Emmett Till

by Devery S. Anderson

  By mid-November 2002, a longer, although still unfinished, version of Untold Story was ready. That same month, the University of Virginia Press released a groundbreaking book edited by Christopher Metress, The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative. Metress, an English professor at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, received inspiration for the book from his experience teaching students about the case since 1994. He began putting the volume together three years later, and the result was a compilation of news accounts contemporary to the kidnapping, murder, and trial; it also included investigative pieces, literary contributions, and memoirs.41 This collection of primary documents was further evidence of a surging interest in Emmett Till, and followed the May 2002 release of the novel Mississippi Trial, 1955, written by Brigham Young University English professor Chris Crowe. Geared toward youth, the book was first picked up by the McComb County, Michigan, school district and currently is part of the curriculum in schools throughout the country. In 2003, it won the award for Best Book for Young Adults from the American Library Association, the Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People from the National Council for the Social Studies, the IRA Children’s Book Award, and the Jefferson Cup. It has been reprinted several times.42

  Mamie Till-Mobley was pleased with all that was happening, but her gratitude was heightened by the fact that it was coming at a time when her health, which had been failing for years, seemed to be on the mend. She suffered from heart and kidney problems, among other ailments, and her husband, Gene, had died a few years earlier, which made it more difficult for her to live on her own. On two occasions she fell while home alone, and once, unable to call for help, was forced to remain on the floor until she received aid from a relative who came to check on her the following day. Only after consulting with family and organizing a network of loved ones willing to help was she assured the chance to remain in the home she had shared with Gene for nearly forty years.43

  On November 13, just over a week before her eighty-first birthday, Mamie was thrilled to attend a fund-raiser with celebrity-activist Harry Belafonte, who had requested to meet her. Later that day, in a three-way phone call with radio host Tavis Smiley, Mamie, and Beauchamp talked further about their work. Mamie was upbeat. “So many marvelous things are happening at this point in my life.” She revealed that she was writing her own memoir, which would be published in 2003. She was also more active in the causes dearest to her. “I have begun training children again. I train them to do Dr. Martin Luther King’s speeches and any other notable speeches. I now have 13 children that I am working with. . . . So it feels so good to be in the land of the living again.”44

  Although Mamie had tried to write her memoir in the past, the project became delayed several times over the years, most recently when a coauthor abandoned her and retained much of her material after they had been paid an advance. In June 2002, she met Christopher Benson through David Barr, her coauthor for the play State of Mississippi vs. Emmett Till. Benson was an attorney and journalist who had published a suspense novel, Special Interest, the year before. Barr, Raymond Thomas, director James Moll, and Benson sat down to discuss turning Mamie’s story into a film. When Mamie learned that Benson had written a book, she decided he should help her write hers. This met with Barr’s approval, who believed that the desired screenplay could then develop out of the book. Benson agreed, and he and Mamie began working together immediately. For the next several months, Benson interviewed Mamie regularly. Two months into the project, after negotiations with her attorney, Lester Barclay, Mamie and Benson signed contracts with Random House on August 28, 2002, the forty-seventh anniversary of Emmett Till’s murder. Things moved fast, and by the end of the year the research was finished and Mamie began reviewing chapter drafts.45

  During the Tavis Smiley interview, Beauchamp revealed that he had talked with an official from the Mississippi attorney general’s office who was impressed by the evidence Beauchamp had uncovered and asked Beauchamp to work with his office toward a goal of reopening the case.46 This was a mixed blessing. Frank Spencer, special assistant attorney to Attorney General Mike Moore, had first contacted Beauchamp for help in locating the ring taken from Emmett Till’s finger after the body had been removed from the Tallahatchie River. Mamie never received it back after the trial, and when she spoke at an assembly at Regina Dominican High School in Wilmette, Illinois, she told the students that if there was anything they could do for her, it would be to find the ring. Inspired by this, Chicago schoolteacher Mike Small put his students in pursuit of the ring by obtaining 300 signatures, which he sent to Senators Dick Durban and Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois; Thad Cochran and Trent Lott of Mississippi; and the governors of both states. Spencer then contacted Small and promised to find out what he could. This led to dialogue between Spencer and Beauchamp, and the Mississippi official sought Beauchamp’s help in seeking a photo of the ring.47

