Emmett Till
Page 10
On Friday, Illinois governor Stratton added his voice to the growing number of high officials speaking out, and instructed his attorney general, Latham Castle, to urge Mississippi authorities to thoroughly investigate the murder.87 Indeed, law enforcement officers in Leflore and Tallahatchie Counties were still searching the area where Emmett Till had been found, looking for new clues in the crime. Sheriff Smith and District Attorney Stanny Sanders, who both covered Leflore County where the kidnapping occurred, asked the Greenwood Commonwealth to publicize a photo of the cotton gin fan used to weigh down the body in an attempt to locate the owner and zero in on the crime scene. The photo appeared in Friday’s paper.88 Officers also went door-to-door, questioning residents living near the river, in an effort to locate anyone who might have seen the suspects. “We haven’t been able to find the murder weapon or anything,” Strider reported, but he insisted that “we are not leaving a stone unturned.”89
Sometime that weekend, officials found what was believed to be hair and blood on a bridge in Tallahatchie County. Strider became convinced that the body had been dumped into the river from this bridge, located about four-and-a-half miles north of the spot where it had been discovered.90 Strider sent the specimens to Greenwood, and on September 5 police chief R. R. Shurden forwarded them to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover for testing. On September 9, the FBI wired Shurden the results, which revealed that the hair was not human, but of unknown animal origin. The substance thought to be blood was something unidentifiable.91
On Friday, September 2, readers of southern papers got their first look at the accused murderers. Because Milam and Bryant had declined to have their pictures taken after their arrests, older photos of the men, smiling in their military uniforms, graced the front pages. These hardly looked like the faces of killers, and an accompanying article in the Memphis Commercial Appeal probably helped convince more than a few southerners of the innocence of the pair. “They were never into any meanness,” said their mother, Eula Bryant, interviewed from her store in Sharkey County. “I raised them and I’ll stand by them.” She also praised Milam for his military honors and Bryant for his service as a paratrooper. Milam’s wife, Juanita, visiting at her mother-in-law’s store, added: “He’s an ideal father. The children worship him. And all the Negroes at Glendora . . . liked him like a father. They always came to him for help.” The following day, the same paper quoted Bryant’s fraternal twin, Raymond, who declared his brother innocent (he did not mention his half-brother, J. W. Milam), and said the charges against Roy were “all a matter of politics.” The Jackson State Times, also trying to portray a different side to Bryant, reported that the previous January he had spotted two duck hunters whose boat had capsized on Six Mile Lake, jumped into the icy water, and saved them from drowning.92
On Friday, Rev. H. Thomas Primm, bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Mississippi and Louisiana, called for two days of mourning to protest the murder. He encouraged everyone in Mississippi to wear a strip of black ribbon three inches long on September 8 and 9. But some southern newspapers had already gone out of their way to reassure readers that Mississippians were indeed outraged over the crime. On Saturday, the Memphis Press-Scimitar gathered several quotations from Mississippi papers condemning the killing, as did the Jackson Daily News.93
That said, the Mississippi press was also quick to voice contempt for the condemnations hurled by outsiders—most noticeably the NAACP—which seemed to indict all Mississippians in the killing. A front-page editorial appeared in the Greenwood Commonwealth on September 2 responding to the harsh statements made by Roy Wilkins and Mamie Bradley just after the body had been discovered. “This deplorable incident has made our section the target of unjustifiable criticism, thoughtless accusations, and avenging threats,” it declared. To Mamie, “we offer our sympathy and express our deep regret that this terrible thing has happened to her.” However, “her determination to see that ‘Mississippi is going to pay for this,’ charging the entire state with the guilt of those who took the law in their own hands is evidence of the poison selfish men have planted in the minds of people outside the South.”94
