Emmett Till

by Devery S. Anderson

The recent Courts shooting added to Howard’s outrage and to the list of Mississippi atrocities that he highlighted before the overflow crowd. He had just addressed the shooting in a letter to Brownell, asking that the attorney general pursue Courts’s assailants. He went over the unsolved murders of Rev. George W. Lee and Lamar Smith. The FBI had been given evidence on the probable killers of Lee, Howard said. He believed that they were the same ones who tried to take down Courts.69

  The center of his speech, however, was the Till case. He told the dramatic details, provided little-known facts, and disclosed names, just as he had been doing in speeches since early October. The host for the event, the new pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, was a twenty-six-year-old Boston University graduate named Martin Luther King Jr. King had gone to Montgomery to lead the church only the year before.70

  Another local citizen present that night was a forty-two-year-old seamstress named Rosa Parks. She remembered the meeting vividly enough to reflect back on it some thirty years later: “The first mass meeting that we had in Montgomery following his [Till’s] death was when Dr. T. R. M. Howard came to speak to . . . a community meeting and he was telling us about it in detail.”71 The Till murder, the protests, and the Courts shooting all contributed to a new resolve. The rest, of course, is history. Four days later, Parks, tired after a long day at work, boarded a bus at Montgomery’s Court Square. At the next stop, a rush of passengers overflowed the white section, which left one white man standing. The driver, James Blake, looked at the black passengers in the fifth row, or front row of the black section, and ordered them to “let me have those front seats.” Law required black passengers to give up their seats to whites once the white section was full. When no one moved, he spoke again. “Y’all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats.” The man next to Parks got up and moved, but Parks stayed seated. Blake threatened to arrest Parks, then left the bus and called the police.72

  Parks’s arrest moments later caught the attention of local black leader E. D. Nixon, who wanted to use Parks’s case as a means to break down Montgomery’s segregation laws. Parks consented, and the day of her trial, Monday, December 5, was designated as a one-day boycott of Montgomery’s buses. Local activist JoAnn Robinson prepared 35,000 handbills and recruited students to help distribute them. Monday night, a mass meeting at the Holt Avenue Baptist Church voted to continue the boycott. Rev. King agreed to head the hastily organized Montgomery Improvement Association and lead the boycott, and was the keynote speaker that night. The extraordinary determination of the black citizens of Montgomery to see this protest through to the end produced an unprecedented victory that took 382 days to achieve. It was the first grassroots success (thanks to an eventual decision by the US Supreme Court) of a struggle that emerged as the modern civil rights movement.73

  It would have been impossible for Parks, secretary of the local branch of the NAACP, to have remained unaffected by the continued outcry following the Till trial verdict that had been announced sixty-nine days earlier. Parks said little publicly that connected Emmett Till with her defiant move, and she does not mention the case at all in her autobiography. Yet, as she explained it in retrospect in 2003, “The news of Emmett’s death caused many people to participate in the cry for justice and equal rights, including myself.”74

  Several years earlier, the Reverend Jesse Jackson reportedly asked Parks, “Why didn’t you go to the back of the bus?”

  “I thought of Emmett Till and I couldn’t go back,” she responded.75

  For all that followed, that November evening at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church proved to be providential. The growing determination, coupled with King’s ability to move the masses, provided the guarantee that the citizens boycotting the buses would endure to the end. The federal government thought it could do nothing about Emmett Till. On the other hand, black citizens in Montgomery proved that nothing was impossible.

  Dr. Howard did not know it at the time, but his visit to Dexter Avenue served as a passing of the torch to the unassuming Martin Luther King Jr. With King as the new leader of the quest for black equality, a path was about to be emblazoned that would not only burn its way throughout the South, but would be etched permanently across the American landscape.

  9

  The Look Story and Its Aftermath

  As December 1955 dawned, media coverage of the Emmett Till case began to wane.1 The grand jury decision in Greenwood meant that J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant were officially free, while at the same time, jurisdictional issues preventing federal action effectively closed the door to further attempts at justice. Mamie Bradley’s controversial parting with the NAACP suddenly took her out of the spotlight, and Mose Wright’s West Coast tour had come to an end. In Chicago, Mamie was bracing herself for a Christmas alone, while Wright, Willie Reed, and Mandy Bradley were still adapting to life outside of the South. In Mississippi, the shooting of Gus Courts moved racial violence outside the realm of sex and back to the heated issues surrounding voter registration. Lastly, in Montgomery, Alabama, the bus boycott following the defiant act of Rosa Parks was about to garner steam as well as national attention.

