murder of Emmett Till describes Bryant's as a store that sold candy
and provisions, primarily to blacks. Roy Bryant, 24, and Carolyn Bryant, 21, a
white couple, owned and operated it. As the documentary states, "The Bryants
lived with their two boys in cramped rooms behind the store." The Bryants
owned neither a car nor a TV. They were unable to eke out a living from the
store alone so Roy frequently took trucking jobs.
On this particular day, Roy was on the road, hauling a load of shrimp from
New Orleans to Brownsville, Tex. According to "The Shocking Story of An
Approved Killing in Mississippi" by William Bradford Huie that was published
in Look magazine in January 1956, when Roy was absent, Carolyn
and their sons did not spend the night in the rooms behind the store. Juanita
Milam, her sister-in-law, would come to the store during the day to stay with
Carolyn until the store closed at which time her husband would pick both women
up, together with their kids, and drive them to his home.
Outside of Bryant's, Emmett and his cousins joined a group of young blacks
already gathered there. Emmett was soon bragging about his romantic success
with white women and flashing photos of white women, he had in his wallet,
bragging that they were his "girlfriends." According to Crowe, Emmett and his
cousins had cut photos of white women out of magazines and put them in the
compartments of their wallets for precisely this purpose.
Crowe continues, "one of the boys pointed at the store and challenged
Emmett: 'You talkin' mighty big, Bo. There's a pretty little white woman in
there in the sto'. Since you Chicago cats know so much about white girls,
let's see you go in there and get a date with her."
Emmett went into Bryant's while the others crowded around its window to
watch the interaction. The account of what happened next is pieced together
from the courtroom testimony of Carolyn Bryant and the recollections of those
who watched through the window.
Carolyn Bryant claimed the teenager requested two cents worth of gum and
that, when she held her hand out for the payment, he grabbed her hand and
brashly asked, "How about a date, baby?" She jerked her hand away and headed
to the apartment at the back of the store to summon her sister-in-law.
According to Carolyn Bryant's account, before she could get to that apartment,
the boy stepped in front of her and put his hands around her waist, saying,
"You needn't be afraid of me, baby, I've been with white women before."
The store's door flew open and another black male rushed inside, grabbed
Emmett and hustled him out the door, but before they left, Emmett said, "Bye,
baby." Carolyn left the store to get a gun from her sister-in-law's car.
According to Emmett's friends as well as Carolyn Bryant, Emmett let out a wolf
whistle – a whistle that would turn out to be the most infamous in the history
of civil rights. Then he and his friends piled into the pickup and sped off.
Stephen J. Whitfield in
A Death in the Delta writes that Carolyn
Bryant confided the story of the incident to her sister-in-law. Both women
agreed to keep quiet because they feared what their husbands might do if they
knew about it.
While Carolyn Bryant and Juanita Milam kept silent, Emmett's amazed young
friends did not. Soon just about everyone in Money had heard about it.
When Roy Bryant came home from his Texas trip on Saturday, a black customer
at his store told him of the encounter that was the talk of the town. Bryant
was infuriated. He asked his wife about it. According to Crowe, she confirmed
the truth of it but begged him to let it pass.
Bryant learned that Emmett was staying at his great-uncle's home and
decided to confront the boy. Lacking a car, he asked his 36-year-old balding
half brother, J.W. "Big" Milam, Juanita's husband, if he could borrow one.
When Bryant explained what he wanted it for, Milam insisted on accompanying
him. Each man brought along a .45 Colt revolver.
According to both Crowe and Whitfield, a loud call at the door awakened
Moses Wright in the wee hours that Sunday morning. Wright went to the door to
find Milam and Bryant standing there. Milam carried his pistol in one hand and
a flashlight in the other. He demanded to see "the boy who done the talking at
Money."
Wright pleaded with them to leave the boy alone, saying, "He ain't got good
sense. He was raised up yonder. He didn't know what he was doing." Wright's
wife Elizabeth joined her husband and said they would "pay you gentlemen for
the damages," but Milam brushed aside her desperate offer.