  Because Beauchamp’s focus was on pursuing justice, he told Spencer that he had little interest in finding the ring but would work with the state only if officials would commit to opening a new investigation into the Chicago boy’s murder. Even then, Beauchamp was hesitant about turning his research and film footage over to the same state that had acquitted Emmett Till’s killers so many years before. As Beauchamp mulled over what to do, New York Times reporter Brent Staples introduced him to Ted Shaw, president of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. Shaw took an interest in Beauchamp and his efforts to reopen the case, and instructed Beauchamp to hold off giving anything to Mississippi officials. Instead, Beauchamp opened his research to Shaw.48

  Staples had just interviewed Beauchamp for an article that appeared in the New York Times on November 11, and the piece served as a turning point. Staples, noting that the last of the Birmingham bombers had finally been brought to justice, believed that Beauchamp’s Untold Story “could well cause [the Till] case to be reopened.” The article highlighted Beauchamp’s lifelong interest in the Till story and his success in talking to witnesses speaking out for the first time, and noted that the mother of Emmett Till “has lived half a century with the knowledge that the legal system in Mississippi conspired to disregard her son’s murder and let the killers go.”49

  Staples correctly predicted privately to Beauchamp that this article would open doors and that people would come knocking. As the media began to take notice, Beauchamp premiered his ninety-minute rough cut of Untold Story on November 16 at the Cantor Film Center at New York University. It was an event sponsored by QBR: The Black Book Review, the University of Virginia Press (as part of the launch of Metress’s Lynching of Emmett Till), and NYU’s Institute of African-American Affairs and Africana Studies Department. Till-Mobley and Metress joined Beauchamp for a panel discussion after the private screening. “We have to keep telling the story to raise people’s consciousness and until justice prevails,” Mamie told the crowd.50

  The Beauchamp and Metress projects were soon joined by another film documentary, this one to the chagrin of Beauchamp, who was still struggling financially to complete his own. Slated for a January 20 showing on the PBS series The American Experience, it would be the first film exclusively about Till to air to a national audience. The Murder of Emmett Till, directed by veteran filmmaker Stanley Nelson, was a landmark endeavor. Nelson, fifty-one, had conceived the idea for his project a few years earlier after his wife, Marcia Smith, returned home in tears after listening to a National Public Radio (NPR) interview with Mamie Till-Mobley. After Nelson ordered a tape of the broadcast and listened to it himself, he decided to make Emmett Till his focus. He quickly took his crew to Chicago and interviewed Till-Mobley and Wheeler Parker and came home determined to continue. He had produced an earlier film for The American Experience, called Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind, and was anxious to do another. Executives there liked the idea of a Till film and gave Nelson money and the green light to proceed. The film took about a year to complete.51

  Both the Nelson and Beauchamp documentari
es would feature Mamie, Wheeler Parker, and trial witness Willie Reed. Nelson would also include a man named Oudie Brown, who said that he saw and questioned Levi “Too Tight” Collins the morning after the murder when he spotted Collins washing blood out of J. W. Milam’s truck. Nelson also found another man, Warren Hampton, who said he had seen the truck pass by while he was playing on the side of the road. Hampton heard screams coming from the back of the truck, which was covered with a tarpaulin. For Untold Story, Beauchamp interviewed Henry Lee Loggins in Dayton, Ohio. Although Loggins was believed to have been in the back of the truck restraining Till, he denied those allegations to Beauchamp. In fact, he was adamant that he was never present at any point during the kidnapping and murder. Beauchamp’s film also featured Simeon Wright, who had not spoken publicly about the case in fifteen years. Wright also led Beauchamp to Ruthie Mae Crawford and Ruthie’s uncle, Roosevelt Crawford. They, like Wright and a few others, had been with Emmett Till at the Bryant store. Beauchamp also interviewed Roosevelt’s brother, John, who along with several others had spent time with Till just hours before the Chicago teen was kidnapped. Beauchamp was also the first to talk with Willie Nesley, who, like Oudie Brown, claimed to have seen the blood-splattered truck the morning after the murder.52

