Emmett Till
Page 65
128. Trial Transcript, 90–93.
129. Trial Transcript, 93–94.
130. Trial Transcript, 94–95.
131. Trial Transcript, 96–101.
132. Trial Transcript, 101–2. Future state senator David Jordan recalled that Miller was nervous during questioning. “When it was time for cross-examination, the white attorney began drilling Miller and sweat poured profusely from the funeral director’s face. It looked as if someone had poured a bucket of water on top of his head” (David L. Jordan, with Robert L. Jenkins, David L. Jordan: From the Mississippi Cotton Fields to the State Senate, A Memoir [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014], 58. See also Mamie Fortune Osborne, “An Interview with David Jordan on Emmett Till,” Southern Quarterly: A Journal of Arts & Letters in the South 45, no. 4 [Summer 2008]: 140).
133. “Undertaker’s Story Heard,” Jackson State Times, September 21, 1955, 12A; John Herbers, “Uncle Identifies Boy’s Abductors,” Jackson State Times, September 21, 1955, 8A.
134. Paul Holmes, “Jurors Hear of Confession in Till Trial,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 22, 1955, 11; William Sorrels, “Uncle of Slain Boy Points Out Milam, Says Body Was Till,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, September 22, 1955, 10.
135. Trial Transcript, 103–9.
136. Trial Transcript, 110–15.
137. Trial Transcript, 119–35.
138. Trial Transcript, 139.
139. Trial Transcript, 139–40.
140. Trial Transcript, 140–44.
141. Trial Transcript, 144–58.
142. Trial Transcript, 159–62.
143. Trial Transcript, 163–65, 171; Clark Porteous, “Grand Jury to Get Case of Slain Negro Boy Monday,” Memphis Press-Scimitar, September 1, 1955, 4.
144. Trial Transcript, 165–68, 171, 176. Mose Wright’s neighbor, John Crawford, interviewed for Beauchamp’s Untold Story, made several erroneous statements that went unchallenged in the film. First, he said he was the one who took Mose Wright to the river to identify the body, even though Wright and Cothran testified differently in court. Simeon Wright also says that Crawford drove his father to the river, but he is probably using Crawford’s memory as his source (Wright and Boyd, Simeon’s Story, 63). Crawford also said that Mose Wright told him that Till’s “privates had been cut off,” something that Cothran, on the stand, and Till’s mother later denied. Such stories as Crawford’s were also disproved during Till’s 2005 autopsy (Federal Bureau of Investigation, Prosecutive Report of Investigation Concerning . . . Emmett Till, February 9, 2006, 99–110). Nowhere in its summary of the autopsy, including its description of the body, is any evidence of castration mentioned. Dale Killinger, the FBI agent in charge of that investigation, told me that the autopsy conclusively proved that Till had not been castrated (Dale Killinger, author telephone interview, April 29, 2014).
145. Marsh, “Communist Writer at Trial,” 1.
146. Holmes, “Jurors Hear of Confession,” 1; Popham, “Slain Boy’s Uncle on Stand,” 64; Joseph C. Nichols, “Marciano, Floored in Second Round, Stops Moore in Ninth to Keep Title,” New York Times, September 22, 1955, 37; Desmond, “Old Negro Points to Accused Pair,” 6.
147. Herbers, “Cross-Burning at Sumner,” 1; Virgil Adams, “Resentment Rising against Radicals at Trial,” Greenwood (Miss.) Morning Star, September 22, 1955, 6; “Sidelights of Till Trial,” 5.
148. Jay Milner, “Jittery News Men at Sumner Kept in a Dither by Rumors,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, September 22, 1955, 2.
149. Milner, “Sumner Folk Already Bored,” 3, 5.
150. Adams, “Resentment Rising,” 6.
151. James L. Hicks, “Hicks Arrested in Mississippi,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 1, 1955, 8; “Dismiss Traffic Charge Against Reporter Covering Sumner Trial,” Clarksdale (Miss.) Press Register, September 22, 1955, 1.
152. Harry Marsh, “Editors Eye Clock in Awaiting Verdict,” Delta Democrat-Times (Greenville, Miss.), September 23, 1955, 1.
153. Marsh, “Editors Eye Clock,” 1; “Says Reds Lie About Arrest in Sumner,” Jackson State Times, October 17, 1955, 2A.
154. Wilson F. Minor, author interview, August 24, 2009, Jackson, Miss.
155. See Ronald Singleton, “Dey’ Done Took Him, says Old Mose,” London Express, September 22, 1955, 2. Articles reporting Thursday’s and Friday’s trial coverage were written by others. See “Murder Trial Jury Hears Wolf Whistle,” London Express, September 23, 1955, 1, attributed to an “Express Staff Reporter” in New York; James Cooper, “‘Wolf Whistle’ Men Are Freed,” London Express, September 24, 1955, 1.