  On December 2, one day after Parks’s arrest, the Till murder and related southern atrocities were the topics of an Eisenhower cabinet meeting at the White House. The president, still recovering from his September heart attack, was absent, but Vice President Nixon presided in his stead. One issue on the agenda was the upcoming State of the Union address. A planned focus of the speech was the divisive topic of civil rights, with some emphasis on the Citizens’ Councils, founded in Mississippi eighteen months earlier in response to the Brown decision. Attorney General Brownell wanted to eliminate any language that would anger the South. He believed that threats to investigate alleged efforts to keep blacks from voting lacked solid evidence and were unnecessarily polarizing. Rather than face accusations of “waving the red flag,” Brownell reasoned, the administration should limit itself to a short statement in support of the Supreme Court’s decision and leave it at that. He also reminded his colleagues that the Department of Justice had been under intense pressure to investigate racial violence in Dixie, particularly the Till murder.2

  Secretary of State John Foster Dulles listened carefully and offered his own opinions. He called the Till killing tragic, yet he worried about political and constitutional ramifications should the administration get involved. Nixon, however, proposed one way out of the dilemma by suggesting they push the issue on to Congress. If a bill came out of a congressional investigation, southern Democrats would certainly filibuster it, allowing the administration to save face while forcing the Democrats to deal with the fallout. Both Brownell and Dulles liked this idea.3

  Then, suddenly, it was déjà vu all over again in Tallahatchie County. On December 3, the day after the Eisenhower cabinet discussed and essentially minimized the severity of the southern “Negro problem,” a thirty-three-year-old black man named Clinton Melton was at work at a Glendora gas station owned by a local white man named Lee McGarrh. Two other of the town’s 175 residents were J. W. Milam and his good friend Elmer Kimbell. Melton had worked for McGarrh for ten years and was popular in the community. Around 9:30 that Saturday night, a drunken Kimbell drove into the station and told McGarrh that he wanted his car filled with gas. McGarrh, in turn, told Melton to go out and take care of it, which he did. The bill came to $4.47, but when Kimbell learned this, he insisted that he had asked for only $2 worth and began threatening Melton. The attendant told Kimbell that he had simply followed McGarrh’s orders.

  “Suppose I pay by check. Waddaya think you’d do about it if the check bounced?” said Kimbell, angrily.

  Melton responded that he did not care how Kimbell paid because he (Melton) only worked there.

  Growing more agitated, Kimbell told McGarrh that he had a “smart Negro” working for him, and said he wanted to close out his account. McGarrh sided with Melton and reminded Kimbell that he had indeed asked for a full tank. After
things became more heated, McGarrh told Kimbell to “get going.”

  “I’m going, but I’ll be back,” said Kimbell. Turning to Melton he promised, “I’m going to kill you.” To McGarrh he said, “I’ll see you, too.”

  Kimbell then drove off, leaving behind twenty-nine-year-old John Henry Wilson, a black employee of Kimbell’s at the local cotton gin who had been riding in the car with him.4

  McGarrh, fearing Kimbell would keep his word, urged Melton to go on home. Before leaving, however, Melton paused to put gas in his own car. As he got inside to leave a few minutes later, Kimbell returned to the station. Wilson, knowing what was up, ran out and begged him not to hurt Melton, but Kimbell ignored that plea and threatened to kill them both. Wilson then ran back into the store, begging McGarrh to hide him. Outside, Kimbell fired three shots at Melton, hitting him twice in the head and once in the hand, killing him instantly. McGarrh watched in horror from inside the station.5

  Although the murder of Clinton Melton was by itself a senseless, tragic act, it was accompanied by a few ghosts of the recent past that gave it a bizarre twist. Store owner Lee McGarrh had been a character witness for J. W. Milam during Milam’s murder trial in September. When Elmer Kimbell drove into McGarrh’s station that December evening, he did so in Milam’s car. Immediately after the shooting, Kimbell drove to Milam’s home less than half a mile away, where O. D. Rogers, the town marshal, arrived shortly thereafter. He found Kimbell, who was receiving treatment for a slight bullet wound to his left shoulder. Rogers arrested him, but for reasons that could only make sense in Tallahatchie County, he allowed Milam to first drive Kimbell to a hospital twenty-five miles away in Clarksdale. After doctors spent about forty minutes cleaning and dressing the wound, Kimbell was taken to jail. The mysterious injury allowed Kimbell to claim self-defense by pointing to Melton as the aggressor.6

