On this date, August 28, 1955, Emmett
Till, an
African-American boy who was murdered in Mississippi at the age of 14 after
reportedly flirting with a white woman.
We, the comrades of Unit 1012:
The VFFDP, will make him one of The
82 murdered children of Unit 1012, where we will not forget him. Let us
remember how he lived and not how he died.
We will post information about
him from Wikipedia and other links and we will give our thoughts on another
blog post.
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Emmett Till in a photograph taken by his
mother on Christmas Day 1954, about eight months before his murder. When the
photo ran in the Jackson Daily News Till and his mother were given
"a profound pathos in the flattering photograph", which
"humanized the Tills".
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Born
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Emmett Louis Till
July 25, 1941 Chicago, Illinois U.S. |
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Died
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August 28, 1955 (aged 14)
Money, Mississippi U.S. |
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Cause of
death
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Murder
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Ethnicity
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African-American
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Parents
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Mamie Carthan
Louis Till |
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Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 –
August 28, 1955) was an African-American boy who was murdered in Mississippi at
the age of 14 after reportedly flirting with a white woman. Till was from Chicago,
Illinois, visiting his relatives in Money, Mississippi, in the Mississippi
Delta region, when he spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the married
proprietor of a small grocery store there. Several nights later, Bryant's
husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam went to Till's great-uncle's
house. They took Till away to a barn, where they beat him and gouged out one of
his eyes, before shooting him through the head and disposing of his body in the
Tallahatchie River, weighting it with a 70-pound (32 kg) cotton gin fan
tied around his neck with barbed wire. Three days later, Till's body was
discovered and retrieved from the river.
Till's body was returned to Chicago.
His mother, who had raised him mostly by herself, insisted on a public funeral
service with an open casket to show the world the brutality of the killing.
"The open-coffin funeral held by Mamie Till Bradley exposed the world to
more than her son Emmett Till's bloated, mutilated body. Her decision focused
attention not only on American racism and the barbarism of lynching but also on
the limitations and vulnerabilities of American democracy". Tens of
thousands attended his funeral or viewed his casket and images of his mutilated
body were published in black-oriented magazines and newspapers, rallying
popular black support and white sympathy across the U.S. Intense scrutiny was
brought to bear on the condition of black civil rights in Mississippi, with
newspapers around the country critical of the state. Although initially local
newspapers and law enforcement officials decried the violence against Till and
called for justice, they soon began responding to national criticism by
defending Mississippians, which eventually transformed into support for the
killers.
The trial attracted a vast amount of
press attention. "When an all-white, all-male jury acquitted Bryant and
Milam of kidnapping and murder in September, the verdict shocked observers
across the country and around the world. And when, mere months later, the men
openly admitted to Look magazine that they had, in fact, mutilated and murdered
Till, the outcry was so intense — and the reaction of Till’s devastated family
so dignified — that it lit a spark that helped ignite the modern civil rights
movement". Bryant and Milam were acquitted of Till's kidnapping and
murder, but only months later, a Look magazine reporter interviewed
Bryant and Milam. Protected against double jeopardy, they admitted to killing
him, which further inflamed black opinion. Till's murder is noted as a pivotal
event motivating the African-American Civil Rights Movement.
Problems identifying Till affected the
trial, partially leading to Bryant's and Milam's acquittals, and the case was
officially reopened by the United States Department of Justice in 2004. As part
of the investigation, the body was exhumed and autopsied resulting in a
positive identification. He was reburied in a new casket, which is the standard
practice in cases of body exhumation. His original casket was donated to the Smithsonian
Institution. Events surrounding Emmett Till's life and death, according to
historians, continue to resonate, and almost every story about Mississippi
returns to Till, or the region in which he died, in "some spiritual,
homing way".
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Emmett Till (July 25, 1941 to August 28, 1955)
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.biography.com/people/emmett-till-507515]
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Emmett Till and Mamie Till
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.death2ur.com/emmett_till_gravesite.htm]
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Early childhood
Emmett Till was the son of Mamie Carthan (1921–2003) and Louis Till (1922–1945). Emmett's mother was born in the small Delta town of Webb, Mississippi. The Delta region encompasses the large, multi-county area of northwestern Mississippi in the watershed of the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers. When Carthan was two years old, her family moved to Argo, Illinois, as part of the Great Migration of black families to the North to escape lack of opportunity and unequal treatment under the law. Argo received so many Southern migrants it was named "Little Mississippi"; Carthan's mother's home was often used as a way station for people who had just moved from the South as they were trying to find jobs and homes. Mississippi was the poorest state in the U.S. in the 1950s, and the Delta counties were some of the poorest in Mississippi. In Tallahatchie County, where Mamie Carthan was born, the average income per household in 1949 was $690 ($6,755 in 2013 dollars); for black families it was $462 ($4,523 in 2013 dollars). Economic opportunities for blacks were almost nonexistent. Most of them were sharecroppers who lived on land owned by whites. Blacks had essentially not been allowed to vote since the white-dominated legislature passed a new constitution in 1890, were excluded from politics, and had very few legal rights.
Till was born in Chicago and nicknamed
"Bobo" as an infant by a family friend. His mother Mamie largely raised
him with her mother; she and Louis Till separated in 1942 after she discovered
he had been unfaithful. Louis later choked her to unconsciousness, to which she
responded by throwing scalding water at him. For violating court orders to stay
away from Mamie, Emmett's father Louis was forced by a judge to choose between
jail or enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1943; he died in 1945. At the age of six
Emmett contracted polio, leaving him with a persistent stutter. Mamie and
Emmett moved to Detroit, where she met and married "Pink" Bradley in
1951. Emmett preferred to live in Chicago, so he relocated to live with his
grandmother; his mother and stepfather rejoined him later that year. After the
marriage dissolved in 1952, Bradley returned to Detroit.
Mamie Till Bradley and Emmett lived
alone together in a busy neighborhood in Chicago's South Side, near extended
relatives. She began working as a civilian clerk for the U.S. Air Force for a
better salary and recalled that Emmett was industrious enough to help with chores
at home, although he sometimes got distracted. His mother remembered that he
did not know his own limitations at times. Following his and Mamie's
separation, Bradley visited and began threatening her. At eleven years old,
Emmett, with a butcher knife in hand, told Bradley he would kill him if Bradley
did not leave. Usually, however, Emmett was happy. He and his cousins and
friends pulled pranks on each other (Emmett once took advantage of an extended
car ride when his friend fell asleep and placed the friend's underwear on his
head), and spent their free time in pickup baseball games. He was a natty
dresser and often the center of attention among his peers.
