Emmett Till

by Devery S. Anderson

  Simeon Wright was equally distraught over the decision, having lived with the horror of Emmett Till’s murder and the effect it had on him and his family for half a century. “They came up with this 50 years ago,” he said. “Some of the people haven’t changed from 50 years ago. Same attitude. The evidence speaks for itself.” Wright told another reporter that despite his disappointment, he “wasn’t expecting any indictments” anyway. “Not too much has changed here in Mississippi. I guess that’s just about it.”

  Joyce Chiles weighed in, empathizing with Wright’s emotional response but recognizing that there had been tremendous progress in her state. “I am very sorry he feels that way,” she said. “I personally feel that a lot has changed. Men’s hearts and attitudes have changed over time. This was a very intelligent grand jury, and a good grand jury. They looked at all the evidence that was presented and considered it, and I do respect their decision.” Injustice could have worked the other way, Chiles noted. “It would have been very easy for that grand jury to have returned a true bill based solely on emotion and the rage they felt. And I commend them for not doing that.” As to Carolyn Donham, Chiles emphasized that “I didn’t feel good toward her; I still don’t feel good toward her.” However, “We are justice-seekers and not headhunters.” Reiterating what she had privately told Alvin Sykes, “if I were to follow the law and the evidence as it was presented, I would have had to have returned a no bill.”101

  Federal prosecutor John Hailman, who worked with both Dale Killinger and Joyce Chiles during the course of the investigation, believed that things would have worked out differently with just one more bit of evidence. During the 1955 trial, Mose Wright testified that the voice he heard identify Emmett Till “seemed like it was a lighter voice than a man’s,” but Wright did not say specifically that it was Carolyn Bryant’s. Had Wright have been able to do so, Hailman believed, Chiles probably could have gotten an indictment and been able to prosecute.102 In that case, would there have been a conviction? That will never be known, of course, and the evidence presented to the grand jury would have been undermined by defense attorneys had the case gone to trial. If Carolyn Bryant was present at the Wright home and identified Till and had aided her husband and brother-in-law in ruling out others who were not, did she know in advance that the men were going to kidnap the boy once she identified him, or did she believe they would only talk to him? Did she accompany her husband and brother-in-law willingly and presumably consent to leave her two young sons home alone, or had Roy or J. W. coerced her? Surely these were issues good attorneys would have raised had the case been tried in a Mississippi courtroom.

  Grand jury members were sought out by Greenwood Commonwealth reporter William Browning once the six-month gag order had expired and they were free to talk. He spoke with five of them—Otis Johnson, Almeda Luckey, George Smith III (grandson of the former Leflore County sheriff who arrested Milam and Bryant on kidnapping charges in August 1955), Greg Watkins, and Gary Woody. “The fact is,” said Woody, a white man, “there is no way to know for sure if she was in that car. And if she was, the question is, was she there on her own free will?” Of course, a grand jury does not need proof before issuing an indictment—that is a later job for a trial jury when considering a conviction. However, Otis Johnson, a forty-seven-year-old black member of the panel, found that sufficient evidence was lacking and that even the motive of the state was suspect. “I feel like the district attorney used us as scapegoats. To me it seems like they just wanted to put on a show and go through the process to make people happy.” Johnson insisted that “anybody who sat in there with us would have reached the same conclusion—no matter which side of the aisle you sit on.”103

  Did Joyce Chiles believe that putting the case before a grand jury was warranted when in the end she knew that she would not have indicted Carolyn Donham either? What was not at issue was that Carolyn Bryant could have been charged with manslaughter even without being present during the murder if it could be shown that she identified Emmett Till as the one who came into the store, if she knew that Till would suffer harm as a result. The problem for the jury was that the evidence used to incriminate her was based on hearsay. Chiles presented the evidence, the grand jury weighed it. In the end, both did their jobs.

  On Thursday, March 29, 2007, a month after the grand jury issued its no bill, family members of the slain fourteen-year-old met with FBI officials at its Chicago headquarters and went over the evidence in the case. The following day, the FBI released a 115-page summary of its investigation, along with a copy of the 1955 trial transcript. Both became immediately available online at the FBI’s website.104

  The success of the joint investigation partnered by the FBI and the state of Mississippi should not be measured in terms of suspects indicted, tried, and convicted. Indeed, if evidence is persuasive to bring anyone to justice, then justice should be sought, no matter how many years have passed or how old or repentant any guilty parties are. However, the investigation was as much a fact-finding mission as it was a justice-seeking endeavor. That alone justified the cost in tax dollars and human resources. In the Till case, as in all criminal cases, suspects and convicts die. Yet the truth lives on. The 2004–5 investigation did not uncover all of the answers, but it revealed more than anyone could have imagined about what happened to Emmett Till and who had a hand in his demise. The truth will often incarcerate the guilty, but it will always set the rest of society free.

