Emmett Till

by Devery S. Anderson

  On Monday, November 7, the twenty-man panel began considering cases for the upcoming term of court. That morning, Circuit Clerk Martha Lamb swore in Mose Wright, Willie Reed, Leflore County sheriff George Smith, and his deputy, John Cothran, as the only four witnesses slated to testify regarding the Till case. The caseload was so large, however, that they had still not been called before the hearing adjourned for the day. After patiently waiting since morning, Wright and Reed left the courthouse.25

  That same day, the NAACP announced in a press release that Mamie Bradley had arrived in San Francisco from Chicago for the kickoff of the West Coast tour. She and Ruby Hurley were to hold a 9:00 A.M. press conference in the Cable Car Room at the Hotel Fairmont on Wednesday before flying to Seattle to address the first of eleven scheduled meetings. The finale, in Denver, Colorado, was planned for November 22.26 Mamie, however, failed to show up in San Francisco, and that temerity on her part began a strange chain of events that would, within hours, sever her relationship with the NAACP.

  Sometime that morning, Mamie had telephoned Franklin Williams, West Coast regional secretary for the association, to report that she had missed her flight because she had been out shopping. She also told Williams that she would need more than the $1,100 honorarium that she had previously agreed to, wanted to sell photo books at the events (probably photographer Ernest Wither’s Complete Photo Story of the Till Case), and also wanted time to go shopping while in San Francisco. Williams assured Mamie that she would have time to shop and asked her to get on the next plane. The NAACP had already purchased tickets for Mamie and her father. Mamie promised Williams that she would arrive in San Francisco by five o’clock the following morning, and asked that he have breakfast ready for her, which he agreed to do. This would still allow her time to attend the press conference.

  Later that day, however, a woman named Anna Crockett spoke by phone with Williams, saying she was Mamie’s personal representative and secretary, and that Mamie now wanted a guarantee of $5,000 for the tour, plus expenses, or her original agreement of $100 per engagement, all expenses paid, and one-third of all donations collected at the meetings. After hanging up, Williams frantically called Roy Wilkins and told him of these latest developments.27

  Wilkins, obviously startled by all of this, called Mamie’s home that evening just after ten o’clock. Crockett answered but would not let Wilkins speak with Mamie. She told him, as she had Williams, that she was Mamie’s representative and that she would speak on Mamie’s behalf. She confirmed the earlier conversation with Williams, including the demand for $5,000. Wilkins listened patiently, then gave Crocket an important message to pass along to Mamie. He was canceling her appearances and would explain it all in a press release. He also explained it all in a telegram sent to Mamie that same night.28 With the tour already scheduled and ready to begin the following morning at the Hotel Fairmont, Wilkins and his colleagues had little time to make new plans.

  The NAACP’s New York office immediately prepared a statement and released it the following day, November 8. It revealed Mamie’s demands and explained that “the NAACP does not handle such matters on a commercial basis.” Ruby Hurley would continue on the tour, but would now do so as the principal speaker. The press release did not state this, but a covering letter from Franklin Williams to the West Coast leadership explained that Williams hoped to secure Mose Wright as Mamie’s replacement.29 Wright was then in Greenwood, Mississippi, waiting to testify before the grand jury and was unaware of the plans being made with him in mind.

  As this story played out in the North, the grand jury in Greenwood began listening to evidence in the Emmett Till kidnapping case that afternoon. Wright was the first witness to appear at the hearing, entering the room at 2:20 P.M. After giving testimony behind locked doors for twenty-five minutes, he exited at 2:45. Willie Reed went in next, at about 3:18, and finished at 3:33. Deputy John Cothran and Sheriff Smith each followed. At 4:03 P.M., Mose Wright was recalled for just two minutes.30