In 1955, Emmett was stocky and
muscular, weighing about 150 pounds (68 kg) and standing 5 feet
4 inches (1.63 m). Despite his being only 14 years old, whites in
Mississippi claimed Till looked like an adult. Mamie Till Bradley's uncle,
64-year-old Mose Wright, visited her and Emmett in Chicago during the summer
and told Emmett stories about living in the Mississippi Delta. Emmett wanted to
see for himself. Bradley was ready for a vacation and planned to take Emmett
with her, but after he begged her to visit Wright, she relented. Wright planned
to accompany Till with a cousin, Wheeler Parker, and another, Curtis Jones,
would join them soon. Wright was a sharecropper and part-time minister who was
often called "Preacher". He lived in Money, Mississippi, a small town
in the Delta that consisted of three stores, a school, a post office, a cotton
gin, and a couple hundred residents, 8 miles (13 km) north of Greenwood.
Before his departure for the Delta, Till's mother cautioned him that Chicago
and Mississippi were two different worlds, and he should know how to behave in
front of whites in the South. He assured her he understood.
Since 1882, when statistics on
lynchings began to be collected, more than 500 African Americans had been
killed by extrajudicial violence in Mississippi alone. Most of the incidents
took place between 1876 and 1930; though far less common by the mid-1950s,
these racially motivated murders still occurred. Throughout the South the
racial caste system was predicated by whites upon avoiding interracial
relationships and maintaining white supremacy. This did not prevent white men
from taking sexual advantage of black women, but was meant to
"protect" white women from black men. Even the suggestion of sexual
contact between black men and white women carried the most severe penalties for
black men. A resurgence of the enforcement of such Jim
Crow mores was evident following World War II. Racial tensions increased
further after the United States Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v.
Board of Education to end segregation in public education. Many
segregationists viewed the ruling as an avenue to allow interracial marriage.
The reaction among whites in the South was to constrain blacks forcefully from
any semblance of social equality. A week before Till arrived, a black man named
Lamar Smith was shot in front of the county
courthouse in Brookhaven for political organizing. Three white suspects were
arrested, but they were soon released.
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Carolyn Bryant
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The remains of Bryant's Grocery and Meat
Market as it appeared in 2009
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Bryant's Grocery - Money Mississippi
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Encounter
between Till and Carolyn Bryant
Till arrived in Money, Mississippi on
August 21, 1955. On August 24, he and cousin Curtis Jones skipped church where
Wright was preaching, joining some local boys as they went to Bryant's Grocery
and Meat Market to buy candy. The teenagers were children of sharecroppers and
had been picking cotton all day. The market was owned by a white couple,
24-year-old Roy Bryant and his 21-year-old wife Carolyn, and mostly catered to
the local sharecropper population. Carolyn was alone in the store that day; her
sister-in-law was in the rear of the store watching children. Jones left Till
with the other boys while Jones played checkers across the street. According to
Jones, the other boys reported that Till had a photograph of an integrated
class at the school he attended in Chicago,[note 1]
and Till bragged to the boys that the white children in the picture were his
friends. He pointed to a white girl in the picture, or referred to a picture of
a white girl that had come with his new wallet, and said she was his
girlfriend. One or more of the local boys dared Till to speak to Bryant.
The facts of what took place in the
store are still disputed but according to several versions, including
allegations from some of the kids standing outside the store when Till walked
in, Till may have wolf-whistled at Bryant. A newspaper account following his
disappearance stated that Till sometimes whistled to alleviate his stuttering.
His speech was sometimes unclear; his mother said he had particular difficulty
with pronouncing "b" sounds, and may have whistled to overcome
problems asking for bubble gum. According to other stories, Till may have grabbed
Bryant's hand and asked her for a date, or said "Bye, baby" as he
left the store, or "You needn't be afraid of me, baby, I've been with
white women before."
Bryant testified during the murder
trial that Till had made sexual advances and asked her for a date. In her
testimony, Bryant alleged that Till grabbed her hand while she was stocking
candy and said "how about a date, baby?" She said that after she
freed herself from his grasp, the young man followed her to the cash register,
grabbed her waist and said "what's the matter baby, can't you take
it?" Bryant then allegedly freed herself, and Till told her "you
needn't be afraid of me, baby," used "one unprintable"
word" and said "I've been with white women before." Bryant also
alleged that one of Till's companions came into the store, grabbed him by the
arm and ordered him to leave.
Till's cousin, Simeon Wright, writing
about the incident decades later, challenged Carolyn Bryant's account. Entering
the store "less than a minute" after Till was left inside alone with
Bryant, Wright saw no inappropriate behavior and heard "no lecherous
conversation." Wright said Till "paid for his items and we left the
store together." The FBI also noted in their 2006 investigation of the
incident that a second anonymous source, who was confirmed to have been in the
store at the same time as Till and his cousin, backed this claim as well.
In any event, Bryant was so alarmed
she ran outside to a car to retrieve a pistol from under the seat. Upon seeing
her do this, the teenagers left immediately. It was also acknowledged that
while Bryant was running to her car, Till whistled. However, it is disputed
whether Till whistled towards Carolyn or towards a checkers game that was
occurring just across the street.
One of the other boys ran across the
street to tell Curtis Jones what happened. When the older man with whom Jones
was playing checkers heard the story, he urged the boys to leave quickly,
fearing violence. Bryant told others of the events at the store, and the story
spread quickly. Jones and Till declined to tell Mose Wright, fearing they would
get in trouble. Till said he wanted to return home to Chicago. Roy Bryant was
on an extended trip hauling shrimp to Texas and did not return home until
August 27.
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J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://mdah.state.ms.us/timeline/zone/1955/]
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Murder
When Roy Bryant was told of what had
happened, he aggressively questioned several young black men who entered the
store. That evening, Bryant, with a black man named J. W. Washington,
approached a young black man walking along a road. Bryant ordered Washington to
seize the young man, put him in the back of a pickup truck, and took him to be
identified by a companion of Carolyn's who had witnessed the episode with Till.
