Emmett Till

by Devery S. Anderson

  Killinger, forty-one, was a Pennsylvania native who had been with the FBI for eight years when Garrity placed him in charge of investigating the forty-nine-year-old homicide. Although Killinger had spent his entire career with the Bureau in Oxford, Mississippi, he had never heard of Emmett Till before getting the assignment. He went immediately to the local library to brief himself and checked out the only two books in the stacks, Stephen Whitfield’s A Death in the Delta and Christopher Metress’s documentary history, The Lynching of Emmett Till.2

  The investigation would be a full-time job for Killinger, although an occasional bank robbery or other federal crime required his attention now and then. From the start, he discovered many of the challenges that would make the Till case especially difficult. Most of the participants in the 1955 trial were dead—both defendants, the judge, all of the jurors, and most of the known trial witnesses. Of the eight attorneys who tried the case, the only one still living was eighty-three-year-old Harvey Henderson, a member of the defense team. In fact, Henderson was still practicing law out of the same office in Sumner’s town square that he used in 1955. The trial transcript had been missing for decades, and there was no surviving investigative file. Killinger and his team would quite literally be starting from scratch.3

  During the early phase of the investigation, Killinger sent letters to all of the authorities in the surrounding counties and asked for anything in their files that might help. He also traveled to Chicago to establish a positive relationship with the Till family and met with Wheeler Parker and Simeon Wright, among others. The investigation required extensive background research from the beginning. With the passage of time, much of the landscape of the Mississippi Delta had changed, and it became necessary to re-create the layout of the 1950s. Killinger had to determine where the relevant locations were or had once been, such as Mose Wright’s house, the Sturdivant plantation, and the sharecropper homes of Willie Reed and Mandy Bradley. He had to learn who trial witnesses were as well as other key players in the case. This was a time-consuming effort, and as Killinger proceeded, the Justice Department conducted research of its own to ensure that Killinger and his team stayed within the bounds of the law.4

  A month after the federal officials opened the case, Steve Ritea, a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, traveled to the Mississippi Delta, where he quickly learned that after fifty years, black people living in Money and the neighboring communities were still reluctant to speak about Emmett Till. Ritea’s brief probe provided some insight into the challenges Killinger would face. L. C. Dorsey of Mississippi Valley State University assured Ritea that there were “still a lot of older people who are uncomfortable with going out of their place.” Seventy-five-year-old Mary Jackson said that there were people who even today kept quiet because “they’re still afraid.”5 Killinger learned this himself after some of those he tried to interview refused to speak with him. Their fear immediately became apparent; when he approached one woman whom he thought might have information, she quickly made a 180-degree turn away from him before providing Killinger an alibi for her husband on the night Till was kidnapped.6

  One who came forward to Ritea and later to Killinger was a man calling himself Willie Lee Hemphill of Darling, Mississippi.7 Hemphill, who was around the same age as Emmett Till in 1955, had an unusual story that he had kept quiet for decades. He claimed that on the Saturday evening before Emmett Till’s kidnapping, he was heading home from the Bryant grocery. As he walked north along Money Road, a pickup truck approached and someone from inside the cab ordered a black man sitting in the back to grab Hemphill and throw him in the truck. The jars of molasses and snuff that Hemphill had been carrying broke into pieces when he landed face down in the bed, as did some of his teeth. He could see J. W. Milam and Roy and Carolyn Bryant sitting in the cab. After Carolyn got a better look at Hemphill, she turned toward the men riding with her. “That’s not the nigger. That’s not the nigger boy,” she said. Hemphill recognized the black man who accosted him but did not provide the name to Ritea. When Hemphill later talked to Killinger, he identified the man as “J. W. Washington.” Hemphill actually meant Johnny B. Washington, a twenty-seven-year-old helper at the Bryant store. Hemphill never discussed this strange, frightening encounter with anyone, not even his children. As he explained it to Ritea, “I just didn’t want them to know what really happened to Dad, that there wasn’t anything done about it.”8 If Hemphill’s story was any indication, there was a multitude of secrets in the Mississippi Delta, and peeling back the layers of silence would not be easy.

