It was no surprise that in Chicago, Mamie Bradley read the Huie piece immediately. Her instant response was that Milam and Bryant lied about her son. The boy she knew “would never brag about the women he had. How could he? He was only 14.” The “Shocking Story” was the most recent in a series of personal blows. The trial verdict in Sumner, the dismissal of kidnapping charges in Greenwood, not to mention the murder itself, all left her devastated. “I don’t see how much more I can stand, how I can go on. These terrible lies they tell to try and explain away killing a child in cold blood. They aren’t human, they’re beasts. And nobody does anything about them.” Carolyn Bryant fared no better in Mamie’s eyes. “That woman . . . I don’t see how she can sleep at night.”50
Although the article has typically been touted as a “confession,” it does not fit that description if remorse and penitence are to be implied by such a definition. Neither did it read as one. Had the signed releases been forced into the open, one would see that Milam only agreed to let Huie portray him as a killer, and did so in return for money.
That the acquitted half-brothers immediately distanced themselves from the story further negates the idea that it should be taken as a confession. Newsmen began tracking down the pair right away, but anyone who asked was met with denials by both Milam and Bryant. Unknown to anyone asking, that was all part of the deal. “I don’t know a damn thing about it, and you can quote me on that,” Milam told newsmen. “There’s nothing I can do about someone’s imagination but I didn’t have nothing to do with killing anyone.” Bryant’s response sounded more canned. “I haven’t seen the article, but if it’s anything I am supposed to have said, I deny it. I don’t have any comment until we finish talking to our lawyers.” Milam also said he was even mulling over the idea of filing a libel suit against the magazine, and claimed to have hired John Whitten to explore the possibility. Whitten, getting in on the act himself, told the press that he was still deciding what to do, but believed a suit, if filed, would be handled by a federal court, through a New York attorney.51
Within a few days, however, Milam admitted to reporter Jay Milner that he was not sure if he really had grounds for winning a lawsuit because “that guy that wrote it was careful not to say where he got his information and he didn’t quote me directly.” Actually, Huie did quote Milam directly, but never mentioned that he heard the story from Milam himself. Milam did note with a smile that the article “was written from a Mississippi viewpoint. I’ve gotten a lot of letters from people complementing me for what Look said I did.” He showed the reporter a stack of fourteen that he had received that day alone.52
Four years later, Huie revealed that the denials Milam and Bryant made to the press had been carefully crafted by Huie himself.53 When Huie answered questions from curious reporters following the release of the article, he stood by the story but said little else. In a statement issued through Look, he explained, “In researching the Till story for Look magazine, I talked to all the important sources in Mississippi.” Yet, true to his word, he refused to reveal identities. “I cannot, as a responsible newsman[,] enumerate these sources by name.” “For the same reasons,” Huie continued, “I cannot answer any questions as to whether or not I personally talked with any particular individuals in the Till case.” He insisted that “the Look article is completely accurate. Look published it only after being thoroughly satisfied of that fact.” The magazine’s attorney, John Harding, also pointed out that no one connected to the case had contacted the publication to dispute the details.54
For most readers, none of that made any difference. However careful Huie was in protecting his sources legally, few saw Huie’s “Shocking Story” as anything but an admission of murder by Milam and Bryant. The public denials of the acquitted killers notwithstanding, the article prompted immediate calls for authorities to empanel a new grand jury to once again consider kidnapping indictments against them. Because they had never been tried and acquitted on those charges, they could legally be charged again if there was evidence to warrant it. The loudest voice insisting on a renewed effort was that of Roy Wilkins, who sent a telegram to Mississippi governor-elect J. P. Coleman urging him to act. Coleman was still serving as state attorney general until his inauguration on January 17. “If nothing is done to make them pay for at least one of their crimes, not only is Mississippi disgraced but our country will be held up for international ridicule. Accordingly, we urge you to act promptly to save the good name of our country and to salvage what you can for the State of Mississippi.” In a separate letter to Look, Wilkins had words for Huie, who raised too many questions by never identifying his sources. “Who stands behind these ‘facts,’ Mr. Huie?”55
The man who had the power to call a grand jury was Arthur Jordan, circuit judge over Leflore County, but even his hands were tied. He explained to the press that in order to proceed, he would have to call a special grand jury with only a twenty-day notice. Because his schedule was already full, this would be impossible. The next term of court for Greenwood was not slated until May, and Jordan still had cases to preside over in four other counties before then. Even so, his only role in the matter would be to empanel the jury. Any decision to indict would be up to the men selected to serve. Jordan was not optimistic. “Nobody will indict anybody just on the basis of an article in a magazine.” Should there be an indictment and the case go to trial, it would all be a waste of time without Huie’s cooperation anyway. The district attorney could not force him to go to the state to testify, but Huie could do so voluntarily. In a separate interview with the Washington Afro-American, Jordan admitted that in that case, testimony from Huie “might carry some weight.”56 For Huie, who had already promised to protect his sources, testifying voluntarily was not an option.
