“By Thursday afternoon,” continued Huie, “Carolyn Bryant could see the story was getting around. She spent Thursday night at the Milams, where at 4 A.M. (Friday) Roy got back from Texas.” This story is in basic agreement with Carolyn’s statement to her attorneys that Roy returned home early Friday morning at 4:30. Milam or Bryant told Huie that because “he [Roy] had slept little for five nights, he went to bed at the Milams’ while Carolyn returned to the store.” Carolyn’s later recollection to Dale Killinger was that Roy returned home on Saturday.11 Because the earliest accounts were written within a few days to a few weeks of the event, it is safe to conclude that Carolyn’s later version is incorrect.
Although Carolyn said to Carlton and Henderson that she told Roy about the incident after Roy returned home Friday morning, she does not state that she told him immediately or initiated the conversation. In fact, sources independent of each other demonstrate that Carolyn was not the one who first told Roy about the encounter with Emmett Till. In a speech delivered on October 8, 1955, even before Huie interviewed Milam and Bryant, Dr. Howard affirmed that he talked to the people that had gathered on the porch the night of the Till/Bryant trouble. He learned that there was “some two-bit person sitting there who wanted 50 cents worth of credit; that individual told Mr. Bryant that a boy from Chicago, a northern boy, whistled at his wife.” Huie learned a similar story. He wrote that after Roy returned to the store sometime in the afternoon on Friday, “a Negro told him what ‘the talk’ was, and told him that the ‘Chicago boy’ was ‘visitin’ Preacher.’” It was then that Carolyn confirmed to Roy what he had already learned had occurred.12
Olive Arnold Adams, whose booklet Time Bomb relied exclusively on Howard, repeated the same story but claims that the unnamed person got the idea to tell Roy only after Till and his friends returned to the store two days later. During this alleged second visit, the Wednesday night encounter did not come up. However, “The whistle incident was marked by one of the men who was within earshot. It is believed such a person may have sought a favor, or perhaps easy credit at the store, by distorting the story for the benefit of Roy Bryant who had been out of town during the week.” In his October speech, Howard said he learned of this information after he spoke with the black people who were sitting on the porch.13
Neither Howard nor Adams specifically noted that the person who informed Roy Bryant of Till’s indiscretion was black, but another source influenced by Howard does. A reporter writing for the California Eagle under the pseudonym Amos Dixon, like Adams, learned that the day after the store incident, “Emmett and some of the kids went back to the store, to ‘fool around’ and buy cokes and bubble gum.” Dixon, like Adams, said that “nobody mentioned the wolf whistle. It had been forgotten, that is forgotten by everybody but one Negro loafer. That one loafer who hadn’t forgotten wanted to curry favor with Roy Bryant, either to get some credit, or cadge a favor, or just to keep in good with the white folks.” Sometime after Roy’s return on Friday, “the Negro snitch told him that the ‘Chicago boy’ had whistled at Carolyn.”14
The Adams and Dixon stories are the only instances to claim that Till returned to the store a day or two after the incident, although their common source is clearly Howard. Simeon Wright denies that they ever went back; Carolyn Bryant also maintained that she never saw the “Negro man” again after Wednesday night.15
When speaking to Dale Killinger during his 2004–5 investigation, Carolyn affirmed that she did not tell Roy about the incident and the reason was that she feared Roy “was . . . gonna go find and beat him up.” She also instructed Juanita not to tell J. W.16 Carolyn’s later story is consistent with what J. W. and Roy told Huie and may have been influenced over the years by what she read in that account. However, Howard’s and Huie’s independent confirmations that someone else told Roy about the trouble at the store backs up Carolyn’s story to Killinger.
