Emmett Till

by Devery S. Anderson

  “Your honor, sir,” Bryant said to Judge Keady, “I wouldn’t care if I never saw another food stamp.”

  “All right. It may come to that. I don’t know,” Keady responded, after which the courtroom erupted in laughter.131

  Despite his brief moment of humility and penitence, Bryant found himself unable to resist the temptation to repeat the same violations only a few years later. On February 12, 1987, he was again caught purchasing food stamps at a cash discount, and this time, his sister, Mary Louise Campbell, who worked as a cashier at the store, was indicted along with him the following September as a co-conspirator on six counts of food stamp fraud. Bail was set for Bryant at $10,000 and for Campbell at $5,000. Campbell pleaded guilty to one count on November 23, and Bryant pleaded guilty on two counts. Campbell did not receive any prison time, but Bryant, having been convicted four years earlier for the same crime, received a two-year prison sentence and was ordered to turn himself in to the attorney general on April 4, 1988.

  Bryant’s attorney, John Hatcher, argued for a thirty-day extension so that Bryant could finish converting his store into an apartment building in order that his family might receive income during his incarceration. Bryant also wanted time to train people to run his tree-spraying business during his absence. Judge Glen H. Davidson denied the motion, and Bryant went to prison as scheduled at the federal facility at Fort Worth, Texas. A month later, Hatcher entered a motion that Bryant’s sentence be reduced. Since Bryant began his prison sentence, the family had lost income and could not make up for it without Bryant’s contribution. Also, “the Defendant is advanced in age, legally blind and has numerous other physical ailments which will not be adequately provided for or properly nurtured in the absence of constant supervision by his family members.” Hatcher believed that Bryant either should receive probation, be placed in a supervised work-release program, or have his two consecutive one-year terms changed to two concurrent one-year terms. On August 21, 1989, Davidson denied the motion. In the end, Bryant only served eight months of his term.132

  Having lived past the thirtieth anniversary of the Till murder when interest in the case reemerged, Bryant received several requests for interviews. He would grant them in varying degrees, but always refused to say much about the case. In 1985, between his two federal convictions, Chicagoans saw film coverage of an aging, overweight, and uncooperative Bryant escorting a WMAQ correspondent from Bryant’s Ruleville store. That same year, reporters from the Jackson Clarion-Ledger paid Bryant a visit. Fearing belated revenge, he refused to let them photograph either him or his store. “This new generation is different and I don’t want to worry about a bullet some dark night. This store is all I have now, that and my disability check.”133

  When speaking to the Clarion-Ledger reporters, Bryant sent mixed messages about his role in the Till murder. “I don’t know what happened to Emmett Till. I didn’t admit to it then. You don’t expect me to admit to do it now,” he said. Yet he added one caveat, reminding his visitors that the law “couldn’t do anything to me if I did.” Although he maintained his innocence, he said that “for a bunch of money,” he might be willing to talk. He did not elaborate, but insisted that the Chicago teen brought about his own demise. “If Emmett Till hadn’t got out of line, it probably wouldn’t have happened to him.” When pressed by those same reporters, Bryant seemed to show a little remorse about the murder, but even that is not entirely clear. “You mean do I wish I might wouldn’t have done it? I’m just sorry that it happened.”134

  That same year, Clotye Murdock Larsson, former reporter for Ebony magazine, wrote a sequel to her 1955 article, “Land of the Till Murder,” appropriately titled, “Land of the Till Murder Revisited.” She and her guide, NAACP officer Cleve McDowell, visited Bryant at Bryant’s store, but he refused her request for an interview, saying that he could no longer “trust” reporters. The Clarion-Ledger piece, he insisted, had “misquoted me. Claimed I said money would jog my memory. I never said nothin’ like that. I don’t wanta be hard, but this thing has hurt me.”135

  Four years later, Bryant’s store was burned down by white arsons, and, having no insurance, he suffered a loss that he estimated to be around $75,000. He opened up a fireworks store near his home, which operated only seasonally, and began selling watermelons out of the back of his truck. He also made money renting his rundown housing units to blacks. On August 24, 1992, thirty-seven years to the day after Emmett Till’s encounter with Carolyn Bryant, Roy was again asked the one question that always agitated him. Did he kill Emmett Till?

