Emmett Till

by Devery S. Anderson

  Amos Dixon, writing for the California Eagle and basing most of his story on the research of Dr. Howard, said that “about 2 o’clock Sunday morning, Aug. 28, three full days after the wolf-whistling incident, a Chevrolet truck belonging to J. W. Milam drew up in front of Mose Wright’s farm,” and that Henry Lee Loggins was in the back. “He lives in Glendora, too, where J. W. lives. He has worked for J. W. for 12 years and whatever J. W. says is gospel as far as Loggins is concerned. He was along to see that Emmett Till didn’t jump off the truck and run once he was placed there.” Reporter James Hicks revealed later that this and other information about Loggins came from Loggins’s father, DeWitt, who Hicks said received a confession directly from Henry Lee, and that Henry Lee also told an unidentified preacher that he was in the back of the truck that night. The significance of Hicks’s account, then, cannot be overstated as it seems unthinkable that he and Howard would have fabricated the stories they say came from DeWitt Loggins or that the senior Loggins would have made up tales about his son. Hicks detailed Loggins’s involvement in an open letter to Attorney General Herbert Brownell and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and published it in the Washington Afro-American on November 19, 1955.38 The risk he ran in jeopardizing the safety of Henry Lee and DeWitt Loggins was serious, but he thought he had a case, and taking it public was the only way the federal authorities might listen.

  It is possible that Roy Bryant told the attorneys that he went to Wright’s house in a pickup and not in a car so as not to say anything that would incriminate anyone else—in this case, Hubert Clark. Loggins’s account came after having been told by Loggins to his father, then to Dr. Howard, and finally, to Dixon. It is possible that some details got muddled as a result or that DeWitt Loggins conflated the story of the kidnapping and, later, the murder by assuming the same people were present for both. Therefore, it is impossible to determine what vehicle was used during the kidnapping and precisely who was in it, but the most likely scenario is that J. W. Milam, Roy Bryant, Carolyn Bryant, and Henry Lee Loggins comprised the group.

  What happened just after the kidnapping party left Mose Wright’s house?

  J. W. Milam told Bonnie Blue that from the Wright home, they drove to the store and dropped off Carolyn Bryant. Carolyn, of course, denied having accompanied the men during the abduction. Defense notes show that she told attorneys on September 2, 1955:

  I did not go to this negroe’s [Mose Wright’s] house on Saturday night but they [J. W. and Roy] did bring him [Emmett Till] to the store later Saturday night or early Sunday morning for me to identify. Roy brought him in—if J. W. was there I didn’t see him. Roy brought him to back. He came right in but inside back door. No gun. Negro was scared but hadn’t been harmed. He didn’t say anything. Roy asked if that was the same one and I told him it was not the one who had insulted me. Roy went out with the negro and I locked the door.

  Carolyn told a similar story to Dale Killinger fifty years later. “I think it happened pretty much like he, like they said. I think they probably asked me who, if that was him.” Her response was “no that’s not him.” Roy then told her that “he was gonna take him back.”39 Either scenario means the men drove back to the store, either to drop off Carolyn (if she had, in fact, accompanied them to Mose Wright’s house) or to have her identify Till. It is possible that they did both—she may have identified Till at the Wright home with only the help of the flashlight and did so again once she could see more clearly at the store. One must also consider the possibility that when she identified Till at the Wright home, she thought Roy and J. W. might only talk to him or reprimand him. Once he was abducted and they returned to the store, she may have changed her mind and said Till was not the right one because she realized at this point that they were going to harm him. Mose Wright definitely heard a voice identify Till at his house. No one else is known to have been in a position to identify Till from his moment with Carolyn other than her.

  If she was forced to leave her boys at home during the six-mile round trip to Mose Wright’s home, she likely went along unwillingly. Carolyn did make one interesting claim to Killinger. When Roy and J. W. brought Emmett Till to the store for her to identify him, she said, “I think that Kimbrell man was, was with, with ’em.”40 This was, of course, Elmer Kimbell, a neighbor and good friend of Milam’s in Glendora. If Carolyn did accompany the men to the Wright home, it may be that Kimbell went inside the store to remain with the boys while she did so. Milam did not tell Bonnie Blue that Kimbell was with them at all that night. However, because Kimbell was still living at the time (he died in 1985), Milam may have wanted to protect him from any possibility of prosecution.

