by Mark Bowden
I asked him if he thought the jury had reached the correct verdict. “Under the circumstances, I don’t know if correct would be the right word,” he told me. “But I think it was sustainable.” Had he since come to believe the defendants guilty? “I expect, yes,” he said. “If you had to put me down as—if I had to say one way or the other what my belief was, it would be that the body was that of Till and he had been put in the river. These people either did it or knew of it.”
I raised the subject of his having helped get a loan for Milam—who, like Whitten, was a veteran of World War II, and a highly decorated one at that—after the trial. Huie had quoted Whitten as saying: “Yes, I helped him. He was a good soldier. In a minefield at night, when other men were running and leaving you to do the killing, J.W. Milam stood with you. When a man like that comes to you and his kids are hungry, you don’t turn him down.”
“Did you really feel that he was a good man?” I asked.
“Yes, I did. Now, I don’t say I felt like he was a man I wanted to know and be with every day. But I felt like he was honest. I felt like he was—could be counted on to do things and look after his family. I never changed my mind about that.”
“Well, how is it possible that he did this, then?”
He was silent for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said.
I asked him if he didn’t see a conflict there: how could he believe both that Milam was a good man and that he was a murderer? “Well, if that’s what you’re to judge by,” he said. “I don’t know whether doing this means he’s bad or not. I can’t—I’m sure I would have done differently, but I don’t dismiss him in every respect because he made one mistake—bad mistake, but his children are still—he’s still entitled to work and feed his children.”
He was clearly feeling uneasy now, and I could see that it was not merely with this line of questioning; his discomfort, I suspected, mirrored the way he had felt forty years earlier when he had been called upon to defend men of a type he did not associate with, men who had committed a crime he no doubt considered distasteful, to say the least. People of John Whitten’s background, his station, did not do such things, or embrace those who did. And yet, in killing Emmett Till, Milam and Bryant had drawn fire from the outside world, not just upon themselves and their crime, but upon their state and their region and nothing less than the entire Southern way of life. And John Whitten, as one of the chief beneficiaries of that way of life, had been called upon to defend it by defending them.
Adding to that burden must have been the knowledge that, in the process, he had become something of a spokesman for white resistance: his final entreaty to the jury was the most notorious utterance of the whole affair. “I’m sure,” Whitten told the jurors, that “every last Anglo-Saxon one of you men in this jury has the courage to set these men free.”
“Why ‘Anglo-Saxon’?” I asked him.
At first he offered something about Anglo-Saxons having “a reputation for being a little harder against people who get out of line than do others,” but he quickly set that aside and explained: “You said ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ the jury would understand what you were talking about. You’re talking about a white man.” He added, making a pointed reference to another trial that at that very moment was also polarizing the country, “I guess you could say I was playing the race card.”
And it occurred to me, right then, just how much the defense of O.J. Simpson owed to the defense of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, and how little, in some ways, the country had changed in the past forty years. The issue of race was still so potent that it could overwhelm evidence and hijack a jury, even when the case at hand was a brutal, savage murder. I found it interesting that Whitten made the connection; I wondered if anyone in that courtroom in Los Angeles had.
THE PREACHER
Sometimes, when you set out to find answers to what you believe are simple questions, what you actually end up with are more questions, the kind that are anything but simple. That’s what happened to me during those four conversations. Especially the last one.
Howard Armstrong. In 1995, he was, aside from Ray Tribble, the only living juror. In 1955, he was a thirty-six-year-old veteran of World War II, just like John Whitten, and was living in Enid, up in the northern stem of Tallahatchie County. Most of the other jurors, he said, were from other parts of the county, and he didn’t know them. They might have known him by reputation: he was a lay minister, leader of the deacons at the Mount Pisgah Baptist Church. A few years later he would be ordained, and would serve as pastor to a number of congregations for the next thirty-five years, finally retiring at the age of seventy-five, just a year before we met.
As with the others, I spoke to Armstrong on the phone first, and he invited me to come by and visit—although, like Ray Tribble, he wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about the trial. No one, he told me, had ever tried to interview him on the subject. “Ain’t a lot of people even know I served on that jury,” he said.
He was living with his wife of fifty-three years, Janie, in a small, neat house that sat up on a rise off a dirt road. In 1955, he was a farmer who made ends meet by working nights at a heating and air-conditioning factory in Grenada, Mississippi, about thirty miles away. The first he had heard of the murder of Emmett Till, he told me, was when he received his jury summons. “I didn’t have time for much news,” he explained, “working night shift and farming during the day.”
I asked him how he had felt about serving. “Really and truly,” he told me, “I can’t remember how I felt about that. I reckon I felt the way I did about serving on any other jury. I wasn’t crazy about serving on none of them…. I needed to be on my job and on the farm.” When I pressed him to tell me what else he remembered, he responded: “I don’t want to pull it up. I want to leave it out there—it’s just best to leave things alone.”
“He just never did talk about that much,” his wife, who was sitting next to him, explained.
I asked about the verdict. “I didn’t think that they presented the case to prove it,” he said of the prosecutors. “I understand that them folks was pretty much outlaws, but I didn’t know that. I heard it years later.” He was quiet for a moment. “I still don’t know.”