Black journalist James Hicks had stayed on the Till case since the trial, and naturally followed the Huie story with vested interest. It had been two months since he had written his open letter to Attorney General Herbert Brownell and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, wherein he named probable accomplices of Milam and Bryant.57 In the January 21, 1956, edition of the Baltimore Afro-American, he published another such letter, this time prompted by the Huie revelations. This one was directed to Brownell alone.
Hicks was none too happy with Brownell as it was. Back in December, a delegation of five women from various organizations met with Brownell about the many abuses endured by southern blacks, especially those in Mississippi. Juanita Mitchell, an attorney for the National Council of Negro Women, admonished Brownell to strengthen federal statutes as a means to probe southern racial problems without hindrance. Brownell promised to consider the concerns of the group and offered to meet with them again after the president’s State of the Union message in January. One of the women present mentioned Hicks’s November letter, in which Hicks named individuals and spelled out a course of action for the FBI. Brownell rejected Hicks’s charges as “groundless.” Hicks later read about the attorney general’s criticisms in a New York newspaper.58
Hicks believed, in light of the Look article, that he was having the last laugh. To him, however, the situation was not funny. “Mr. Milam is quoted from direct quotes all through the article. Now, Mr. Brownell, you are a lawyer, and you know that if a magazine or any publication charges a man with murder in direct quotes, that man can sue the magazine or newspaper for libel in any court in this nation AND FORCE THAT MAGAZINE OR NEWSPAPER TO EITHER PROVE HE COMMITTED THE MURDER OR COLLECT DAMAGES TO THE AMOUNT OF HARM HE HAS SUFFERED BY SUCH A CHARGE.”
Hicks believed that Milam’s inaction, despite early threats to sue, was telling. “A Mississippi jury acquitted him of murder and he is in an ideal position to sue. But he is not suing.” Hicks said he had even talked with Look’s attorney, John Harding, who was sure that Look would win a lawsuit in the unlikely event that there would be one. “Mr. Attorney General, you are the highest lawyer in the land—what would be the best guarantee that any editor would want in a case like this? That’s right—an affidavi
t signed by J. W. Milam in which he admits to the magazine that everything in the article is true. That’s the only kind of guarantee that any publication with the national standing of Look Magazine could accept under the circumstances.” Did Harding alert Hicks to the releases signed in Sumner? Harding knew that the statements made no admissions of guilt, but ethical boundaries should have kept him from telling anyone about them at all, especially a loose cannon such as Hicks. Harding may have provided Hicks with a hypothetical scenario, or Hicks’s talk of affidavits was all conjecture on his part. Either way, his theory was nearly spot on. “What I now say is that Milam and Bryant have confessed their killing of Emmett Till and there is a strong suggestion that they were paid a handsome sum for the confession.” Hicks publicly challenged Brownell to intervene by concluding his letter with six words: “It’s your move, Mr. Attorney General!”59
Brownell ignored Hicks altogether and was not swayed when former California congressman Sam Yorty wrote and urged, as thousands had before him, that Brownell see “that justice is done in this case.” On February 12, Warren Olney, assistant attorney general, responded to Yorty and assured him that the Justice Department shared the congressman’s views about the horrific nature of the murder. Regardless, nothing pointed to the crime as anything other than a state matter.60
In the end, Huie’s “Shocking Story” only confirmed the fact that two men got away with murder. It would not serve as a springboard for justice, and Mississippi officials never tried to prosecute the men again.