156. “Says Reds Lie,” 2A.
157. Kempton, “Heart of Darkness,” 5; “The Strange Trial of the Till Killers,” Jet 8, no. 22 (October 6, 1955): 8.
158. Gunter, “Jokes, Threats Are Blended,” 8.
159. William B. Franklin, “Staff Photog Tells Own Story of Trip,” St. Louis Argus, September 20, 1955, 19; Ernest Withers, Complete Photo Story of Till Murder Case (Memphis, Tenn.: Withers Photographers, 1955), 13.
160. Steve Duncan, “Argus Pres. On-the-Scene,” St. Louis Argus, September 23, 1955, 13.
161. Milner, “Jittery News Men at Sumner,” 2.
162. Porteous, “Mrs. Bryant on Stand,” 4.
163. Wakefield, Between the Lines, 146; Wakefield, author telephone interview; Kempton, “Heart of Darkness,” 5.
Chapter 6
1. See Stokes McMillan, One Night of Madness (Houston: Oak Harbor Publishing, 2009), for a thoroughly researched, detailed treatment of this tragedy. For a contemporary account, see “Attala Desperadoes Captured after Killing 3 Negro Children,” Kosciusko (Miss.) Star-Herald, January 12, 1950, 1, 6.
2. “Attala Desperadoes Captured,” 1, 6; “Brilliant Defense Counsel Named for Three Men Accused of Massacre,” Kosciusko (Miss.) Star-Herald, January 26, 1950, 1, 3; “Preliminary Hearing Set Friday for Men Accused of Mass Killing,” Kosciusko (Miss.) Star-Herald, February 2, 1950, 1. Windol Whitt died in 1992 at age sixty-seven, Malcolm Whitt died in 1996 at seventy-four, and Leon Turner was fifty-seven when he died in 1968.
3. “Mississippi: Shooter’s Chance,” Time 55, no. 4 (January 23, 1950): 17; “Trial of Revenge Murderers to Be in National Spotlight,” Kosciusko (Miss.) Star-Herald, March 9, 1950, 1; “Windol Whitt’s Trial Opens Today in Attala,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, March 15, 1950, 1; Bill Keith, “Windol Whitt’s Trial Rusumes [sic] Today with Surprise Testimony,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, March 16, 1950, 1, 7; “First of Trio Goes on Trial Here for Revenge Massacre of Children,” Kosciusko (Miss.) Star-Herald, March 16, 1950, 1, 6; Bill Keith, “Windol Whitt Gets Life Term,” Kosciusko (Miss.) Star-Herald, March 17, 1950, 1, 16; “Attala Court Judge Overrules Mistrial Motion by Defense,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, March 21, 1950, 1, 10; Bill Keith, “Turner Guilty, Jurors Disagree on Penalty,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, March 22, 1950, 1, 16; “Leon Turner Gets Life Imprisonment without Hope of Pardon,” Kosciusko (Miss.) Star-Herald, March 22, 1950, 1; Bill Keith, “No Parole for Leon Turner, Thrice Murderer,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, March 23, 1950, 1, 16; “Whitt Gets 10 Years for ‘Manslaughter,’” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, April 4, 1955, 7; McMillan, One Night of Madness, 301–64.
4. McMillan, One Night of Madness, 286.
5. McMillan, One Night of Madness, 360.
6. “White Man Was Hanged 65 Years Ago in Grenada for Murdering Negro,” Columbian-Progress (Columbia, Miss.), September 29, 1955, 2.
7. James Gunter, “Early Crowd Fills Courtroom, Unrest Mounts at Late Start,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, September 23, 1955, 1.
8. Gunter, “Early Crowd Fills Courtroom,” 1.
9. Gunter, “Early Crowd Fills Courtroom,” 1.
10. Clark Porteous, “Mrs. Bryant on Stand,” Memphis Press-Scimitar, September 22, 1955, 4; Federal Bureau of Investigation, Prosecutive Report of Investigation Concerning . . . Emmett Till, Appendix A–Trial Transcript, 180–83 (hereafter cited as Trial Transcript).
11. Porteous, “Mrs. Bryant on Stand,” 3; Dan
Wakefield, “Justice in Sumner, Land of the Free,” Nation 181, no. 14 (October 1, 1955): 284.
12. Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (New York: Random House, 2003), 178.
