by Till-Mobley, Mamie; Benson, Christopher; Jackson, Jesse Rev (FRW)
These voices were heard in Mississippi, where officials started digging in. What began to take shape was just unbelievable. Even Mississippi officials had to admit that the murder of my son was a horrendous crime. Who couldn’t see that? But, when the pressure began to build from outside the state, the people in the state began to build up their defenses. Mississippi’s governor—with the ironic name Hugh White—shot back a telegram to the NAACP to argue that Emmett’s killing was not a lynching, but a “straight out murder.” What a strange debate this was turning out to be. Lynching or murder. As if defining it one way or the other would make a difference. This was the vicious torture/killing of a defenseless boy, by men who had seemed to turn it into a good time. Blood sport. And the only reason Emmett was killed was because he was black. That sure sounded like a lynching to me, and to every other reasonable person who would come to see my son’s killing as part of a pattern. But what difference did it make what it was called, anyway? That was my first reaction to what seemed like a silly little diversion. I have learned, though, that it could make a big difference. And, although they would not be called to testify about the matter, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam ultimately would answer that question for the entire nation.
Meanwhile, some members of the Southern press tried to turn these heartless murderers into heartwarming human-interest stories. They were veterans, we would learn. J. W. Milam was thirty-six and had served in Europe in World War II. Roy Bryant was twenty-four and had served more recently as a paratrooper. Milam had been a lieutenant, given a field commission. He was known as the man who could be counted on to deal with German prisoners, a harsh but efficient interrogator who would not hesitate to use his Colt .45 automatic. He had taken shrapnel and had won a Purple Heart. He was a celebrated killer. The papers also gave a full presentation on the wives and the kids. Each of these men had two sons. And there was a story on the mother of Bryant and Milam, creating public sympathy for her plight. She was proud of her boys, and so troubled by the murder trial.
Meanwhile, one Mississippi newspaper writer called Emmett’s funeral a “Congo circus” and Roy Wilkins a “witch doctor.” Oh, it was getting ugly, and that was not to be the worst of it in what some began to call a new war between the North and the South, a new Civil War, a war of words that was anything but civil. In a statement that showed just how twisted the logic of racism can be, a spokesman for the segregationist White Citizens Councils took the opportunity to point to the murder of my son as yet another justification for keeping the races apart. Emmett wouldn’t have been killed if he hadn’t been allowed to have contact with whites.
The war of words, though, was beginning to have consequences. It was beginning to look like it would have an effect on the course of events. Even while we were sitting in the Saturday funeral service, Tallahatchie County Sheriff H. C. Strider, the man who was supposed to enforce the law, the man who was supposed to investigate the murder, the man who was supposed to assist the prosecution, that man was sending a signal, an indication just where this trial was headed. He really wasn’t sure, he said, that the body pulled from the river was, in fact, the body of Emmett Till. The body might have been in the water too long to have been Emmett’s. Strider said he didn’t even know whether the corpse was black or white, because of the deterioration. Never mind what Strider had done, what he would do. What he had done was to release the body to a black undertaker, which he never would have done if he thought the victim might not be black. What he was about to do was to permit the death certificate to be formally certified by the county with information that contradicted everything he said. The death certificate showed Emmett’s full name, his race, his age, the names of his parents, the date of death, the cause of death. Sheriff Strider signed the certificate affirming all these things on September 1, two days before he gave his outrageous statement to the press. But I didn’t know that at the time. The death certificate wouldn’t be delivered to me for some time to come.
Strider didn’t stop there. “I’m chasing down some evidence now that looks like the killing might have been planned and plotted by the NAACP,” he said. So, instead of doing his duty, chasing down evidence against my son’s killers, he was going way beyond the call of duty to make it impossible to convict these murderers in his county. It was reported that he was concerned about the safety of Bryant and Milam sitting in a Charleston jail. He had seen hate mail with Chicago postmarks. He said there were people planning to drive down to Tallahatchie County and take the law into their own hands. A black lynch mob, I guess. He felt there was a need to call out the National Guard to prevent that kind of mob action. Mississippi newspapers picked up on that one, too, and published stories on why local citizens didn’t need to panic, stories that only drew more attention to the rumors about bands of angry black men riding down from Chicago to seek revenge. Imagine that. My son was the one who was brutalized and murdered, and I was the one getting hate mail in Chicago, all those threatening letters about my call for justice. But here in the inside-out world of Mississippi, it was the white murderers who felt they were being victimized. It was the white people who needed protection from the angry hordes. Of black folks. Incredible. They were going to turn the murder of my son into a case of self-defense—defense of the Mississippi way of life. The state of Mississippi had become the mirror image of the rest of the world. Normal at a glance, until you realized it was all completely backward.