  In August, Killinger, federal prosecutor John Hailman, District Attorney Joyce Chiles, and her assistant, Hallie Gail Bridges, all met at the courthouse in Greenwood to discuss the case and the status of the inquiry. Hailman described Bridges as thoroughly committed to the investigation and “as tough and pragmatic a state prosecutor as I could possibly have wished for.” Leflore County sheriff Ricky Banks was also fully supportive, as was retired FBI agent Lent Rice. In an unusual move, Killinger dedicated a room to the Till case at the FBI office in Oxford. It contained photos, old reports, and anything that Killinger’s team would accumulate.9 They worked quietly, but the fact that the investigation was occurring at all attracted media attention. The biggest story prompted by the inquiry was a two-part 60 Minutes segment that aired on October 24, 2004, five-and-a-half months after the probe began. The piece confirmed to viewers the names of two individuals still living that had become a focus of the FBI.

  The highly rated news program would guarantee that millions of Americans would tune in and learn about Emmett Till, most, perhaps, for the first time. In the opening segment, longtime correspondent Ed Bradley provided background for the case and interviewed Wheeler Parker and Simeon Wright, who each recounted the store incident and kidnapping in Money. Bradley also spoke with sixty-seven-year-old Willie Reed, who recalled the beating he heard outside the shed in Drew. The story featured footage of Mamie Till-Mobley from Keith Beauchamp’s The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, which, incidentally, Beauchamp was still trying to complete. In the second segment, Bradley talked with Beauchamp about his research and to Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) about their push to reopen the case and hopes of punishing any living perpetrators. Bradley interrogated Henry Lee Loggins at Loggins’s home in Dayton, Ohio, and, not surprisingly, the former Mississippi farmhand denied any firsthand knowledge of the kidnapping and murder. Bradley’s interview occurred before FBI agents had yet talked to Loggins, and Loggins assured Bradley that when they came calling, “I’ll tell them the same thing—that I wasn’t there.”10

  The most intriguing part of the piece occurred when the public got its first glimpse of Carolyn Bryant in nearly fifty years. Bradley and his producer, Michael Radutzky, found Bryant, by then known as Carolyn Donham, living in Greenville, Mississippi, near her forty-seven-year-old son, Frank. A cameraman filmed a few frames of Donham, who never emerged from beyond the glass door at her home and refused to talk. Frank Bryant drove up to the home while Ed Bradley was on the property and angrily denied the reporter any access to his mother. He ordered Bradley to leave and then quietly walked toward the house and went inside. All of this footage appeared on the broadcast. Bradley revealed to viewers that Mose Wright’s testimony in which he claimed to have heard a woman’s voice at the scene of the kidnapping made Donham a target in the new investigation.11

  The 60 Minutes piece was well hyped and important in shining a light on Beauchamp’s efforts in talking to potential witnesses, working with Mamie Till-Mobley before her death the previous year, and the film that grew out of that, all of which played a major role in opening the new investigation. However, the story was also skewed in many respects because the angle it took—that a novice filmmaker had single-handedly persuaded federal authorities to reopen the case—was not accurate. Bradley failed to interview other crucial players such as Alvin Sykes, president of the Emmett Till Justice Campaign; Donald Burger, who had pushed hard for an investigation and
had several notable contacts within the Justice Department; and Stanley Nelson, who had also produced a film, uncovered witnesses, and petitioned Mississippi’s attorney general to reopen the case. Producers of the show reached out to Sykes during the early stages of the report, but, unfortunately, miscommunication prevented any follow-up with the tireless activist.12

  To be sure, Beauchamp had tracked down several individuals claiming to have a direct link to the Till case, knew people who did, or saw suspicious behavior by the killers or their accomplices. An essential part of Killinger’s job as lead investigator was to sift through the evidence provided by Beauchamp and anyone else and determine its relevance. Some of it panned out, some did not. In his public speeches, Beauchamp claimed that up to fourteen people had been involved in the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till, a number that critics believed was inflated. However, Ed Bradley happily passed that figure on to 60 Minutes viewers, along with a revelation that five of the fourteen were still alive. In a teaser, Bradley promised to name them during the second half of the broadcast, but the only two he identified were Carolyn Donham and Henry Lee Loggins.13