Friends or parents vouched for the young men in Bryant's store, and Carolyn's
companion denied that the young man Bryant and Washington seized was the one
who had accosted her. Somehow, Bryant learned that the young man in the
incident was from Chicago and was staying with Mose Wright.[note 2]
Several witnesses overheard Bryant and his 36-year-old half-brother John
William "J. W." Milam discussing taking Till from his house.
In the early morning hours—between
2:00 am and 3:30 am—on August 28, 1955, Roy Bryant, Milam, and another man (who
may have been black) drove to Mose Wright's house. Milam was armed with a
pistol and a flashlight. He asked Wright if he had three boys in the house from
Chicago. Till shared a bed with another cousin; there were eight people in the
small two-bedroom cabin. Milam asked Wright to take them to "the nigger
who did the talking". When they asked Till if it was him, he replied,
"Yeah", for which they threatened to shoot him and told him to get
dressed. The men threatened to kill Wright if he reported what he had seen.
Till's great-aunt offered the men money, but they did not respond.
They put Till in the back of a pickup
truck and drove to a barn at the Clint Shurden Plantation in Drew. Till was
pistol-whipped and placed in the bed of the pickup truck again and covered with
a tarpaulin. Throughout the course of the night, Bryant, Milam, and witnesses
recall their being in several locations with Till. According to some witnesses,
they took Till to a shed behind Milam's home in the nearby town of Glendora,
where they beat him again and tried to decide what to do. Witnesses recall
between two and four white men and two and four black men who were either in or
surrounding the pickup truck where Till was seated. Others passed by Milam's
shed to the sounds of someone being beaten. Accounts differ as to when Till was
shot; either in Milam's shed or by the Tallahatchie River. The group drove with him in
the truck to Bryant's store, where several people noticed blood pooling in the
truck bed. Bryant explained he killed a deer, and in one instance showed the
body to a black man who questioned him, saying "that's what happens to
smart niggers".
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 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.'J. W. Milam, Look magazine, 1956
In an interview with William Bradford Huie published in Look magazine in 1956, Bryant and
Milam said they intended to beat Till and throw him off an embankment into the
river to frighten him. They told Huie that while they were beating Till,
however, he called them bastards, declared he was as good as they, and in the
past had sexual encounters with white women. They put Till in the back of their
truck, drove to a cotton gin to take a 70-pound (32 kg) fan—the only time
they admitted to being worried, thinking that by this time in early daylight
they would be spotted and accused of stealing—and drove for several miles along
the river looking for a place to dispose of Till. They shot him by the river
and weighted his body with the fan. [note 3]
Mose Wright stayed on his front porch
for twenty minutes waiting for Till to return. He did not go back to bed. He
and another man went into Money, got gasoline, and drove around trying to find
Till. Unsuccessful, they returned home by 8:00 am. After hearing from
Wright that he would not call the police because he feared for his life, Curtis
Jones placed a call to the Leflore County sheriff and another to his mother in
Chicago. Distraught, she called Mamie Till Bradley. Wright and his wife also
drove to Sumner, where Elizabeth Wright's brother contacted the sheriff.
Bryant and Milam were questioned by
Leflore County sheriff George Smith. They admitted they had taken the boy from
his great-uncle's yard but claimed they had released him the same night in
front of Bryant's store. Bryant and Milam were arrested for kidnapping. Word
got out that Till was missing, and soon Medgar
Evers, Mississippi state field secretary for the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Amzie Moore,
head of the Bolivar County chapter, became
involved, disguising themselves as cotton pickers and going into the cotton
fields in search of any information that might help find Till.
Three days after his abduction, Till's
swollen and disfigured body was found by two boys fishing in the Tallahatchie
River. His head was very badly damaged. He had been shot above the right ear,
an eye was dislodged from the socket, there was evidence that he had been beaten
on the back and the hips, and his body weighted to the fan blade, which was
fastened around his neck with barbed wire. He was nude, but wearing a silver
ring with the initials "L. T." and "May 25, 1943" carved in
it.[note
4]
Confusion about Till's whereabouts and
a positive identification of the body retrieved from the river compounded
issues in the case that eventually influenced the trial. Hodding Carter in the Delta
Democrat-Times, a local Mississippi newspaper, reported that Till may have
been hidden by his relatives or perhaps returned to Chicago for his safety. The
body's face was unrecognizable due to trauma and having been submerged in
water. Mose Wright was called to the river and identified Till. The silver ring
Till wore was removed and returned to Wright, and further passed to the
district attorney. Stories from witnesses, both black and white, conflict about
whether the ring was on Till's body and who knew he had worn it previously.
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Mamie at her son’s casket
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Crowds viewing the corpse of Emmett Till
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Till's mother insisted on an open casket
funeral. Images of Till's body, printed in The Chicago Defender and Jet
magazine, made international news and directed attention to the rights of the
blacks in the U.S. South.
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Till's mother insisted on an open casket
funeral. Images of Till's body, printed in The Chicago Defender and Jet
magazine, made international news and directed attention to the rights of the
blacks in the U.S. South.
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Funeral
and reaction
Although racially motivated murders
had occurred throughout the South for decades, the circumstances surrounding
Emmett Till grew beyond the details of a 14-year-old boy who had unknowingly
defied a severe social caste system. Till's murder brought considerations about
segregation, law enforcement, relations between the North and South, the social
status quo in Mississippi, the NAACP, White Citizens' Councils, and the Cold War,
all of which were played out in a drama staged in newspapers all over the U.S.
and abroad. When Till went missing, a three-paragraph story was printed in the Greenwood
Commonwealth and quickly picked up by other Mississippi newspapers. They
reported on his death when the body was found, and the next day, when a picture
of him his mother had taken the previous Christmas showing them smiling
together appeared in the Jackson Daily News and Vicksburg Evening
Post, editorials and letters to the editor were printed expressing shame at
the people who had caused Till's death. One read, "Now is the time for
every citizen who loves the state of Mississippi to 'Stand up and be counted'
before hoodlum white trash brings us to destruction." The letter said that
Negroes were not the downfall of Mississippi society, but whites like those in
White Citizens' Councils that condoned violence.
Till's body was clothed, packed in
lime, and put in a pine coffin and prepared for burial. It may have been
embalmed while in Mississippi. Mamie Till Bradley demanded that the body be
sent to Chicago; she later stated that she endeavored to halt an immediate
burial in Mississippi and called several local and state authorities in
Illinois and Mississippi to make sure that her son was returned to Chicago. A
doctor did not examine Till post-mortem.