  What happened between the kidnapping and when the party was spotted at 6:30 A.M.?

  It is unknown how long the group remained at the Bryant store before heading out to begin what ended in the torture and murder of Emmett Till. One story that does not fit the chronology is provided by writer Susan Klopher, who said she talked to someone who was seventeen years old at the time of the murder. Klopher’s source told her that one evening in August 1955, at around midnight, her mother and father let Milam and Bryant into their home in Ruleville. “My parents didn’t tell me then what was going on at the time. J. W. had a full brother, Bud, and I am very sure he was with them too. I was in bed but I could hear their voices.” The woman, who remained anonymous by request in Klopher’s report, said her father told her many years later that Milam and Bryant revealed to him that they had killed Emmett Till. When the daughter got up the next morning, the men were gone. “I never knew what happened to them after they left our house. I think they knew the law was going to catch up with them.”41

  The problem with Klopher’s story is that the men did not kill Emmett Till until after sunrise Sunday morning, so they could not have gone to the house late Saturday night claiming that their kidnap victim was dead. By the following afternoon, Roy Bryant had been arrested. If Klopher’s source is instead thinking of a Sunday night visit, Bryant could not have been there. It is possible that Milam and his brother Spencer Lamar “Bud” Milam went to the home in Ruleville alone on Sunday night, but a late-night visit would not have been necessary at that point. Also, there is no evidence that Bud Milam was involved in any of the events related to the kidnapping and murder. By Monday afternoon, J. W. Milam was in jail himself.

  J. W. Milam told Bonnie Blue that after they dropped off Carolyn at the store, they went to a place where they had been drinking earlier in the evening. At this point, Hubert Clark, Melvin Campbell, Henry Lee Loggins, and Levi “Too Tight” Collins were there. They beat Emmett for a while, after which they got back into the truck to take him to a spot on the river to scare him. After driving around for some time, daylight was approaching, and they went to Leslie Milam’s farm in Drew.42

  Milam told a similar story to Huie, but in 1955 he was trying to protect his accomplices who had not been tried. He said that he and Roy planned only to “just whip him . . . scare some sense into him.” Milam had discovered a spot the year before while hunting near Rosedale—a place he called “the scariest place in the Delta,” with a 100-foot drop straight into the Mississippi River. After driving around for seventy-five miles looking for it, they gave up and went back to Glendora, arriving there at 5:00 A.M.43

  When a friend of Bryant’s asked him in 1985 about taking Till to a bluff on the river near Rosedale, Bryant said only that they planned to “put his ass in the river.” This backs up Milam’s story to Huie that they went to Rosedale. As to why they eventually went to the shed in Drew, Bryant said they were “tryin’ to make our minds up.” Bryant also said they “didn’t go back to Glendora” as Milam told Huie, but that they “went through Glendora.”44 The Glendora story was Milam’s way of diverting attention away from Leslie Milam’s farm. Both accounts are consistent that they spent much of their time trying to find a place to scare or otherwise deal with Till but gave up. Although Milam does not mention to Huie anything about the eventual stop in Drew, he does ad
mit this to Bonnie Blue. Bryant also did so on tape in 1985. All of this would indicate that the four-hour window was taken up by first going to the Bryant store, either to drop off Carolyn or have her identify Emmett Till, and from there going to a spot where they had been drinking earlier and where they initially beat Emmett. From there they drove out to Rosedale to find the spot on the bluff to scare their victim. After getting lost and abandoning that plan, they went to the Drew plantation, arriving around 6:30 A.M. It was about a seventy-mile drive from Money to Rosedale, and from Rosedale it was another thirty-eight miles to Drew. Driving to these locations without any diversions would have taken about two hours. The time they spent giving Till his first beating and then looking for the bluff before giving up could have easily taken up the rest of the time.

  Who was in the truck when it was spotted at the plantation in Drew?

