If J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant followed the news in the decade or so after their trial, they may have felt some warped sense of justice when, one by one, the three men who had prosecuted them in Sumner died tragically and much too soon. District Attorney Gerald Chatham passed away only one year after his courageous attempt to convict the two half-brothers. Because of notoriety in the Till case, the death of this otherwise unknown country lawyer was noted in the New York Times.67 Ill health had forced his retirement as district attorney in January 1956. He suffered not only from high blood pressure but from nosebleeds so severe that he was often admitted to the hospital, where doctors had to pack his head in ice to stop them.68
In August 1956, Chatham, who had returned to private practice in Hernando, told a reporter that he had not been back to Sumner since the trial and was happy to be out of his elected office. He no longer received letters related to the Till case but held on to the 250 that had been sent to him. “It was astounding,” he said. “They came from all over the United States, England, France, Italy and Germany. Most were from cranks, and a few were threatening.”69
Two months later, on October 9, he introduced a speaker at the afternoon opening of the Producers Gin of Hernando, Inc., in which Chatham was a shareholder. Not feeling well, he went home, took a nap, and later that evening died of a massive heart attack. His family has long blamed his early death on pressures he faced during the Till trial. Two days later, in Batesville, Judge Curtis Swango adjourned the Panola County fall term of court out of respect for his former colleague.70
Hamilton Caldwell, the elected attorney for Tallahatchie County, lived for seven years after the trial. He was out of office and serving as vice president of the Bank of Charleston when he drowned in Enid Lake on September 3, 1962. He had been fishing alone in his boat and, for reasons unknown, fell overboard as he headed back to shore. He was sixty-four.71
Robert Smith, the special prosecutor sent by the governor’s office to aid Chatham in the state’s case against Milam and Bryant, went back to his law practice in Ripley, Mississippi, after the trial. He rarely talked about the case, and his sons came to regret that they never asked him about it. “I’ve come to understand that not a lot of people in those days would have taken that case,” said son Fred in 2003. “I know now it took a lot of courage.” Bobby Elliot, a former law partner of Smith’s, remembered how surprised people were that Smith agreed to do it. “That wasn’t the popular thing to do back then.”72
On December 4, 1967, he was at work in chancery court and appeared fine. Yet privately, he was masking unbearable pain and went home later that morning and shot himself. Although he did not allude to his father’s suicide, Smith’s son Bruce explained in 2005 that his father had been battling alcoholism. “He had a sad life in a way, in his later years.” Smith’s obituary noted that he had helped with “important criminal cases” in his career, but it failed to mention the Till trial in particular.73
The five defense attorneys who represented Milam and Bryant remained in Sumner. Sidney Carlton, former president of the Mississippi State Bar Association, died first, in 1966, at age fifty after suffering a heart attack. At the time of his death, Carlton was incoming president of the Mississippi Law Foundation and served the Webb-Sumner Methodist Church as a member of the board of stewards.74 Eighty-year-old Jesse J. Breland, the oldest member of the team, died three years later, in 1969, at Washington County General Hospital in Greenville after a long illness.75
J. W. Kellum was one of three members of the defense team who lived for at least four decades after the trial and witnessed Mississippi’s transformation to an integrated society. In 1979, he sat for an interview, alongside civil rights activist Amzie Moore, for the PBS series Eyes on the Prize. “As far as a fair trial is concerned,” Kellum said, there was no proof that his clients “were the criminal agent.” Had there been a conviction, he believed the Mississippi Supreme Court would have overturned it. Kellum said this during a new era, however, and he noted with pride that blacks now served on juries, and that more were practicing law. “I would say that Mississippi now is part of the New South.”76
Kellum, a self-taught lawyer who never attended college, passed the state bar exam in 1939 and practiced law until his death in July 1996. A year before he died, Kellum insisted that, for him, the Till affair was “just another case over the desk.” He said that he asked Milam and Bryant early on if they were guilty of the murder, and both denied that they were. “I believed them,” he insisted, “just like I would if I was interrogating a client now. I would have no reason to think he’s lying to me.” Forty years after representing them, he claimed he still harbored doubts about their guilt. “I would have to see something. . . . But they told me they did not [commit the murder]. They told the other lawyers that they did not. I have not seen anything where it was supposed to have been an admission of guilt on their part.”77 Yet Kellum clearly contradicted an acknowledgment made during his 1979 Eyes on the Prize session that Milam admitted killing Till in Look magazine.78 His stance sixteen years later may simply have been that of a good lawyer, who could not recall ever seeing the Look piece firsthand.