All accounts say that before leaving the home, Milam asked Wright how old
he was. Wright said he was 64. "If you tell anybody about this, you won't live
to get 65," Milam warned.
Wright later testified that the boy was "marched" to a car where someone
was asked if he was the "right boy" and a woman's voice answered, "It is."
One of Emmett's cousins, Curtis Jones, rushed to a neighbor's house to use
the phone to call the county sheriff to report the abduction. Then he called
his own mother in Chicago who in turn called Emmett's mother. Mamie
Till-Mobley phoned Chicago police and asked them to ask their Mississippi
counterparts to find her son's kidnappers. Crowe records her as recalling, "I
began calling every newspaper I could think of . . . I had expected no
response from the newspapers, but to my surprise, everyone I called responded
instantly."
Bryant and Milam were arrested for kidnapping the following day, a Monday.
They admitted forcing the boy away from his home but claimed they let him go
after Carolyn Bryant said he was not the one who had offended her. The two men
stayed in jail while police searched for Emmett.
Crowe writes that on the following Wednesday, Aug. 31, 17-year-old Robert
Hodges was fishing on the Tallahatchie River when he was shocked by what
looked like a human body. He contacted the Tallahatchie County sheriff's
office.
Fearing it was the body of the missing child, officers took Moses Wright to
the river with them. A ferocious beating and days underwater had rendered the
corpse's face unrecognizable, but it had a ring bearing the inscription "May
25, 1943, L.T." Crowe wrote, "Mose Wright recognized it as the ring of Louis
Till, Emmett's father, a ring that Emmett had worn."
Murder charges were filed against the jailed Bryant and Milam.
Emmett's body was shipped to Chicago for burial. The mutilated body was
displayed under glass at the Roberts Temple Church of God. As Mamie Till
related in an interview shown in The Murder of Emmett Till, she wanted
to "let the people see what I've seen . . . everybody needed to know what had
happened to Emmett Till." About 50,000 African-Americans massed into the
church to look at the dead child. Many burst into tears; some fainted.
The Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, and Jet, a national
black magazine, ran photographs of Emmett's disfigured face.
Much of the country viewed this slaying as symbolic of racism's evil. As
Whitfield wrote, an outraged Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP,
observed, "It would appear that the state of Mississippi has decided to
maintain white supremacy by murdering children."
Journalist Rose Jourdain recalled for The Murder of Emmett Till, "I
think black people's reaction was so visceral. Everybody knew we were under
attack and that attack was symbolized by the attack on a 14-year-old boy."
Whitfield records that while some white Southerners were horrified that
their region had been the cradle for this dreadful homicide, others were swept
by a wave of sympathy for men they regarded as defending the "Southern way of
life." Many derided the "outside agitators" they blamed for the burgeoning
civil rights movement as well as the prosecution of Bryant and Milam.
The Trial in Sumner
Bryant and Milam were tried in the city of Sumner, the county seat of
Tallahatchie County. As Whitfield notes, there were only five attorneys
practicing law in Sumner, but sympathy for the accused men was so strong among
whites that all five attorneys agreed to defend the impoverished defendants
pro bono. Leading the defense team was J. J. Breland, whom Crowe quotes as
saying that he and his co-attorneys wanted to "let the North know that we are
not going to put up with Northern Negroes 'stepping over the line.'"
Crowe further quotes Breland as telling The Greenwood Commonwealth,
"The state has got to prove three things: That the boy was murdered. That it
happened in the second judicial district of Tallahatchie County. That Bryant
and Milam did it."
D.A. Gerald Chatham was the lead prosecutor. Mississippi Assistant Atty.
Gen. Robert B. Smith assisted him.
The judge was Curtis M. Swango. An all-white, all-male jury was impaneled.
The trial opened Sept. 19, 1955.