13. Telegram from B. M. Bammett and M. E. Steel to Gerald Chatham, n.d.; J. H. Ashley to Gerald Chatham, September 13, 1955, both in Gerald Chatham Papers, Charles W. Capps Jr. Archives and Museum, Delta State University, Cleveland, Miss. (hereafter cited as Chatham Papers).
14. Trial Transcript, 189.
15. Trial Transcript, 189–90; Porteous, “Mrs. Bryant on Stand,” 3.
16. Porteous, “Mrs. Bryant on Stand,” 3.
17. Trial Transcript, 190–92.
18. Trial Transcript, 193–94; Porteous, “Mrs. Bryant on Stand,” 3. Although Mamie Bradley correctly remembered this questioning as an attempt by defense attorneys to insinuate that she had been party to her son’s death, or perhaps had a hand in faking his death in order to collect life insurance money, decades later she misremembers other defense theories that she says were posed to her while she was on the stand. One was the claim that the NAACP planted a corpse in the river in order to fake the murder. In reality, that was part of the defense’s closing arguments to the jury, not to her. She also wrongly remembered that attorneys accused her of sending Emmett, who they believed was still alive, to live with his grandfather in Detroit. Defense attorneys did not make this accusation at all, but alleged sightings of Till had their origins in posttrial rumors publicized in the press. Bradley responded to the rumors at the time. See “‘A Cruel Hoax’: Till’s Mother,” Memphis Press-Scimitar, September 29, 1955, 4; “Rumors Flying That Till’s Alive Somewhere in Detroit,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, September 30, 1955, 1; Jack Stapleton, “Query Lingers: Is Till Dead?,” Clarksdale (Miss.) Press Register, September 30, 1955, 1; “Yarn About Till Being in City Is Denied by Negro,” Delta Democrat-Times (Greenville, Miss.), September 30, 1955, 1. For Bradley’s later, erroneous recollections, see Keith Beauchamp, prod., The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till (Till Freedom Come Productions, 2005); Till-Mobley and Benson, Death of Innocence, 179–80.
19. Trial Transcript, 195. Mamie Bradley mentioned Breland’s question in her later memoir: “Well, everybody knew where he was about to go with that” question. “The Defender was about as bad as the NAACP to those people. He wanted to try to prejudice the jurors against me” (Till-Mobley and Benson, Death of Innocence, 180).
20. Trial Transcript, 195–99.
21. Trial Transcript, 204–5.
22. Trial Transcript, 205–8.
23. Trial Transcript, 209.
24. Trial Transcript, 210–12.
25. Till-Mobley and Benson, Death of Innocence, 180.
26. Porteous, “Mrs. Bryant Called on Stand,” 3.
27. Trial Transcript, 213.
28. Trial Transcript, 214–20.
29. Trial Transcript, 220–22.
30. Trial Transcript, 220–24. Reed’s account of his experience at the shed changed substantially as he told it later in life, resulting in many conflicting statements. A crucial part of Reed’s court testimony was that he saw J. W. Milam with a gun strapped to his side after Milam exited the shed where Reed heard the beating. He saw Milam get a drink of water from a well and then reenter the shed. Reed never claimed to have been close enough to Milam to talk to him, and was very specific that he saw all of this from a distance, which allowed the defense to challenge Reed’s identification. After the trial and Reed had moved to Chicago, he spoke at a few protest rallies and said nothing to contradict his courtroom testimony, although he did provide other minor details that did not come out at the trial in Sumner.
David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito were the first in decades to contact Reed when they interviewed him in 2001 for their book, Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). This brought Reed back into public view, and other interviews followed, three of which were filmed and featured in Stanley Nelson, prod., The Murder of Emmett Till (Firelight Media, 2002); Beauchamp, Untold Story; and Michael Radutzky, “The Murder of Emmett Till,” 60 Minutes (CBS, October 24, 2004). In each of these, Reed claimed that Milam actually confronted him after Milam left the shed. Milam asked the young sharecropper if he had heard anything, which was an obvious reference to the beating. Reed, seeing the gun on Milam’s side and fearing for his life, denied that he had. When I interviewed Reed in 2007, he told me, as he had Beauchamp, that Mandy Bradley was with him when Milam confronted him and asked them separately if they had heard or seen anything (Willie Reed, author interview, February 6, 2007, Chicago). That Reed never mentioned any conversation with Milam in court (which would have bolstered the prosecution’s case) or even in his speaking engagements once he was safely out of Mississippi makes these later recollections extremely suspect. He may have come to conflate this imagined experience with one he did have with Milam at the defense attorney’s office the day before he testified in court. The attorneys had Milam and another bald man present to see if Reed could correctly pick out Milam. Milam appeared intimidating and had his legs propped up on a desk. This will be discussed in a later chapter.