  “Hell no, I didn’t do it.”

  Bryant was puzzled that scholars still viewed him as a criminal. Yet, despite his denials of murder, he hinted that back in 1955, he had a motive to kill.

  “Are they saying a man doesn’t have the right to protect his wife? A man’s got to do what has to be done.”

  He insisted that he got along well with blacks, did not mistreat them, and would not allow them to mistreat him. “Hell, I got some right here, I guarantee you, would fight for me in a minute.” Yet he believed that blacks “still don’t know how to act in front of white women.” Because of that belief, he refused to permit his second wife to walk alone in the black sections of Ruleville.

  Bryant attended the initial town meeting of the administration of Shirley Edwards, Ruleville’s first black mayor, and complained of burglaries at his fireworks store and poor performance by police in stopping them. Reminiscent of his actions in his most famous dirty deed, Bryant had no trouble taking the law into his own hands and threatened to do so. “If I catch one out there this big [raising his hands two-and-a-half feet off the floor] I’m going to twist his damn head off.” Edwards did not hesitate in telling a reporter that “Bryant is a vicious man,” and was bewildered that so many black citizens in town seemed to forgive him of his past. “If my people did not deal or trade with him, he couldn’t stay here.”136

  Bryant began battling cancer and diabetes, and not long before his death was left with large lumps growing on his neck and throat. Beginning around September 1993, he underwent radiation treatments for the next year and lost thirty-five pounds. He lived just long enough to learn of the 1994 conviction of Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers, and wondered if he (Bryant) was really safe from further prosecution over the Till case. One reason he refused to discuss the case was because he feared that the government might change the Constitution and try him again.137 But that was probably the least of his worries. John Whitten, who had helped defend Bryant in Sumner so many years earlier, said that in early 1994 Bryant came to Whitten’s office, unannounced. “I don’t think I’d seen him since the trial. He had to identify himself. He looked terrible. ‘I’m old,’ he said. ‘I’m sick. I can’t work.’ He wondered if there was anything I could do for him. I told him, ‘I don’t know, only thing I can tell you, do what you did before: Trade with some of those who might want to write a book about you.’ He left and then about six months later he was dead.”138

  Two months before his death he spoke for two hours to a reporter from Florida’s Palm Beach Post, but refused to say much about the Till case. He again denied that he had anything to do with the murder and matter-of-factly said, “I have no idea” who killed the Chicago youth when the reporter asked. Bryant believed that his acquittal in the Till case meant that people should leave that past alone. The case that brought him worldwide notoriety in 1955 was, to him, “just something in the past. You have to leave it alone, live your life. You can’t just sit around and cry over spilt milk.” His frustration was caused in part by the occasional threats he received from crank callers. “They say: ‘We don’t like what you did a few years ago. We’re comin’ over to get you.’ I say, ‘Well, bring your goddamn ass on over—what’s taking you so long?’”139

  Bryant died of cancer on September 1, 1994, at the Baptist Hospital in Jackson. When Vera Jo Bryant died in May 2012, her obituary mentioned nothing about her marriage to Roy, and only liste
d her parents and a brother as family members who had preceded her in death. She was, however, buried next to her infamous husband to whom she was married for fourteen years.140

  Carolyn Bryant is perhaps frozen in memory as the twenty-one-year-old local beauty working behind a counter in a country store where Emmett Till fatefully crossed her path in 1955. She turned eighty years old in July 2014 and has, for decades, been a devoted mother and grandmother. She remains extremely grateful for both her immediate and extended family.141 She is equally loved in return by her posterity.

