Emmett Till

by Devery S. Anderson

  When Curtis Jones woke up that morning, he vaguely recalled the commotion from the night before, but thought for a moment he may have dreamed it. He went out onto the porch, learned what had happened, and immediately went to the home of a neighbor to call Chicago and report the abduction to his mother, Willie Mae. It would fall to her to pass the news to Mamie Bradley.4

  Talk of the abduction began spreading throughout Money Sunday morning, and soon, both white and black neighbors began congregating at the Wright home to comfort the distraught preacher. “The people kept coming,” Mose Wright said, “and we prayed and prayed.”5

  Mamie Bradley had not left for her trip to Omaha yet. She felt tired after Emmett left for Mississippi and wanted to take a day just to relax first. That day turned into seven, and she spent much of the week sleeping and simply feeling lonely for her son. By the weekend, she decided she would not leave until she first heard from him. On Saturday, August 27, she received his letter, which lifted her spirits. That night, she went out with a friend until around 11:00 P.M., then hosted several others who dropped by her house. They talked and laughed until early in the morning.

  After her company left, she laid down, intending to get up for church, but at 9:30, her phone rang, and with that call came the news that would change her life. The caller, crying, could say very little.

  “This is Willie Mae. I don’t know how to tell you—Bo—they came and got him last night.”

  With that, the caller abruptly hung up, leaving Mamie alone to process the words she had just heard, words that came out of nowhere, but which left her stunned and confused. She tried to collect herself, but Willie Mae’s evasive message left her with more questions than answers. At the same time, it was frighteningly clear that Emmett had been kidnapped and was presumably still missing in Mississippi.6

  By instinct, Mamie immediately phoned her mother. Alma began to panic also but told Mamie to come right over. Too upset to drive, Mamie phoned her boyfriend, Gene Mobley, who agreed to drive her. However, after waiting for what seemed like forever, Mamie started to leave by herself. As she backed out of her driveway, Gene finally arrived, got into the car, slid behind the wheel, and together they headed to Alma’s. At Sixty-Third Street and Halstead, Mamie again lost patience, made Gene pull over, and traded places with him. After racing through red lights and stop signs, they arrived at Alma’s house at 1626 West Fourteenth Place.7

  Mamie discovered upon arriving that Alma had already made some phone calls but so far had learned nothing. After the mother and daughter took time to comfort each other, they tried to get a call to Mose Wright by phoning his landlord, Grover Frederick, but this proved useless. “The man said he was too old to hear,” said Mamie about that frustrating experience. “He didn’t have a pencil. He didn’t know where the paper was. He was just in a helpless condition. He couldn’t even call anybody to the phone who could take the message.”8 Later, Alma called her brother, Crosby, who told her all he knew. By this time, family began to arrive at Alma’s, including Willie Mae, who shared what little else her son Curtis had told her about the kidnapping. Mamie now learned for the first time that her son had allegedly whistled at a white woman.9

  The Argo Temple Church of God in Christ, Mamie’s congregation, received word of the kidnapping and said a prayer for the family during its Sunday service. But for Mamie and Alma, this Sabbath would remain a day of waiting and worry, with no apparent comfort on the horizon. Mamie began calling Chicago newspapers and reported the abduction, which proved to be a wise move. Soon, the family members gathering at Alma’s were joined by local newspaper reporters, who took immediate interest in the story. “I told them the only thing I knew at the time,” Mamie later wrote. “My son, Emmett Till, had been taken away in the middle of the night by white men who came into my Uncle Moses Wright’s home in Money, Mississippi.”10 Mamie stayed near the phone in case Wright tried to call. She and Alma also sought help from other friends and family in Mississippi, but this proved disappointing. “They, too, had other business,” Mamie said.11

  After his many visitors left, Mose Wright went into Greenwood and reported the abduction to Deputy John Cothran, who promised to tell County Sheriff George Smith.12 It remains unknown exactly what Wright said to the officer, but he certainly provided what details he could. After all, one of the men who went to Wright’s home identified himself at the door as “Mr. Bryant.” Wright did not know the man and had never been in Bryant’s store, but he knew that the incident that started Till’s troubles had occurred at the Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market the previous Wednesday. That was enough to provide the sheriff’s office with at least one suspect—Roy Bryant, the husband of the woman working behind the counter.

