Emmett Till

by Devery S. Anderson

  It was obvious that demand for Mamie Bradley and her story would continue for some time. It was also no secret that fund-raising was the lifeblood of the NAACP. In early October, Mamie and Rayfield Mooty went to New York and visited with Roy Wilkins about how they could work together. At the meeting, Mamie entered into a verbal agreement with Wilkins that her future speaking appearances would be arranged by the association. Plans developed immediately for Mamie to appear at numerous events throughout the month, followed by a West Coast tour starting in November.

  Mamie still had two engagements outside of NAACP auspices that she had previously committed to, however. The first would be held in Washington, DC, on October 16, and the other was scheduled for November 6 in Chicago. Her Washington appearance would conflict with NAACP meetings in Dayton and Columbus, Ohio, but Mose Wright agreed to take her place at these two events. When the Ohio rallies approached, William Durham of the Columbus branch became worried about potential problems should Wright make the long trip from Chicago alone. Durham even reported rumors that claimed that Wright had been kidnapped after the trial, which probably grew out of Spell’s sensational “mental captive” articles. Nevertheless, Durham feared that, from such stories, “one might get the idea to really kidnap him and keep him hidden until after the kidnap trial.” Durham decided to arrange a police guard for Wright during his stay in Columbus, not only for Wright’s safety but also because “it will add to the drama of our meeting.”102

  Wright was visiting in Detroit with Mamie’s father when the Ohio arrangements were made. He was willing to speak for $50 per meeting, but Durham offered him $100, plus expenses. However, Annie Carthan, Mamie’s stepmother, told Durham that Wright’s sudden move from Mississippi left him nearly destitute, and that these speaking engagements were his only source of income.

  “Can’t you make it $150 plus expenses?” she asked. “Uncle doesn’t have a suit of clothes. He had to leave everything he had down there, crops and all.”

  Durham decided to pay Wright $300 for the two meetings. “I am glad that Mrs. Carthan took part in the agreement,” wrote Durham to NAACP officer Miley Williamson, “because the family cannot later say that the NAACP took advantage of an elderly old gentleman.”103

  If William Durham wanted drama at his gatherings, certainly the unembellished facts of the Till case were enough to keep the nation talking and the rallies full, and as long as people kept speaking out, interest would continue. Of all the high-profile Americans to do so, none was more influential than Eleanor Roosevelt, who for years had been a thorn in the side of white southerners for her outspoken views on both gender and racial equality. Millions of Americans read her nationally syndicated column, “My Day,” which appeared six days a week.104 On Tuesday, October 11, she shared her thoughts on the Till case. “It is true that there can still be a trial for kidnapping, and I hope there will be,” she wrote. “I hope the effort will be made to get at the truth. I hope we are beginning to discard the old habit, as practiced in part of our country, of making it very difficult to convict a white man of a crime against a colored man or woman.”105 The following day, her son, California congressman James Roosevelt, called for a federal law that would help prevent the “brutalities that are presently going unpunished in Mississippi.” Roosevelt sought NAACP support for his proposed law, which would allow for federal intervention “when local law officials are patently malfeasant.”106

  That the Till murder would become a rallying cry for civil rights legislation was clear from the beginning, but the verdict in the trial advanced the calls for political action. On October 12, Representative Adam Clayton Powell spoke at a labor rally in New York’s garment area, where he proposed a march on Washington to demand antilynching legislation from Congress. He reported to the 20,000 people present that the Till case had damaged the reputation of the United States throughout foreign lands. “In the eyes of Europe,” said Powell, who had just returned from overseas, the murder was “a lynching of the Statue of Liberty. No single incident has caused as much damage to the prestige of the United States on foreign shores as what has happened in Mississippi.” He then outlined a program to fight the recent surge in racial killings, which, including the murders of Rev. George Lee and Lamar Smith, numbered three in just a three-month period.107

  To illustrate foreign reaction to the Till murder, the American Jewish Committee released a memorandum quoting newspapers from all over Europe and even Africa that criticized the murder and the subsequent acquittal of Milam and Bryant. “These are only [a] few examples of the unanimous and violent reaction of Europe to the Mississippi trial,” the memorandum said in conclusion. “They can be multiplied a hundredfold.”108

  Quite possibly, the fallout over the murder would determine US strategy, but not without a fight from southern politicians. Minnesota representative Eugene J. McCarthy said the Till case had “eliminated what might appear to be a ‘go slow’ attitude in regards to the civil rights issue,” and encouraged the Democratic Party to nominate a liberal ticket for the 1956 presidential election. Black voters were now energized, he believed, and it was time for the party to take a clear stand on racial matters. The election “will be won or lost in the North,” and the time to appease the South was over.109

  With all of the negative attention heaped upon Mississippi, its citizens were more defensive than at any time since possibly the Civil War. None of the protests, rallies, or fund-raisers sat well with its white populace, which was still angry that outsiders cared at all, or worse, wanted to change their way of life. As a result, at least a few decided they were not going to sit back and do nothing. Their means to sway public opinion was to focus on Emmett Till’s father, Louis. Although he had been dead for over a decade, the revelations about him would be explosive nevertheless. And when the time came to bring them forth, the Jackson Daily News led the pack once again.

