Getting Away with Murder

by Chris Crowe

  Justice. Racist style.

  THE GREENWOOD COMMONWEALTH

  New Story On Murder Of Till

  MEMPHIS, Sept. 21 (AP)—The Memphis Press Scimitar said today it had been told that two negro men, last seen in the company of slain Emmett Till, had disappeared.

  The newspaper said reporter Clark Porteous also had unearthed information that could place the Till murder site in Sunflower County, Miss., instead of in Tallahatchie County where the trial of two white men accused of killing the young Chicago negro is under way.

  After the verdict, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant celebrate the jury’s decision with their wives

  Porteous, in a story written from Sumner, Miss., trial scene, said his new information had been obtained from Dr. T. R. M. Howard, a negro physician and a resident of the all-negro town of Mound Bayou, Miss.

  Porteous quoted Howard as saying he could produce four or five witnesses “at the proper time” who would testify that Till’s slaying “probably” occurred in the headquarters shed of a plantation near Drew, Miss. Drew is in Sunflower County.

  Howard also said, Porteous wrote, that his informants told him they had seen four white men and three negroes, including Till, enter the shed in a truck in the early morning hours of Aug. 28. That was the day young Till was taken from the home of his uncle, Mose Wright, near Money, Miss.

  Only the white men were seen in the truck when it left the shed, Howard said. A tarpaulin was spread over its pickup compartment, he said.

  “There are witnesses,” Howard said, “who heard the cries of a boy from the closed shed. They heard blows. They noted with anxiety of soul that the cries gradually decreased until they were heard no more.”

  Howard identified the two negroes reported missing as Leroy Collins and Henry Lee Loggins, plantation workers.

  CHAPTER 7

  AFTERSHOCKS

  Southern racism won a battle in the Emmett Till case, but that would be one of its last victories in its war against integration and racial equality. The murder of a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago and the trial of his killers would turn out to be the beginning of the decline of segregation and Jim Crow rule in the outh.

  While some reporters and well-wishers crowded around local “heroes” Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam in the noisy Sumner courtroom on Friday, September 23, other journalists were busily writing articles and headlines condemning the outcome of the trial. The bad news spread lightning-fast across the country. In a banner headline, one Black newspaper declared the day “Black Friday!” An NAACP news release to the Associated Press called the verdict “as shameful as it is shocking.” Many Blacks and sympathetic whites were disgusted by the news of the acquittal and concerned that the victory signaled a continuation of racial discrimination in the South.

  But not everyone felt so hopeless. An article in the New York Post denounced the biased decision of the Sumner jury but also predicted that the intense media coverage of the trial would have a positive effect on American life. “There can be no rest for Till’s murderers,” the paper stated, “or for those who have rationalized this brutal deed. Like other great episodes in the battle for equality and justice in America, this trial has rocked the world, and nothing can ever be quite the same again—even in Mississippi.” Many people in the North and in the South hoped the newspaper’s prediction would be right.

  Immediately after the trial, civil rights activists used the momentum from the case to cultivate support. On Sunday, September 25, Charles C. Diggs, Jr., and Medgar Evers spoke to a crowd of more than 60,000 people at a rally in Detroit; Roy Wilkins and Mamie Till Bradley addressed 15,000 in New York City; and Simeon Booker, an editor for Jet magazine, talked about the Emmett Till case to a gathering of over 10,000 people in Chicago. These protest rallies continued for several more weeks, earning financial and emotional backing for the NAACP and its fight against racism. Hundreds of thousands of people across the nation turned out for these meetings; by the end of 1955, Emmett’s mother and Mose Wright themselves had spoken to more that 250,000 people.

  In the meantime, the national press took up the cause. An editorial in The Commonweal reported on the murder and the trial, concluding that “By his death Emmitt [sic] Louis Till took racism out of the textbooks and editorials and showed it to the world in its true dimensions. Now the ugliness is there for all the world to see.” Other periodicals reacted to that ugliness. Life magazine published an editorial eulogizing Emmett with passionate, religious language. “Sleep well, Emmett Till,” it read. “You will be avenged. You will be remembered as long as men have tongues to cry against evil.” Newsweek, Time, The Nation, The New Republic, and other national magazines published similar reactions to the murder and trial.

  Even Nobel Prize—winning novelist William Faulkner condemned the racist killing. While on tour outside of the United States, he followed news reports of the case and told reporters, “Perhaps the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Northern child is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive. Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive and probably won’t.“ Like Faulkner, nearly all Americans who read newspapers, watched TV, or listened to the radio knew about the Emmett Till case, and the widespread press made many white Americans more supportive than ever of equal rights for Blacks.

  Medgar Evers, State Secretary for the NAACP in Jackson, Mississippi, a few weeks before Emmett Till’s murder

  Emmett’s mother surrounded by reporters from the trial

  Black Americans, of course, were already keenly aware of their second-class status in U.S. society, but before the Emmett Till case, no single event had ever generated enough support, enough publicity, or enough outrage to unify a large-scale effort to oppose segregation. The unification began when Jet magazine published its article about Emmett’s murder along with the photo of Emmett in his casket. John H. Johnson, publisher of the magazine, recalled the impact it had on Blacks: “The issue [of Jet], which went out on sale on September 15, 1955, sold out immediately and did as much as any other event to traumatize Black America and prepare the way for the Freedom Movement of the sixties.”