That truly surprised me. But he stood by it, insisting that the prosecution had not proven its case—otherwise, he said, “I’d never have voted the way I did.” When I asked him what the jury deliberations had been like, he said, “I’m sure there was a good bit of discussion. I do remember that there were at least three votes on that thing.” He must have anticipated my next question, because he quickly added, “And I voted to acquit all three times.”
I was disappointed; somehow, I had hoped he might have been that lone dissenter. I asked if he still believed they had reached the right verdict.
“I still think they were innocent,” he said. “I have no reason and no proof, and I don’t judge people. I went and done my duty, left my duty where it was at and went on to other things.” And no misgivings at all? “I served to the best of my ability, under my prayer to God for guidance and wisdom. And I stand by my decision…. I still stand by it. I think I was right.”
“I guess you know that an awful lot of people disagreed.”
“I was surprised at all the fuss,” he said. “I thought we deliberated that thing, came back with a decision and that should be it.” I asked him if racial tensions were sharpened there afterward. “There wasn’t as much tensions as there are now,” he said.
“We’ve always had some good black friends,” his wife added. “Very good.”
“Go to Charleston,” he told me, “talk to any of the blacks that was raised with me, and they’ll tell you I was anything but a racist.”
And I found that statement more disturbing than anything that Ray Tribble, or J.W. Kellum, or John Whitten had said to me. Because I believed him. I believed that Howard Armstrong was not a racist. I felt I had gotten to the point where I could spot a racist of almost any type in almost any circumstance, and he w
as not one. And yet he had voted—at least three times, by his own account—to acquit two men who were clearly guilty of a horrific, racist crime.
I have spent a lot of time contemplating that conundrum over the past ten years, and I have come to the conclusion that at least part of the problem is ours. We tend to think of racism, and racists, the way we think of most things—in binary terms. Someone is either a racist or he isn’t. If he is a racist, he does racist things; if he isn’t, he doesn’t. But of course it’s much more complicated than that, and in the Mississippi of 1955 it was more complicated still. Today, we can look back and say that Howard Armstrong should have voted to convict Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam of murdering Emmett Till; but for him to buck the established order like that would have actually required him to make at least four courageous decisions. First, he would have had to decide that the established order, the system in which he had lived his entire life, was wrong. Second, he would have had to decide that it should change. Third, he would have had to decide that it could change. And finally, he would have had to decide that he himself should do something to change it.
Howard Armstrong never made it to that final step. Another juror apparently did, and managed to stay there through two votes before backing down. It is frustrating to me that I will probably never know who that other juror was, where he found the courage that got him that far, and why, ultimately, he changed his mind. But it is even more frustrating to me to imagine that Howard Armstrong made it past Step 1 but got tripped up on 2 or 3.
I only wonder if it was frustrating for him too. In 1995, sitting with him in his living room, I took his answers, his unwavering declarations that he had no regrets, at face value; today, I’m not so sure. Rereading my notes after ten years, I can perceive a certain defensiveness in his words, an urge to keep the conversation short and narrow, perhaps cut off the next question before it could be asked. His insistence, like J.W. Kellum’s, that this was just another trial feels flat now. And then there’s his vacillation on the matter of whether or not the defendants were “outlaws.” Did he really believe, in both 1955 and 1995, that Bryant and Milam were innocent, and that he himself had done the right thing in voting to set them free? Or was this merely something he repeatedly told himself—and others—to get by? I do believe he was not a racist in 1995. But had he been one in 1955 and then grew, in subsequent decades, so ashamed of that fact that he did everything he could to defeat it in his own mind?
I don’t know if Howard Armstrong could have answered those questions then, but I imagine he didn’t want to try. It was easier on him, I’m sure, to believe that he had just forgotten all about it. “I’m glad I can’t remember those old days,” he told me near the end of our visit. “You hear so much about ‘the good old days.’ The good old days weren’t so good.”
RICHARD RUBIN has been a regular contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, and has written for the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, New York magazine, and The Oxford American, among others. His most recent book, Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South (Atria, 2002), is in part a memoir of his experiences reporting for a daily newspaper in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1988–1989. He lives in New York, and is at work on a book about World War I.
Coda
I first heard the story of Emmett Till in 1987, as a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, while watching the documentary Eyes on the Prize as part of a seminar on the subject of Race in America. I was shocked, of course, by Till’s story—most of Eyes on the Prize is shocking, really—and when the narrator recounted how an attorney for the killers said, at their trial, “I’m sure every last Anglo-Saxon one of you men in this jury has the courage to set these men free,” I remember, clearly, thinking: Why would anyone say such a thing? What could he have been thinking? In a general sense, my desire to find the answers to questions like those is what led me to take a job as a newspaper reporter in the small Delta town of Greenwood, Mississippi, after graduation, and to spend nearly five years living in the Deep South. I never imagined, though, that I would someday have the chance to pose those questions to the man who had inspired them in the first place.