  It was true that Private Louis Till died while stationed overseas in 1945. Mamie Bradley had told reporters as much upon her arrival in Sumner. But she did not mention that his death came via execution by the US Army. Had she known the story would come out, she probably would have mentioned it herself to soften the blow. She surely felt uneasy when others, such as Ethel Payne, praised the dead soldier, although Mamie was certainly the source of the basic facts and, most likely, the embellishments. Payne wrote passionately about Louis in the New York Age Defender shortly after the Sumner trial, although she mistakenly referred to him as Thomas Till. The young soldier, she wrote, “was reported missing in action by the Defense Department in 1945. He died somewhere in the European theater where he had gone to defend his country and make democracy work for his five year old son.” “Somewhere in Europe,” Payne continued, “Till’s body lies mouldering [sic] in a lonely unmarked grave and the son he gave his life for lies in a Chicago cemetery, and the picture of the hero father is unclaimed by the boy who couldn’t remember him but worshipped his memory.”110

  In one instance where she spoke of her husband, Mamie Bradley was careful to avoid lavish praise, but she still said little about his death. She told the New York Amsterdam News for its October 1 edition that Louis wanted to enter the army for the “excitement and travel” of it all. Louis, just like any parent, “would be more than disgusted to learn that two bigoted white men killed his only son.” Her words then hinted of unusual circumstances surrounding his death, which may have raised a few eyebrows. “On July 2, 1945, I received a telegram from the War Department telling me my husband had died. I’m still hazy about the details.” Astute readers surely caught the fact that the war had ended three months earlier. The headline for the article read, “Father of Young Till Died for His Country.”111

  It was the portrayal of Louis Till in Life magazine that got the most attention, however, and that editorial, as brief as it was, seemed to arouse sympathy everywhere but Mississippi. Eleanor Roosevelt even referred to the column, on the whole, as “an appeal to the conscience of all our people.”112 Titled “In Memoriam, E
mmett Till,” it said in part:

  Men can be forgiven for prejudice, as a sign of ignorance or imperfect understanding of their religion; no righteous man can condone a brutal murder. Those in Sumner, and elsewhere, who do condone it, are in far worse danger than Emmett Till ever was. He had only his life to lose, and many others have done that, including his soldier-father who was killed in France fighting for the American proposition that all men are equal. Those who condone a deed so foul as this are in danger of losing their souls.113

  It may have been this public praise that aroused some curiosity, or perhaps rumors about the deceased private made their way to Mississippi. Whatever the reasons, reporters for the Daily News asked Senators James Eastland and John Stennis to persuade army officials to release Louis Till’s records.114 On Friday, October 14, Eastland called the office of the judge advocate general of the army for some facts on the former soldier, and he received them verbally through the army records division in St. Louis. A spokesperson for the judge advocate confirmed to the Chicago Defender that it was standard procedure to answer questions about specific cases, but that the actual records were confidential. Eastland did not waste any time getting the information to the Daily News, because its first story publicizing the scandal came out that same day. Stennis told a constituent the following month that “the matter of getting this information out of the Army was pressed by both of us [he and Eastland] to the limit, as we were glad to do of course, and we were glad to furnish it to the newspapers.”115

  The large, bold headline on the front page of the Sunset edition on Friday said it all: “TILL’S DAD RAPED 2 WOMEN, MURDERED A THIRD IN ITALY.” The accompanying article, naming the murdered woman as Anna Zanchi and the two assaulted women as Benni Lucretzia and Freida Mari, noted that Louis Till was tried on February 17, 1945, and hanged four and a half months later on July 2.116

  An editorial introducing the story when it reappeared in the regular edition on Saturday tried to soften the motive of the reporters who broke it. It assured readers that the Daily News was “in complete agreement” with attorney Huff, who said that the story “may be true, but it has no bearing on the case pending.” However, the editorial justified its revelation because “NAACP embellishments of the true facts in the case were out of place.” Those lies, according to the News, went far beyond Louis Till. The NAACP had branded Emmett Till’s murder as a lynching “when the facts did not support the ‘lynch’ label.” Mississippi justice was maligned, it said, and the NAACP had collected huge sums of money through “distorted facts” that “painted Mississippi as a virtual battle-ground between the races.” None of that, even if true, had any connection to Private Till, yet the paper believed the story still came into play. “It is a fact that Mamie Bradley, in NAACP-sponsored speeches throughout the country, has been saying that her husband and Emmitt [sic] Till’s father lost his life overseas, leaving the inference that he was one of the Americans who gave his life for his country.”117

  Mamie’s response to the story ran in the same article. When she first received her telegram from the War Department in 1945, she insisted, the only thing she learned was that Louis died due to “willful misconduct.” She was never given any other details, despite sending letters “to the commanding officer, to the chaplain and to the late President Roosevelt.” Roosevelt, however, had died in April 1945, three months before Louis.118