  If there is any consolation in the fact that no one was ever punished for the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till, it is that the lingering, multilayered injustice tied to the case gives it its power. The horrific details of the crime are exacerbated by the fact that men got away with murder and lived to tell about it. Two were tried and acquitted, while others died before ever seeing the inside of a courtroom. Mamie Till-Mobley turned that tragedy into a positive, as her life’s work later demonstrated. Now and then the nation has followed suit. The next phase of the case would set the Till family and the state of Mississippi on a path toward healing, despite the stinging message out of Greenwood that, once again, when it came to Emmett Till, it was “justice denied.”

  13

  The Legacy of Emmett Till

  In Webb, Mississippi, just two miles south of Sumner, Highway 32 intersects with Highway 49 E. In 1981, an eighteen-mile section of Highway 32 that stretches east-west from Webb to Charleston was designated the Henry Clarence Strider Memorial Highway. Twenty-four years later, on March 21, 2005, Mississippi governor Haley Barbour signed legislation that renamed thirty miles of the north-south-running Highway 49 E as the Emmett Till Memorial Highway.1 More than a few have noted the ironies in seeing these two highways come together. The overtly racist sheriff who declared that Emmett Till’s murder was all a hoax has been confronted by the young teen whose name on the sign serves as official recognition that the once-beloved lawman, the hero of the defense, was wrong.

  Given Mississippi’s long, concerted effort to forget the horror and injustice of the Till case, it is stunning that the name change and highway sign honoring the slain Chicago youth came to fruition at all. The proposal came before the Mississippi Senate at the last hour of a Friday afternoon session, its sponsor even giving an unprepared speech.2 The memorial is not an announcement that the defense theory was absurd, but a reminder. For better or worse, it is a constant reminder. No doubt many a Deltan’s blood has boiled during morning commutes on this long stretch of road. The Emmett Till Memorial Highway, unlike the one named for Strider, has the element of collective guilt behind it as much as it does any determination to remember and commemorate. Seeking to right the wrongs of the past can divide people as much as it unifies because people haunted by the past simultaneously live with fear and denial. When haunting evolves into ownership, and then remembrance, peace has a chance to enter the mix—but not without pain and certainly not without controversy.

  Over the years, the name “Emmett Till” has provoked anger, bitterness, uneasiness
, sadness, guilt, and shame—depending on locale, race, generation, and sometimes even gender. Yet the emotional impact of the case has made it a rallying cry for change. This can be demonstrated in pivotal moments where Emmett Till’s name has been invoked in Congress, and once the partisan or ideological wrangling quieted down, there are times when it has made a difference.

  This was evident during the debate that ensued prior to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first such law passed in over eighty years. Southern resistance to the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 focused on a greater resolve among white southerners to stifle black voting rights, and President Eisenhower would not long ignore that. The administration tried and failed to pass civil rights legislation in 1956, but after Eisenhower’s reelection in November of that year, Attorney General Herbert Brownell informed Republican leaders that he would introduce the bill again after the first of the year. During his State of the Union speech delivered on January 10, 1957, Eisenhower urged Congress to pass the legislation and outlined to the nation each of its four components. His aim was to form a bipartisan civil rights commission, create a civil rights division within the Department of Justice, expand the authority of the department to enforce civil and criminal proceedings, and authorize the attorney general to protect voting rights through civil suits and preventative injunctions.3

  Earlier on the same day that Eisenhower addressed the nation, Michigan representative Charles Diggs Jr. read into the Congressional Record William Bradford Huie’s new Look article, “What’s Happened to the Emmett Till Killers?,” which was a follow-up to Huie’s “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi” piece from a year earlier. Diggs saw the local backlash against J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant as recorded in the new article as “evidence of a change in Mississippi, the significance of which cannot be discounted.”4

  Things were not quite that simple, however, either in Mississippi or Washington. Debate about the proposed civil rights bill began on February 4 before a House Judiciary subcommittee, overseen by Brooklyn representative Emanuel Celler, and on February 12 before the Senate Judiciary Committee chaired by Senator Thomas C. Hennings Jr. of Missouri. Brownell tried to reassure the House subcommittee that Part III of the legislation would not trample states’ rights; he then sought to persuade Hennings’s group that the administration had no intention of sending in federal troops to enforce injunction orders. Southern Democrats believed, however, that if enacted, the law “would result in creation of a Federal gestapo” that would recklessly launch investigations into state affairs.5

  In addition to their desire to gut Part III of the bill, southern Democrats also came out fighting because Part IV failed to provide for jury trials in cases of criminal contempt in civil rights cases. Advocates of the bill knew that southern juries, all of whom were made up of white men, would never convict anyone in a case involving civil rights. Val Washington, director of minorities for the Republican National Convention, knew how ineffective the courts would be in jury trials and posed a question to Senate majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson. “If a Southern jury would not convict confessed kidnappers of Emmett Till after he was found murdered, why would they convict an election official for refusing to give a Negro his right of suffrage?”6 Johnson, like southerners before him, had always blocked civil rights legislation that came before the Senate. Now that he was eyeing a presidential run in 1960 and knowing full well that the fate of the national Democratic Party rested partly on its stance on such issues, Johnson came out in favor of a moderate civil rights bill.7