Mississippi's governor, Hugh L.
White, deplored the murder, asserting that local authorities should pursue
a "vigorous prosecution". He sent a telegram to the national offices
of the NAACP promising a full investigation and assuring them "Mississippi
does not condone such conduct". Delta residents, both black and white,
also distanced themselves from Till's murder, finding the circumstances
abhorrent. Local newspaper editorials denounced the murderers without question.
Leflore County Deputy Sheriff John Cothran stated, "The white people
around here feel pretty mad about the way that poor little boy was treated, and
they won't stand for this."
Soon, however, discourse about Till's
murder became more complex. Robert
Patterson, executive secretary of the segregationist White Citizens'
Council, lamented Till's death by reiterating that racial segregation policies were in force for
blacks' safety and that their efforts were being neutralized by the NAACP. In
response, NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins
characterized the incident as a lynching and stated that Mississippi was trying to maintain white
supremacy through murder, and "there is in the entire state no
restraining influence of decency, not in the state capital, among the daily
newspapers, the clergy, nor any segment of the so-called better citizens".
Mamie Till Bradley told a reporter that she would seek legal aid to help law
enforcement find her son's killers and that the State of Mississippi should
share the financial responsibility. She was misquoted; it came out as
"Mississippi is going to pay for this".
The A. A. Rayner Funeral Home in
Chicago received Till's body, and upon arrival, Bradley insisted on viewing it
to make a positive identification, later stating that the stench from it was
noticeable two blocks away. She decided to have an open casket funeral, saying "There was just no way I could describe what was in
that box. No way. And I just wanted the world to see." Tens of
thousands of people lined the street outside the mortuary to view Till's body,
and days later thousands more attended his funeral at Roberts Temple Church of
God in Christ. Photographs of his mutilated corpse circulated around the
country, notably appearing in Jet magazine and The Chicago Defender,
both black publications, and drew intense public reaction. According to The
Nation and Newsweek, Chicago's black community was "aroused as
it has not been over any similar act in recent history".[note 5]
Till was buried September 6 in Burr
Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois.
News about Emmett Till spread to both
coasts. Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and Illinois Governor William
Stratton also became involved, urging Governor White to see that justice be
done. The tone in Mississippi newspapers changed dramatically. They falsely
reported riots in the funeral home in Chicago. Bryant and Milam appeared in
photos smiling in military uniforms and Carolyn Bryant's beauty and virtue were
extolled. Rumors of an invasion of outraged blacks and northern whites were
printed throughout the state so that the Leflore County sheriff took them
seriously. Local businessman, surgeon, and civil rights proponent T. R. M. Howard,
one of the wealthiest blacks in the state, warned of a "second civil war"
if "slaughtering of Negroes" was allowed. Following Wilkins'
comments, white opinion began to shift. According to historian Stephen
Whitfield, a specific brand of xenophobia in the South was particularly strong in
Mississippi, urging whites to reject the influence of Northern opinion and
agitation. This independent attitude was profound enough in Tallahatchie County
that it earned the nickname "The Freestate of Tallahatchie", according
to a former sheriff, "because people here do what they damn well
please", making the county often difficult to govern.
Consequently, Tallahatchie County
Sheriff Clarence Strider, who initially positively identified Till's body and
stated that the case against Milam and Bryant was "pretty good", on
September 3 announced his doubts that the body pulled from the Tallahatchie
River was Till's, who, he speculated, was probably still alive. The body,
according to Strider, was planted by the NAACP: a cadaver stolen by
T. R. M. Howard, who colluded to place Till's ring on it.
Strider was motivated to change after the comments made in the press about the
people of Mississippi, later saying, "The last thing I wanted to do was to
defend those peckerwoods. But I just had no choice about it."[note 6]
Bryant and Milam were indicted for
murder, despite the reservations of the grand jury's prosecuting attorney,
Hamilton Caldwell, who was not confident a conviction would ever be returned in
a case of white violence against a black male accused of insulting a white
woman. A local black paper was surprised at the indictment and praised the
decision, as did the New York Times. The high profile comments made in
Northern newspapers and by the NAACP concerned the prosecuting attorney, Gerald
Chatham, who worried that they would not be able to secure a guilty
verdict, even with the evidence they had. Initially, with limited funds, Bryant
and Milam had difficulty finding attorneys to represent them, but five
attorneys at a Sumner law firm offered their services pro bono.
Collection jars were placed in stores and other public places in the Delta,
eventually gathering $10,000 for the defense.
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Ernest
Withers defied the judge's orders prohibiting photography during the trial
to document Mose Wright standing to identify J. W. Milam, which "signified
intimidation of Delta blacks was no longer as effective as the past" and
Wright had "crossed a line that no one could remember a black man ever
crossing in Mississippi".
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Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam at their 1955
trial
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Trial
The town of Sumner in Tallahatchie County served as the
venue for the trial as the body had been found there. Sumner had only one
boarding house and the small town was besieged by reporters from all over the
country. David Halberstam called it "the first
great media event of the civil rights movement". A reporter who had
covered the trials for Bruno Hauptmann and Machine Gun
Kelly remarked that this was the most publicity for any trial he had
ever seen. No hotels were available for black visitors. Mamie Till Bradley
arrived to testify and the trial also attracted black congressman Charles Diggs
from Michigan. Bradley, Diggs, and several black reporters stayed at Howard's
home in Mound Bayou. Located on a large lot and
surrounded by Howard's armed guards, it resembled a compound. The day before
the start of the trial, a young black man named Frank Young arrived to tell
Howard he knew of two witnesses to the crime. Levi "Too Tight"
Collins and Henry Lee Loggins were black employees of Leslie Milam, J. W.'s
brother, in whose shed Till was beaten. Collins and Loggins were spotted with
J. W. Milam, Bryant, and Till. The prosecution team was unaware of Collins and
Loggins. Sheriff Strider, however, booked them into the Charleston, Mississippi jail to keep them
from testifying.