  Early on, police seemed to side with Kimbell. Deputy Sheriff A. G. Thomas speculated that Melton, McGarrh, and Wilson had “ganged up” on Kimbell. As he theorized it to the New York Post, “It looks very much that way to me. I can’t say for sure but it certainly looks like there was a gun duel with three against one.” McGarrh, however, insisted that Thomas’s theory was “absolutely absurd,” and assured police that Melton was unarmed. Indeed, no weapon was found at the murder scene. The officer in charge of the investigation was outgoing sheriff H. C. Strider, who examined the bullet hole in Kimbell’s shirt and found no evidence of powder burns. They would be present, he explained, if the gunshot had been self-inflicted or occurred at close range.7

  On December 24, three weeks after the shooting, Kimbell attended a preliminary hearing in Sumner, where three justices of the peace denied him bond. He was later refused a second time on January 9 by Circuit Judge Curtis Swango after Kimbell’s attorney requested bond on a writ of habeas corpus. Swango’s decision guaranteed that Kimbell would remain incarcerated until his trial, scheduled for March. Representing Kimbell was J. W. Kellum, one of the five Sumner attorneys who had aided Milam and Bryant during their murder trial three months earlier.8

  For a brief moment in time, the Melton murder was not touted as a race crime because Kimbell, in his drunken state of mind, could just as easily have taken out his rage on a white attendant. However, the white community quickly made the connection and denounced the slaying. The local Lion’s Club issued a statement declaring, “We consider the taking of the life of Clinton Melton an outrage against him, the people of Glendora, as well as the entire human family. We intend to see that the forces of justice and right prevail in the wake of this woeful evil. We humbly confess repentance for having so lived as a community that such an evil occurrence could happen here.”9

  Several local white citizens pledged to help Melton’s widow, Beulah, and her four young children, in the wake of the shooting. The National Council of Churches of Christ donated $1,000 to the grieving family. At a meeting of the local Lion’s Club, Methodist pastor William A. Harris demanded that the club go on record in protest of the killing. Glendora physician W. C. McQuinn promised Beulah a job, while a local planter, Michael P. Sturdivant, offered to build the family a house.10 Michael’s grandfather, M. P. Sturdivant, had owned the plantation managed by Leslie Milam in Drew where Emmett Till had allegedly been beaten and killed, thus providing another eerie connection to that notorious case. Although M.P. died in 1948, the property remained in the family.

  Beulah Melton shortly received a visit from Medgar Evers, but she kindly asked that the NAACP not get involved because “that is why they [the jury in Sumner] did Mrs. Bradly [sic] like they did.” In other words, outside agitation had cost Mamie Bradley a guilty verdict, and Beulah did not want to risk the same outcome in Kimbell’s case.11

  Certainly the Melton murder had all the ingredients needed to finally convict a white man for killing a black man in Tallahatchie County. Melton lived locally, was respected by black and white citizens, and was not a known crusader for black equality. Most significant, the sex taboo was not an issue. On March 13, 1956, however, Elmer Kimbell was acquitted of murder after a two-day trial, the jury believing Kimbell’s claim that he shot Melton in self-defense. Tragedy preceded the verdict when Beulah Melton’s car went off the road and into a bayou on a dark night four days before the trial began. She drowned, but the two children who were with her were rescued, just in time to join their two other siblings as orphans. The drowning was ruled an accident, the sheriff surmising that because Beulah was a new driver, she probably lost control of the car.12 Others believed that someone close to Kimbell intentionally ran her off the road. Regardless, it was clear by the verdict that in the six months since Emmett Till’s killing, things had not changed in the Mississippi Delta.

