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7. World War I Selective Service Draft System Registration Cards; 1930 US Census, Leflore County, Mississippi, Beat 2, Enumeration District 42-5, sheet 6B, microfilm no. 2340890, FHL; “Rites Held Saturday for Moses Wright, 85,” Chicago Defender, August 8, 1977, 2; William Parker, author telephone interview, April 30, 2014. Simeon Wright also believes the April 1892 date to be correct. See Wright and Boyd, Simeon’s Story, 15.
8. Holmes County (Miss.) Circuit Clerk, Marriage Records, 1889–1951, black marriages, vols. 11–12: 157, microfilm no. 879492, FHL.
9. 1920 US Census, Holmes County, Beat 2, Enumeration District 50, sheet 17b, microfilm no. 1820877, FHL; Wright, author telephone interview; Wright and Boyd, Simeon’s Story, 17, 19.
10. World War I Draft Selective Service System Registration Cards; Parker, Smith, and Wright, author interview, comments by Wright; Wright and Boyd, Simeon’s Story, 18. For more on the Selective Service Act, see Edward M. Coffman, The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), 25–28. See also Richard V. Damms, “World War I: Loyalty and Dissent in Mississippi during the Great War, 1917–1918,” http://mshistory.k12.ms.us/articles/237/World-War-I-the-great-war-1917-1918-loyalty-and-dissent-in-mississippi.
11. Wright and Boyd, Simeon’s Story, 21.
12. 1930 US Census, Leflore County, Beat 2, Enumeration District 42-5, sheet 6B; Federal Bureau of Investigation, Prosecutive Report of Investigation Concerning . . . Emmett Till, Deceased, Appendix A—Trial Transcript, February 9, 2006, 8 (hereafter cited as Trial Transcript); Wright, author telephone interview; Parker, Smith, and Wright, author interview, comments by Wright.
13. Till-Mobley and Benson, Death of Innocence, 109; Parker, Smith, and Wright, author interview, comments by Wright; Wright and Boyd, Simeon’s Story, 32.
14. Tallahatchie County (Miss.) Circuit Clerk, Marriage Records of the First District, 1856–1918, white marriages, vol. 8, 1908–1916: 238, microfilm no. 894882, FHL.
15. William Leslie Milam parents’ information, http://trees.ancestry.com.
16. Helen E. Staten Arnold and Nick Denley, comps., Tallahatchie County, Mississippi Marriage Records (Carrollton, Miss.: Pioneer Publishing, 1998), 177, 181; 1920 US Census, Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, Enumeration District 132, sheet 2, microfilm no. 1820895, FHL.
17. 1930 US Census, Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, Enumeration District 68-8, sheet 18A, microfilm no. 2340903, FHL; “Two of Three Victims of Gravel Pit Accident Die of Their Injuries,” Mississippi Sun (Sumner, Miss.), October 13, 1927, 1; “Milam Is Pictured a War Hero Who Also Snatched Negro from Drowning,” Jackson Daily News, September 20, 1955, 6.
18. Arnold and Denley, Tallahatchie County, Mississippi Marriage Records, 153; Eula Lee Morgan Bryant v. Henry E. Bryant, Chancery Court of the Second Judicial District of Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, Case No. 2875.
19. “Milam Is Pictured a War Hero,” 6; Clark Porteous, “New Angle in Till Case Claimed,” Memphis Press-Scimitar, September 20, 1955, 4; Federal Bureau of Investigation, Prosecutive Report of Investigation Concerning . . . Emmett Till, Deceased, Victim, February 9, 2006, 23 (hereafter cited as Prosecutive Report).
20. Ellen Whitten, “Justice Unearthed: Revisiting the Murder of Emmett Till” (honor’s thesis, Rhodes College, 2005), 9; http://www.rhodes.edu/images/content/Academics/Ellen_Whitten.pdf.
21. Erle Johnston, Mississippi’s Defiant Years, 1953–1973 (Forest, Miss.: Lake Harbor Publishers, 1990), 28–29.
22. For excellent studies on the Brown case, see James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Charles J. Ogletree Jr., All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education (New York: Norton, 2004); Clare Cushman and Melvin I. Urosky, eds., Black, White, and Brown: The Landmark School Desegregation Case in Retrospect (Washington, DC: Supreme Court Historical Society/CQ Press, 2004).
23. For a full account of the Citizens’ Councils, see Neil R. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971). For more on the black response to the councils, see J. Todd Moye, Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945–1986 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
24. Julius E. Thompson, Lynchings in Mississippi: A History, 1865–1965 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2007), 142. Two scholars note, “By the time of Emmett Till’s murder, lynching was no longer an acceptable public spectacle, though it was still an acceptable community practice. That is, by 1955, lynching had become an invisible public event: everyone in town would know what happened, to whom, and ‘why,’ but it was no longer performed before a large crowd in the public square” (Christine Harold and Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Behold the Corpse: Violent Images and the Case of Emmett Till,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8, no. 2 [Summer 2005]: 269).