Dozens of journalists descended on Sumner, including reporters from the
Daily Worker, The Nation, the African-American Amsterdam News,
and the New York Post. Whitfield reports that their courtroom seating
was assigned according to race. White reporters sat close to the judge and
jury while their black counterparts, along with Emmett's mother, sat at a
distant bridge table.
U.S. Rep. Charles C. Diggs Jr. of Michigan came to the trial to observe it.
Whitfield records how James Hicks, a reporter for the Amsterdam News
and the National Negro Press Association headed for the bench to secure Rep.
Diggs a place in the courtroom. Whitfield elaborates that a deputy stopped him
and asked him his mission. 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 Clarence
Strider, who told Hicks, "I'll bring him in here, but I'm going to sit him at
you niggers' table."
The Murder of Emmett Till reports that Sheriff Strider habitually
greeted the journalists and Rep. Diggs throughout the trial with a cheery,
"Hi, niggers."
The state's first witness was Moses Wright. Whitfield writes that he told
the court how two men had come to his house early on that fateful Sunday. One
said, "This is Mr. Bryant" and told Wright they wanted to see "the boy who
done that talk at Money."
Asked to identify the two men he had seen, Wright pointed to Milam, then to
Bryant and said, "Thar he."
Crowe writes that in cross-examination, defense attorney Sidney Carlton
suggested it unlikely Wright could positively identify men he had seen only in
darkness.
Sheriff George Smith of nearby Greenwood testified that Bryant confessed to
the kidnapping. Undertaker Chester Miller and Officer C.A. Stickland testified
to the horrendous state of Emmett's body when it was recovered.
Perhaps the most moving testimony was that of Mamie Till-Mobley. Chatham
asked if she was certain the horribly mutilated body was that of her son. She
replied, "Yes, sir, positively." She described painstakingly examining his
feet, hands, teeth, gums, and hairline. "A mother knows her child," she said.
"I just looked at it very carefully, and I was able to find out that it was my
son, Emmett Louis Till." Crowe records the following courtroom exchange.
[Chatham] asked her if she could identify the body in the photo. She looked
at it and nodded. "That's my son, my son, Emmett Till." Her voice broke, and
she took off her glasses to wipe away tears.
"Are you sure?" Chatham asked.
"If I thought it wasn't my boy, I would be out looking for him now."
Mamie Till recalled for The Murder of Emmett Till how the defense
suggested she conspired in an elaborate scheme to pretend her son had been
murdered. She was asked if it was not true that she had plotted with the
NAACP to dig up a body, throw it in the river, and then pretend it was Emmett
for political purposes. "Isn't it true," a defense attorney prodded, "that
your son is in Detroit, Michigan with his grandfather right now?"
Willie Reed, 19, a sharecropper's son, testified that on that Sunday, he
saw four white men and two black men drive to a barn on property owned by
Milam's brother Leslie. Crowe recorded that he claimed, "The two black men
rode in the back of the pickup with Emmett Till. When the truck stopped, the
men carried Emmett into the barn from where Willie later heard screams and
'licks and hollerings.'"
On cross-examination, Reed admitted that he had not seen Milam in the
truck.
According to Whitfield, Reed's aunt, Amanda Bradley, "also testified to
hearing the beating from the shed."
Whitfield further writes that Lefore County Sheriff George Smith testified
that Bryant had confessed to kidnapping Emmett but claimed he had released him
alive and unharmed. Deputy Sheriff John Edd Cothran testified to a similar
confession from Milam.
Then the defense began. It called Carolyn Bryant to the stand. Whitfield
states that "Over the objections of the defense," Judge Swango sent the jury
out while she testified. The judge ruled that he believed the store incident
occurred too long before the abduction for it to be legally admissible.
Carolyn Bryant told the story recounted earlier in this article to the judge,
attorneys, spectators and reporters.
With the jury back, the defense called Sheriff H.C. Strider to the stand.