  The jury did not make its decision that day, but Wright could not stay in town long enough to hear about it anyway. His last-minute agreement to substitute for Mamie Bradley on the West Coast gave him almost no time to prepare for his first appearance scheduled for the following night in Seattle. Rather than head immediately west, Wright first flew home to Chicago, where he arrived at around midnight and was met by NAACP attorney Robert Ming, who had worked quickly to secure Wright for the tour. Ming drove the former sharecropper home briefly, where Wright said good-bye to his family and packed some belongings. A few hours later, Ming had him back at the airport to catch his plane to Seattle.31

  By Wednesday, Mamie had come to regret her falling out with Wilkins. She asked her longtime friend, attorney Joseph Tobias, to call the NAACP leader on her behalf to try to straighten out everything. The phone call was recorded and transcribed by Wilkins’s office. Tobias assured Wilkins that he was calling as Mamie’s friend and not as her lawyer.

  “Mrs. Bradley feels very badly and feels there has been a misunderstanding of what the situation is.”

  “What situation?” asked Wilkins.

  “Whatever little service she can give, she wants to continue,” said Tobias.

  Wilkins became guarded. “Are you speaking now as a friend of the family or as her legal adviser?”

  “As a friend of the family,” Tobias assured him.

  “Now Mr. Tobias, if it is as a friend I can talk to you.”

  Tobias told Wilkins that he had read Wilkins’s telegram terminating his relationship with Mamie, and he readily acknowledged the one fact at the center of the trouble. “There is no doubt she wants an increased stipend.”

  Wilkins reviewed for Tobias the various conversations of November 7 involving himself, Franklin Williams, and Anna Crocket. He also detailed the calls among Bradley, Williams, and Crockett regarding Bradley’s missed plane and money demands. He refuted any notion that the NAACP was not taking care of Mamie’s expenses, and he assured Tobias that Mamie had already expressed satisfaction with the honorarium that they had agreed to.

  “There is no misunderstanding as to what has taken place. If there is a change of heart—”

  Tobias interrupted. “She feels so distraught about this. Let her say there is a change of heart.” She definitely wanted more money, admitted Tobias, “but I would like you to agree to let the cause of your group be served. Let her go up to Ming’s office and sign a statement saying what she has just said and let her go and do a job for you.”

  Wilkins said he would have to get advice from the president, chairman, and legal department of the association before any decision could be made. However, Mose Wright was about to land in Seattle, and NAACP representatives were meeting him.

  “We have changed the billing substituting Moses Wright’s name for Mrs. Bradley’s name. We had this tour laid out. It cost us money. We made hotel and plane reservations, put out handbills.” It was hardly feasible to change plans yet again. “The meeting in Seattle is tonight, and we have made other arrangements.”

  Wilkins gave Mamie the benefit of the doubt about her motives, however, affirming that she had, in the past, put their common cause over money. Although this had apparently changed, he was still hesitant to blame her entirely.

  “She has listened to other people and allowed them to make arrangements for her,” he told Tobias. Although doubtful of a resolution acceptable to Mamie, he promised to talk with his officers before 5:00 P.M. if he could.32

  Whether Wilkins took up the matter with his colleagues or was simply trying to appease Tobias with that assurance is not clear. However, Mamie’s admission, through Tobias, that she had in fact wanted more money only served to finalize Wilkins’s decision to cut ties with her. That afternoon he sent a telegram to NAACP field secretary Lester P. Bailey, apprising him of the situation:

  We have secured Moses Wright as speaker for West Coast meetings opening in Seattle tonight fresh from grand jury appearance in Greenwood, Miss. November 8.
Attempt of agent of Mrs. Bradley to demand five thousand dollars now admitted in effect by principal which means no Bradley appearances henceforth. Judging by Wright reception in Philadelphia, Columbus, Ohio and elsewhere we are confident scheduled meetings on West Coast including Los Angeles will be overwhelming successes. He is not only central hero of case but colorful and articulate speaker. Branch should proceed with November 15 meeting with appropriate publicity as to change of speakers.33

  That evening, Wright opened the tour in Seattle, telling his audience, among other things, that “Mississippi hasn’t got any law. I mean they don’t apply the law the same to the Negro and the white man in Mississippi.” Leaving the land of his birth had opened his eyes, and the lifelong Deltan could now admit, “Things are pretty bad for the Negro in Mississippi.”34