If Roy Bryant learned the story from a black “loafer,” who was it? As noted earlier, in 1974 Mose Wright’s brother-in-law, Crosby Smith, told an interviewer that the informant was Mose Wright’s sixteen-year-old son, Maurice. Smith believed Maurice was jealous of Emmett Till because he wore fancy clothes and had spending money in his wallet. Smith said confidently that “Maurice told Bryant how Emmett had told his wife what a good-looking woman she was,” but that Maurice “also added a whole lot more to it than there actually was.” In 1995, Emmett’s mother indicated to George Curry of the now defunct Emerge magazine that she believed elements of that story as well. Simeon Wright has repeatedly declared the accusations against his brother to be false and said of Emerge, “With stories like that, I can see why the magazine went under.”17 However, Wright fails to note that Curry relied on the Crosby Smith story and that Mamie Till-Mobley also backed the accusation. Nor does he mention that his uncle Crosby was the first to tell that story in print twenty years before that.
Neither Howard, Adams, Dixon, nor Huie place blame on Maurice—at least by name—and by characterizing the person as a “loafer,” they seem to take Maurice out of the picture, as Maurice hardly had time to hang around outside the Bryant store during this crucial cotton harvest time. Huie said a few years later that he knew the identity of the person but opted not to reveal his name so as not to jeopardize his safety. Since Maurice was by then living with his family up north in Chicago, he would not have needed protection, at least from anyone in the South. It is possible that Huie wanted to protect him from northern blacks who would have seen him as a Judas. It is also possible that Huie simply wanted to appear in the know concerning this aspect of the story and in reality knew nothing about the identity of the informant.18
Keith Beauchamp believes that the informant was Johnny B. Washington, a black employee of Bryant’s.19 This is based on an account made fifty years later by a man who claimed to have seen Washington with Milam and Bryant earlier on the night of Emmett Till’s abduction. Robert Wright, son of Mose, revealed years later that his father said he may have heard Washington’s voice outside the house during the kidnapping.20 Still, there is no evidence that Washington was the informant at the store. In summary, it appears that a black male who witnessed the encounter at the store was the first to tell Roy Bryant about it. His identity remains a mystery, although there have been suspicions, and family lore has in the past identified him as Maurice Wright.
Did Mose and Elizabeth Wright learn of the store incident prior to the kidnapping?
Simeon Wright has been adamant that his mother and father knew nothing about what happened on Wednesday, August 24, prior to Emmett Till’s kidnapping. “If I had told Dad, he would have done one of two things: either he would have taken Bobo back to the store and made him apologize to Mrs. Bryant or he would have sent Bobo home as soon as possible. Either way, perhaps Bobo would be alive today.” He also insists that “Mom didn’t know about the incident—it was Bobo who wanted it to remain a secret.”21 This claim is refuted by Mose and Elizabeth Wright themselves. Simeon is correct that he did not tell his father, but somebody did. Elizabeth Wright found out even before her husband. Wheeler Parker told Jet magazine after he returned to Chicago from Money that “Grandma knew about the ‘incident’ because we’d told her and not Grandpa, who would have gotten angry at us.” Elizabeth made it clear that she had heard about it before the kidnapping because when the men came to their home, she immediately knew what they wanted. She tried to run to Emmett’s bedroom to wake him up before they got in the house. “We knew they were out to mob the boy,” she explained to a reporter. “But they were already in the front door before I could shake him awake.” This backs up Huie’s story as published in his book Wolf Whistle, and Other Stories. Huie quotes from an interview he conducted with Mose and Elizabeth Wright, which Simeon believes Huie fabricated. “I feel partly responsible for the boy’s death,” Elizabeth said. “From what I could worm out of the boys, it seemed like a kind’a prank. Bobo shouldn’a done it. I told him so; and Preacher told him so. The boys shouldn’a let him do
it. But he didn’t know what he was doing—and I guess I thought the white folks’d realize that. And when they didn’t come lookin’ for him right off, I figgered maybe they’d forget it.”22
Mose Wright’s testimony on the witness stand was clear that he had found out about the store incident, perhaps one or two days after it happened.
“I heard someone say that this boy had done something, or had done some talking down at Money. I think that was on Thursday or maybe Friday,” he told attorney Sidney Carlton on cross-examination.
Carlton asked Wright to clarify that statement. “You already knew about it, did you?”
“That’s right,” the witness answered.