According to Crowe, "Strider testified that based on his previous experience,
the body found in the Tallahatchie River on Aug. 31 had been missing for at
least 10 to 20 days. He said the corpse was so decomposed that it was
impossible for him to recognize the victim or even determine if the body was
black or white."
An African-American reporter noted that it was odd that if the sheriff was
unsure of the victim's race, why had he asked a black undertaker to treat the
body.
Another doctor and an embalmer both testified that the victim had been dead
for over a week before his body was found.
In their summations before the jury, both the prosecution and the defense
appealed to the jurors as fellow segregationists. Prosecutor Smith urged the
jury to prove wrong those who thought Mississippi's racial policies meant it
condoned murder. Smith said, "I tell you, gentlemen, that Emmett Till was
entitled to his constitutional rights; he was entitled to his liberty, and
once we go taking away his rights, then we are on the defensive and we can't
complain what people do to us. Those people, outside agitators, want J.W.
Milam and Roy Bryant turned loose."
Defense attorney John Whitten argued, "There are people in the United
States who want to destroy the custom and way of life of Southern white people
and Southern colored people. . . . They would not be above putting a rotting,
stinking body in the river in the hope it would be identified as Emmett Till."
The trial was over in five days. On Sept. 23, 1955, the jury – after 67
minutes of deliberations – came back with verdicts of not guilty for both
defendants. (One juror told a journalist that the jury would not have taken
even that long had the jurors not interrupted their deliberations to drink
soda pop.) A photograph taken in the immediate aftermath of the verdict shows
the defendants and their wives smiling and hugging; Roy Bryant is chomping on
a recently lit cigar.
Kidnapping charges were still pending but a grand jury refused to return
indictments. On Nov. 9. Milam and Bryant were set free.
According to The Murder of Emmett Till, a European newspaper
commented that, "the life of a Negro in Mississippi is not worth a whistle."
The program continued that African-Americans packed meeting rooms to hear
Mamie Till's story. The grieving mother told an assembled crowd: "What I saw
was a shame before God and man and the way the jury chose to believe the
ridiculous stories of the defense attorneys. I just can't go into detail to
tell you the silly things, the stupid things that were brought up as
probabilities and they swallowed it like a fish swallows a hook, just
anything, any excuse to acquit these two men." Whitfield writes that Roy
Wilkins denounced the trial as "a travesty, a farce, a joke as far as it
demonstrated the American principle of trial by jury to secure a just
verdict."
The injustice galvanized the civil rights movement. Crowe notes that Mamie
Till and Moses Wright had spoken to more than 250,000 people by the end of
1955. Just over three months after Emmett Till's death, seamstress Rosa Parks
refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger, leading to Martin
Luther King Jr.'s famous Montgomery bus boycott. According to Whitfield, Parks
"acknowledged the impact of the Till case in arousing blacks to indignation."
The success of the Montgomery bus boycott led to similar and similarly
successful protests in other major cities.
Milam and Bryant Confess
All sources report that Milam and Bryant were ostracized after the trial.
Blacks boycotted the small stores that the extended Milam and Bryant families
owned in Money, Glendora, and Sharkey so that all three quickly went out of
business. Even segregationist whites, who supported Bryant and Milam during
the trial, shunned them after it. Their inability to get jobs led them to
grant interviews for $4,000 to reporter William Bradford Huie in which they
purported to tell the truth of Till's death. (Constitutional protection
against double jeopardy meant they could not be prosecuted again for the
slaying. Attorneys for Milam and Bryant were in the room when they gave the
interviews to Huie.) The January 1955 Look magazine published Huie's
"The Shocking Story of An Approved Killing in Mississippi."
The confessions should be taken as proof that Milam and Bryant got away
with murder but cannot be assumed to be completely accurate. Huie recalled,
"Milam did most of the talking . . . Milam was a bit more articulate than
Bryant was. Bryant did some talking, particularly when they talked about what
they were told had happened in the store."