  Although the two films differed from one another, there was enough overlap that Beauchamp was especially disheartened that Nelson’s was getting national attention at the same time Untold Story, still a work-in-progress, was beginning to make waves. Two Emmett Till films in the news at the same time could easily confuse the public when either was mentioned. Beauchamp and Nelson spoke to each other when their paths crossed in New York City on November 3, 2002. Beauchamp had accompanied Mamie Till-Mobley to a tribute concert for her son, performed by jazz trumpeter Hannibal Lokumbe, at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The encounter was awkward.53 Beauchamp, as a novice documentarian, was working hard to raise every dime he needed to produce his film, while the better-known Nelson avoided that obstacle and glided through to the finish line. In September 2002, just a few months before the release of The Murder of Emmett Till, Nelson’s talents earned him the MacArthur Foundation’s $500,000, no-strings-attached “Genius award.”54

  Nelson had set out mainly to produce a historical film and, unlike Beauchamp, was not actively campaigning for a new investigation into the case. Yet after the first screening of The Murder of Emmett Till at Harlem’s Schaumburg Library in December 2002, the audience was so affected that they wanted to run to Mississippi, as Nelson later put it, and “burn down the town of Money.” Seeing this reaction, Nelson and his wife, Marcia, spearheaded a more constructive way for people to speak out by printing thousands of postcards bearing a photo of Emmett Till and a plea to Mississippi’s attorney general to reopen the case. Nelson distributed them at screenings and urged audience members to fill them out and send them in. He estimates that over 10,000 people eventually did so.55

  The same month that Nelson premiered his film in Harlem, the case got the attention of yet another voice, not a filmmaker or an author but an activist—one with a long history of results. Forty-seven-year-old Alvin Sykes of Kansas City had just read an Associated Press article in the local black weekly, the Kansas City Call, and became intrigued. It highlighted the films by Beauchamp and Nelson, as well as the new book by Metress. What especially caught Sykes’s eye was the claim that others involved with the murder might still be alive. It quoted Mamie Till-Mobley as saying, “I’ve been trying to get that case re-opened since 1956.” She was determined, the Call reported, even though friends and family had long urged her “to let this thing die.”56

  Sykes had been advocating for victims in criminal cases since he was sixteen, and had worked with the Justice Department since age seventeen. In fact, he had worked at some level with every assistant US attorney general for the Civil Rights Division since Drew S. Days III held the position under President Jimmy Carter beginning in 1977.57

  On the surface, Sykes seemed like one of the unlikeliest voices that those in power would listen to, yet people all the way from the Justice Department to the halls of Congress paid attention. He had been born to a fourteen-year-old mother as a result of statutory rape, and was raised by a friend of the family. Growing up, he suffered from epilepsy and mental problems, made worse, no doubt, by the fact that he was raped by neighbors when he was eleven years old. He dropped out of high school in the tenth grade, as he explained it, in order to get an education, which occurred through what he calls his transition from public schools to the public library. He also sat in on countless courtroom trials, where he learned about the law. At night, he managed the local R&B band, Threatening Weather.58

  Sykes left the music scene after Threatening Weather disbanded and began to concentrate full time on victims’ rights and justice-seeking, although it failed to bring him a steady or sustainable salary. In the late 1980s, he was forced to live for a time in a homeless shelter. Surviving on very little income even in better times, Sykes lived in a small apartment when he could afford one, but stayed intermittently with friends when he could not. He continued to conduct his work from the library and did it all without the benefit of a car or cell phone. Despite any setbacks along his journey, Sykes’s experiences prepared him well as a voice for justice in the Till case. In 1980, the racially motivated murder of Kansas City jazz musician Steve Harvey was a turning point. Harvey had become a good friend of Sykes due to Sykes’s local music connections. Harvey was practicing his saxophone at Penn Valley Park on November 5 when nineteen-year-old Raymond Bledsoe targeted Harvey because he was black and also because he assumed erroneously that Harvey was gay. Bledsoe attacked Harvey with a baseball bat and beat him to death after chasing him out of a public restroom. The case went to trial in 1981, and Bledsoe was acquitted by an all-white jury. Motivated by that obvious injustice, Sykes formed the Steve Harvey Justice Campaign the following day.59