  Significantly, a similar claim that three other participants were still living was then being made by a fifty-one-year-old filmmaker named Gode Davis, who was trying to produce a documentary he was calling American Lynching: A Strange and Bitter Fruit. Davis contacted Keith Beauchamp for help with the Emmett Till segment of his film, and Beauchamp learned that some of the people still living whom he believed participated in the Till murder were the same as those Davis discovered.14

  In 2003, Davis told journalists Rebecca Segall and David Holmberg about two of his sources. Davis described one of them as “a white man in Mississippi who told a convincing story of his alleged participation in the Till murder.” Davis did not provide a name or tell where the man lived but said that six months earlier he had moved “out of the sticks” and into a “residential neighborhood” in an unidentified town in Mississippi. Davis also interviewed someone who identified himself as Billy Wilson, who claimed to have witnessed but not participated in the Till murder.15

  Oddly, a man named Billy Wilson had once owned a grocery store called Billy’s Pak-a-Sak in West Point, Mississippi, and was rumored in the Southern Patriot in February 1970 to have bragged to local blacks “about being one of the killers of Emmett Till.” Strangely, the article also stated that “Wilson’s wife was formerly married to one of the self-confessed but legally acquitted killers, Roy Bryant, and was the woman in the case.” John H. Haddock, director of Mississippi’s Division of Economic Opportunity, told Governor John Bell Williams that same month that “a very reliable source gave me some information which is not verified and is not known in the West Point community of the white citizens, but which is apparently known by the black community, that Mr. Billy Wilson is the husband of the white lady who was the center of controversy in the Emmett Till case.”16 These 1970 claims that Billy Wilson and Carolyn Bryant were married are clearly erroneous, partly because the Bryants did not divorce until 1975. Additionally, this Billy Wilson had wed Betty Dewberry in 1951, and they remained married until Billy’s death in 1991, over a decade before Gode Davis talked with a man with the same name. Jan Hillegas, who wrote the Southern Patriot piece, said in 2014 that she later investigated the rumors further but “could find no reason to think that Billy Wilson was other than a local man with another wife.”17 Around the same time the 1970 Hillegas piece appeared, Jet magazine also got in on the Billy Wilson rumors, claiming that he had been acquitted for the Till murder. A month later, however, it published a retraction and apology to Wilson after discovering that he had nothing to do with the case.18

  Dale Killinger also learned of Billy Wilson, probably from Gode Davis, but for privacy purposes, Killinger’s report does not provide his source. Killinger only notes that the informant “was conducting research on a lynching in Mississippi” when he learned of Wilson.19 Killinger also interviewed Betty Wilson sometime during his investigation. The widow told Killinger that she knew about statements her husband had allegedly made about his connection to the Till murder but that she believed that there was likely another man by the same name living elsewhere in the Delta who made those claims.20 Because the man rumored to have been involved in the Till murder was long dead before Gode Davis began his research, Davis’s claim is puzzling. Was there another Billy Wilson, as Betty Wilson claimed, and were the stories that he witnessed Emmett Till’s lynching unfairly linked back in 1970 to the man living in West Point? Even if there had been another Billy Wilson, he was never married to Carolyn Bryant. In the end, Killinger was unpersuaded by the Wilson angle and found many inconsistencies when comparing his informant’s story with what his own investigation would later turn up. Davis told Killinger that, according to Wilson, the Till murder “had been approved by the local Ku Klux Klan leadership.” Killinger, however, could find nothing in the records of Klan activities that backed up that assertion. Wilson also told Davis that up to twelve people were in the shed watching or participating in Till’s murder, including a white woman and a twelve-year-old boy. The shed was even said to have contained a set of bleachers, apparently for spectators. Wilson also said that most of Till’s teeth were knocked out by the beating and that “there were scraping wounds along Till’s ribs.” He also repeated a claim made decades earlier that the hole in Till’s head was made by a drill. Not only do those elements of the story sound farfetched, they would soon be proven untrue.21 Sadly, Gode Davis’s quest for answers ended when he died unexpectedly in September 2010. Unfortunately, his documentary, still only a work-in-progress at the time, died with him.22

