Four witnesses testified against Milam and Bryant on the kidnapping charges, including a sheriff and his deputy.48 Certainly, the decision not to indict had nothing to do with a lack of evidence. If the grand jury made what Adams called “the right decision,” it was a decision based on a system of justice advocated by Adams, Patton, Moore, Breland, and, certainly, a whole host of others.
After he left the Leflore County courthouse, Willie Reed took a train back to Chicago and arrived in the Windy City before the grand jury decision was even announced. He was accompanied by Alonzo Bradley, husband of trial witness Mandy Bradley, who was ready to join his wife up north after a month and a half apart.49 A resolution passed at the NAACP state convention in Jackson two days earlier provided Alonzo with $200 for new clothing and his train ticket.50 Alonzo’s timing in joining his wife surely lifted her spirits. Mandy was facing difficulties in her new surroundings and was unable to work, due to severe arthritis. At some point, she had moved out of Mamie Bradley’s house and in with a family on Chicago’s West Side. Although she had been given $50 by the NAACP, she was behind in her rent by several weeks. Overall, Mandy was overwhelmed and disillusioned by the city.
On a brighter note, the Elks lodge had just announced that it had donated $1,000 to an education fund set up for Willie Reed. Should he decide to attend college, he would receive $250 per year over a four-year period. “I feel that this young hero stands as a symbol of our unquenchable faith in God and man,” said George Lee, Elks grand commissioner of education. “I feel that this young man is a living symbol of our conviction that no tyrant ever could for long starve or torture average men out of that dream” of freedom and justice.51
Unfortunately, things were only getting worse for Mamie Bradley. Following her split with the NAACP, attorney Huff sent her a letter of resignation, thus severing his own relationship with her. Under the circumstances, this was inevitable. As a lawyer affiliated directly with the NAACP, he explained, “it would be impossible for me to continue as your attorney for you being as you are not associated with the organization.” By now, the press was seeking Mamie’s side to the controversy. Because Wilkins’s press release only indicated that Mamie’s demand for money was the central issue, she did not address any of the other relevant matters, such as missing her plane to San Francisco, or that her insistence on more money was made at the last minute. Once again, Anna Crockett did all of the talking. Crockett now denied that Mamie had ever asked for the $5,000 but claimed that this figure was suggested by Franklin Williams and Sylvester Odom, a minister and president of the Oakland branch. Speaking by phone from Chicago, Crockett admitted, however, that Mamie had asked for the alternative stipend of $100 per meeting plus one-third of the profits. This increase was necessary because Mamie had accumulated large hospital bills after her nervous breakdown in early October, and because her father quit his job in order to accompany her on her travels. Crockett also told the Chicago Defender that in the past, several checks that were to go to Mamie had been turned over to the NAACP instead.52
In response, NAACP publicity director Henry Moon calmly countered the latter claim made by Crockett. “We do not wish to enter into a controversy over the matter,” he said, “but for the sake of clarification it must be stated that we have not withheld any funds intended for Mrs. Bradley.” Moon insisted that NAACP records backed this up.53
As Mose Wright was about to take the podium on Wednesday night in Seattle, Mamie wrote Wilkins from her home in Chicago, following up on Tobias’s call from earlier that day and hoping that her own words might convince the NAACP leader that her support of the organization’s agenda meant more to her than any financial rewards. She was now willing to serve the group on its terms. “I set out to trade the blood of my child for the betterment of my race; and I do not now wish to deviate from such course,” she said in this, her first communication with Wilkins since before the trouble began. “I feel very bad that the opportunity to talk for the Association would be taken from me. I know that you have tried very hard and sincerely to see to my day-to-day financial needs. It is unfair and untrue for anyone to say otherwise. . . . If NAACP is willing to continue to do what it has to defray my travel and living expenses,” she assured him, “that should suffice. Please let me go forward with NAACP. It is a duty. I would not want it said that I did anything to shirk it.”54
After Wilkins received the letter, he presented it to his board of directors on Monday, November 14. He then sent Mamie a personal response the next day. His four-page letter detailed their various conversations, beginning with a meeting back on October 8 during which Mamie had assured him that she wanted to help the NAACP. The two agreed verbally at that time that the association would manage her future speaking engagements and that she would receive a minimum honorarium of $100 per meeting. Rayfield Mooty, who was present, accepted all the terms as well. “It was a shock, therefore, to learn on November 7, the day you were to leave for San Francisco, that Mr. Williams had been informed you had missed the flight on which we had purchased two seats because you were ‘busy shopping.’” He reminded her also of the demand, through Anna Crockett, of a guarantee of $5,000 for the eleven-city tour.