  As noted earlier, Mamie knew the charges against Louis long before she claimed to have known about them. In 1946, she married Lemorse Mallory, a World War II veteran who served with Louis in Italy and was still stationed there at the time of Louis’s court-martial.119 Mallory, who had always disputed the army’s version of the story, would have been the most immediate source for apprising Mamie of the charges even if the army had not.120

  Whatever the members of Private Till’s company learned, however, came through the grapevine and not official channels, according to a few who served with him. Shortly after the story broke, some of these men spoke out against the army’s charges in the November 3 issue of Jet magazine. On the night the accusations were first made against Louis, he and three other black soldiers were taken away and placed in a stockade. Later on, all of Louis’s records were removed, and no one in the company was allowed to see anything related to the charges. One anonymous former sergeant (perhaps Mallory) said that this occasion was “the first time during our overseas stay that we were plainly ignored.” Another said that “Till never confessed to the crime and we felt he was innocent. It is inconceivable that the big, playful fellow could be a criminal. If the facts stood up, the Army should not have been so hush-hush about killing him.”121

  Mamie stated later that she had inquired of the army in July 1948, through attorney Joseph Tobias, about her benefits as a widow but was not given a sufficient answer about Louis’s death.122 Army records, however, show that during that very month, Tobias received the court-martial documents.123 Those would have spelled out the details behind Louis Till’s execution. Tobias’s letter to the army may have been prompted not so much by concerns about Mamie’s benefits (she had been remarried two years by then), but by the fact that the army had notified Mamie of a July 10, 1948, disinterment directive to move Louis’s shroud-wrapped, skeletal remains from the Naples Allied Cemetery in Italy to the Oise-Aisne Cemetery at Fere-en-Tardenois, France. A disposition form listing 122 army personnel who were executed during the war, dated July 14, 1948, stated that their next of kin “have been notified that deaths were due to wilful misconduct and upon their request, further detailed information was given.”124 Considering her marriage to Mallory in 1946 and Tobias’s communication with the army in 1948, it is clear that Mamie had known for several years before the story broke in 1955 that Louis had been executed for rape and murder.

  Mamie may or may not have known about one source, published three years after Louis’s death, that is astonishingly coincidental. Ezra Pound, the acclaimed yet controversial American poet, had been living in Italy since 1924. During World War II, he wrote a series of pamphlets and made several anti-Semitic, pro-Fascist radio broadcasts that included harsh criticisms against the Roosevelt administration. Fifty-nine-year-old Pound was arrested for treason by US Army police on May 24, 1945, and jailed in an outdoor cell at the US Army’s Disciplinary Training Center near Metato, a village located just north of Pisa. He was the only civilian held at the facility, which also housed 3,600 military prisoners. The majority of them were black, and 7 percent were accused of rape, murder, or “misbehavior before the enemy.”125 While incarcerated, Pound wrote his Pisan Cantos, which makes reference to Louis Till, who had been held at the same prison camp. Pisan Cantos was published in 1948, seven years before Louis’s son was murdered in Mississippi. In 1949, it won the Bollingen Prize for poetry, awarded by the Library of Congress. In two references to the executed soldier, Pound wrote, beginning on line 170:

  Pisa, in the 23rd year of the effort in sight of the tower

  and Till was hung yesterday

  for murder and rape with trimmings . . .

  “St. Louis Till” as Green called him. Latin!”126

  In criticizing the military’s handling of the Louis Till case, Till’s army friends raised a valid point. Several studies of military court-martials document the disparity between white and black convictions and executions during World War II.127 With that context in mind, a summary of the Louis Till case is in order. His file consists of numerous letters, affidavits, the eighty-three-page trial transcript, and a fifteen-page review by the three judge advocates of the board of review, dated June 13, 1945. Another black private, Fred A. McMurray, was tried with Till on the same charges. McMurray had four previous convictions by summary court-martial, and Till had two. To the present charges, however, they pleaded innocent.

  According to testimony given before and during the trial, Private James Thomas and an unnamed British soldier, together with Till and McMurray, raided the homes of the three women. Benni Lucretzia; Freida Mari; her f
ather, Ernesto; and the future son-in-law of Anna Zanchi, the murdered woman, all testified at the trial. Moreover, Thomas gave a statement implicating himself and the others, and McMurray did the same, providing a detailed oral statement that was committed to writing and signed by McMurray in front of witnesses. After the statement was read, the defense declined to offer any counter evidence, and both Till and McMurray remained silent. They were found guilty and were executed together five months later. Thomas was granted clemency for his testimony and released back into his unit and served out his time in the military.128 It is not known if the British soldier was ever identified.

  Whether Louis Till was guilty or not did not matter in the end anyway. If Daily News reporters did not see a link between Louis’s case and that of his son, they knew that in publishing the sensational details of Private Till’s execution, many of their readers would make the connection on their own. It was no surprise that this is exactly what happened. “His son was merely trying to follow in his foot steps and receive the same treatment,” wrote Dr. H. S. J. Walker to the editors of Life magazine. He also asked for a corrective to Life’s October 10 editorial praising Louis Till. “The only difference is that he was caught before he attempted the rape and killed before he could do any harm.”129