To complicate things further, Mamie Till-Mobley said in an otherwise very important filmed interview for The Chicago Project in 2001 that Reed was looking through a crack in the shed’s wall and witnessed the men inside split open Emmett’s head with an ax, something Reed had never claimed before (“Interview with Mamie Till-Mobley,” https://sites.google.com/site/mamietillinterview/). When I asked Reed about this in 2007, he assured me that Mamie was incorrect. He had never heard this version of his story before.
31. Trial Transcript, 225–27.
32. Trial Transcript, 227–28.
33. Trial Transcript, 229–33.
34. Trial Transcript, 237–39.
35. Trial Transcript, 239–41.
36. Trial Transcript, 241–42.
37. Trial Transcript, 242–43.
38. Betty Pearson, author interview, February 6, 2006, Sumner, Miss.
39. Porteous, “Mrs. Bryant on Stand,” 2.
40. Trial Transcript, 244–46.
41. Trial Transcript, 247–48.
42. One indication of Willie Reed’s poor memory when reflecting back on the trial was that he forgot his grandfather had been a witness at the proceedings. In my interview with Reed, he insisted that Add Reed never testified, even after I pointed out that he had (Reed, author interview).
43. Trial Transcript, 248–52.
44. William Sorrels, “Uncle of Slain Boy Points Out Milam, Says Body Was Till,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, September 22, 1955, 1.
45. Trial Transcript, 253–58.
46. Trial Transcript, 258.
47. Harry Marsh, “Editors Eye Clock in Awaiting Verdict,” Delta Democrat-Times (Greenville, Miss.), September 23, 1955, 1; John Herbers, author telephone interview, December 15, 2006.
48. Trial Transcript, 258–59.
49. Trial Transcript, 259–60.
50. Trial Transcript, 261–63; Beauchamp, Untold Story. Although Mamie told Keith Beauchamp that she did not hear Carolyn Bryant’s testimony, her memoir is written as though her report is firsthand. See Till-Mobley and Benson, Death of Innocence, 185–86.
51. Trial Transcript, 263–64.
52. Trial Transcript, 263–65.
53. Trial Transcript, 265.
54. Trial Transcript, 266.
55. Trial Transcript, 266–67.
56. Trial Transcript, 267–68.
57. Trial Transcript, 268–73.
58. Trial Transcript, 273–74; Clark Porteous, “Till Murder Case Goes to Jury,” Memphis Press-Scimitar, September 23, 1955, 2.
59. Trial Transcript, 274–75.
60. Trial Transcript, 275–77; Porteous, “Till Murder Case Goes to Jury,” 3.
61. Trial Transcript, 277–79.
62. Trial Transcript, 279–80.
64. This thesis of justifiable homicide has been persuasively argued by researchers David Houck and Matthew Grindy. The prosecution seemed aware, yet worried that this would thwart their effort for a first-degree murder conviction. In Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 96, Houck and Grindy write:
Perhaps the more important question is[:] Why did the prosecution object to Carolyn Bryant’s testimony in the first place? If she was going to testify to a possible sexual assault, wouldn’t this work to its advantage? Upon cross-examination, wouldn’t the prosecution try to show that the offending person in question was in fact Emmett Till? If so, wouldn’t this make liars out of her husband and half-brother [who told Leflore County law officials that they let the boy go after Carolyn said he wasn’t the right one]? At this point, wouldn’t the prosecution case be even stronger? Had the prosecution made a mistake in not beginning its case at the Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market? If members of the Wright and Crawford families could describe what happened when Emmett entered the store, wouldn’t such testimony force Carolyn to take the stand and admit that the offender was Emmett Till? In hindsight it seems that the prosecution was unusually careful in steering clear of what happened on August 24; it stands to reason that they actually feared a justifiable homicide defense—even if they had caught the perpetrators in a big lie.
65. Trial Transcript, 280–82.
66. Trial Transcript, 283–84.
67. James Gunter, “Judge Raps Gavel as Witness Provokes Laughter at Trial,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, September 22, 1955, 33; Gunter, “Early Crowd Fills Courtroom,” 1; Arthur Everett, “Defendants Admit Kidnaping Till Boy but Deny Murder,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, September 22, 1955, 18; Arthur Everett, “Trial in Leflore Must Await Action by Grand Jury,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, September 24, 1955, 8.
68. Telegram from Westheimers Employment Service to Gerald Chatham, September 22, 1955, Chatham Papers.
69. Trial Transcript, 284–85.