The trial was held in September 1955, lasting for
five days; and attendees remember the weather being very hot. The courtroom was
filled to its 280-spectator capacity, and as a matter of course was racially
segregated. Press from major national newspapers attended, including black
publications; black reporters were made to sit segregated from the white press,
farther from the jury. Sheriff Strider welcomed black spectators coming back
from lunch with a cheerful, "Hello, Niggers!" Some visitors from the
North found the court to be run with surprising informality. Jury members were
allowed to drink beer on duty, and many white men in the audience wore handguns
holstered to their belts.
The defense's primary strategy was arguing that the
body pulled from the river could not be positively identified, and they
questioned whether Till was dead at all. The defense asserted that Bryant and
Milam had taken Till, but had let him go. They attempted to prove that Mose
Wright—who was addressed as "Uncle Mose" by the prosecution and
"Mose" by the defense—could not identify Bryant and Milam as the men
who took Till from his cabin. Only Milam's flashlight was in use, and no other
lights in the house were turned on. Milam and Bryant identified themselves to
Wright the evening they took Till—the third man did not speak—but Wright only
saw Milam clearly. Wright's testimony was considered remarkably courageous and
a first in the state for a black man implicating the guilt of a white man in
court.
Journalist James Hicks, who worked for the black
news wire service National News Association, was present in the courtroom; he
was especially impressed that Wright stood to identify Milam, pointing to him
and saying "Thar he" (There he is),[note 7]
calling it a historic moment and one filled with "electricity". A
writer for the New York Post noted that following his
identification, Wright sat "with a lurch which told better than anything
else the cost in strength to him of the thing he had done". A reporter who
covered the trial for the New Orleans Times-Picayune stated it
was "the most dramatic thing I saw in my career".
Mamie Till Bradley testified that she instructed
her son to watch his manners in Mississippi and that should a situation ever
come to his being asked to get on his knees to ask forgiveness of a white
person, he should do it without a thought. The defense questioned her
identification of her son in the casket in Chicago and a $400 life insurance
policy she had taken out on him.
While the trial progressed, Leflore County Sheriff
George Smith, Howard, and several reporters, both black and white, attempted to
locate Collins and Loggins. They could not, but found three witnesses who had
seen Collins and Loggins with Milam and Bryant on Leslie Milam's property. Two
of them testified that they heard someone being beaten, blows, and cries. One
testified so quietly the judge ordered him several times to speak louder; he
said he heard the victim call out, "Mama, Lord
have mercy. Lord have mercy." Judge Curtis Swango allowed Carolyn
Bryant to testify, but not in front of the jury, after the prosecution objected
that her testimony was irrelevant to Till's abduction and murder. It may have
been leaked in any case to the jury. Sheriff Strider testified for the defense
his theory that Till was alive, the body retrieved from the river was white,
and a doctor from Greenwood stated on the stand that the body was too
decomposed to identify, and therefore had been in the water too long for it to
be Till.
In the concluding statements, one prosecuting
attorney admitted that what Till did was wrong, but it warranted a spanking,
not murder. Gerald Chatham passionately called for justice and mocked the
sheriff and doctor's statements that alluded to a conspiracy. Mamie Bradley
indicated she was very impressed with his summation. The defense stated that
the prosecution's theory of the events the night Till was murdered were
improbable, and said the jury's "forefathers would turn over in their
graves" if they convicted Bryant and Milam. Only three outcomes were
possible in Mississippi for capital murder: life imprisonment, the death penalty,
or acquittal.
On September 23 the all-white jury acquitted both defendants after a 67-minute
deliberation; one juror said, "If we hadn't
stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have taken that long."
In post-trial analyses, blame for the outcome
varied. Mamie Till Bradley was criticized for not crying enough on the stand.
The jury was noted to have been picked almost exclusively from the hill country
section of Tallahatchie County, which, due to its poorer economic make-up,
found whites and blacks competing for land and other agrarian opportunities.
Unlike the population living closer to the river (and thus closer to Bryant and
Milam in Leflore County). who possessed a noblesse
oblige toward blacks according to historian Stephen Whitaker,
those in the eastern part of the county were remarkably virulent in their
racism. The prosecution was criticized for dismissing any potential juror who
knew Milam or Bryant, for the fear that such a juror would vote to acquit.
Afterward, Whitaker noted that this was a mistake as anyone who had personally
known the defendants usually disliked them. One juror voted twice to convict, but
on the third discussion, acquiesced and voted with the rest of the jury to
acquit. In later interviews, the jurors acknowledged that they knew Bryant and
Milam were guilty, but simply did not believe life imprisonment or the death
penalty fit punishment for whites who had killed a black man. This is somewhat
disputed by later interviews with two jurors who stated as late as 2005 that
they believed the defense's case, that the prosecution had not proven that Till
had died, and that it was his body that was removed from the river.
In November 1955, a grand jury declined to indict
Bryant and Milam for kidnapping, despite the testimony given that they had
admitted taking Till. Mose Wright and a young man named Willie Reed, who
testified to seeing Milam enter the shed from which screams and blows were
heard, both testified in front of the grand jury.
T. R. M. Howard paid to relocate Wright, Reed, and another black
witness who testified against Milam and Bryant, to Chicago. Reed, who later changed
his name to Willie Louis to avoid being found, continued to live in the Chicago
area until his death on July 18, 2013. He avoided publicity and kept his
history secret from his wife until she was told by a relative. Reed began to
speak publicly about the case in the PBS documentary The Murder of Emmett Till
in 2003.
Media
discourse
Reactions from newspapers in major
international cities and Catholic, Protestant,
Jewish, and socialist
publications were furious about the verdict and very critical of American
society. Southern newspapers, particularly in Mississippi, wrote that the court
system had done its job. Till's story continued to make news for weeks
following the trial, especially sparking debate between Southern, Northern, and
black newspapers, the NAACP and various high-profile segregationists about
justice for blacks and the propriety of Jim Crow
society.
In October 1955, the Jackson Daily
News reported facts about Till's father that had been suppressed by the
U.S. military. While serving in Italy, Louis Till raped two women and killed a
third. He was court-martialed and hanged by the Army near Pisa in July 1945.
Mamie Till Bradley and her family knew none of this, having only been told that
Louis had been killed for "willful misconduct". Mississippi senators James
Eastland and John C. Stennis probed Army records to uncover
Louis Till's crimes. Although Emmett Till's murder trial was over, news about
his father remained on the front pages of Mississippi newspapers for weeks in
October and November 1955, further engaging debate about Emmett Till's actions
and Carolyn Bryant's integrity. Stephen Whitfield writes that the lack of
attention paid to identifying or finding Till is "strange" compared
to the amount of published discourse about his father. Emmett Till's urges, to
white Mississippians, were genetic instincts violently apparent in Louis Till.