For the NAACP, there was no sympathy at all. The writer blasted Wilkins’s attacks upon his state, but had apparently forgotten that there had been two other racially motivated murders recently committed in Mississippi: “On the basis of one murder it [the NAACP] has judged the character, honor and integrity of the entire population.” With this rebuke of Wilkins and Mamie Bradley, the Mississippi press, which had been reporting community outrage over the murder in its stories since Wednesday, became defensive and, going forward, notably less sympathetic. Resentment clearly developed over what most white southerners saw as outside agitation, and Mississippi journalists began carefully orchestrating what they wrote and juxtaposed images in such a way as to shape negative public opinion toward Till in the weeks ahead.95
The Chicago Sun-Times announced on Friday morning that Emmett Till’s body would arrive at the Central Street Station at 9:00 A.M. When Mamie Bradley arrived to meet the box carrying her murdered son, the station was already filled with onlookers and reporters. Entering the station in a wheelchair, Mamie was escorted by a support team consisting of her father, John Carthan (who had come in from Detroit); Gene Mobley; Bishop Louis Ford; Bishop Isaiah Roberts; and some cousins, including Rayfield Mooty. When the train arrived, Mamie got up from her wheelchair and quickly crossed three sets of tracks to meet the baggage car that held her son’s remains. Press photographers snapped pictures of the grief-stricken mother as she collapsed. “My darling, my darling. I would have gone through a world of fire to get to you. I know I was on your mind when you died,” she cried. The family formed a ring and watched solemnly as men removed the large pine box from the train and loaded it onto a flatbed truck. Mamie spoke again, assuring her deceased son that he “didn’t die for nothing.” The box was opened as it sat on the truck, and the casket removed and placed into a hearse for the trip to Rayner’s.96
Mamie had already talked to Ahmed Rayner by telephone and said she wanted to see the body once the casket arrived. Rayner at first refused, stating his own obligation, by verbal and written promise, not to break the seal from the state of Mississippi. Yet Mamie kept insisting, and Rayner reluctantly relented.97 The family also requested an autopsy, and Rayner agreed to see that the request was honored, providing that the condition of the body would allow it.98 It is unknown if there was further talk about that once Rayner and his staff saw the remains, but the autopsy did not occur—nor would it until fifty years later.
After the casket left the train station, Mamie, her father, Mooty, and Mobley followed Rayner to his mortuary.99 Simeon Booker, correspondent for Ebony-Jet magazines, and David Jackson, photographer for the same publications, were waiting outside. They had been there since midnight, not knowing when Till’s body was going to arrive. Finally, the hearse pulled up, followed by Mamie’s party. After Mamie got out of the car and walked into the building, Booker and Jackson followed behind.100
Mamie waited with her family in a separate room while Rayner opened the casket. Now a witness to the body’s condition himself, he again tried to dissuade Mamie from viewing it. After this failed, Rayner acquiesced. Rayfield Mooty went in first, looked at the mangled corpse, and then went back for Mamie. With her father on one side and Gene Mobley on the other, she made her approach to the room containing her son. “The first thing that greeted us when we walked into the parlor was a terrible odor. I think I’ll carry that odor with me to my grave,” she said a few months later. As she neared the casket, she could see her son, naked, covered with lime. “What I saw looked like it came from out of space. It didn’t look like anything that we could dream, imagine in a funny book or any place else. It just didn’t look like it was for real.”101
Standing over the casket, Mamie began to examine Emmett’s right side. She first noticed a large gash in his forehead, which she assumed had been made with an ax. The mouth was open and the tongue was protrudin
g. “His lips were twisted and his teeth were bared just like a snarling dog’s,” she said. Then she saw the gunshot wound. “I wondered why they wasted a bullet because surely it wasn’t necessary.” Some features she recognized, such as the nose and forehead. One eye was missing, probably lost during the embalming process, but the other, despite being detached, was the right color. Still looking at the right side, “I found that part of the ear was gone, and the entire back of the head had been knocked out.” Mamie then asked Rayner to remove her son from the casket so that she could examine the left side also. He agreed, but asked her to go home first, send some clothes back, and then finish viewing the body once it was dressed.102
Although Mamie left, Booker and Jackson stayed behind and watched as attendants lifted the body from the casket and placed it onto a slab. In that instant, they were horrified to see a piece of Till’s skull fall off and bits of his brains come out. “Calmly, Dave replaced the skull,” explained Booker, “like putting on a hat.”103