  Eisenhower and officials within his administration were opposed to the jury trial amendment inserted by southern Democrats and made it clear that they saw this move as a “clever device to nullify the civil rights bill.” Several members of Congress went before the Senate committee and used the Till case when weighing in on either side of the argument. On June 14, during a session of the House of Representatives, Republican Marguerite S. Church of Illinois’s Thirteenth District, told her colleagues, “I myself have had only one personal experience illustrating the need for such legislation to protect civil rights, but it was a potent one.” It had nothing to do with the right to vote “but with the failure adequately to determine and punish those who had taken young life. I refer, or course, to the Emmett Till case. . . . I knew then, Mr. Chairman, that action must be taken to protect the civil rights, at least, of certain of our citizens who are as much American and who are as much entitled to the protection of their rights as anyone who sits in this Chamber as a Member of Congress.” Church then launched into an argument against the jury trial proposal.8

  An opposing view came from Mississippi congressman Jamie Whitten, who represented Tallahatchie County and preceded Gerald Chatham as district attorney in that section of the Delta. He, too, pointed to the Till case but declared, “It is easy to second guess either a jury or a judge when one does not know all the facts or even when the facts are known.” He proceeded to tell the story of a case dating back to his days as district attorney when a black man was killed by a white citizen. The white defendant then tried to plead guilty in court. The man’s request was denied because the evidence against him was overwhelming and prosecutors wanted him to go to trial instead. “The defendant was tried in that county before a jury of 12 white citizens. That jury brought in a verdict of guilty, which meant he received a death sentence. I mention that case to show what southern juries do when the facts are sufficient to warrant a guilty verdict.” However, his colleagues’ memories were not as short as Whitten had hoped. In all, six members of Congress brought up Emmett Till during hearings about the bill.9

  Opponents of the legislation tried unsuccessfully four times to inject a jury trial amendment, and the administration’s version passed in the House on June 18 by a vote of 286-126.10 Two days later, the Senate voted 45-39 to bypass the Judiciary Committee and send the bill directly to the floor. Senate debate opened on July 8, and lawmakers there began working toward a compromise. On August 2, the Senate added an amendment to the bill guaranteeing a right to a jury trial, and passed the amended bill 51-42. Eisenhower, who had always viewed his bill as a moderate proposal, declared immediately that the modifications would damage the entire judicial system of the United States. On August 7, the Senate approved its compromise bill 72-18.

  The revised bill was expected to pass in the House, but was immediately rejected by Republican leader Joseph W. Martin, who declared it would be better to have no bill at all than to pass the Senate’s watered-down version. More debate followed, and on August 21 House Republicans offered their own Eisenhower-backed compromise that would retain the Democrats’ requirement for jury trials for criminal contempt cases but tweaked it to apply only when fines exceeded $300 or imprisonment was set at ninety days or more. Two days later, however, congressional leaders of both parties—Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican William Knowland of the Senate, and Democrat Sam Rayburn and Republican Joseph Martin of the House—reached their own deal stipulating that federal judges could determine whether a jury trial would be granted in criminal contempt cases that arose out of federal voting rights injunctions. If judges proceeded unilaterally and convictions surpassed a $300 fine or forty-five days in jail, the defendant could request a retrial before a jury.11

  On August 27, 1957, the House passed this compromise bill, 279-97. In the Senate, Strom Thurmond, of South Carolina, made a last-minute attempt to kill the bill by initiating a filibuster on the evening of August 28 that lasted for twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes (still the longest filibuster in the history of the Senate), but that body passed the bill late on August 29 by a vote of 60-15. It was signed by President Eisenhower on September 9.12 Even though the bill had lost many of its original provisions, it was the first civil rights bill passed since Reconstruction, and for that it could be measured as a success. The Civil Rights Division it created is still a vibrant part of the Department of Justice.13

  Nearly fifty years later, as Dale Killi
nger worked to uncover the truth about the Till murder, Congress discussed the Chicago teen once again. After Senators Jim Talent and Charles Schumer and Representatives Charles Rangel and Bobby Rush met together in November 2004 to pressure the Justice Department to speed up its investigation, Alvin Sykes called Talent’s office to voice his dismay at the resolution because a rush to justice could have adverse effects. Sykes left a message for the senator, who soon responded, and the two men talked.

  “At best, your resolution is symbolic. It won’t have any impact because they will go at their own pace anyway,” explained Sykes. “At worst, it could interfere with the investigation.”

  Sykes advised Talent that if he wanted to make a difference, he should find a way for the federal government to look into the numerous unsolved civil rights cases that had gone ice cold, the victims of which were mostly unknown to the public at large. Sykes’s vision grew out of the quest for justice that he, Keith Beauchamp, Donald Burger, and Mamie Till-Mobley foresaw when they formed the Emmett Till Justice Campaign in 2002. It was hardly feasible to start a justice campaign for each of the many unsolved cases still on the books, but if investigations were centralized and placed under the jurisdiction of the federal government, money would not be an issue.14

  Talent liked the idea, and he began work on a bill right away. His strategy was to make it a bipartisan effort. Before long he authored the Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act (S. 1369) and introduced it before the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 1, 2005; California representative Bob Filner brought it to the House four weeks later, on July 28. Unfortunately, it died in committee.15