  Killinger spent much of his time trying to separate fact from fiction as he had in the Wilson story, and was not distracted by the 60 Minutes episode or other news stories about the investigation; on the contrary, he generally found such media attention to be helpful. Nor did he allow any criticisms to intimidate him.23 On November 19, 2004, Senators Schumer and Jim Talent (R-Mo.), along with Representatives Bobby Rush (R-Ill.) and Charles Rangel (D-NY), gathered for a news conference in Washington, DC, to make the point that, in their view, the probe was going dangerously slow. “We want to find those who participated in this brutal murder and bring them to justice,” said Schumer. “But both they and the witnesses . . . are old and so there cannot be a delay.” To spur things on, the four men sponsored a congressional resolution “that calls on the Department of Justice and the state of Mississippi to speed up their investigation of the murder of Emmett Till and the acquittal of Milam and Bryant.” They planned to introduce the resolution when Congress reconvened in January and even considered raising the issue at the confirmation hearings of Alberto Gonzales, President George W. Bush’s nominee to replace John Ashcroft as US attorney general. “We have moral rectitude on our side,” said Schumer.24

  Senator Talent’s presence gave the resolution bipartisan support. Although the Missouri Republican had consistently received failing grades from the NAACP throughout his term for lack of support, he seemed genuinely anxious to see justice in this case and was hopeful that the resolution would “continue to hold the department accountable.” Bobby Rush explained that the investigation was personal for him because “it was the brutal murder and torture of Emmett Till that started me on my own personal journey for justice and my own participation in the civil rights movement.” Speaking for all four congressmen, Charles Rangel hoped “that the Justice Department would not make the family of Emmett Till [simply] feel good or the people in Chicago or us individually or collectively, but to make the world know that America has the courage to admit when she is wrong and to move forward to say, ‘Never, never again.’” Schumer read the nonbinding resolution to the Senate on January 24, 2005, and Rangel presented it to the House of Representatives three weeks later on February 17.25

  With the 2004 elections over, George W. Bush assured a second term, and both houses of Congress still in Republican hands, one cannot ignore the probability th
at political motives played a role in the three Democratic politicians speaking out about what they saw as ineptitude within the current Justice Department; Talent also may have wanted to make good with his black constituents. Politics aside, Alvin Sykes was less than pleased with the action of the lawmakers, despite their calls for a speedier investigation. “We appreciate what the Congressmen are doing,” Sykes told the press. “But you can’t rush justice. One of the worst things they could do is not have enough evidence and risk another acquittal.” Sykes explained that the goal of the investigation was not only to prosecute but to clear the names of any innocent parties. “If there are people who were not involved but were accused, then they need to be cleared by this process as well. They don’t need this hanging over their heads for generations to come.”26

  During the news conference, Schumer relayed a message from Beauchamp that “if a full investigation is done, the likelihood is there will be new indictments.” This was a bold declaration, but Beauchamp’s confidence was understandable. He had invested years in this endeavor, which had become personal due to his relationship with Mamie Till-Mobley and his promises to her that he would fight for justice in this case; for the investigation to produce anything less seemed unthinkable. In fact, in February 2005 he told a group of students who had just screened his film at Clark University in Worchester, Massachusetts, that indictments “should be handed down within two months.”27 Killinger, who was still conducting his investigation with no apparent end in sight, may have felt uneasy about such assurances, but they were undeniably frustrating to Mississippi district attorney Joyce Chiles, who would ultimately be the one to decide any action in the case. Feeling the same discomfort, Alvin Sykes repeatedly urged Beauchamp to be circumspect in his public comments.28