Wilkins assured Mamie, as he had Tobias on the phone a week earlier, that there had been no misunderstanding. Although Tobias had tried to persuade Wilkins that Mamie had experienced “a change of heart,” Wilkins was troubled that her letter made “no mention of the events of November 7, or of Mrs. Crockett. It does not admit that any such conversations took place, nor does it disavow them or seek to explain them in any way. Instead it implies that we have ‘taken’ from you the opportunity to talk for the Association.” Wilkins explained, as he already had to the press, that his organization could not “enter into any commercial lecture arrangement.” Far from shorting her anything, Wilkins insisted Mamie had been paid over $2,100 in honorariums between October 7 and November 4. The real issue, however, was her “ultimatum,” through Crockett, which gave him no choice but to cancel her tour. “We could do nothing with Mrs. Crockett and we could not get through to you. It was the last minute of the last hour. We had to act.”55
This episode was unfortunate for Mamie as well as for the NAACP, because each benefited immensely from the month-long relationship. But the negative press shattered Mamie’s image among many who had heretofore supported her. She clearly erred in making her last-minute demands upon the association, thinking that forcing Wilkins into a tight spot would cause him to acquiesce. At the same time, however, she may well have been influenced by others who put her up to it. It is unknown just who Anna Crockett was and why she insisted on speaking on Mamie’s behalf. Was the whole plan for more money Crockett’s idea? Whoever’s idea it was, Crockett’s role as a go-between backfired. Had Mamie talked to Wilkins directly, the entire controversy could easily have been avoided.56
That said, Roy Wilkins and others in the NAACP may not have been innocent in their treatment of Mamie Bradley while she was affiliated with them. NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers certainly felt that way and told his wife, Myrlie, how furious he was that rather than help Mamie, the association “used her” to advance its cause. Evers even instructed Myrlie that “if anything happens to me, don’t let them use you like that.”57 Before long, Mamie was making similar accusations against the organization.
By the time Mamie received Wilkins’s letter, however, the sting over her split with the NAACP may have already begun to fade. With her ties to the association severed, she was free to speak for other organizations, and on November 14 she appeared before a crowd of 5,000 in Flint, Michigan. The rally, sponsored by Buick Local 599 of CIO United Auto Workers, took in $1,300, of which $1,000 went to Mamie. That honorarium nearly matched the one she was to receive for her now-canceled eleven-city tour, and was by far the largest she had earned to date for any one engagement. Despite her problems with Wilkins, $100 taken from the profits were also set aside as a donation to the NAACP. It appears that Mamie was still trying to mend f
ences with the organization, or perhaps wanted to downplay their falling out, as she told her audience that she was working with the association to help raise awareness about the injustices in her son’s case.58
Meanwhile, many were still fuming over the grand jury’s decision and paid little attention to the tiff between Mamie Bradley and Roy Wilkins. On November 10, Illinois governor William Stratton released a letter to Attorney General Brownell. By doing so, Stratton became the most prominent official to call for a federal probe into the Till case. As such, his plea was featured prominently in the press. “It now appears that those responsible for this tragic crime are not being brought to justice,” he said, fearing the case might fall off the radar of authorities. “Somebody murdered that boy and should be made to pay for it.” A few weeks later Brownell explained that the Department of Justice could have intervened only if local and state officers had participated in the crime (Title 18, USC, Section 242 of the Federal Civil Rights Statute) or if Till had been taken across state lines (as per the Lindbergh Law).59