  Many young Blacks were traumatized by the story. In her memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody, who was fourteen when Emmett was murdered, explained that whatever innocence she might have had about being Black in Mississippi vanished when she heard about the crime. She wrote, “Before Emmett Till’s murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me—the fear of being killed just because I was Black. This was the worst of my fears. I knew once I got food, the fear of starving to death would leave. I was also told that if I were a good girl, I wouldn’t have to fear the Devil or hell. But I didn’t know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period was enough, I thought.” Many other Blacks felt the same way, and their fear—and outrage at having to be afraid—inspired them to mobilize against racism.

  Joyce Ladner was a young woman when Emmett was murdered, and her reaction to his death eventually led to her involvement in the civil rights movement, where she met many other young Black women who had also been motivated by the case. In a Brookings National Issues Forum in 2000, Ladner discussed the effects the Jet magazine photo and the news of the trial had on her and others. “When I met people like Judy [Richardson] and SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] in 1962, 63, all of us remembered the photograph of Emmett Till’s face, lying in the coffin, [in] Jet magazine.... Almost to a person, every one of my SNCC friends I’ve known 40 years can recall that photograph.... That galvanized a generation as a symbol—that was our symbol—that if they did it to him, they could do it to us.”

  The nationwide fallout from the Emmett Till case brought together politicians, NAACP workers, civil rights activists, church lead
ers, and ordinary Black and white citizens. The senseless murder of the boy from Chicago was the last straw for all people opposed to racism. They knew that if they were ever to have freedom in their own land, they would have to take action soon. They knew that if they wanted to put an end to senseless murders, lynchings, and intimidation, they would have to make a stand. They knew that if they wanted to provide better lives for their children, they would have to put an end to discrimination, prejudice, and hatred. The trial of Emmett’s killers was the necessary and final catalyst for a united effort against racial discrimination in America.

  Rosa Parks, a forty-two-year-old seamstress from Montgomery, Alabama, was among those horrified and inspired by Emmett’s murder. The ugliness of racism was nothing new to this lifelong resident of the Deep South—she had worked with the NAACP for some time—but the brutal murder of a child tore her heart. Parks’s biographer, Douglas Brinkley, wrote that she cried when she saw the awful Jet magazine photo and that “the sight of it made her phys ically ill.... With the murder of Emmett Till, a new era of defiance in the name of civil rights was at hand.“

  Rosa Parks riding a city bus in 1956, after the Montgomery bus boycott

  The Emmett Till case was not the sole cause of the civil rights movement, but it was the final indignity that caused the flood of outrage to overflow the dam of racial injustice. Brinkley points out that Rosa Parks did not plan to initiate a bus boycott on December 1, 1955, but her own weariness from a lifetime of discrimination made her determined not to surrender her seat to a white person on a Montgomery city bus that evening. “A lifetime’s education in injustice—” wrote Brinkley, “from her grandfather’s nightly vigils to the murder of Emmett Till—had strengthened her resolve to act when the time came.” Parks’s refusal to abide by the segregated busing laws in Montgomery led to the 381-day boycott of the city bus system, a boycott that brought Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., to prominence, brought an end to segregated public transportation in Alabama, and marked the first nationally publicized action in the modern civil rights movement.

  While progress was being made in the civil rights movement, the final threads of the Emmett Till case were unraveling. After their trial in September, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam were sent back to jail to await a Leflore County grand jury’s decision on their kidnapping charges. Even though both men had confessed to kidnapping Emmett, in November, the grand jury refused to indict them for the crime, and they were set free.

  The life Bryant and Milam returned to in the Delta after the trial had changed. Even though many whites considered them heroes, Black residents knew them to be cold-blooded killers and boycotted Bryant’s store in Money and the other local businesses owned by Milam. Finances became tight for the two men and their families, and they had difficulty securing loans to keep their businesses afloat. Owing perhaps to their desperate need for money and to their racist arrogance, in December 1955, the two half brothers agreed to sell their story to Look magazine reporter William Bradford Huie. For $3,500, they granted Huie a series of interviews in the presence of their lawyers, and in those interviews they described why and how they murdered Emmett Till. Because they had already been acquitted of the crime, Bryant and Milam knew they could not be retried for the murder, no matter what details they might confess. They were careful, however, not to implicate anyone else in their story.

  The report of that interview, “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” the last media blast of the Emmett Till case, appeared in the January 24, 1956, issue of Look magazine. The sensational article was reprinted in Reader’s Digest, and a more detailed version of it appeared in Huie’s book Wolf Whistle and Other Stories in 1959.