  Wright and Crosby Smith may have gone to see the sheriff together, or perhaps Smith went first and reported it because he later recalled a conversation he had at the sheriff’s office that day. After Crosby related the kidnapping, Sheriff Smith seemed sure of the suspects right away.

  “Don’t you reckon that’s Bryant and Milam?” he asked his deputy. “They done something like that in Glendora once.” Sheriff Smith did not elaborate on what that “something” was. Besides Roy Bryant, Sheriff Smith had in mind Bryant’s half-brother, John “J. W.” Milam.13

  The two brothers were known as peckerwoods, or poor whites despised by those of a higher social status. They were part of a large clan that was said to “work, fight, vote, and play as a family.” Milam, thirty-six, weighed 235 pounds, was bald, stood six feet two inches, and was a decorated World War II veteran. He had been awarded several medals during the war, including a Purple Heart and Silver Star, and won a battlefield commission by the Seventy-Fifth Division. He would not leave his penchant for fighting and shooting behind after his discharge from the army, but kept his Colt .45 pistol and knew how to use it. “Best weapon the Army’s got,” he would later say. “Either for shootin’ or sluggin.’” He married Mary Juanita Thompson in 1949, and by 1955 the Milams had two sons.

  Roy Bryant, twenty-four, married Madge Carolyn Holloway in 1951, after their paths crossed during one of her many visits to Tutwiler to visit her married sister, Frances Reed. Carolyn was a former high school beauty queen who also won several beauty contests as a baby. By 1955, Roy and Carolyn had two young boys. Roy served as a paratrooper during the Korean War, but never left the United States during his service.14 After Bryant moved to Money and took over this family store in early 1954, he got into a dispute with a neighboring white merchant who had agreed to close his grocery each day in the early afternoon. When the man reneged, Bryant threatened him at gunpoint.15

  Sunday afternoon, Sheriff Smith and Deputy Sheriff Cothran set out to question Bryant in Money. When they arrived at his store at 2:00 P.M., they learned he was still asleep in the living quarters. His wife and sons were gone, but other family members were present. In the apartment upstairs lived Money’s postmaster, but it is unknown if she was present at the time. Cothran brought the suspect outside, and Smith questioned Bryant alone while they sat in the patrol car.

  Smith, who reconstructed their conversation a few days later, did not pull any punches. “What did you want to go down there and get that little boy for?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, but I went and got him,” admitted Bryant.

  “What did you do with him?”

  “My wife said he wasn’t the right one and I turned him loose at the store,” claimed Bryant.

  Smith thought that was odd. “Why didn’t you take him back home?”

  “I thought he knew the way home.”

  Bryant’s confession was enough for Smith to arrest him on kidnapping charges and book him into the Leflore County jail. Bryant went willingly after Smith allowed him to change clothes.16

  Milam’s arrest occurred the next day after he went to the sheriff’s office at around noon.17 He went to Greenwood on his own that day, and Cothran spotted him outside the window.

  “Lookey yonder George,” urged Cothran to his boss
.

  Sheriff Smith looked through the window and saw that this was their man. “Oh dog gone let’s go get him. That’s Milam.”18

  Milam had gone to Greenwood with the intent of turning himself in to authorities in order to keep Bryant from “running his mouth” off and deviating from the story that they had rehearsed.19 Cothran questioned him on the way to the jail, and Milam admitted abducting the boy but, like Bryant, claimed he let him loose. Milam also failed to implicate anyone else, not even his jailed brother. He was then booked and placed in a separate cell on a different floor from Bryant. Sheriff Smith also issued an arrest warrant for Carolyn Bryant, based on Mose Wright’s statement that he heard what sounded like a woman’s voice outside during the kidnapping.20