25. Jack Mendelsohn, The Martyrs: Sixteen Who Gave Their Lives for Racial Justice (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 1–20.
26. “Grand Jury, District Attorney Rap ‘Cover-Up’ in Brookhaven Case,” Clarksdale (Miss.) Press Register, September 21, 1955, 6; M. Susan Orr-Klopfer, with Fred Klopfer and Barry Klopfer, Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited, 2nd ed. (Parchman, Miss.: M. Susan Orr-Klopfer, 2005), 240–48.
27. “Gov. White Orders Crackdown on Wide-Open Gambling,” Greenwood (Miss.) Morning Star, August 25, 1955, 1.
28. NAACP press release, September 1955, in Papers of Medgar Wiley Evers and Myrlie Beasley Evers, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Archives and Library Division, Special Collections Section, Manuscript Collection, Accn. no. Z2231.0005, box 3, fd. 1.
29. Tom P. Brady, Black Monday (Winona, Miss.: Associations of Citizens’ Councils, 1955), 63–64.
30. “Leflore County Communities,” 5.
31. Clark Porteous, “Grand Jury to Get Case of Slain Negro Boy Monday,” Memphis Press-Scimitar, September 1, 1955, 4.
32. Till-Mobley and Benson, Death of Innocence, 111–12; Parker, Smith, and Wright, author interview, comments by Wright; Wright and Boyd, Simeon’s Story, 45.
33. Parker, Smith, and Wright, author interview, comments by Wright. In my interview with Wright, he could not recall specifically what day this or any of the events occurred that week other than Till’s encounter at the Bryant store and Till’s kidnapping three days later. For his book, Wright assigned dates to the various events for clarity. For Wright’s account of the week, see Wright and Boyd, Simeon’s Story, 41–66.
34. Parker, Smith, and Wright, author interview, comments by Parker; William Sorrels, “Guards Called to Protect Men Held in Youth’s Death,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, September 5, 1955, 8.
35. Parker, Smith, and Wright, author interview, comments by Wright. In his book, Wright said the firecracker incident happened on Sunday, August 21, the day after Till’s arrival. See Wright and Boyd, Simeon’s Story, 42.
36. “Gov. White Orders Crackdown,” 1.
37. Wheeler Parker Jr. interviews, in Stanley Nelson, prod., The Murder of Emmett Till (Firelight Media, 2002), and Keith Beauchamp, prod., The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till (Till Freedom Come Productions, 2005); Parker, Smith, and Wright, author interview, comments by Parker.
38. Trial Transcript, 58; Porteous, “Grand Jury to Get Case,” 4–5. Simeon Wright said in 2007 that his parents did not go to church that Wednesday night, and that the story was fabricated by some unknown person. His recollection is that the family attended church on Tuesday nights instead (Parker, Smith, and Wright, author interview, comments by Wright). However, because Mose Wright stated on at least two occasions that he had been at church that Wednesday evening, it is clear that his version is the accurate one. Simeon does not address this at all in his book when discussing the events of Wednesday, August 24. See Wright and Boyd, Simeon’s Story, 49–53.
39. Porteous, “Grand Jury to Get Case,” 4–5; George Murray, “‘Wolf Call’ Blamed by Argo Teen,” Chicago American, September 1, 1955, 4; “Resume of Interview with Mose Wright.”
40. Sorrels, “Guards Called to Protect Men,” 8; “Chicago Negro Youth Abducted by Three White Men at Money,” Greenwood (Miss.) Commonwealth, August 29, 1955, 1; Mattie Smith Colin and Robert Elliott, “Mother Waits in Vain for Her ‘Bo,’” Chicago Defender, September 10, 1955, 2, reprinted in Christopher Metress, ed., The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 31. Simeon Wright is inconsistent when providing names of those present. In a 2004 article written by the coauthor of his book, Wright lists the same names I do, which mirrors Wheeler Parker’s list from September 1955. However, in his book Wright insists that Ruth Crawford was not with them. He also told me in 2007 that he does not recall Roosevelt Crawford having been there either. See Herb Boyd, “The Real Deal on Emmett Till,” New York Amsterdam News, May 20, 2004, 3; Wright and Boyd, Simeon’s Story, 134; Simeon Wright, author interview, October 2, 2007, Money, Miss.