  Earlier that day, news of the Mamie Bradley controversy hit the papers. At the same time, a small group of reporters were awaiting the grand jury’s decision on the kidnapping charges against Milam and Bryant. At 10:00 A.M. the panel began its third workday, and at 3:08 P.M. submitted its report. The men had reached decisions in all of the cases under consideration, but the newsmen present were only interested in one. Judge Arthur Jordan announced the decision to the anxious reporters. Coming on the heels of the internationally publicized, highly shocking, and much-debated verdict in the murder trial forty-seven days earlier, the news out of Greenwood would be anticlimactic no matter the decision. And in the end, it was hardly a surprise.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “in the case you are interested in, there was no bill returned.”35

  That was it. Milam and Bryant were no longer simply free on bond but were now free of all charges. And if Jordan’s words did not fully sink in, District Attorney Stanny Sanders took over from there. “As far as I know, the case is closed. The Leflore County grand jury has adjourned and did not return indictments in the Emmett Till case. Beyond that I can make no statement.” Jury foreman William Henry Broadway Jr., nicknamed “June,” told reporters that he wanted to make a statement but was, unfortunately, “sworn to secrecy for six months.”36

  Because grand jury decisions do not require unanimity, it is unknown if the outcome was based only on a simple majority or something else along the spectrum. A granddaughter of fifty-year-old William G. Somerville, a member of the panel, said in 2010 that Somerville was one among the number who voted for an indictment. Family lore has it that Somerville “never recovered” from the outcome of that hearing.37

  June Broadway, overseer at the Star of the West plantation in Greenwood, died just two years later. He told family members that one day “the world will be shocked at what comes out about this trial.” Broadway was well loved by his family, who were shaken in November 1957 when he drove through the plantation, waved at some field hands, turned a corner, and shortly shot himself. Although the death was ruled a suicide, an air of mystery has remained because Broadway died on the same plantation, owned by Luther Wade, where legend places the 1937 death of blues guitarist Robert Johnson. Johnson was said to have been poisoned.38

  J. W. Milam had been running a cotton picker when he heard the news. He stopped at a gas station in Webb and drank a beer in celebration. “I’m happy about the whole thing,” he said, smiling. Bryant was not available for comment.39 Not smiling, however, was Leflore County sheriff George Smith, who had been in charge of the kidnapping investigation since August 28. Unable to find any new evidence to bolster the case, he blamed the outcome on the dearth of witnesses willing to testify. At least three that he hoped would come forward were Elizabeth Wright, who had witnessed the kidnapping, and two of the boys staying at the house that night, all of whom were now in Chicago. “I’ve been in this business for 22 years,” he said to a reporter the following day. “I know what you can get and what you can’t get” when seeking witnesses. “They have their rights, just like anyone else and if they don’t want to talk, I can’t make them.” Smith, who had worked hard during the murder trial to aid black reporters in rounding up witnesses like Willie Reed, now accused others with crucial testimony of actually wanting the defendants freed as part of a ploy to continue shaming Mississippi.

  During a noon recess at chancery court in Indianola, Stanny Sanders expressed similar sentiments as Smith. Sanders insisted that the two witnesses who came down did not even cooperate fully.40 Since both Wright and Reed did testify, it is unclear what Sanders was alluding to. Did he believe they were holding back? Was he blaming Wright for not taking his wife and sons with him? Whatever the case, both Smith and Sanders were clearly frustrated. Unfortunately, their frustration was not focused on the grand jury.