The Emmett Till case seems so straightforward, and has become so iconic, that people often mistakenly believe they know the whole story. One thing you won’t hear in Eyes on the Prize, or just about anywhere else, is that it was extremely unusual that Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were even tried for murder in the first place. In fact, no one I’ve asked in Mississippi can recall another such trial happening before then. There were a great many lynchings before then, of course, most of them now long-forgotten, but despite the fact that many of them were public events—and there are plenty of pictures to document them—no white man had ever been tried in Mississippi for lynching a black man before September 1955. What’s more, the trial of Milam and Bryant was widely regarded, at the time, to have been eminently fair (unlike the verdict). This was a universal conclusion—even the black press, outraged though they were over the verdict, devoted a lot of ink to how hard the prosecutors worked for a conviction, and how fair the judge was in presiding over the trial, the latter going so far as to exclude the testimony of Carolyn Bryant, which, he determined, served no purpose other than to inflame the jurors’ racial prejudices. James L. Hicks, the legendary pioneer black journalist, was there in Sumner and wrote:
I had come here almost with a preconceived idea that I would jeer a mockery of justice from the first day of the trial. But, as the state spun its web around the two men in five days, I stayed up late and long each night, waiting and getting ready to cheer a state which I felt was coming over to the side of decency and fair play when the rest of the world was saying that it couldn’t be done.
And up to the very moment that the jury of white sharecroppers came out of the jury room to announce their verdict, I was inwardly cheering and rooting for the people of Mississippi as loud and long as I root for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
For in the five days’ conduct of the trial, Mississippi just didn’t follow the script written for her by the rest of the world.
After my article was published, I was contacted by the son of one of those prosecutors; he later shared with me a large cache of letters his late father had received during and after the trial. There were two basic types: the first from a black or white correspondent thanking him for his courageous stand in the name of justice; the seond from a white correspondent condemning him, often obscenely, for betraying his race.
As I said, I never imagined, in 1987, that I would someday have the opportunity to confront some of the men involved in the Emmett Till case, if for no other reason than that the whole affair seemed so bizarre and archaic and otherworldly that I just assumed everyone involved in it was long dead. They were not, though most are now. J.W. Kellum died at eighty-four, less than a year after I met him. Ray Tribble died of cancer in 1998, at the age of seventy-one; a senior center in Greenwood is now named for him. John W. Whitten, Jr., succumbed to Parkinson’s in 2003, a week shy of his eighty-fourth birthday. Three years earlier, he and his wife gave a million dollars to their alma mater, Ole Miss, to build a new student golf center. Howard Armstrong died of heart failure on August 25, 2003; he was eighty-four years old. The road that leads to the cemetery where he is buried is named for him.
Roy Bryant died of cancer in 1994 at the age of sixty-three. So did his half brother, J.W. Milam, at the age of sixty in 1981. I am told that Milam’s cancer was spinal, and particularly painful. The hotel in Sumner where the jurors were sequestered has long since closed, and now looks as if it is being devoured by trees; parts of it appear to have been swatted to the ground by some giant hand. Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market continues to deteriorate; when I last saw it, in the fall of 2004, the roof, windows, interior walls, and floors were entirely gone, and trees were growing inside it. The second-story porch had been reduced to some dangling weather-beaten timbers, and the front doors had vanished; someone had already put them up for sale on eBay, with an openin
g bid price of five hundred dollars. There were no takers.
For much more on the subject, including an account of my 1989 encounter with Roy Bryant, see Confederacy of Silence.
Chuck Hustmyre
BLUE ON BLUE
Murder, Madness, and Betrayal in the NOPD
FROM New Orleans MAGAZINE
SATURDAY, MARCH 4, 1995. 1:55 A.M. EASTERN NEW ORLEANS
Antoinette Frank stood in the cramped kitchen of the Kim Anh restaurant, a 9mm pistol clutched in her hand. Kneeling on the dirty floor at Frank’s feet were seventeen-year-old Cuong Vu and his twenty-four-year-old sister, Ha.
Cuong was an altar boy at St. Brigid Catholic Church. He played high school football and wanted to be a priest. Ha was considering becoming a nun. Both worked long hours at their parents’ restaurant.
Frank fired nine bullets into them.
Ha Vu died instantly. When detectives found her, she was still on her knees, her forehead resting on the floor.
Cuong took longer to die. Frank shot him repeatedly in the chest and back, but his young athlete’s heart continued to beat. Frank heard him trying to talk, so she shot him again, this time firing two bullets into Cuong’s head.
Frank and her partner in crime, an eighteen-year-old named Rogers LaCaze, ransacked the Bullard Avenue restaurant until they found what they were looking for—money.
Frank and LaCaze bolted through the dining room. On their way to the front door they passed Ronnie Williams. Williams was a twenty-five-year-old New Orleans police officer assigned to the Seventh District. He had gotten off work at 11:00 P.M. and had gone straight to the restaurant to work a security detail. Williams needed the extra money the detail paid. Ten days earlier, his wife had given birth to the couple’s second son, Patrick.
Still in his police uniform, Williams would be found face down behind the bar in a pool of blood. He had been shot twice in the head and once in the back.