  Sykes contacted the Civil Rights Division but was told by an intern there that with Bledsoe’s acquittal, double jeopardy laws prevented any further attempt toward prosecution. Sykes persevered, however, spent a day in the library, and ten minutes before closing time found a little-known federal statute, Title 18, USC, Section 245. This statute, called “Federally Protected Activities,” prohibited the denial of public facilities because of race. Sykes contacted Richard W. Roberts, an attorney in the Civil Rights Division, and Roberts instructed Sykes to send him everything he had found. In 1983, the case was tried in federal court on the grounds that Harvey’s civil rights had been violated. This time, Bledsoe was convicted and given a life sentence.60

  Harvey’s widow, Rhea, mentioned to Sykes on several occasions that her husband’s death was the second civil rights murder perpetuated upon her family. Her mother, she explained, was a distant relative of Emmett Till. It would be another two decades before Sykes would have reason to think much more about the Till case, but just before he read of Mamie Till-Mobley’s interest in a new investigation, he was working on a case in which a black public utilities worker had been left a hangman’s noose at his place of employment. Sykes investigated the possibility that the incident was a hate crime and heard the victim compare his case to that of Emmett Till. This episode, fresh on his mind, helped Sykes notice the Call article featuring Till-Mobley when he happened upon it in late December 2002.61

  After reading about the new developments in the Till case, Sykes telephoned Wheeler Parker at Parker’s church and left a message the day after Christmas. When Parker did not respond, Sykes called directory information for Mamie Till-Mobley and then phoned her at home. She answered, but was at first elusive, asking her own questions and sounding so businesslike that Sykes did not even realize he was talking to Emmett Till’s mother until partway through the call, when she revealed herself. He faxed her some information about his success in the Harvey case and then contacted the office of Attorney General John Ashcroft, “in an exploratory way,” and let officials there know that he would b
e looking into the case further. Sykes saw from the beginning that, in going forward, a joint investigation with the FBI and the state of Mississippi would be the wisest course to follow. The response from Ashcroft’s office indicated some interest on its part. That same night, Parker returned Sykes’s call from earlier that day, and the two men talked.62

  Sykes was a member of the National Association for Human Rights Workers, as was sixty-three-year-old Donald Burger, a retired official with the Justice Department. The two had known each other from their days of working together on a federal desegregation case in Kansas City some thirty years earlier. Because two of their fellow members were getting married in Detroit, the men arranged to drive to the wedding and then go on to Chicago and meet with Mamie Till-Mobley in person.63

  They arrived in the Windy City on December 30 and drove to Mamie’s home, where they found her frosting a cake for everyone to enjoy as they talked. They were also joined by Chris Benson, who took copious notes at the meeting. They discussed Mamie’s interests in a new investigation, and Sykes buoyed up the possibilities of action by telling her that he had already been in contact with Ashcroft’s office and that contacts there had responded positively. He further recounted his success in the Harvey case. He emphasized that his goal would be the pursuit of truth, without any preconceived ideas about who may have been involved in her son’s death. Sykes assured Mamie that there would be a full investigation into the case, but he could not promise her a conviction.64

  During the meeting, Mamie talked about Keith Beauchamp, his film, and his own desire to seek a new probe. She immediately believed that Sykes, Burger, and Beauchamp should become allies in this cause. Mamie thought that Beauchamp, who phoned her regularly, might call before the two men left, but when that did not happen, Burger left Mamie his cell phone number.65