“Had you talked to Emmett about it?”
“I sure did,” confirmed Wright.23
Defense papers show that attorneys interviewed Wright previous to the trial. Notes from that interview read that “sometime between Wednesday and Saturday night someone told Mose about Till’s getting into trouble in Money, but he did not talk to Till about it at anytime.”24 The discrepancy about whether Wright talked to Emmett is inexplicable, but the issue as to whether Wright heard about the trouble before the kidnapping is indisputable. On Sunday, September 18, Wright told reporters that he had heard about the incident from an unidentified “outsider.” Roosevelt Crawford said in an interview for Keith Beauchamp’s film, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, that it was his father, Jonas Crawford, who told Wright. This is probably true, since two of the Crawford children were with Emmett at the store, witnessed the event, and could easily have told Jonas about it. The Crawfords and the Wrights were neighbors.25
What happened in the hours prior to Emmett Till’s kidnapping?
By Saturday, August 27, Roy Bryant clearly knew about the trouble at the store, was angered by it, and wanted to confront the stranger from Chicago. As part of his investigation, Dale Killinger confirmed from two separate sources that a boy entered the store Saturday and was accosted by Bryant, who thought the boy may have been the one who had insulted his wife the previous Wednesday. Both the boy involved and Carolyn Donham separately recounted the August 27, 1955, incident to Killinger. Because both were still living at the time the FBI released its report, their names are redacted from the published version:
[Source] lived near Money, Mississippi, and had just returned to Mississippi from a summer vacation trip to Chicago, Illinois. [Source] entered Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, accompanied by his uncle and his mother. When he entered the store, Roy Bryant and [Carolyn Bryant] were inside. Roy Bryant asked [source] where he [source] was on “that Thursday or Friday or something. . . .” “I didn’t know what the devil he was talkin’ about, so he, he acted like he wanted to do something to me. . . .” [Source’s] mother intervened . . . “and she said what’s goin’ on? And ah, he just started out off and he say you all got to teach this boy how to say I said yes sir, no sir.” At about the same time [Carolyn Bryant] said something to Roy Bryant that [source] could not hear. The next day, [source’s] father went and told their landowner about the incident. The landowner went to find out if Roy Bryant had a problem with [source] and learned that Roy Bryant was in jail for kidnapping Preacher Wright’s grandson the night before.26
Killinger’s summary of Carolyn Donham’s version is as follows: “On the evening prior to Till’s kidnapping, a black boy entered Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market and Roy Bryant was aggressively quizzing the boy. Initially, [Donham] did not recall exact details about the incident.” When Killinger interviewed her again later, she remembered more clearly. “‘I know that there was a lady and her little boy or her grandson or somebody was in the store and, I don’t know, Roy said something to ’em, and I remember telling him to leave him alone that, you know, that wasn’t him,’ meaning it wasn’t Emmett Till.”27
This story is actually confirmed, with some variation and likely exaggeration, in an overlooked account published in the Baltimore Afro-American. In October 1955, Elizabeth Wright told a reporter during a joint interview with Mamie Bradley that on the day before the kidnapping, something happened inside the Bryant store: “A colored boy forgot to say ‘sir’ . . . and the white man kicked the boy in the body. Everybody thought he would be stomped to death, but only one thing saved him. He begged and pleaded that his life be spared.”28
As discussed earlier, a man named Willie Hemphill claimed in 2004 that a few hours before Emmett Till’s kidnapping, Hemphill was walking home after buying some items at the Bryant grocery. A pickup truck drove up alongside him, stopped, and someone inside the cab ordered a black man sitting in the bed to put Hemphill into the truck. Hemphill could see J. W. Milam, Roy Bryant, and Carolyn Bryant inside the cab. Carolyn told the men that Hemphill was not the right boy, and Washington threw him out of the truck. During the fracas, Hemphill’s front teeth were broken.29 Although the confrontation at the store earlier in the day involving a different boy is corroborated by three separate sources (including Carolyn Bryant), one must rely solely on Hemphill’s late recollection for his story. However, it is consistent with the fact that upon finding out about the Wednesday night encounter between Emmett Till and Carolyn Bryant, Roy Bryant became incensed and was determined to find the guilty youth.