  That same day, news of the abduction appeared on the front page of one Chicago newspaper and several others in Mississippi. The Chicago Daily Tribune’s story, prepared on Sunday after reporters visited Mamie at her mother’s home, quoted Deputy Cothran, who said that Till “reportedly had had an argument with Mrs. Bryant at the Bryant store.” Mississippi papers reporting the story on Monday included the Clarksdale Press Register, Delta Democrat-Times, Greenwood Commonwealth, Jackson Daily News, Laurel Leader-Call, McComb Enterprise-Journal, and Jackson State Times. Most of them reported that Till was kidnapped because he had allegedly made “ugly remarks” to the woman. They also noted that three men were involved, two of whom entered the house and abducted Till at gunpoint. The Delta Democrat-Times said that Till “said something to offend Bryant’s wife.” Only one paper, the Greenwood Commonwealth, identified J. W. Milam as a second suspect, reporting his arrest just before press-time by placing the breaking news in a paragraph above the story. The Commonwealth also named five of the youth who were with Till on the evening of the incident at the store. The Tribune failed to mention the presence of a woman in the car who identified the boy, as did some of the Mississippi papers. In these first reports, no one mentioned the wolf whistle. With all the focus on Milam and Bryant, the third man who accompanied the suspects to Wright’s home remained unknown and was, in fact, still at large.21

  Mamie Bradley likely read the Chicago Daily Tribune article, which provided some hope that the men who took her son had released him, as they claimed. “In the back of my mind was the hope that Bo had slipped away from his abductors and was hiding, afraid, in the home of some colored people,” she said, “and I kept hugging this hope close to me.” Yet Deputy Cothran’s suspicion, quoted in the same paper, that he feared “some harm has been done to the boy” meant that Mamie had to prepare for the worst. However, Monday proved too busy to dwell on that as she continued to seek information about her missing son. She was not alone. Her stepfather, Henry Spearman, enlisted the help of his nephew, Rayfield Mooty, a local union leader and competent organizer, who introduced Mamie to officials at the local NAACP office. They provided her access to their own legal counsel, attorney William Henry Huff, who was also an expert on extradition cases.22

  All of this was helpful, but Mamie was over 600 miles from her son’s last-known whereabouts. Feeling restless, helpless, and growing more impatient, she nearly boarded a train to Mississippi herself before her uncle Crosby persuaded her to wait until he attempted one last time to try to arrange contact with Mose Wright.23 That evening, more information came as sixteen-year-old Wheeler Parker arrived back in Chicago.

  Parker, who had accompanied Emmett Till to Mississippi nine days earlier, had left the Delta on the 4:30 A.M. train, too scared to stay any longer.24 His uncle Thelton Parker Sr. had taken him to the home of another uncle, William Parker, in Duck Hill, where Wheeler boarded the train for home. When the train stopped in Memphis, young Parker unknowingly started for a restroom marked “White Only,” until someone yelled out, “Don’t go in there!” Parker, overwhelmed at the size of the station, thought it looked too much like Chicago for Jim Crow to exist. At sixteen, and all alone, “I got scared all over again.”25 Once safely home, however, he began talking to family and reporters.

  In Mississippi, Mose Wright and his sons spent Monday and Tuesday picking cotton, and Mose also gathered wood for the winter. “But I was listening and hoping I could hear something about Bobo.” With hope fading, however, he called a daughter in Chicago to let her know there had been no developments. She in turn informed Mamie.26 Elizabeth wrote Mose on Tuesday, fearing for the safety of their three young boys. She pleaded for him to join her in Sumner, and in the meantime, to not let their sons go into Money. Wright had no choice but to stay on the plantation, however, as most of his twenty-five acres were still full of cotton.27

  That same day, Mamie finally got through to Wright on the telephone. Wright told her that he had visited the Bryant store soon after the kidnapping and that someone there told him that Emmett had been released unharmed, which backed up Milam’s and Bryant’s story.28 In Chicago, Parker’s account of the store incident and the kidnapping appeared in the Chicago Daily Tribune. Now, for the first time, news of the wolf whistle was known in the North.29

  While out running errands, Mamie stopped at the NAACP office, where she learned that Huff, already acting on her behalf, had sent telegrams to US attorney general Herbert Brownell, Illinois governor William Stratton, and Mississippi governor Hugh White, urging them all to conduct a thorough investigation.