Milam told Huie that when they rousted Emmett Till out of bed on the night
of Saturday, Aug. 15, 1955 their intention was to "whip him . . . and scare
some sense into him." Milam continued that they planned to drive him to a
bluff over the Big River that Milam considered "the scariest place in the
Delta." The "whipping" planned was no spanking but a pistol-whipping with the
threat of being thrown down the bluff and into the Big River.
They drove about 75 miles but Milam could not find that bluff in the
darkness. He claimed that they also could not intimidate their captive. "We
were never able to scare him," Milam said. "They had just filled him so full
of that poison that he was hopeless."
After driving to the tool house in back of the Milam home, Milam and Bryant
told Huie that they took Emmett in there and began pistol whipping
him. According to his killers, the 14-year-old boy remained defiant even after
vicious blows to his head from a .45. "You bastards, I'm not afraid of you,"
Emmett supposedly told them. "I'm as good as you are. I've 'had' white women.
My grandmother was a white woman."
Milam claimed he felt he had to murder Emmett. "I just decided it was time
a few people got put on notice," he said. "As long as I live and can do
anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place . . . And when a
nigger gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he's tired o' livin.'"
Milam decided to murder the 14-year-old and sink his body into the
Tallahatchie River. Needing a weight to drag the body down, he remembered a
big discarded fan at a gin in which he had recently installed new equipment.
The captors ordered the badly bruised Emmett back into the truck. They
drove to the Progressive Ginning Company. "When we got to that gin, it was
daylight," Milam recalled, "and I was worried for the first time. Somebody
might see us and accuse us of stealing the fan."
They claimed in the interview with Huie that they forced Emmett, who was
strong for his age, to pick up the 75-pound fan and load it into the truck.
Then they drove to the Tallahatchie River and stopped beside a riverbank.
Milam ordered Emmett to pick up the fan. The child staggered under its weight.
Milam ordered Emmett to take off his clothes. It was a little before 7 a.m.
on Sunday morning. Milam claimed the following exchange took place.
Milam: "You still as good as I am?"
Emmett: "Yeah."
Milam: "You still 'had' white women?"
Emmett: "Yeah."
With that, Milam shot Emmett in the head. He fell to the ground. Milam and
Bryant tied the fan to his neck and rolled him into the water.
Parts of this account defy credibility. Anyone who was pulled out of bed in
the middle of the night by menacing people with guns would have to be
disoriented and terrified and it is not believable that a teenager, however
spunky, would have shown no fear under the circumstances. Rather, it is more
likely that Milam and Bryant described their victim as fearless and defiant
because they believed such an attitude would justify the murder in the eyes of
their peers.
They do not mention anyone else with them but it is likely there were
others.
Moses Wright testified he heard a woman in the car identify Emmett. Many
observers believe this must have been Carolyn Bryant. Willie Reed testified to
seeing four white men and two black men in the truck in which Emmett was
driven to his death.
After the trial, bitterly ironic information about the father Emmett had
never known, Louis Till, came to light. It was already widely reported that
Louis Till had been a soldier in World War II at the time of his death. An
Oct. 10, 1955 editorial in Life magazine wrote that the elder Till "was
killed in France fighting for the American proposition that all men are
equal."
Army Private Louis Till did not die honorably in combat. The American
military executed him for raping two Italian women and murdering a third.
Some saw a chance to visit the sins of the father upon the son. On Oct. 15,
1955, next to a story titled "Till's Dad Raped 2 Women, Murdered a Third in
Italy," the Jackson Daily New ran an editorial accusing the NAACP of
raising "fabulous sums of money" based in part on the claim that Private Till
had died fighting for his country. The editorial went on to tell "the Negro
organizations . . . to stop peddling manufactured stories to the nation about
Mississippi and about their own people."
Filmmakers Open the Closed Case
The Till case continued to send reverberations through society as years
passed and the civil rights movement gained momentum. However, there was a
persistent, gnawing sense of frustration on the part of Mamie Till-Mobley and
others because justice had been thwarted.