According to historians Davis Houck and Matthew Grindy, "Louis Till became
a most important rhetorical pawn in the high-stakes game of north versus south,
black versus white, NAACP versus White Citizens' Councils".
Protected against double jeopardy,
Bryant and Milam struck a deal with Look magazine in 1956 to tell their
story to journalist William Bradford Huie for between $3,600 and $4,000. The
interview took place in the law firm of the attorneys who had defended Bryant
and Milam. Huie did not ask the questions; Bryant and Milam's own attorneys
did. They had never heard the story before either. According to Huie, the older
Milam was more articulate and sure of himself than Bryant. Milam admitted to
shooting Till and neither of them thought of themselves as guilty or that they
had done anything wrong.
Reaction to Huie's interview with
Bryant and Milam was explosive. Their brazen admission that they had slain Till
caused prominent civil rights leaders to push the federal government harder to
investigate the case. Till's murder was one of several reasons the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was passed; it
allowed the U.S. Department of Justice to intervene in local law enforcement
issues when civil rights were being compromised. Huie's interview, in which he
said that Milam and Bryant had acted alone, overshadowed inconsistencies in
earlier versions of the stories. Details about Collins and Loggins and anyone
else who had possibly been involved in Till's abduction, murder, or the
clean-up of it, were, according to historians David and Linda Beito, forgotten.
[note 8]
If the facts as stated in the Look magazine account of the Till affair are correct, this remains: two adults, armed, in the dark, kidnap a fourteen-year-old boy and take him away to frighten him. Instead of which, the fourteen-year-old boy not only refuses to be frightened, but, unarmed, alone, in the dark, so frightens the two armed adults that they must destroy him.... What are we Mississippians afraid of?William Faulkner, "On Fear", 1956
Emmett Till began to seep into the
consciousness of Americans through media and literature. Langston
Hughes dedicated an untitled poem (eventually to be known as
"Mississippi—1955") to Till in his October 1, 1955 column in The
Chicago Defender. It was reprinted across the country and continued to be
republished with various changes from different writers. Author William
Faulkner, a prominent Mississippi native who often focused on racial
issues, wrote two essays on Till: one before the trial in which he pleaded for
American unity and one after, a piece titled "On Fear" that was
published in Harper's in 1956, in which he questioned why the
tenets of segregation were based on irrational reasoning. Till's murder was the
focus of a 1957 television episode for the U.S. Steel Hour titled "Noon
on Doomsday" written by Rod Serling, who was fascinated with how quickly
Mississippi whites supported Bryant and Milam. Although the script was
rewritten to avoid mention of Till, or even that the murder victim was black,
White Citizens' Councils vowed to boycott U.S. Steel.
The eventual product bore no resemblance to the Till case. Gwendolyn
Brooks wrote a poem titled "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in
Mississippi. Meanwhile, A Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon" in 1960. The
same year Harper
Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird in which a white
attorney is committed to defending a black man named Tom Robinson, accused of
raping a white woman. Lee, whose novel had a profound effect on civil rights,
has not publicly stated Robinson's origins, but literature professor Patrick
Chura notes several compelling similarities between Till's case and that of
Robinson. James Baldwin loosely based his 1964 drama Blues for Mister Charlie on the Till
case. He later divulged that Till's murder had been bothering him for several
years.
Bob Dylan
recorded a song titled "The Death of Emmett Till" in 1962.
Till was mentioned in the 1968 autobiography of Anne Moody,
Coming of Age in Mississippi, in
which she states she first learned to hate during the fall of 1955. Audre Lorde's
poem "Afterimages" (1981) focuses on the perspective of a black woman
thinking of Carolyn Bryant 24 years after the murder and trial, and Bebe Moore Campbell's 1992 novel Your Blues
Ain't Like Mine centers on the events of Till's death. Toni
Morrison's only play as of 2010 is Dreaming Emmett (1986), a
feminist look at the roles of men and women in black society, which she was
inspired to write while considering "time through the eyes of one person
who could come back to life and seek vengeance". Emmylou
Harris includes a song called "My Name is Emmett Till" on her
2011 album, Hard Bargain. According to scholar
Christopher Mettress, Till is often reconfigured in literature as a specter
that haunts the white people of Mississippi, causing them to question their
involvement in evil, or silence about injustice.
Later
events
After Bryant and Milam admitted to
killing Till in their interview, their support base eroded in Mississippi. Many
of their former friends and supporters, including those who had contributed to
their defense funds, cut them off. Their shops went bankrupt and closed after
blacks boycotted them, and banks refused them loans to plant crops. After
struggling to secure a loan and find someone who would rent to him, Milam
managed to secure 217 acres and a $4,000 loan to plant cotton, but blacks
refused to work for him, and he was forced to pay whites higher wages.
Eventually, Milam and Bryant relocated to Texas, but their infamy followed
them, and they continued to receive extreme animosity from locals. After
several years, they returned to Mississippi.[note 9]
Milam found work as a heavy equipment operator, but ill health forced him into
retirement. Over the years, Milam was tried for offenses such as assault and
battery, writing bad checks, and using a stolen credit card. He died of spinal
cancer in 1980, at the age of 61.
Bryant worked as a welder while in
Texas, until increasing blindness forced him to give up this employment. At
some point, he and Carolyn divorced; he remarried in 1980. He opened a store in
Ruleville, Mississippi and was convicted in 1984 and 1988 of food stamp fraud.
In a 1985 interview, he denied that he had killed Till, but said: "if
Emmett Till hadn't got out of line, it probably wouldn't have happened to him."
Fearing economic boycotts and retaliation, Bryant lived a private life and
refused to allow himself to be photographed or reveal the exact location of his
store, explaining: "this new generation is different and I don't want to
worry about a bullet some dark night". He
died of cancer in 1994, at the age of 63.
Till's mother married Gene Mobley,
became a teacher, and changed her surname to Till-Mobley. She continued her
life as an activist working to educate people about her son's murder. In 1992,
Till-Mobley had the opportunity to listen while Bryant was interviewed about
his involvement in Till's murder. With Bryant unaware that Till-Mobley was
listening, he asserted that Till had ruined his life, expressed no remorse, and
said, "Emmett Till is dead. I don't know why he
can't just stay dead."