Brownell’s personal response to Stratton followed what Justice Department officials surely hoped would be the department’s final word on the issue. Whether it was because of Stratton’s letter or the 3,000 others sent to his office is unclear, but the Eisenhower administration’s answer to the nation at large finally came when Deputy Attorney General William P. Rogers appeared on the ABC television program College Press Conference on Sunday, November 20. Rogers, who was not familiar enough with the details of the case “to say exactly where the fault lies,” nevertheless called the murder “a real black mark” because Till’s killers were still free. Although he would not comment on whether he believed Milam and Bryant had been given a fair trial, he did explain the jurisdictional problems involved that prohibited a federal investigation. He certainly wanted this television appearance to halt public appeals for such action. “We just have no authority to step into a state if we think there is a failure on the administration of justice,” he insisted.60
One other letter may have also played into Rogers’s television appearance, although he did not address it. In the November 19 issue of the Washington Afro-American, reporter James L. Hicks published an open letter to Brownell and FBI director Hoover, detailing all of the reasons why he believed the Department of Justice could intervene. He had specific information for the FBI in order for it to come to that same conclusion. His instructions to federal agents willing to look into it were precise and were based on investigations that he and Dr. T. R. M. Howard had conducted after the trial.
Hicks assured Brownell and Hoover that the facts would prove that four white men and two black men had participated in the murder of Emmett Till. The key to unanswered questions regarding the case was to be found in the town of Glendora. Agents should talk to both the wife and the father of Henry Lee Loggins. DeWitt Loggins “will be reluctant to talk and when you finally hear his story you will easily understand why he is reluctant to talk.” His account would reveal that his son told him that he was on the back of the truck on the morning of the murder. The senior Loggins could also give the FBI the name of a black minister who received a similar confession from Henry Lee.
Hicks next told them what was most relevant in justifying a federal probe. Should the FBI send an agent to the jail at Charleston, he should talk to an inmate named Sarah, who “will tell you that during the Sumner murder trial when Sheriff H. C. Strider was saying that he could not locate Too Tight Collins, actually Collins was at that time locked up in the Charleston jail.” Sarah, according to Hicks, was granted various privileges at the jail for performing sexual favors for the inmates as well as for Strider. “I have been informed that Federal Government is looking for an ‘in’ through which to get into the Till murder case,” Hicks continued. “I’m also informed that one of the ways the Federal Government can get into the case is by proving that at the time of the murder trial key witnesses were prevented by law officers from testifying.”61
The Criminal Division received a photocopy of Hicks’s letter on December 6 but declined to investigate further. The revelations about Loggins’s alleged involvement in the crime or any newly disclosed evidence about accomplices would not change the jurisdictional problem, and would have been up to the state to pursue. The October interview with Robert Smith by agents from the FBI’s Memphis office satisfied them that Collins and Loggins had never been held in Charleston.62 Still, however, the department would be forced to revisit Hicks’s letter a few months later.