  Meanwhile, Mamie Bradley, like Beulah Melton, wanted little to do with the NAACP, but for entirely different reasons. On December 22, Mamie and her father were in New York, where Mamie was about to headline three rallies hosted by local churches. Still hurt over her rift with Roy Wilkins, she accused the NAACP, during a press conference at Harlem’s Hotel Theresa, of profiting off of the death of her son, much as Wilkins had accused her of doing. John Carthan agreed with his daughter’s criticisms, declaring that “without any doubt the NAACP is using Emmett Till and his mother.” Mamie, however, was more upset that the association dropped its plans of filing a civil suit on her behalf against Milam and the Bryants. When NAACP attorney William Henry Huff resigned as Mamie’s legal counsel following the cancellation of her West Coast tour, he saw a conflict of interest in any future representation. In his November 15 letter to Mamie, Roy Wilkins downgraded the association’s willingness to help by extending his hand only for “consultation and advice on matters in connection with your situation.”13

  Because Mamie was now speaking for other organizations and no longer needed the NAACP in that regard, she felt free to offer some new demands should the organization be inclined to take her back. Although reminiscent of Anna Crockett’s ultimatum from a month earlier, the new provisions came directly from Mamie herself. She wanted at least $150 per meeting, with a promise that she would not speak at more than three meetings in a week. She also wanted her father to receive $100 per week for traveling with her. Another requirement was that the NAACP pay her household expenses. These included her monthly mortgage payment and a $400 debt left behind by her estranged husband, Pink Bradley. These terms, explained to members of the black press, seemed inexplicable in light of Mamie’s earlier attempt to reconcile with Wilkins. Her criticisms, not to mention her preconditions for a renewed partnership, would no doubt serve only to widen the divide. During the press conference, she gave newsmen copies of her November 9 letter to Wilkins and his response from November 15.14

  It is unclear just how long the demand continued for public appearances. Mamie was scheduled for at least three more meetings in New Jersey on January 15, 1956, sponsored by the Goodwill Progressive Club of the Newark Church of God in Christ.15 Mose Wright remained willing to speak also, and on January 2 he ad
dressed a crowd in Brooklyn at the First AME Zion Church, hosted by the Baptist Pastors Union. Two thousand people, including fifty ministers, attended the event. Dr. Gardner C. Taylor, who introduced Wright to the crowd, referred to the former sharecropper as not only a black hero but as an American hero who risked his life by testifying in Sumner. The following day, Wright made a surprise appearance at the NAACP annual meeting in New York City.16

  Although the mass meetings continued to draw large crowds, by the first of the year they had become so routine as to rarely make headlines anymore. And they were about to be overshadowed by an announcement that can only be described as explosive. In early 1956, newspapers ran an advertisement for the January 24 edition of Look magazine, and it demanded attention. That the ad was sure to generate interest is evident by the fact that the print run for the issue was two million more than the magazine’s usual number.17 What was so intriguing about this particular ad was that it carried a photo of Emmett Till and included a bold headline that promised “for the first time . . . THE TRUTH about the Emmett Till killing.” The accompanying teaser was even more sensational:

  Headlines screamed across the Nation. Millions of words were written about it. A trial would be held. Yet the truth about the Emmett Till killing in Mississippi remained hidden—until now! Now exclusively in Look magazine you can read the story—the story that the jury did not hear, that no newspaper reader ever saw . . . the brutal step-by-step full account of what happened on that fateful night. You’ll read how Till was killed, where, why and by whom! Don’t miss this shocking story in Look. It will make magazine history the minute it hits the newsstands. Get your copy of LOOK early!18

  Needless to say, the promo promised quite a punch, and on January 10, when the magazine hit the stands, by most accounts, it delivered.

  The story had been in the making for three months. The author was William Bradford Huie, a forty-five-year-old nationally known journalist, author, and television personality from Hartselle, Alabama. He was a 1930 graduate of the University of Alabama, and by the time he joined the navy in 1943, he had already worked for the Birmingham Post (1932–36), founded Alabama: The News Magazine of the Deep South (1937), and published his first book, Mud on the Stars (1942). Several other books followed, including The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1951) and The Execution of Private Slovik (1954), a nonfiction title about a World War II soldier executed in 1945 for desertion; Eddie Slovik was the first to meet such a fate for this charge since the Civil War. For six years, beginning in 1946, Huie served as associate editor and editor of American Mercury, and from 1951 until 1953 he hosted the CBS political program Longines Chronoscope, described as a precursor to Meet the Press. Before his death in 1986, his twenty-one books had sold twenty-seven million copies. Mamie Stover, Private Slovik, and four others were adapted into Hollywood movies.19