In 1996, documentary filmmaker Keith Beauchamp, who was greatly moved
by Till's open casket photograph, started background research for a feature
film he planned to make about Till's murder. He asserted that as many as 14
people may have been involved, including Carolyn Bryant Donham (who had
remarried). Mose Wright heard someone with "a lighter voice" affirm
that Till was the one in his front yard immediately before Bryant and Milam
drove away with the boy. Beauchamp spent the next nine years producing The
Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, released in 2003. That same year, PBS aired an installment of American Experience titled "The Murder
of Emmett Till". In 2005, CBS journalist Ed Bradley
aired a 60
Minutes report investigating the Till murder, part of which showed him
tracking down Carolyn Bryant at her home in Greenville, Mississippi.
A 1991 book written by Stephen
Whitfield, another by Christopher Mettress in 2002, and Mamie Till-Mobley's
memoirs the next year all posed questions as to who was involved in the murder
and cover-up, leading federal authorities to try to resolve the questions about
the identity of the body pulled from the Tallahatchie River.
In 2004, the U.S. Department of Justice announced
that it was reopening the case to determine whether anyone other than Milam and
Bryant was involved. David T. Beito, a professor at the University of Alabama, states that Till's
murder "has this mythic quality like the Kennedy assassination". It
was one of a number of cold cases dating to the Civil
Rights era that Justice was investigating.
The body was exhumed and
an autopsy conducted by the Cook County coroner in 2005.
Using DNA from Till's relatives, dental comparisons to images taken of Till,
and anthropological analysis, the body exhumed was positively identified as
Till's. It had extensive cranial damage, a broken left femur, and two broken
wrists. Metallic fragments were found in the skull consistent with being shot
with a .45 caliber gun.
In February 2007, a Leflore County grand jury, composed
primarily of black jurors and empaneled by Joyce Chiles, a black prosecutor,
found no credible basis for Beauchamp's claim that 14 people took part in
Till's abduction and murder. Beauchamp was angry with the finding, but David
Beito and Juan Williams, who worked on the reading materials
for the Eyes on the Prize documentary, were critical
of Beauchamp for trying to revise history and taking attention away from other
cold cases. The grand jury failed to find sufficient cause for charges against
Carolyn Bryant Donham. Neither the FBI nor the grand jury found any credible
evidence that Henry Lee Loggins, identified by Beauchamp as a suspect who could
be charged, had any role in the crime. Other than Loggins, Beauchamp refused to
name any of the people he alleged were involved.
Influence
on civil rights
Somehow [Till's death and trial] struck a spark of indignation that ignited protests around the world... It was the murder of this 14-year-old out-of-state visitor that touched off a world-wide clamor and cast the glare of a world spotlight on Mississippi's racism.Myrlie Evers
Through the constant attention it
received, Till's case became emblematic of the disparity of justice for blacks
in the South. The Chicago Defender in 1955 urged their readers to react
to the acquittal by voting in large numbers, a reminder that most blacks in the
South had been disfranchised since the turn of the century under laws passed by
white Democrat-dominated legislatures. Myrlie
Evers, widow of Medgar Evers, stated in 1985 that Till's case resonated so
strongly because it "shook the foundations of Mississippi—both black and
white, because...with the white community...it had become nationally
publicized...with us as blacks...it said, even a child was not safe from racism
and bigotry and death." The
NAACP asked Mamie Till Bradley to tour the country relating the events of her
son's life, death, and the trial of his murderers. It was one of the most
successful fundraising campaigns the NAACP had ever known. Journalist Louis
Lomax acknowledges Till's death to be the start of what he terms the
"Negro revolt" and scholar Clenora Hudson-Weems characterizes Till as
a "sacrificial lamb" for civil rights. NAACP operative Amzie Moore
considers Till the start of the Civil Rights Movement, at the very least, in
Mississippi.
The 1987 14-hour Emmy award-winning
documentary Eyes on the Prize begins with the murder of Emmett Till.
Accompanying written materials for the series, Eyes on the Prize and Voices
of Freedom (for the second time period) exhaustively encompass the major
figures and events of the Civil Rights Movement. Furthermore, Stephen Whitaker
states, as a result of the attention Till's death and the trial received,
Mississippi became in the eyes of the nation the epitome of racism and the citadel of white supremacy. From this time on, the slightest racial incident anywhere in the state was spotlighted and magnified. To the Negro race throughout the South and to some extent in other parts of the country, this verdict indicated an end to the system of noblesse oblige. The faith in the white power structure waned rapidly. Negro faith in legalism declined, and the revolt officially began on December 1, 1955, with the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott.
In Montgomery, Rosa Parks
refused to give up her seat to a white bus rider, sparking a year-long
well-organized grassroots boycott of the public bus system, designed
to force the city to change its segregation policies. Parks later said when she
did not get up and move to the rear of the bus, "I
thought of Emmett Till and I just couldn't go back." According to
author Clayborne Carson, Till's death and the widespread
coverage of the students integrating Little Rock Central High School
in 1957 were especially profound for younger blacks: "It was out of this
festering discontent and an awareness of earlier isolated protests that the
sit-ins of the 1960s were born." After seeing pictures of Till's mutilated
body, in Louisville, Kentucky, young Cassius Clay
(later famed boxer Muhammad Ali) and a friend took out their frustration
by vandalizing a local railyard, causing a locomotive engine to derail. It is
thought that Till's story influenced Harper Lee to create the character Tom
Robinson in her novel To Kill A Mockingbird.
In 1963, Sunflower County resident Fannie
Lou Hamer, herself a sharecropper, was jailed and beaten for attempting to
register to vote. The next year, she led a massive voter
registration drive in the Delta region, and volunteers worked on Freedom
Summer throughout the state. Before 1954, 265 black people were registered
to vote in three Delta counties, where they were a majority; they made up 41%
of the total state population. The summer Emmett Till was killed, the number of
registered voters in those three counties dropped to 90. By the end of 1955,
fourteen Mississippi counties had no registered black voters. The Mississippi
Freedom Summer of 1964 registered 63,000 black voters in a simplified process
administered by the project; they formed their own political party because they
were closed out of the Democratic Regulars in Mississippi.