  Milam told Huie that the brothers’ original intention was to “just whip him ... and scare some sense into him.“ After kidnapping Emmett, they drove the dusty back roads of the Delta looking for a good place to beat and intimidate the boy, but their plan, according to Milam, didn’t work. ”We never were able to scare him. They [Northern rabble-rousers] had just filled him so full of that poison that he was hopeless.“ By then it was dawn, and the men drove to Leslie Milam’s plantation and dragged Emmett into a shed where they pistol-whipped his face and head. Throughout the beating, said the killers, Emmett remained defiant.

  J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant leave the Leflore County courthouse in Greenwood, Mississippi, after posting bail for their kidnapping charges

  “Well, what could we do?” Milam asked Huie. “He was hopeless.... I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice.... When a nigger even gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he’s tired o’ livin‘. I’m likely to kill him.... ’Chicago boy,‘I said, ’I’m tired of ‘em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddamn you, I’m going to make an example of you—just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.’”

  The two men told Huie how they made Emmett load a seventy-four-pound cotton gin fan into the back of their pickup. Then they forced Emmett to get into the truck, and they drove him to a secluded spot on the Tallahatchie River. It was a little after 7:00 Sunday morning when they pulled to a stop on the banks of the river. Bryant and Milam ordered Emmett to get out of the truck and strip off his clothes. According to the killers’ story, he obeyed and stood, naked, before the two white men.

  At gunpoint, Milam challenged the boy. “You still as good as I am?”

  Milam said Emmett’s answer was “Yeah.”

  “You’ve still ‘had’ white women?”

  “Yeah,” said Emmett.

  That was all the enraged Milam needed to hear. He squeezed the trigger of his .45 pistol and fired an expanding bullet into Emmett’s skull, killing him instantly. Then, according to their interview, they used barbed wire to tie the cotton gin fan around Emmett’s neck and threw him into the muddy green water of the river.

  Bryant and Milam’s bold national confession in Look drew responses from all over the country. Most Blacks and whites were furious with the two men, but one letter to the editor of Look revealed that even after all that had happened in the months following the trial, racial intolerance still thrived in the hearts of some Americans. After criticizing the magazine for publishing the interview, the racist letter writer said, “Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam did what had to be done and their courage in taking the course they did is to be commended. To have followed any other course would have been unrealistic, cowardly and not in the best interests of their family or country.”

  Fortunately, that kind of attitude was in the minority. Most Southern whites, including those who had defended Bryant and Milam, shared the opinion of Will Campbell, the director of religious life at the University of Mississippi. In an interview, he said that those two men, who had once been considered heroes by many of their white neighbors, “were nobodies after that. They were disgraced. Which is a strange dichotomy in Southern society, that while they were being accused of this crime, we have to rally to their defense and take up money and hire lawyers and all the rest. But then when it’s over, ‘Look, why did you have to disgrace us like that? Now get out of town, we really don’t want to see you again.’” Their chilling admission to the murder of a boy caused them to be ostracized by their community, and within a few years, both Bryant and Milam would leave Mississippi.

  The Look magazine interview had an unintended effect on Blacks. In addition to proving, beyond a doubt, that Bryant and Milam had kidnapped and murdered Emmett Till, it solidified their commitment to the fight for civil rights. If society had degenerated to the point where white men could murder a Black boy and then brag about it in a national magazine, something had to be done. In a television interview thirty years after the trial, African American historian Tim Black emphasized the impact of the Look article: “When [Bryant and Milam] made that story public of how they brutalized this boy because he would not say he was afraid of them as white people, that just turned us all on; it gave us new energy to get into it, so it was a stimulant, a major stimulant, in push
ing people further and deeper into the civil rights movement.” By then, January 1955, there was no turning back. Rosa Parks had started the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King, Jr., had emerged as a powerful and charismatic leader of the new civil rights movement, and Blacks nationwide were committed to doing whatever they could to make equality the law of the land.

  In the years that followed the Look article, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam lived the rest of their lives in shame and anonymity. Their wives divorced them, and the two half brothers never regained their reputations or livelihoods in Mississippi. And, perhaps not surprisingly, both men remained unrepentant to the end of their lives. In a later interview with Huie, Milam said that even though the murder of Emmett Till had caused him lots of problems, he didn’t regret the killing. In 1993, a resentful Roy Bryant told Plater Robinson that he was tired of hearing about the Emmett Till story. “Let that goddamn stuff die,” he snapped when the reporter asked about Emmett. “Look what they’re doing with Beckwith 2 down there now ... And now they want to get me, so the hell with ‘em.... Lot of people made a lot of money out of it; I ain’t made a damn nickel.”

  Milam died in 1980, Bryant in 1994.

  The courageous Blacks who testified against Milam and Bryant had to leave Mississippi soon after the trial. Willie Reed and his family moved to Chicago. Mose Wright accepted a job in Albany, New York, and gave away Dallas, “the best dog in seven states,“ and abandoned his car at a train depot before saying good-bye to Mississippi forever.

  From left to right: Willie Reed, Walter Billups, Amanda Bradley, and Mose Wright wait in the witness room