The story of Emmett Till retained the ability to traumatize decades after
the fact. According to an article entitled "Documentarian Keith Beauchamp
Reveals the Truth about the Lynching of Emmett Till," Beauchamp was a
10-year-old African-American boy living in Baton Rouge, La., when he first
learned of Emmett Till. It was 26 years after the acquittal of Roy Bryant and
J. W. Milam. Beauchamp happened to be leafing through old copies of Jet
when the famous photograph of Emmett's mutilated remains arrested his gaze.
The sight of a boy only four years older than himself murdered in such a
grisly manner left Beauchamp badly shaken.
"I'm looking at this angelic face of a 14-year-old," he recalled, "and I'm
looking at this horrific face beside it that looked like a monster, and I
could not believe that a little boy could be brutally murdered for just a
whistle."
As Beauchamp grew up, he was frequently warned not to let what had happened
to Emmett Till happen to him. He knew other young African- American men who
received similar warnings. In an article called "Murder He Wrote," Sara Faith
Alterman quotes Beauchamp as stating, "The Emmett Till case is very deeply
embedded in the African-American male psyche; it was something that was
mentioned to me all the time, to teach me that racism still existed in
America."
Alterman writes that Beauchamp has said that the horror suffered by Till
was brought home to him in a most personal way when he went out to a nightclub
with friends one evening in 1989 and danced with a white woman. A bouncer
accosted him. Then another man dragged Beauchamp outside and started roughing
him up. The stranger was an undercover police officer and arrested Beauchamp.
In "Documentarian," Beauchamp recalled that at the station, "They tied me to a
chair, pistol-whipped me, all kind of stuff." He was asked for his
identification. Beauchamp told Alterman that he was released only when the
detective on duty realized that he a close friend of the son of a major with
the sheriff's department.
As a young adult, Beauchamp studied criminal justice at Southern
University, but left before getting a degree to work with New York friends who
owned a production company. He worked on music videos, and then was offered a
chance to produce his own feature film.
The Emmett Till case was his natural subject. Beauchamp devoted nine years
to researching what would become
The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till,
a documentary released by THINKFilm and Till Freedom Come Productions in 2005.
Alterman writes that Beauchamp started his research in a library where he
assiduously read microfilm of archived articles connected to the case. What he
found astonished and dismayed him. The pieces named witnesses that the
authorities had never even bothered to question and possible participants who
had never been charged. Alterman quotes Beauchamp, "It was very strange that
you have all of this overwhelming evidence that was just there, and nobody
ever took the time to go back and research all of that stuff."
Beauchamp was especially impressed by a series of articles published by
James Hicks in 1955 in the Cleveland Call and Post. In these articles,
later gathered by Christopher Metress in
The Lynching Of Emmett Till,
Hicks recounts his own investigation of the Till case while the trial was in
progress. Both Moses Wright and Willie Reed testified to seeing black men in
the truck with Emmett Till.
Hicks was determined to discover who those men were and believed he did.
However, he discloses, "I did not write it in Mississippi for fear of bodily
harm to myself, and to my colleagues." Early on in his investigation, a
clearly frightened African-American woman offered a tip. She told him that a
young man called "Too Tight" was in the truck and that he had since
disappeared from the area. She suggested he go to "the only colored dance hall
in town" to learn Too Tight's real name. Hicks followed her suggestion and
visited a tavern called King's.
At King's, Hicks writes that he posed as "a drifting guy who had dropped in
for a beer." He asked, "Whatever happened to my boy Too Tight?" The manager of
King's stopped and stared. A group of men playing cards dropped them and
turned to look at Hicks. Hicks "grabbed [the manager] by the arm and moved
over in a direction away from [the card players] and nearer the kitchen." The
manager asked what he wanted with Too Tight and Hicks replied that Too Tight
was a friend of his. The manager told him that Too Tight was in jail.