The varied responses to the article were hardly a surprise. Huie received around 5,000 letters, and the sentiments of the authors sat anywhere along the spectrum. Some pledged financial support to Milam for doing what was to them an honorable deed. Others accused Huie of being a “nigger-lover.” Still others read “Shocking Story” as Huie’s attempt “to make a Negro child into something detestable.” In its March 6 and March 20, 1956, issues, Look published a total of nineteen letters to the editor about the article.61
Editorials in northern and southern papers clearly demonstrated these diverse attitudes. The New York Post declared that “if a slaying can not only be committed but proclaimed—and that is what the Look report suggests—there is no longer any semblance of protection for the civil rights of Negroes in that state. . . . The Till case haunts the national conscience, and this article, until or unless it is successfully disputed, is a sensational and decisive exhibit.” The Greenwood Morning Star denounced the piece and the magazine that gave it a forum. Huie’s claim that the murder was approved by the state of Mississippi was especially disturbing. “It is this insinuation which marks Look magazine as the bitter enemy of the South and the South’s way of life.”62
Amid the outcry over the story, one development was completely unexpected, but it demonstrated that Huie planned to cash in on the Till case for some time to come. Within days after Look hit the stands, papers reported that Huie, Mamie Bradley, J. W. Milam, and Roy Bryant were all parties in a movie deal with Lloyd Royal, president of Panorama Productions and owner of a movie theater chain in Meridian, Mississippi. When the story broke, Royal was in New York with an associate, T. V. Garroway, to secure a deal with Huie, who was slated to write the script. Huie also contracted with the New American Library to write a book building upon his “Shocking Story.”
The film was to be called The Emmett Till Story, and Royal hoped to begin shooting in Money and Sumner in less than a month. Till family members had already signed contracts and Royal was in negotiations with Milam and Bryant. Huie was not worried, however. Should the brothers fail to sign on, “we will be willing to take the risks involved. But we intend to use real names and places and the real locale of the killing.”63 If there were any risks to consider, they would have only involved Roy Bryant. The releases that Milam and Carolyn Bryant signed in Sumner already gave Huie and anyone working with him the right to portray them in film. Publicly claiming he still had to negotiate with them was probably necessary to conceal the fact that they had actually given the go-ahead three months earlier.
A follow-up story soon reported that the acquitted pair did sign on, as expected. Twenty-seven-year-old actor and Arkansas native Cecil Scaife told the press he hoped to play Milam in the film, although casting had not yet started.64 As Royal explained it, “We don’t plan to make a documentary. We are going to dramatize a story based on the known facts. We’re a Mississippi company and we’re not going to do anything to hurt Mississippi. The releases we have obtained give us the final say on what goes into the picture.” Royal said he was even working out details for financing and distribution of the film with forty-five-year-old Arthur B. Krim, entertainment lawyer and, since 1951, chairman of United Artists.