Just after the Hicks piece appeared in the Washington Afro-American, the West Coast tour featuring Mose Wright and Ruby Hurley wrapped up on November 22 with a gathering in Denver. The eleven meetings brought in over $22,000, with $5,900 more in pledges. Wright, comfortable in front of an audience after years at the pulpit, did not disappoint, and neither did Hurley. Roy Wilkins summarized the tour as “a success in spreading the story of Mississippi terror in the Far West.”63
With the rallies and Delta trials behind him, Wright began settling in to his new life in Argo, Illinois. If he had entertained any doubts at all about his decision to flee the South after the murder trial, they were about to be swept away. On November 25, in Belzoni, the same town where Rev. George Lee had been shot and killed six months earlier, Gus Courts, president of the local branch of the NAACP, was counting receipts behind the counter at his modest grocery store when someone outside began shooting through the window. Three bullets hit the 250-pound, six-feet-seven-inch Courts in the abdomen and arm before a witness noticed a car, presumably carrying the gunman, slowly drive away. Thankfully, Courts survived. His first instinct was that the assailant was Belzoni Citizens’ Council chairman Hezekiah Fly. The Citizens’ Council, according to Courts, had been targeting him because of his work toward black equality and for his refusal to step down from his NAACP position. Following the shooting, Courts was taken by car to the all-black Taborian Hospital sixty miles away in Mound Bayou, where his condition was listed as serious. He refused admittance to the local Humphreys County Hospital for fear that his would-be killer might come by to “finish what had been started.”64
Prompted by this continued violence, E. Frederick Morrow, administrator for special projects in the Eisenhower administration, sent Maxwell Rabb a memorandum lamenting the situation in the South. He also addressed the Till case in particular. Life had not been easy for Morrow, the only black man in the White House, since joining the administration in July. Other staff members were “cold, but correct” in their treatment of him, and as an anomaly in the administration, he was often mistaken as a servant at official affairs.65 His role and personal experiences made him particularly sensitive to the nation’s reaction to the Till murder. He understood that all official responses from the administration had come from the Office of the Attorney General, which reiterated that the federal government lacked jurisdiction in the matter. “However, this particular situation is so fraught with emotion because of the circumstances under which the crime was committed, and the fact that the victim was a youngster, that normal methods of dealing with the usual case of crime are not completely acceptable to all of the interested parties.”66
Morrow, believing “that we are on the verge of a dangerous racial conflagration in the Southern section of the country,” agonized that wherever his duties had taken him throughout the country, “the one theme on the lips and in the minds of all Negroes is the injustice of the Till matter, and the fact that nothing can be done to effect justice in this case.” This was creating a situation that could only be described as explosive. “The warning signs in the South are all too clear; the harassed Negro is sullen, bitter, and talking strongly of retaliation whenever future situations dictate.” Blacks had formed their own underground to counter unabated discrimination, while Citizens’ Councils, on the other hand, were practicing “economic terrorism.” The situation was becoming unbearable for Morrow:
As a member of the White House Staff, I am sitting in the middle of this an
d I have been accused of being cowardly for not bringing this situation to the attention of the Administration, and requesting the President to make some kind of observation on this unwholesome problem. My mail has been heavy and angry, and wherever I go, people have expressed disappointment that no word has come from the White House deploring this situation. I always point out, of course, that our Attorney General has followed this situation with interest and skill and that he will act when and if Federal laws are violated. But this does not still the protestations. There is a clamor for some kind of statement from the White House that will indicate the Administration is aware of, and condemns with vigor, any kind of racist activity in the United States.
Morrow suggested that Vice President Nixon invite several black leaders to Washington to talk together about the problem, and to do it “intelligently and dispassionately.” It would reassure the black community that the administration was concerned, while also putting racists on alert that their “un-American tactics” would result in prosecution by the attorney general.
Morrow also noted that thousands still attended large rallies all over the country protesting the Till murder, and that the case was “the subject of numerous Sunday sermons in the pulpits of the land.”67 Unbeknownst to Morrow, one of the most significant of those Sunday gatherings had occurred two days earlier.
Dr. T. R. M. Howard had been scheduled to speak in Montgomery, Alabama, on November 27 for the thirty-fourth annual program of National Achievement Week, sponsored by the graduate chapter of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity at Alabama State College. The speech, scheduled for 7:00 P.M. at the Tullibody Auditorium, promised to tell the “inside story” of the Till case under the theme “Desegregation, a Weigh Station: Integration, Our Destination.” The location was later changed to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.68
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