When Hicks inquired as to what Too Tight was jailed for, the manager
referred him to a woman seated nearby. Hicks asked the woman for a dance. As
they twirled around, they exchanged pleasantries, then Hicks asked about Too
Tight. She confirmed that Too Tight was in jail, but claimed she did not know
why. She told Hicks that Too Tight had been residing with her and her
boyfriend, Henry Lee Loggins, with whom she was cohabiting. She said Loggins
was also in jail but did not know what he was charged with either, then added:
"Both of them worked for one of those white men who killed that boy from
Chicago and they came and got both of them." She said Too Tight's real name
was Leroy Collins.
In researching the Till case, Beauchamp met Mamie Till-Mobley. The
24-year-old filmmaker and the then 74-year-old bereaved mother forged a strong
friendship. In an article Beauchamp wrote called "The Murder of Emmett Louis
Till: The Spark that Started the Civil Rights Movement," he stated, "Our
relationship would soon blossom and sculpt me into the man that I have become
today. Her charisma, wisdom and perseverance will always be a part of me."
According to "Who Killed Emmett Till?" an article by Rebecca Segall and
David Holmberg in The Nation, Feb. 3, 2003 "Special Assistant to
the Atty. Gen. Jonathan Compretta agreed to have a conference call on Jan. 6
[2003] with Beauchamp, Mamie Till-Mobley and Alvin Sykes, president of the
Justice Campaign of America, as a possible first step [to re-opening the
case]. Unfortunately, Mamie Till-Mobley died that very day of heart failure,
on the eve of a visit to Atlanta for an appearance with Beauchamp."
Beauchamp traveled to Mississippi in his quest for the truth. According to
Alterman, "He tracked down the people he had read about who allegedly
witnessed the crime, but found they were reluctant to speak out. Many were
African-Americans from the Delta who had kept silent for decades, afraid of
meeting a similar persecution if they revealed what they knew about the people
who brutally murdered a 14-year-old boy."
Eventually, Beauchamp was able to persuade several witnesses to speak
frankly with him and even to tell their stories on camera for The Untold
Story of Emmett Louis Till. Almost half of a century after the events,
some witnesses apparently remained fearful. Ruthie Mae Crawford, a cousin of
Emmett who saw the incident in Bryant's store from the window, allowed her
name to be used and spoke on camera but only in shadow.
Mamie Till-Mobley, interviewed in The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till,
asserts that several people helped murder her son: "I know that Milam and
Bryant had help when they murdered Emmett Till." She also stated that an
African-American man, Leroy "Too Tight" Collins, was seen on the truck
restraining Emmett.
Another interviewee who appears on camera in shadow, "Willie," backs up her
assertion about Collins, claiming to have seen him and another man washing out
blood from the truck. Willie says they told him the blood was from a deer.
"Justice, Delayed But Not Denied," a magazine article published at the CBS
News website on Oct. 21, 2004, reports, "Beauchamp said that after reviewing
thousands of old documents and talking to numerous witnesses with knowledge of
the crime, he believes that at least 14 people may have been involved in the
kidnapping and murder of Till and that five of them are still
alive." According to an email from Beauchamp to this writer, Leroy "Too Tight"
Collins died several years ago.
"Justice, Delayed But Not Denied" elaborates that the current Justice
Department investigation focuses primarily on two individuals. One of them is
the previously mentioned Henry Lee Loggins, one of two local black men jailed
shortly after Till's murder. Now in his 80s and living in Ohio, Loggins
vociferously denies he played any part in the crime.
Loggins spoke to Beauchamp and he appears in The Untold Story of Emmett
Louis Till. He claims he was not involved in the killing of Till and knows
nothing about it except what he has heard. However, Beauchamp says that
witnesses have identified him as the black man on the truck with Collins and
that FBI reports state that he was involved in it.
The other person whose role is being closely examined is Carolyn Bryant.
According to "Justice, Delayed But Not Denied," she is now in her 70s, goes by
the name Carolyn Donham, and lives in Greenville, Miss.