Any infamy Kellum received as a defense attorney in Sumner’s famous murder case eventually faded, and his reputation as that of a good man came to the forefront. “Every day, if he could do something and make somebody happy, it made his day,” said his wife upon his death. Kellum’s motto was “Life’s too short. I want to make somebody happy.” Two surviving colleagues, both of whom worked alongside Kellum in the Till trial, praised their friend further. “J. W. Kellum diligently represented his many clients,” said Harvey Henderson. “He was trusted and respected by the public and members of his profession.” John Whitten described him “as a very charitable man. He did what he could do—without any publicity—just because he thought it was the right thing to do.”79
In 1975, after the fall of Saigon, Kellum and his wife, Ruth, adopted a Vietnamese boy, Duong Nguyen. After Ruth died in 1992, Kellum married Eva Everett. His adopted son, as well as a biological one, Douglas L. Kellum, both became ministers and later presided over their father’s funeral at the First Baptist Church in Tutwiler.80
John Whitten also practiced law until the end of his life. Betty Pearson, a Sumner resident angered by the acquittal, refused to speak to Whitten for over six months after the trial. Yet in 2006 she remembered him as “a wonderful man,” one whom she remained close to for the rest of his life.81
At Breland’s request, Whitten maintained the firm’s name as Breland and Whitten after his partner’s death. Whitten’s son, John Whitten III, later replaced Breland. The senior Whitten occasionally talked to reporters about the Till case, and the message was sometimes mixed. For instance, he told a Chicago journalist in 1985 that as a defense attorney, “You do what you have to do and stay within the limits that ethics required you to stay within.” That same year, he told another reporter that he never asked Milam and Bryant about their guilt, explaining, “If I went to the moral heart of every case that came to me, I’d starve to death.”82 When asked by another researcher a decade and a half later if he had any regrets about defending the men, Whitten said frankly, “It didn’t bother me at all.”83
The right to defense is one thing; the long-term effect of injustice is quite another, however. In 1994, Whitten told another inquirer that he and his colleagues “suspected they [Milam and Bryant] were guilty the day they walked in here.” This prompted a question from his visitor.
“Sir, were you proud of that case?”
“No I was not,” answered Whitten candidly, yet seemingly contradicting what he had said before. “I’ve never been proud of it. Never have. Always wish I’d not been associated with it.”84
Toward the end of his life, Whitten worked in his law office occasionally, but by then his son did the bulk of the firm’s legal work. He had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease since the late 1980s and died in February 2003.85
The last surviving
member of the defense team was Harvey Henderson, who continued to practice law, albeit part-time, up until his death on October 7, 2007. Active in his local community, he was a lifelong member of the Sumner Rotary Club and had also served as its president. The West Tallahatchie School District retained him as its attorney for over fifty years, and he also served as the legal counsel for Mississippi’s first chapter of Habitat for Humanity, which was formed in Tallahatchie County.
Outside of law, Henderson directed the Union Planters Bank of Mississippi and was a chairman of the local Red Cross. He was a commander of the American Legion, a Sunday school teacher, and a Sunday school superintendent at the Episcopal Church of the Advent in Sumner.86 He refused all requests for interviews about the Till case.