Mamie Bradley confirmed after the first reports made the news that she had indeed signed a contract just after the first of the year and hired an attorney to advise her. “My contract gives me the right to pass on the script and I will exercise that right vigilantly to see that it gives a truthful portrayal.” Bradley was adamant that she would not allow her son to be portrayed as he had been in the Look article. “Emmett was no superman and saying that he took all that beating without begging for mercy or that he kept talking back to them to the very end just isn’t true. They were only trying to justify why they did it.”65
Despite early enthusiasm over this project, the film never came to fruition, and the reasons for that are unknown. Huie did fill his contract with the New American Library, producing the book Wolf Whistle, and Other Stories in 1959. The first chapter dealt with the Till case. He finished a screenplay for an Emmett Till film in 1960, but by then Royal was out of the deal and Huie was negotiating with Louis de Rochemont, cocreator of the theatrical newsreels The March of Time and producer of such full-length features as The House on 92nd Street (1945) and Windjammer (1958). De Rochemont, known as the father of the docudrama, may have naturally been drawn to the Till story. However, Huie reported in a 1977 interview that although he had signed a contract with RKO Pictures and had written the script, the producer canceled the project. A footnote to the interview explained that, “given the style of movies at the time, there seemed no way to make a film about two men who casually murder a boy and then escape punishment with the blessings of their peers.” The script still sits unproduced in Huie’s papers at Ohio State University.66
As Huie predicted, his “Shocking Story” eroded the support that Milam and Bryant had gained before and just after the trial. When Huie met up with the pair the following year, he reported that friends had abandoned them and that misfortune was plaguing them both.67
Just after the release of the Look piece, newspapers began reporting that Mississippi governor-elect Coleman spoke about the case to interviewer Dick Smith of radio station KXOL in Fort Worth, Texas. “So far as I am concerned, they both [Milam and Bryant] should have been convicted and electrocuted.” He was quick to criticize the NAACP and Charles Diggs for coming to the trial and stirring up trouble. Had they stayed away, “we would have got the job done.”68
When news of the interview hit, Coleman denied these statements. A reporter from the Memphis Press-Scimitar read Coleman a United Press dispatch in which Look attributed the quotes to the governor-elect. Coleman still denied making such statements. “To begin with, Mississippi no longer electrocutes. We use the gas chamber. Secondly, I have been judge and attorney general for so many years I would never make such a statement without having sat in on the evidence. I did not hear the evidence in this case.” Look, however, insisted that the interview had been recorded and forwarded to New York, where it was released. Coleman admitted that he had talked with Smith by phone several days earlier, but he believed it to have been nothing more than a casual exchange. “I guess I should have declined to talk at all,” said Coleman, regretfully. “I didn’t regard it as a news release conversation.”69
Huie’s “Shocking Story” has received both undue praise and unwarranted criticism in the decades since it appeared. On t
he one hand, it convinced many holdouts who would not believe it before that Milam and Bryant were guilty of murder, and it served as a constant reminder to the state of Mississippi that it had, through its court system, delivered an injustice. As such, the acquitted brothers were no longer heroes, but quickly became pariahs in their communities. However, because Huie willingly accepted their version of the story, which portrayed them as the only perpetrators, the article created and perpetuated a false narrative that has unfortunately been given an authoritative status. Its portrayal of Emmett while in the store as attempting to assault Carolyn Bryant, and at the murder site as fearlessly standing up to the men who killed him, has also made his death a little more bearable for many and justified it for not a few.70
Huie knew that his article would leave some lingering questions unanswered, especially those raised during the trial by Mose Wright and Willie Reed, who claimed others were present at both the kidnapping and murder. The Tri-State Defender reported on the Look piece several days in advance of the magazine’s release and noted that it “was able to obtain some additional factual information, heretofore unrevealed about the kidnapping and murder.” The Defender would only state that this information came from an informant. It is clear, however, that the source was none other than Huie himself.71 This “informant” was already thoroughly familiar with even minute details from Huie’s article. For example, the Defender source noted that the cotton gin where the men got the fan was called the Progressive Ginning Company, located nearly three and a half miles from the town of Cleveland, in Bolivar County. Huie named the gin in “Shocking Story” as well. Notes in Huie’s correspondence indicate that he was likely the source also.72
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