  Like Mamie Bradley, Carolyn experienced the pain of losing a child, or, in her case, two. In September 1995, her firstborn, Roy Bryant Jr., passed away of cystic fibrosis. In April 2010, Frank, her youngest son, died of heart failure. Carolyn gives thanks to God that Frank’s suffering was minimal. Her faith sustained her through these two losses, and she believes her sons are now together. She places God first and her children second in her life.142

  Two months after Frank’s death, Carolyn put her home in Greenville up for sale and moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, to live with her surviving son, Lamar. She took along her dog, Maggie, a sixteen-year-old Shih Tzu. By July 2012, Maggie had died, but Lamar surprised his mother with another Shih Tzu that Carolyn named Jack. She has since moved to her own apartment in Raleigh.143

  Lasting romantic love has eluded Carolyn, however. After her divorce from Roy Bryant in 1975, she remarried at least twice and had another relationship with a man (last name Wren), with whom she lived for a time. On November 21, 1984, she wed Greenville resident Griffin Chandler, an employee at US Gypsum. The marriage ended three and a half years later with Chandler’s death.144 The widowed Carolyn soon married again, this time to former Leland police officer David Donham. In 1988, Carolyn began attending Mississippi Delta Junior College in Moorhead and took classes as a part-time student until 1990. Other than working in her husband’s two stores in Money and Ruleville, however, Carolyn never worked outside the home but was content to be a stay-at-home mother. The Donhams lived in Brookhaven for a time, but eventually divorced, and David remarried and later died in 2002. With the help of her brother, Thomas Holloway, Carolyn moved into a small home in Brookhaven after her divorce, where she lived until Thomas died in 2000. After that, she returned to Greenville to be near Frank.145

  In June 2010, Carolyn joined the social networking site Facebook, under the username “Granny Pike” (after her mother’s maiden name), which kept her actual identity hidden. In mid-2014, however, she was forced to close her account because strangers figured out who she was and began to harass her online. Five months after first joining Facebook, however, she both posed and answered the question as to what constitutes the real qualities in a man. Her answer was that he must be ethical and stand up for a good cause. If this seemed to hint of her first husband’s attempt to preserve the sanctity of her white womanhood, which propelled both her and him into the spotlight, she was quick to add that a real man will respect others and refrain from bullying.146 With the encouragement of her daughter-in-law, Marsha Bryant, Carolyn agreed to write her memoir, in which she would tell her side of the painful Till story. However, the emotional trauma surrounding the case and the effect it has had on her made it difficult to continue. Frank Bryant’s death in 2010 also took a major toll on her and helped squash the effort. She also suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, which has greatly diminished her physical health. In 2014, she moved back in temporarily with Lamar and his family, who have diligently cared for her during her suffering.147

  Carolyn has said almost nothing publicly about the Till murder in sixty years, never discussing it with her siblings or extended family members, but had said that the case has kept her a prisoner. For this reason, she has generally avoided social situations out of fear and has preferred to stay home. She has long been the victim of harassment by people who believe she is in some way responsible for Emmett Till’s death or otherwise condoned his murder. She has consistently avoided watching any of the documentaries or other television coverage of the Emmett Till case.148

  For historians, her silence has been frustrating. For many followers of the case, it implies that she has something to hide at best or is suppressing the guilt of an accomplice at worst. It may be, however, that her silence has simply been her attempt at making this painful episode of her past go away.

  Some of these people in the Till saga would live long enough to see the case reemerge in the public consciousness after the mid-1980s. None, however, could have predicted a series of events that would one day come to pass, all of which represented an era of healing and renewal. An unanticipated quest for justice would be followed by a second gathering outside the courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, fifty-two years after that first one in September 1955. It would rival in size the hostile and segregated crowds that had gathered during that sweltering week a half-century earlier, but this time the mood was different. The chain of events that led to this Second Coming in Sumner were years in the making but long overdue, and they followed a complete investigation of the case by the FBI early in the new millennium. That story is next.