In the commentary section of The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till,
Beauchamp reveals, "I discovered in the course of my research that a warrant
was made out for Carolyn Bryant in 1955 but it was never served." Beauchamp
hopes she will be charged and tried because he feels certain that she was
present when Emmett was abducted and that she identified him.
Another filmmaker, Gode Davis, who worked on a documentary about lynching,
claims to have uncovered information about two other white men who
participated in the Till murder. Segall and Holmberg in their article in
The Nation about Emmett Till quote Davis as saying that he interviewed a
white man who claimed involvement in the crime and that this man knew the
identity of another white man who may have been involved. The article also
states that Davis said he had contact with a white named Billy Wilson who
claimed to have been a witness but not a participant. Beauchamp, however,
reports having a copy of a 1970 story in the Mississippi Southern Patriot
in which a man named Billy Wilson was said "by blacks to brag about being one
of the killers of Emmett Till in 1955 in Money, Miss."
Following a 22-month FBI investigation, The U.S. Justice
Department re-opened the Emmet Till case on May 10, 2004
by turning over more than 8,000 pages of information
about the case to Joyce Chiles, the district attorney
for the 4th Circuit Court District of Mississippi.
In 2007, Chiles sought a manslaughter charge against
73-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the widow of one of the two
confessed killers. On Feb. 26, a grand jury in Leflore County
declined to issue any new indictments. The Till case, for all
intents and purposes, is now officially closed.
Solving Cold Cases
Cold cases are notoriously difficult to solve. Memories and witnesses
become extremely vulnerable to cross-examination. Principals die. Physical
evidence gets misplaced or thrown out.
A few major cold cases have been successfully prosecuted. One of the most
significant was the June 12, 1963 murder of prominent civil rights activist
Medgar Evers, who had been publicly investigating the murder of Emmett Till at
the time he was shot. In the interview with Mamie Till-Mobley shown in The
Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, she says Evers attended the trial every
day, looked for witnesses, and escorted Moses Wright to and from the
courtroom.
Ku Klux Klansman Byron De La Beckwith was arrested for the murder of Medgar
Evers on June 23, 1963. He was tried twice before all-white juries that
deadlocked, allowing him to go free.
Thirty years after his second trial, De La Beckwith was brought to trial
for a third time in 1994. New evidence about statements he had made bragging
about the murder was entered into this trial before a racially mixed jury that
convicted him. He died in prison in 2001.
This intriguing story of belated justice was made into a movie released in
1996 and called
The Ghosts of Mississippi that starred Alec Baldwin as
Bobby DeLaughter, the prosecutor, James Woods as De La Beckwith, and Whoopi
Goldberg as Evers' widow, Myrlie Evers.
According to "'Justice
can't just forget' civil rights era killings [.pdf]," an
article by Bob Kemper published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on
Sept. 13, 2006, interest in several unsolved cases from the civil rights era
has been renewed. The article discusses a few of them. One is that of Georgia
couples George and Mae Dorsey and Roger and Dorothy Malcom who were believed
to have been pulled from a car on July 25, 1946 by a white mob and then beaten
to death. Their murders were in apparent retaliation for Roger Malcom's having
cut a white farmer with a knife a few days earlier. Another case mentioned by
Kemper is that of Jimmy Lee Jackson who was fatally shot by police during a
voter registration demonstration in Marion, Ala.
Kemper notes, "Congress is weighing whether to create special cold-case
units at the Justice Department and FBI that, with a $5 million annual budget,
would exclusively focus on unsolved killings from the civil rights era."
While there are major problems with prosecuting cold cases, there are
advantages to pressing those specifically of the civil rights era. As Kemper
writes, "Once-terrified witnesses and relatives of suspects are increasingly
willing to reveal what they know."
None of those cases is more notorious than that of Emmett Till
whose death struck a chord with so many people, including the
martyred Medgar Evers. Decades after Evers's murder, a measure
of justice was meted out to his murderer.
No such justice awaits Emmett Till.