Judge Curtis Swango remained on the bench of Mississippi’s Seventeenth Judicial District for the next thirteen years. Three years after the Till murder, he presided over another racially charged case, this time in Water Valley. Thirty-six-year-old Yalobusha County sheriff J. G. Treloar had been charged with manslaughter in the beating death of Woodrow Daniels, a delivery man put in jail for bootlegging. It took an all-white jury only twenty-eight minutes to find the sheriff not guilty. The NAACP responded that the verdict “should indicate to negroes in Mississippi that they should expect no justice in Mississippi courts.” Daniels’s widow, Annie, vowed to leave the state out of fear for her life. Swango officiated over this trial with the same decorum he exhibited during the proceedings in Sumner.87
In 1968, a respiratory condition sent Swango to the hospital, followed by several months of treatment for tuberculosis at the Mississippi State Sanatorium in Simpson County. He died there on December 5, 1968. Divorced and without children, he was survived only by his mother and a brother. “He was widely praised for his conduct of the Emmett Till murder case in Tallahatchie County,” noted his obituary, “and was recognized as one of the foremost trial judges in the state.”88
The two sheriffs in the case remained active in the years after the kidnapping and murder, although each was completing his term at the time. After a solid effort in investigating the kidnapping and helping black journalists find witnesses, former Leflore County sheriff George Smith wanted to forget all about his role by the time a reporter asked him about it two years later. “I hate to even mention the case, it was the only thing to mar my four years in office,” he said. “Don’t quote me on anything. I don’t want my name ever printed again in connection with the people involved in this case.”89
Smith later served a second term as sheriff from 1964 until 1968. This time, he succeeded his former deputy John Cothran, who had helped with the kidnapping investigation and served as a witness for the prosecution.90
Smith, an avid outdoorsman, was a member of the Parker-Gary Hunting Club, and was planning a busy season when he died unexpectedly in 1975 at the age of seventy-two. Cothran outlived his former boss by over three decades, dying in 2008 at age ninety-four.91
Former Tallahatchie sheriff Henry Clarence Strider planned to run for the office again in 1959 after sitting out the required minimum of one term, but he changed his mind at the urging of his wife after he barely escaped an assassination attempt in 1957. While he sat in his car outside a store in the town of Cowart, someone fired a shot at his head, missing him, but striking the metal piece between the window and windshield. Strider claimed that the shooter had been sent down from Chicago by the NAACP for the express purpose of killing him, and that the would-be assassin was known to black workers living on Strider’s plantation. Strider also maintained that the governor of Illinois refused to extradite the mysterious gunman back to Mississippi for trial, thus the entire matter was dropped. Still fearing for his life in 1963, Strider declined to run for his former job yet again.92
By 1962, Strider was chairman of the State Game and Fish Commission. In February of that year, state officials tried to keep black student James Meredith from registering at Ole Miss, and the defiance of the governor, Ross Barnett, made national news. Strider, ever the segregationist, announced during the conflict that 250 supervisors and game wardens were ready to aid Ole Miss in preserving its whites-only student body should they be needed.93
In February 1965, Strider won a special election to the state senate, where he represented Grenada, Yalobusha, and Tallahatchie Counties for the next five years. In addition to his role with the Game and Fish Commission, he was a member of the Public Property, Transportation, and Water and Irrigation Committees, and chairman of the Penitentiaries Committee.94
In July 1968, Strider admitted on the floor of the Mississippi Senate that he had paid for votes during his 1951 campaign for Tallahatchie County sheriff. Strider disclosed this as the Senate debated a bill that provided for absentee voting for teachers and students. “In those days you didn’t win elections, you bought them,” he told his colleagues. He said that he paid out a total of $30,000 for blank absentee ballots reserved for people who had indicated they would not be present on Election Day. Reporter Bill Minor, who knew the former sheriff, said years later that Strider had paid $25 to each of those willing to cast their ballot in his favor.95
Minor also recalled that once Strider was in the legislature, he was not the same man that the world saw in Sumner during the Till murder trial. Although he is remembered for regularly insulting the black journalists in the hot, crowded courtroom in Sumner, his election to the Senate after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 forced him to deal with a black constituency that finally had the power of the ballot. Yet Strider would have been happy to rid the Delta of its black citizens. In February 1966, he cosponsored a bill to relocate Mississippi blacks to other states, as a new farm bill was making it harder for laborers to earn a living. A proposed relocation commission would seek federal funds for the removal of those who wanted to go. “If they (Negro farm workers) feel like they are put upon or have to live in tents and opportunities are brighter somewhere else, we’ll be glad to get them there,” said Strider’s cosponsor, Senator Robert Crook of Ruleville.96 Nothing ever came of the proposal, however.