41. Sorrels, “Guards Called to Protect Men,” 8.
42. The length of the visit is an estimation by Simeon Wright to the author during Parker, Smith, and Wright, author interview.
43. Clenora Hudson-Weems, Emmett Till: The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement, 4th ed. (Bloomington, Ind.: AuthorHouse, 2006), 133; Parker, Smith, and Wright, author interview, comments by Parker.
44. Murray, “‘Wolf Call’ Blamed by Argo Teen,” 4. Neither Parker nor Wright remembered in 2007 that their purpose in going into Money was to visit the café (Parker, Smith, and Wright, author interview). In his book, Wright said that after they got into town, “we went directly to Bryant’s grocery store” (Wright and Boyd, Simeon’s Story, 49). I am judging Parker’s August 1955 statement to be more accurate, however. William Bradford Huie, a journalist who later claimed to have interviewed several of the youth who were with Till at the Bryant store, learned from one of them the same story that Parker told the Chicago American. Huie said that the teens “were in the ’46 Ford going to a ‘jook.’ But the ‘jook’ wasn’t open yet, so they stopped in front of Bryant’s.” Because that fact had only been made known one other time, by Parker, it strengthens the argument that Huie did talk to the teens as he claimed, something that Simeon Wright maintains today never happened (Wright and Boyd, Simeon’s Story, 133–34). For Huie to have referred to such an obscure and relatively unknown part of the story, he would have had to have learned about it from someone who had been in the car with Emmett Till that night (see William Bradford Huie, Wolf Whistle, and Other Stories [New York: Signet Books, 1959], 40; Devery S. Anderson, “A Wallet, a White Woman, and a Whistle: Fact and Fiction in Emmett Till’s Encounter in Money, Mississippi,” Southern Quarterly: A Journal of Arts & Letters in the South 45, no. 4 [Summer 2008]: 11–12).
45. Defense notes from interview with Carolyn Bryant, September 2, 1955, Huie Papers, box 85, fd. 346; Wright, author interview, October 2, 2007; Murray, “‘Wolf Call’ Blamed by Argo Teen,” 4.
46. William Bradford Huie, “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” Look, January 24, 1956, 46.
47. Huie, Wolf Whistle, 18; Trial Transcript, 268–69. In her testimony to the FBI during its 2004–6 investigation, Juanita Milam stated that she was not babysitting at the store that Wednesday night, but was probably in Greenville (Prosecutive Report, 42). The evidence that Juanita Milam was at the store the night of the Till-Bryant encounter, in addition to Carolyn Bryant’s testimony, was that there was a car present, to which Bryant went to retrieve a gun. Bryant also testified in court that the car she walked to belonged to Juanita Milam (Trial Transcript, 276). The Bryants did not own a car; the Milams did.
48. “Kidnapped Boy Whistled at Woman,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 30, 1955, 2.
49. Huie, “Shocking Story,” 46.
50. Prosecutive Report, 44. Crawford’s name is redacted from the report for privacy purposes.
51. Till-Mobley and Benson, Death of Innocence, 102
52. Amos Dixon, “Mrs. Bryant Didn’t Even Hear Emmett Till Whistle,” California Eagle, January 26, 1956, 2. Dixon’s identity has never been identified with certainty. His articles will be dealt with more fully in a later chapter. Another source that backs up the claim that Emmett Till bragged about relationships with white girls comes from John Milton Wesley, who was a youth at the time who lived twenty-five miles east of Money in the town of Ruleville. Wesley later wrote an article for the Washington Post in which he claimed to have known Emmett Till as “one of those kids who came from ‘up North’ every summer to join us in the cotton fields. . . . He could keep us spellbound with stories of white girlfriends, the forbidden fruit.” Although Till had been to Mississippi three previous times, the 1955 trip was his first trip in five years and the only time he was old enough to pick cotton. If Wesley was spending time in Money during the week Emmett was there, they could have met, but their interactions would have been brief. It is unlikely that Wesley shared the intimacy with Till that his article suggests. See John Milton Wesley, “The Legacy of Emmett Till,” Washington Post National Weekly Edition, September 4–10, 1995, 21.
53. Murray, “‘Wolf Call’ Blamed by Argo Teen,” 4.
54. Colin and Elliott, “Mother Waits in Vain,” 2; Metress, Lynching of Emmett Till, 31.
55. “Nation Horrified by Murder of Kidnaped Chicago Youth,” Jet 8, no. 19 (September 15, 1955): 8.
56. “Two Armed White Men Break into Negro Worker’s Home,” Greenwood (Miss.) Morning Star, September 1, 1955, 1.
57. “Two White Men Charged with Kidnapping Negro,” Delta Democrat-Times (Greenville, Miss.), August 30, 1955, 1.