Mamie and her party returned to the mortuary an hour or so later. When she approached her son this second time as he lay clothed on a slab, she saw, for the first time, the left side of his face. “It looked as if somebody had taken a criss-cross knife and gone insane. It was beaten into a pulp.”104
David Jackson took photos of Till’s battered face, with Mamie present, which would appear in Jet in its September 15 issue. They would be reprinted in several black newspapers in the coming weeks, which greatly impacted national news coverage of the murder and public outrage. Jet publisher John Johnson, hesitant at first to print such graphic images, consented in the end. The 400,000 print run sold out.105
Although Mamie remained horrified by what she saw upon her return, Rayner had, in fact, touched up the body slightly while she was gone. He closed the mouth, and sewed the gash in the jaw and forehead. Mamie, already having seen enough evidence of indescribable torture, knew that she could never explain it to anyone; others would have to see it too. After Rayner had done what he could, Mamie determined to have an open-casket funeral, to “let the people see what they did to my boy.”106
Mamie also asked Rayner’s permission to hold her son’s wake at the funeral home in order to allow as many people to view the body as possible. He agreed, and by that evening, word was out that fourteen-year-old murder victim Emmett Till was on display, and a crowd began gathering. Newspapers estimated that between 10,000 and 50,000 people viewed the body that night, many of whom fainted or were otherwise taken ill after seeing the badly beaten, partially decomposed corpse. Till’s body, under a thick, clear glass covering, was dressed in the dark suit and white shirt he had received the Christmas before. Mamie taped photos from that happy holiday to the inside lid of the casket so that people could contrast the mutilated face before them to the handsome young man who was so full of life only a week earlier. At one point, the number trying to enter the funeral home became so great that a chapel window was accidentally broken by the throng. Some newspapers reported that the place was in a “shambles” due to the push of the large crowd. At 2:00 A.M., the doors were closed.107
By the following morning, reports of the viewing and large crowd gathered in Chicago had made their way to Mississippi, and with them, rumors spread that protests and violence were about to erupt in the Delta. George Saucier, chief administrative assistant of the Mississippi Highway Patrol, dismissed the stories, as did the Greenwood police department, which found none but the usual number of out-of-state cars in town during a holiday—this being Labor Day weekend. The rumors were based on traffic checks in Clarksdale (fifty-eight miles north of Greenwood), where fifty or so vehicles with Illinois plates were stopped during a ninety-minute surveillance on Saturday morning. At least a dozen drivers, all black, appeared before Justice of the Peace Mary Martin and were fined for traffic violations. One received an additional $25 penalty for carrying a concealed weapon. Because the violations were so minor, officials remained unalarmed.108
That same day, however, Sheriff Strider reported that members of the Bryant family had been forced off a Mississippi road by Illinois cars. He also said he had received letters from people in Chicago threatening Till’s accused killers, and that one even targeted James Bryant, a brother serving at a New York naval base. “We are going to kill your son in New York,” the letter, addressed to Roy Bryant, read. “We are going to kill the first Hill Billy that say he is kin to you up here.” Because so many of the letters were “filthy and vicious,” explained Strider, he asked the FBI to investigate.109
Then came Strider’s bombshell. Out of nowhere he announced that he did not believe the body found in the Tallahatchie River the previous Wednesday was that of Emmett Till. He even postulated that the Chicago youth might still be alive. Four days after he examined the corpse and released it to Till’s relatives, Strider had completely changed his tune. Although he stated at the river that the body had probably been in the water just two days, now, without any further examination, he insisted that it had been submerged at least ten—much longer than to have possibly been Emmett Till. He also said that the body appeared to be that of an adult. Most bizarre, however, was his claim that “the whole thing looks like a deal made up by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” Roy Wilkins, learning of Strider’s revelations from his New York office, wasted no time in firing back, yet surprisingly, he used uncharacteristic restraint. “The sheriff evidently knows nothing about the NAACP. We don’t go in for murder.”110