Like Sheriff Smith, Strider was a hunter. On December 27, 1970, Strider died of a heart attack while on a deer hunt in Issaqueena County; his body was shortly discovered by others.97 Governor John Bell Williams flew to Clarksdale to attend the funeral. In 1981, a portion of Mississippi Highway 32 was designated the Henry Clarence Strider Memorial Highway.98
It is safe to say that J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant suffered in the years that followed their murder trial, despite the fact that they left Sumner as free men. Milam may have learned about a bizarre story that appeared in the black press shortly after his acquittal, but it is unknown what he thought of it. In October 1955, just a month after the trial, a black minister living in Detroit named Benjamin E. Love, thirty-three, told the Michigan Chronicle that Milam had murdered his brother, A. C. Love, back in 1949, when A.C. was helping Milam build a theater in Webb, Mississippi. According to Benjamin, after the two began quarreling over money, Milam shot A.C. and killed him. Milam allegedly told another brother, Clifton Love, that “I’ll kill any nigger who argues with me about money.”
Benjamin Love said he learned of this incident from his mother, Marie Love, in the early 1950s when he was a student at Leland College in Baber, Louisiana. Love also claimed that he had just recently traveled to Mississippi to move his sister and her family out of state when he learned that his mother, stepfather, and two siblings had been missing for six months, and that Milam was behind their mysterious disappearances. A sister, Gertrude, told Benjamin that the Love parents and siblings left the farm managed by Milam and moved to Arkansas. When Milam found out about it, he took a shotgun and a few friends and drove to the family’s new home and took them back to Mississippi. Gertrude and Clifton Love saw Milam take their four family members out to the woods. They then heard screams as though they were being beaten, after which Milam returned without them. After several days, the sister asked Milam where her family had gone. He replied that they were “on
a vacation.”
Benjamin Love reported the disappearances to the FBI offices in Newark, New Jersey (his former home), and Detroit. The Department of Justice received the report in November and, for whatever reason, failed to act. Agents in Newark told Love not to speak about the case, but two months later, in January 1956, Love went public after he developed “a strange hunch that nothing is going to be done about it by the Justice Department.” Love was now convinced that Milam had not only killed his brother A.C. in 1949 but in 1955 murdered the four additional family members whose bodies had never been found. “As a minister, I couldn’t make a charge like that unless I was sure.”99 Nothing ever came of this story, however, and the black papers that initially reported it never pursued it further. Benjamin Love later moved to California, where he pastored the Union Missionary Baptist Church in Barstow from 1971 to 1974. He then moved to Inglewood, California, where he died in 1987. His brother Clifton died in Louisiana in 1980.100 Efforts to find other family members to learn whether they clung to their accusations were unsuccessful.
A year after the Emmett Till murder, Milam was reported to be living on a farm between Ruleville and Cleveland, Mississippi.101 Several months after that, William Bradford Huie interviewed the brothers for a follow-up article to his “confession” piece from a year before. It, too, appeared in Look magazine. In the accompanying photographs, both men appear happy, but it was obvious that the smiles were only a facade. Huie described them as having “been disappointed,” explaining further, “They have suffered disillusionment, ingratitude, resentment, misfortune,” but as yet, no guilt. Few had pity on them, even those who had earlier been supportive. Milam owned no land and could not get his former backers to rent to him. He was finally able to rent 217 acres in Sunflower County with the help of his brother-in-law, and secured a $4,000 furnish (the funds to plant a cotton crop) from a Tallahatchie County bank where one of his defense attorneys, John Whitten, sat on the loan committee. Blacks would no longer work for Milam, and he was forced to pay higher wages to whites for the same work. “I had a lot of friends a year ago,” he told Huie, reflecting on how the tide had turned.
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