  What is clear is that the people who went to Drew did not comprise the exact group who had gone to the Wright home and abducted Emmett Till. Willie Reed, who saw the truck pull into the plantation, testified that he saw four white men in the cab of the truck. William Bradford Huie initially said that “two other men are involved: there were four in the torture-and-murder party.”45 James Hicks reported that Loggins’s father said “his son has named to him the four more white men—instead of two—who were involved in the kidnapping or murder.” Hicks learned that “the other white men involved along with Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam were relatives of Milam, that one of them was a close relative who has already been named by Willie Reed and that the other is a relative who lives at Ita Bend [Itta Bena], Miss.” This is somewhat consistent with what Milam told Bonnie Blue, although there is some variation. Besides J. W. and Roy, Milam said that two others who played a role that night or early in the morning were Leslie Milam (whom Reed mentioned in court) and Melvin Campbell, a brother-in-law. Both fit the description as relatives of Milam and Bryant as described by Loggins’s father, although Campbell lived in Minter City and not Itta Bena. A brother, Edward Milam, did live in Itta Bena, and could have been present, but his name never surfaced in any of the early investigations. It is unlikely, however, that Leslie Milam was in the truck that night. He would have been at home and was there when the truck unexpectedly arrived. J. W. Milam told Blue that Leslie was upset that the men showed up with Till because he had work to do that day. If Reed was correct that he saw four white men in the truck instead of just three, the fourth man would have been either Hubert Clark, whom Milam said was present, or Elmer Kimbell, whom Carolyn Bryant said came by the store with her husband and Milam.46

  Who were the black men in the back? Loggins’s father told Howard that Henry Lee confessed to being on the truck. Both Amos Dixon and Olive Adams, using Howard as their source, said that Loggins was indeed on the back of the truck with Emmett Till, but that eventually Loggins needed help restraining him. The men stopped in Glendora to pick up farmhand Joe Willie Hubbard to give Loggins a hand.47 During interviews later in life, Willie Reed consistently identified the men he saw on the truck as Collins and Hubbard, thus eliminating Loggins altogether.48 There are problems with Reed’s description, however. Reed testified during the trial that there were three black men besides Emmett Till in the back of the truck, not just two, and that “I had never seen them before.”49 Reed could have identified Collins later through a photograph that appeared in the Chicago Defender the month after the trial, but photos of Hubbard never appeared. Reed later began naming the men as Collins and Hubbard probably because those names came up in the news at the time of the trial and were mentioned repeatedly by Howard in speeches. On at least a few occasions, Reed accompanied Howard on speaking engagements. In actuality, Reed could not have identified these men. Seeing Collins’s photo in the paper is the only way that Reed could possibly associate a name with a face.

  If Loggins and Hubbard were on the truck, as Loggins’s father told Howard and Hicks, who was the third man? According to Howard and Dixon, Levi Collins was not recruited until after the murder when the truck returned to Glendora, and his role was to help clean blood out of the truck.50

  In a 2001 telephone interview with the historian Linda Beito, Henry Lee Loggins denied having been present during the kidnapping and murder, but he did provide some clues. “They say Too-Tight, they say he was on the back of that truck and some other boy, named, we called him Oso.” During an interview with Keith Beauchamp for Untold Story, Loggins repeatedly said he had “heard” that Collins, Hubbard, and Oso were on the truck. “Oso” was Otha Johnson Jr., whom Dale Killinger learned had admitted to his own son that he was with Milam and Bryant that night and even drove them around.51 Johnson probably did not drive the truck himself, but was certainly one of those in the back. In all probability then, Loggins, Hubbard, and Johnson were the three black men whom Willie Reed saw with Emmett Till. Later, they picked up Collins to help clean out the truck.

  Who was at the shed in Drew?