Who went to Mose Wright’s home early Sunday morning for the abduction and in what vehicle?
Ruth Crawford Jackson, one of the youths who went to the store with Emmett Till and Till’s cousins and who lived about 100 yards from the Wright home, told Keith Beauchamp in an interview outtake from his film, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, that on the night of the kidnapping, “I heard a lot of cars, just driving real fast. It seemed like to me there ought to have been 200 or 300 cars come down through the gravel road to Wright’s home.” When Beauchamp asked her to clarify if there was more than one car, Crawford reiterated, “Oh my God yes. More than one car.”30
In a portion of the interview retained for the film, Crawford said, “I looked out the window and it was just like daylight. And I said ‘My Lord,’ I said, ‘Look at the cars.’ But I didn’t know where they was going. So at the time I could see this black man get out of the car, went to the back, and the whites went to the front.”31
If Crawford is describing what she saw on the evening of Till’s kidnapping and not confusing a different incident, her testimony contradicts Mose Wright’s, who said that it was so dark outside that he could not tell if the vehicle parked just twenty to twenty-five feet from the door was a car or a truck. If Wright could not make out the vehicle when it was that close and who was in it, it would have been impossible for Ruth Crawford to see the people that she described outside the house, especially being 100 yards away. If she did see numerous headlights coming down the street, the cars obviously did not stop at the Wright home, as Mose heard only one vehicle drive away as he watched from the front porch. He remained outside for around twenty minutes.32
From the first reports of the kidnapping, Mose Wright said that when he was awakened by loud knocks on his door, he opened the door to see three men. Two came into the house, and a third remained on the porch. He assumed that the one who stayed outside was black, only because he “acted like” a black person. After Emmett was taken outside, Wright heard a voice that “seemed like . . . a lighter voice than a man’s” that identified Emmett as the right one. From Wright’s testimony, there were at least four people present. He stood on the doorstep and heard them drive off, but it was so dark that he could only tell which direction they went because he could see the vehicle as it passed the trees.33
J. W. Milam allegedly told writer Bonnie Blue that he and Roy Bryant picked up Carolyn Bryant and either Henry Lee Loggins or Levi Collins and that they used the car of a friend named Hubert Clark to drive out to Mose Wright’s home.34 Interestingly, Clark’s name appears in an article published in Jet magazine in October 1955. “A third man who rode on the ill-fated truck, Hurburt [sic] Clark, has not been located.”35 How Clark’s name became associated with the kidnapping at the time an
d why it was revealed exclusively in Jet is puzzling. The reporter gave no explanation as to his source.
When Roy Bryant talked to defense attorneys on September 6, 1955, he admitted to going to Mose Wright’s home to kidnap Emmett Till and told them that he “did identify self as Mr. Bryant when he went in house” (a fact that the attorneys never mentioned in court; instead, they berated Mose Wright on the witness stand for mistakenly identifying their clients as the abductors). Notes made by the defense contradict Milam’s late statement to Bonnie Blue about the vehicle used because Bryant told the attorneys that he “went out there [to Mose Wright’s home] in pickup.”36
A 1955 green and white Chevy pickup as described in news stories at the time of the trial belonged to J. W. Milam. Dailey Chevrolet in Charleston, Mississippi, was owned by the Dailey family from 1926 until 2009. In April 2012, eighty-two-year-old Bobby Dailey revealed to his family that he was the one who sold Milam the truck. In fact, Dailey said that Milam bought it the Wednesday before the kidnapping, which would have been the same day Emmett Till whistled at Carolyn Bryant. Dailey never told his story before mentioning it to his children when they stopped in Glendora to see their old homestead shortly after his wife’s death when they scattered her ashes in Itta Bena. His fear had always been that people would assume he and Milam had been friends or might reach a conclusion that he condoned the murder. Milam financed the truck through General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC).37
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