  When Mamie returned to Alma’s, she found that her mother was waiting with unbelievable news. Three calls purportedly from the Chicago police department reported news from Mississippi that Emmett was alive and on his way home. As on the morning of the abduction, however, Mamie was once again full of questions, but no one in the house had any answers. She called the police herself, but all they could do was refer her to the Missing Person’s Bureau. When she talked to them, she quickly learned that they knew nothing. Devastated all over again, Mamie could only conclude that the calls had been a hoax.30

  Indeed, in Mississippi, officials had nothing new to report either. In fact, having suspected foul play from the beginning, they had been searching the Tallahatchie River since Sunday. Deputy Sheriff Cothran scoured a thirty-mile stretch on Monday alone.31

  Mamie again called her uncle Crosby in Sumner. He asked her to give him just a few more hours to find her son, after which she could then board the City of New Orleans for Mississippi the following morning if she wished.32 The waiting and wondering continued. “We stood there. We sat there. We waited for . . . three days trying to find out what had happened to Emmett,” Mamie said. This took its toll on Alma, who finally collapsed in an emotional climax to the three-day ordeal. It was at this moment, recalled Mamie, “when I realized for the first time in my life, I was going to have to stand up on my feet and be a woman. A real one.”33

  Beginning Wednesday, August 31, she would need all the strength she could muster. That morning, between 6:30 and 7:00, near the town of Philipp in Tallahatchie County, seventeen-year-old Robert Hodges was fishing in the Tallahatchie River near a spot called Pecan Point. While inspecting his trotline, he noticed something in the distance. It was a pair of human legs protruding up above the surface of the water. Hodges checked on his lines, went home, and told his father of his awful discovery. The senior Hodges got word to his landlord, B. L. Mims. Someone else then notified County Sheriff H. C. Strider.34

  Tallahatchie County deputy sheriff Garland Melton was the first official to arrive at the scene. Mims came, bringing his own boat, and he and Melton took it out to try to retrieve the body. Robert Hodges and Mims’s brother, Charlie Fred, followed in another boat. When they approached the half-submerged corpse, Mims could see that it was that of a black person. Realizing they would need a rope to help free it from a snag, they sent one of the boats back to get one. Shortly, with rope in hand, Mims and Melton began the arduous job of retrieving the body by tying the rope around the feet and ankles, pulling the body loose, and then towing it to shore. Melton held the rope, and Mims steered until they arrived at a shallow area near the riverbank. As they brought the body to land, they
discovered that barbed wire had been wrapped around the neck and tied to a cotton gin fan in an obvious attempt to weigh the body down. As they placed the body in a boat, part of the skull fell off onto the floor. The head had obviously been crushed in by something—or someone.35

  Sheriff Strider arrived at the river about 9:15 A.M. and then notified the Leflore County sheriff’s office.36 Sheriff George Smith was in Jackson for the opening day of the annual Tennessee and Mississippi Sheriffs’ and Peace Officers Association convention, but office deputy N. L. McCool informed Smith’s deputy, John Cothran, of the situation, and Cothran left right away, arriving at the river about 10:00 A.M. The officers immediately assumed that the body retrieved from the Tallahatchie River was that of Emmett Till, now missing for three days.37

  As Strider approached the body, he was met with an odor so strong that he could not get near enough to examine it. He summoned the black undertaker Chester Miller, manager of the Century Burial Association in Greenwood, who came to the scene to lend a hand. When Miller arrived, he set off two deodorant bombs to rid the scene of the smell, and even sprayed the entire corpse with a deodorizing liquid.38

  What the authorities saw in the boat was ghastly. The body was naked, had been badly beaten, and, due to the effects of the river, was heavily decomposed and bloated. Strider said the head had been penetrated by a bullet hole above the right ear, and that the face was “cut up pretty badly like an ax was used.” It appeared to him that the body had been in the river about two days.39 He described the tongue as sticking out of the mouth three inches, and that “the left eyeball was almost out, enough to almost fall out. And the right one was out, I would say, about three-quarters of an inch.”40 The river and the force of debris obviously caused some damage to the body, and the weight of the gin fan may have caused many of the fractures to the head, yet there was no mistaking that the victim had been tortured. One officer at the scene said that in his eight years of law enforcement, this was the “worst beating I’ve seen.”41