Mamie Bradley, learning of Strider’s announcement, was understandably disturbed, but she remained adamant that “it is my son lying there in the church. If the state of Mississippi says he is not my boy, the burden of proof rests upon that state.”111 Rayfield Mooty, echoing Mamie, accused Strider of a “cover up,” but said the family would release the body back to Mississippi officials if doubt about its identity remained.112
There was nothing surprising in hearing the NAACP and Emmett Till’s family criticize Strider’s announcement, which they clearly saw as outlandish. However, law enforcement officials in Leflore County were quick to dispute it as well. Deputy Cothran told reporters he was in complete disagreement with Strider. “Emmett’s uncle, Moses Wright, definitely identified the body as the boy. I was with him when he did it,” he said. District Attorney Chatham was also shocked by this new development. “When we took over the case, I was assured by Stanny Sanders . . . that there was no question of corpus delecti.” He now worried that Strider’s statement might erode the murder case, because the evidence was only circumstantial to begin with; without the body of the victim, there could be no evidence of a homicide. “You would certainly have to prove a death,” he said.113 In just two days, Strider would testify before the grand jury. It was not entirely clear what led to his conjectures, but his announcement about threats to the accused and their families and his own accusations against the NAACP were all rooted in Mississippians’ disdain for outside interference.
Leflore County officials told the press on Saturday that they were still investigating the original charge of kidnapping, which had occurred in their county. Yet despite the fact that the sheriff had issued a warrant for Carolyn Bryant, Stanny Sanders said that there were no plans now to arrest her. He explained that although they knew where she was and could apprehend her if needed, they did not believe she was involved in the crime. In fact, even Sheriff Smith stated flatly: “We aren’t going to bother the woman. She’s got two small boys to take care of.” Officials were still considering the involvement of at least one other person, however, someone whose identity was still unknown. “We believe there was another man,” confirmed Cothran, who declared confidently that “we will get him before we are through.” Smith also planned to search the Bryant store, which had been locked since Roy Bryant’s arrest. It remains unknown if that ever occurred.114
Despite Strider’s public doubts about the identity of the body being mourned in Chicago, Emmett Till’s funeral service began Saturday mo
rning as scheduled. The casket was moved from Rayner & Sons to the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ on State Street. People came several hours early for a seat, and by the time the funeral began, the church, which held 1,800, was packed to overflowing. Outside, another 3,000 people gathered. Several police, under Sergeant Frank Heimowski’s anti-Communist detail, were dispatched and remained outside throughout the service. Communists had passed out literature in front of the mortuary the night before, and authorities worried that left-wing groups would continue to sensationalize the case during the funeral.115
When Mamie arrived at the church, she was escorted first by her cousin Crosby Smith Jr. (on leave from Ft. Campbell in Kentucky), and then by the Reverend Charles Poole and his sister, evangelist Mattie Poole. Mamie took her seat with other family members in the front row.116
The boy who only a week earlier was unknown to anyone except his immediate circle of family and friends was next memorialized in what resembled a state funeral. Isaiah Roberts, pastor of Roberts Temple, presided at the service and read Emmett’s last letter to his mother, sent from Mississippi. Henry Louis Ford, the forty-one-year-old bishop of St. Paul’s Church of God in Christ and presiding bishop of the denomination, preached the eulogy, basing his sermon on Matthew 18:6. “But whosoever shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it was better for him that a millstone was hung about his neck and that he be drowned in the depths of the sea.” He also addressed the racial division in the South. “Our country is spending millions trying to win the good will of colored people in Africa and India,” he told the audience. “Our President and Vice President Nixon and Secretary of State Dulles ought to be seeking the good will of colored people in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.” Ford also named all of the Chicago newspapers and asked God’s blessings upon them for the thorough coverage they had given the case.117