  After the truck stopped at the shed, the men went inside and began beating Emmett Till. Willie Reed identified J. W. Milam as the man he saw walk out of the shed and get a drink of water from a well. Reed claimed at the trial that he turned around and saw Milam from a distance after Reed passed the shed on his way to a store. However, Reed said many times during interviews later in life that Milam approached him with a gun on his side and asked if he had heard or seen anything at the shed. Reed, fearing for his life if he gave the wrong answer, nervously told him no.52 This story, however, is not true. Reed never spoke of any encounter with Milam in his courtroom testimony either during direct or cross-examination, which would have helped the prosecution tremendously. Defense attorneys tried to use the distance issue to paint Reed’s identification of Milam as mistaken. If Reed was afraid to speak about the encounter in court, perhaps fearing that the men would seek revenge, he still failed to do so during the several speeches he gave at rallies in the first few months following the trial after he had moved to Chicago. He did mention other facts that did not come out in his testimony, such as an experience at the attorney’s office where several of the lawyers and Milam tried to intimidate him and confuse him about seeing Milam at the shed. Unfortunately, Reed’s invented account of being confronted by Milam received publicity in Stanley Nelson’s The Murder of Emmett Till, in Keith Beauchamp’s Untold Story, and on CBS’s 60 Minutes.53

  During his own courtroom testimony, Willie Reed’s grandfather, Add Reed, said he saw Leslie Milam and another man at the shed not long after Willie would have passed by. Mandy Bradley, looking out her window, said she saw four men walking in and out of the shed.54

  Stories that there were several other people present, including a small boy and a woman, as one informant told Dale Killinger, do not square with witness testimony from the day of the murder. None reported other cars being present besides the pickup containing four white men inside, which would have been a tight fit as it was, and four black men in back. If there were four men in the truck, then there certainly was a fifth man in the shed, however, and that was Leslie Milam, who would not have been in the truck.55 Therefore, the white men present at the shed were J. W. Milam, Roy Bryant, Melvin Campbell, Leslie Milam, and either Hubert Clark, Elmer Kimbell, or possibly Edward Milam. The black men were Henry Lee Loggins, Joe Willie Hubbard, and Otha “Oso” Johnson Jr.

  Where was Emmett Till murdered and by whom?

  Although Emmett Till’s body was discovered on the Tallahatchie County side of the Tallahatchie River, there is no evidence that he was actually killed in the county. Milam told William Bradford Huie that he shot Emmett Till near the spot where the body was found, outside of Glendora, off Swan Lake Road, past the house and property of L. W. Boyce. Ignoring that version, however, both J. W. Milam, to Bonnie Blue, and Roy Bryant in 1985, to an unidentified friend, said that Till was killed in a shed at the Leslie Milam plantation outside of Drew, in Sunflower County. Witnesses like field hand Frank Young, who was the first to inform Howard of the activities on the Drew plantation, sai
d that a tractor was removed from the shed, the truck then backed in, and, when it left, something was in the back covered with a tarpaulin.56 The trial was never moved to Sunflower County because no one reported hearing a gunshot at the shed. However, Willie Reed had already gone to the store, Add Reed had passed by, and Mandy Bradley was inside of her house. It is possible the gunshot was fired from inside the shed and that no one else on the property heard it.

  Amos Dixon wrote that after the truck left the plantation and reached the river, Emmett Till, whom his killers assumed was dead, began moving, and so Milam shot him.57 This may have happened, but if so, it was probably in the shed and not at the river. Again, all of the details that came from Loggins were told to Howard and Hicks secondhand by Loggins’s father.

  Stories vary as to who pulled the trigger. In the Huie and Dixon accounts, Milam was said to have shot Till. This is probably what happened, although Carolyn Bryant said she was told by her brother-in-law Raymond Bryant that Melvin Campbell actually killed the boy.58 Raymond may have wanted to find a way to spare his brothers of a murder charge and was less hesitant to implicate Melvin, a brother-in-law, which would have been welcome news to Carolyn. Or perhaps Roy told that to Raymond over the phone from the jail as he proclaimed his own innocence. That, unfortunately, will never be known for sure.

  What did the murder party do after killing Emmett at the shed?

  Information about what happened after Emmett Till was murdered comes in greatest detail from Bonnie Blue. Milam told her that after they killed Emmett Till, they removed the clothing from his body and that Collins and Loggins cleaned blood from the shed floor and then spread cottonseed to cover traces of the crime. When highway patrol investigator Gwin Cole, Sheriff George Smith, and Deputy John Cothran visited the shed on September 21, 1955, after learning that Emmett may have been killed there, they reported that the floor was indeed covered in cottonseed.59