58. Murray, “‘Wolf Call’ Blamed by Argo Teen,” 4.
59. Sorrels, “Guards Called to Protect Men,” 8; Parker, Smith, and Wright, author interview, comments by Parker; “Resume of Interview with Mose Wright.”
60. “Kidnapped Boy Whistled at Woman,” 2.
61. Porteous, “Grand Jury to Get Case,” 4.
62. Olive Arnold Adams, Time Bomb: Mississippi Exposed, and the Full Story of Emmett Till (Mound Bayou, Miss.: Regional Council of Negro Leadership, 1956), 17.
63. Hudson-Weems, Emmett Till, 132.
64. Eric Stringfellow, “Memories Sketch Varied Portraits of Emmett Till,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, August 25, 1985, 1H; Hudson-Weems, Emmett Till, 132; Nelson, Murder of Emmett Till; Beauchamp, Untold Story; Parker, Smith, and Wright, author interview, comments by Wright; Wright and Boyd, Simeon’s Story, 51.
65. Defense notes from interview with Carolyn Bryant.
66. Trial Transcript, 269–75; Huie, Wolf Whistle, 20.
67. “Two White Men Charged,” 1.
68. Porteous, “Grand Jury to Get Case,” 4.
69. Timothy B. Tyson, emails to author, March 31 and July 26, 2014; Patricia Spears, “Timothy Tyson Sheds Light on His Novel,” Duke Chronicle (Durham, N.C.), January 26, 2014, www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2014/01/26/timothy-tyson-sheds-light-his-novel#.VJNIrCvF-Ec. Carolyn decided to talk to Tyson after she read one of his books, likely Blood Done Sign My Name (New York: Crown, 2004), the true story of the 1970 murder of Henry Marrow, a twenty-three-year-old black Vietnam War veteran. Marrow’s accused killers were acquitted by an all-white jury; the book focuses on the protests that followed. Blood Done Sign My Name became a feature film (Mel Efros, producer, Paladin, 2010). Tyson will be providing details of his interviews with Carolyn in his own book, still forthcoming as of this writing.
70. “Two Armed White Men,” 1.
71. “Nation Horrified,” 8; “Two Armed White Men,” 1.
72. Murray, “‘Wolf Call’ Blamed by Argo Teen,” 1.
73. Porteous, “Grand Jury to Get Case,” 5.
74. Murray, “‘Wolf Call’ Blamed by Argo Teen,” 1.
75. William Sorrels, “‘Tall Man Came’ with Companion, Say His Cousins,” Memph
is Commercial Appeal, September 1, 1955, 4.
76. Porteous, “Grand Jury to Get Case,” 4.
77. “Negro Boy Was Killed for ‘Wolf Whistle,’” New York Post, September 1, 1955, 12. For more perspective on the whistle, see Rebecca Mark, “Mourning Emmett: ‘One Long Expansive Moment,’” Southern Literary Journal 40, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 130–31.
78. Sorrels, “Tall Man Came,” 4; Hudson-Weems, Emmett Till, 132; Stringfellow, “Memories Sketch Varied Portraits,” 1H; Parker, Smith, and Wright, author interview, comments by Wright; Wright and Boyd, Simeon’s Story, 52.
The name of the road that leads to East Money has, apparently, never been certain. Simeon Wright recalled its name as Darfield Road. However, the FBI called it Dark Ferry Road in the summary of its 2004–6 investigation. Wright told me in 2007 that this was news to him, as he had always called it Darfield Road. In his book, however, he referred to it as Dark Fear Road, explaining that it was given this name due to its reputation as “one of the darkest places in the world, filled with menacing woods and snake-infested lakes. But old-timers say it also got its name from the many lynchings that took place in the area” (Wright and Boyd, Simeon’s Story, 25). Leflore County witnessed 125 documented lynchings between 1882 and 1955. See Thompson, Lynchings in Mississippi, 23, 36, 49, 65, 84, 98, and 142 for charts breaking down the numbers by each decade. It is unclear how many, if any, occurred on the road in East Money. I have found no evidence from any other source that the name of the road was Dark Fear.
79. Establishing evidence that the boy who dared Till was not one of Till’s cousins is important, not only to understand the facts but also to address Wright family sensibilities. Simeon Wright has been very vocal that nobody dared Till at all. “If we had put Emmett up to that, we’d be no better than Milam and Bryant,” he said in 2007 (Parker, Smith, and Wright, author interview, comments by Wright; Anderson, “A Wallet, a White Woman, and a Whistle,” 18). Certainly none of the youth present who may have challenged Till can be blamed for contributing to the actions of those who later killed him.