  Both Wright and Reed talked to Jet magazine about their experience on the stand, and shed a little light on attitudes within the closed courtroom. “The jury members acted peculiar as soon as I got into the room. They wanted to know why I notified Chicago before I called the sheriff” after Till’s kidnapping. His grandson, Curtis Jones, had called his mother later that morning, and it was after Mamie Bradley was notified that Wright went to the sheriff. “They kept inferring that I just wanted to start trouble. Then they asked me a lot of questions about why I had left Mississippi. I told them that J. W. Milam had threatened me but they didn’t believe it. . . . I knew when I left the room they weren’t going to do anything with those men.” Reed said that the jury tried to confuse him by showing him several photos and told him to pick from them which ones were of Emmett Till. “I did, and then they tried to say I couldn’t tell whether the men on the back of the truck (which went into the barn) were white or colored. I said I could tell colored people from white people. All they did was try to mix me up—and I would not let them.”41

  Although the press corps in the courtroom was relatively small, news of the grand jury decision traveled fast, and reaction was swift. Mamie Bradley, still dealing with her controversial parting with the NAACP, now had to endure a far bigger blow. With the closure of the case, “just about everything has run out on me now. I don’t know what to say. I don’t see how they could fail to indict those men.” She never foresaw a conviction, but believed Milam and Bryant would have at least been indicted. She still hoped to file a civil suit, but was not prepared to pay for it. The NAACP would have to take on that one, she said.42

  Roy Wilkins also responded to the decision. “The question now arises, since Mississippi jurors have determined that Milam and Bryant did not kidnap and murder young Emmett Till, who did commit the crimes?” Yet the no true bill “comes as no surprise to anyone acquainted with the administration of justice in Mississippi.” In Chicago, an editorial in the Tribune got right to the heart of the matter. “There was no lack of evidence that would have justified an indictment by any grand jury. . . . Somewhere along the line something went wrong—and it was a shameful, evil thing.”43

  A Mississippi editor saw it differently, however. Virgil Adams of the Greenwood Morning Star insisted that the grand jurors were “men who know justice and are capable of making the right decision.” The Chicago youth, after all, had “attempted to molest Mrs. Bryant, grabbed her and made indecent proposals. Where is there a husband worthy of the name who would not protect his wife?” Adams predicted that had “Bryant been present and slain Till on the spot there would not be a grand jury in the South who would have indicted him, and many in the nation.”44 Adams believed that Till’s behavior at the store, based solely on the testimony of Carolyn Bryant, justified the punishment he received.

  Adams’s affirmation that any southern jury would agree with him was chilling, yet probably close to the truth. Dr. T. D. Patton of Carthage, Tennessee, unaware that attorneys Breland and Whitten had not been retained to defend Milam and Bryant on the kidnapping charges, sent Whitten some words of advice before the hearing. Patton made four key points that he thought would be helpful in crafting a defense. First, the situation was not at all “a case of kidnapping in the usual sense, without provocation reason, or for ransom.” Patton’s second point explained why. “Till w
as guilty of a violent criminal assault and had escaped the scene of the crime.” The reaction of the half-brothers, covering Patton’s third and fourth points, channeled the mindset of an era that was apparently not really part of the past. “Outraged citizens tracked down the vicious sex criminal and simply made a legal citizen’s arrest as any citizen can legally do. The unwritten law decrees sudden execution to such suicidal sex offenders. This fact is well known.”45

  Correspondence between lawyer and future judge Russel D. Moore of Jackson and J. J. Breland seems to indicate further that Patton’s view was perhaps the prevailing one among Mississippi’s white citizens. Moore had sent Breland a photocopy of a letter that a Confederate soldier and ancestor, S. Blanche Moore, had written his wife during the Civil War. The letter addressed insults that Mrs. Moore and other revered women had been forced to endure from the Yankees.46 Breland responded the next day and for the first time clearly implicated his former clients in Till’s murder. At the same time, however, he fully justified their actions:

  The sentiments expressed in the letter of your Ancestor to his wife during the Civil War were, no doubt, the sentiments of Milam and Bryant. When they discovered one of the young married ladies in their family had been grossly insulted by a Chicago negro, their natural reaction was, no doubt, the same that would have been that of “S. Blanche Moore.” In fact, their reaction to this gross insult was the same that would have been that of any other true, white Mississippian.47