  PART TWO

  In Living Color

  11

  Revival

  On July 11, 1985, at 6:30 P.M., Chicago’s NBC affiliate, WMAQ-Channel 5, premiered a half-hour documentary on the Emmett Till case called The Murder and the Movement. Written and narrated by reporter Rich Samuels, it was the first of its kind. Samuels had grown up in Chicago’s North Shore area but had learned next to nothing about Emmett Till. This changed when he met Mamie Till-Mobley on November 24, 1984, at the funeral of Ben Wilson, a local high school basketball star gunned down four days earlier. Samuels became curious about Mamie’s story and began researching the Till case in old newspapers. Inspired by what he learned, he set out to make a film.1

  With the thirty-year anniversary of the case approaching, Samuels found and interviewed many of the principals in the story. The program featured Mamie, a few journalists who covered the trial, a juror, one defense attorney, and even an attempted interview with Roy Bryant. Samuels was also the first reporter in decades to seek out Wheeler Parker and Simeon Wright. Samuels spoke with random Chicagoans about their memories or knowledge of the fourteen-year-old lynching victim, and their answers were surprising. “Emmett Till? I’ve never heard of him,” said one bewildered black man. Another shook his head in puzzlement when asked what he knew about the Chicago boy who had died so violently three decades earlier. Samuels found that this unfamiliarity was common in the very city where tens of thousands had once filed past Emmett Till’s open casket.2

  In Mississippi, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News, which published their Sunday editions together, jointly ran anniversary coverage a month later. As in Chicago, memories had faded or held no knowledge at all about Emmett Till. Sumner’s town clerk, Bonnie Cheshier, told reporter Joe Atkins that she had never heard of the case, despite the fact that she had lived in town for thirteen years. Like Samuels, reporters in Mississippi spoke with Till-Mobley, Parker, Wright, and Bryant.3

  At one level, it is hardly a surprise that these Chicagoans and Deltans were uninformed about Emmett Till. Other than Stephen Hugh Whitaker’s 1963 master’s thesis and an article or two in professional journals, nothing of significance had been written about the case by historians and scholars.4 However, it had received attention from artistic voices over the years, a strong indication that there was still lingering pain and plenty of healing to be done. Original poems, which began appearing in newspapers even before the murder trial began, are numerous. Less than two months after the acquittal of J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, Langston Hughes and Jobe Huntley wrote “The Money, Mississippi Blues.” Aaron Kramer and Clyde Appleton penned “Blues for Emmett Till,” which was published in the November 7, 1955, issue of Sing Out! The first song recorded and released as a 78 RPM was by a group calling themselves the Ramparts, featuring Scatman Crothers on vocals. Titled “The Death of Emmett Till,” th
e lyrics were first published in the California Eagle in December 1955. The record went on sale the following month.5

  The most enduring of these early songs came in 1962, and it had name recognition. Given the same title as the Rampart tune, Bob Dylan’s “Death of Emmett Till” fit well within the brand of protest lyrics for which Dylan was known, and was even recorded by folksinger Joan Baez a year later. Poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, also published two pieces about Till. “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” appeared in 1960, as did “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till.”6

  Artistic contributions were not only made in poetry and song but on television and the stage as well. These proved controversial. Rod Serling, who in 1959 would bring The Twilight Zone to television, tried just months after the Till trial to dramatize the story in a TV script about a southern racial lynching. “Noon at Tuesday,” slated to air on the ABC series The United States Steel Hour, was too risky for television executives, however. Fearing that a growing southern television audience would boycott advertisers, network officials forced Serling to rewrite the script and remove any similarities to the Till case. The revised version aired in April 1956. The following year, another network gave Serling the chance to tell the story his way, but once again, opposition forced him to strip the script of anything related to Emmett Till. In the end, it was retooled as a 1940s murder set in a town on the Mexican border. “Noon at Tuesday” became “A Town Has Turned to Dust,” and aired on CBS’s Playhouse 90 in June 1958. It was turned into a television movie in 1988.7