The story of Emmett Till is one of the most important of the last half of the 20th century. And an important element was the casket.... It is an object that allows us to tell the story, to feel the pain and understand loss. I want people to feel like I did. I want people to feel the complexity of emotions.Lonnie Bunch III, director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture
Till continues to be the focus of
literature and memorials. A statue was unveiled in Denver in 1976 (and has
since been moved to Pueblo, Colorado) featuring Till with Martin Luther King,
Jr. Till was included among the forty names of people who had died in the Civil
Rights Movement (listed as martyrs) on the granite sculpture of the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama,
dedicated in 1989. In 1991, a 7-mile (11 km) stretch of 71st Street in
Chicago, was renamed "Emmett Till Road". Mamie Till-Mobley attended
many of the dedications for the memorials, including a demonstration in Selma,
Alabama on the 35th anniversary of the march over the Edmund Pettis Bridge. She later
wrote in her memoirs, "I realized that Emmett had
achieved the significant impact in death that he had been denied in life. Even
so, I had never wanted Emmett to be a martyr. I only wanted him to be a good
son. Although I realized all the great things that had been accomplished
largely because of the sacrifices made by so many people, I found myself
wishing that somehow we could have done it another way."
Till-Mobley died in 2003, the same year her memoirs were published.
James McCosh Elementary School in
Chicago, where Till had been a student, was renamed the "Emmett Louis Till
Math And Science Academy" in 2005. The "Emmett Till Memorial Highway"
was dedicated between Greenwood and Tutwiler, Mississippi, the same route his
body took to the train station on its way to Chicago. It intersects with the H.
C. "Clarence" Strider Memorial Highway. In 2007, Tallahatchie County
issued a formal apology to Till's family, reading "We
the citizens of Tallahatchie County recognize that the Emmett Till case was a
terrible miscarriage of justice. We state candidly and with deep regret the
failure to effectively pursue justice. We wish to say to the family of Emmett
Till that we are profoundly sorry for what was done in this community to your
loved one." The same year, Georgia congressman John Lewis, whose
skull was fractured while being beaten during the 1965 Selma march, sponsored a
bill that provides a plan for investigating and prosecuting unsolved Civil
Rights era murders. The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act was signed
into law in 2008.
Casket
On July 9, 2009, a manager and three
laborers at Burr Oak Cemetery were charged with digging up bodies, dumping them
in a remote area, and reselling the plots. Till's grave was not disturbed, but
investigators found his original glass-topped casket rusting in a dilapidated
storage shed. When Till was reburied in a new casket in 2005, there were plans
for an Emmett Till memorial museum, where his original casket would be
installed. The cemetery manager, who administered the memorial fund, pocketed
donations intended for the memorial. It is unclear how much money was
collected. Cemetery officials also neglected the casket, which was discolored,
the interior fabric torn, and bore evidence that animals had been living in it,
although its glass top was still intact. The Smithsonian's National Museum of
African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. acquired the casket a
month later. According to director Lonnie Bunch III, it is an artifact with
potential to stop future visitors and make them think.
Notes
- Accounts are unclear; Till had just completed the seventh grade at the all-black McCosh Elementary School in Chicago (Whitfield, p. 17).
- Some recollections of this part of the story relate that news of the incident traveled in both black and white societies very quickly. Others state that Carolyn Bryant refused to tell her husband and Till's oldest cousin Maurice Wright, perhaps put off by Till's bragging and clothes, told Roy Bryant at his store about Till's interaction with Bryant's wife. (Whitfield, p. 19.)
- Several major inconsistencies between what Bryant and Milam told interviewer William Bradford Huie and what they had told others were noted by the FBI. They told Huie they were sober, yet reported years later they had been drinking. In the interview, they stated they had driven what would have been 164 miles (264 km) looking for a place to dispose of Till's body, to the cotton gin to obtain the fan, and back again, which the FBI noted would be impossible in the time they were witnessed having returned. Several witnesses recalled that they saw Bryant, Milam, and two or more black men with Till's beaten body in the back of the pickup truck in Glendora, yet they did not admit to being in Glendora to Huie. (FBI, [2006], pp. 86–96.)
- Many years later, there were allegations that Till had been castrated. (Mitchell, 2007) John Cothran, the deputy sheriff who was at the scene where Till was removed from the river testified, however, that apart from the decomposition typical of a body being submerged in water, his genitals were intact. (FBI [2006]: Appendix Court transcript, p. 176.) Mamie Till-Mobley also confirmed this in her memoirs. (Till-Bradley and Benson, p. 135.)
- When Jet publisher John H. Johnson died in 2005, people who remembered his career considered his decision to publish Till's open casket photograph his greatest moment. Michigan congressman Charles Diggs recalled that for the emotion the image stimulated, it was "probably one of the greatest media products in the last 40 or 50 years". (Dewan, 2005)
- Strider was apparently unable to be consistent with his own theory. Following the trial he told a television reporter that should anyone who had sent him hate mail arrive in Mississippi "the same thing's gonna happen to them that happened to Emmett Till". (Whitfield, p. 44.)
- The trial transcript reads the line as "There he is", although witnesses recall variations of "Dar he", "Thar he", or "Thar's the one". Wright's family protested that Mose Wright was made to sound illiterate and insists he said "There he is." (Mitchell, 2007)
- A month after Huie's article appeared in Look, T. R. M. Howard worked with Olive Arnold Adams of The New York Age to put forth a version of the events that agreed more with the testimony at the trial and what Howard had been told by Frank Young. It appeared as a booklet titled Time Bomb: Mississippi Exposed and the Full Story of Emmett Till. Howard also acted as a source for an as-yet unidentified reporter using the pseudonym Amos Dixon in the California Eagle. Dixon wrote a series of articles implicating three black men, and Leslie Milam, who, Dixon asserted, had participated in Till's murder in some way. Time Bomb and Dixon's articles had no lasting impact in the shaping of public opinion. Huie's article in the far more widely circulated Look became the most commonly accepted version of events. (Beito and Beito, pp. 150–151.)
9. Such was the animosity
toward the murderers that in 1961, while in Texas, when Bryant recognized the
license plate of a Tallahatchie County resident, he called out a greeting and
identified himself. The resident, upon hearing the name, drove away without
speaking to Bryant. (Whitaker, 2005)
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