Even Mississippi’s native son William Faulkner had to speak out on how ridiculous things were becoming. He wrote a commentary from Rome that was featured in publications all over the United States, including The Crisis, the NAACP’s magazine. If people cared at all about holding on to our unique way of life in America, if they valued our special form of democracy, he wrote, they were going to have to think about how this country fit, how it would advance, how it would be judged by the rest of the world, a world where whites were in the minority. “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.” Faulkner’s was a lonely voice warning other white Mississippians about the rumble that was on the way. Nobody in the Delta, it seems, was listening.
So Sheriff Strider was showing his true colors, much of the Southern press seemed to be putting its stamp of approval on it, and we refused to let them get away with it. When we got news of Strider’s remarks, Rayfield Mooty shot back right away that his comments smacked of a cover-up. It looked to us like Strider was trying to influence the grand jury, which still hadn’t convened to consider the murder indictment. Rayfield Mooty was good at this sort of thing. He was a union man, an organizer. He was a hard-hitting fighter who understood what it took to win. He was a shrewd negotiator who understood the timing of every aspect of bargaining with other tough people. He knew when to talk, when to walk. He knew when no was the best way to yes. He also knew all the people he needed to call on, in doing what he did so well. Not just the labor people, the civil rights people, and the politicians, but also the reporters, who were so important in getting the message out. Rayfield was just the person we needed to manage all the things we were taking on. I was glad when he worked out a leave of absence from his job. I was impressed when he was able to keep the leave open-ended so that he could be available to help us get through the difficult days ahead.
On Tuesday, September 6, the day we buried Emmett at Burr Oak Cemetery, the Tallahatchie grand jury sitting in Sumner, Mississippi, indicted Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam for Emmett’s murder. There had been a lot of back-and-forth discussion for a while. There was a question whether the trial should be held in Leflore County or Tallahatchie. Emmett was abducted from Papa Mose’s house in Money, which was in Leflore County, but his body was found in Tallahatchie County. That left the question of where the murder had been committed. At some point, it was decided that Tallahatchie would have jurisdiction over the murder, and Leflore would have jurisdiction over the kidn
apping. Since Bryant and Milam had already admitted to the kidnapping, that seemed like it would be an open-and-shut case. The murder trial was another matter altogether.
CHAPTER 16
Mama didn’t want to hear it. She wouldn’t have it. But I had to do it. I had to go to Mississippi for the trial. I told reporters that I was ready to give my life to make sure that what had happened to Emmett would never happen to anyone else. I meant those words.
It was the possibility behind those words, wrapped up in that meaning, that upset Mama so. She saw the very real risk in all this, and she was terrified. She couldn’t bear the thought of it. The threats had been coming in and she knew about them. Even Mayor Daley had received threats because of his support for us. He placed a police guard at my home. But Henry Huff, the NAACP attorney, had encouraged us. A little. He told us he had gotten threats all the time and it never stopped him from going to Mississippi to do the important things he had to do. He would travel with us to Mississippi to advise us. Attorney Huff also had gone public with a statement that he was looking at the possibility of filing a civil action against Bryant and Milam. He wasn’t afraid. Still, Mama didn’t want me to take the chance. She didn’t want to lose her only daughter after all she was going through, all her suffering in the loss of her only grandson.
“I’ve lost one,” she said. “If I lose you, it would be the death of me.”
I had to stop and consider my mother’s feelings about the whole thing. I didn’t want her to be hurt. I didn’t even want to cause her discomfort. But this was something I simply had to do. Something deep inside was telling me that I had business in Mississippi. I felt that I had no choice but to go. And this is what I finally explained to my mother, what I finally got her to accept.
I could see the way things were going down in Mississippi and believed I could make a difference. Sheriff Strider already had shown his hand. Emmett’s identity was going to be an issue. I knew my son. Who could have known him better? I was ready to testify that I knew my son, that I had recognized him, identified him. Maybe, even in Mississippi, there would be twelve people who would consider the testimony of a grieving mother on the stand.
Despite my determination, there was an indication that we were going to have a very difficult time trying to reason with anybody down there. There was a gloating editorial in a Jackson, Mississippi, paper after the murder indictment was handed down. Basically, the paper claimed that the state of Mississippi had gotten back at the NAACP by deciding to put Bryant and Milam on trial for murder. The point the paper was making was that the NAACP didn’t really want a trial at all. According to this paper, the organization was making Emmett’s death into a political issue. The worse the state of Mississippi looked, the better the NAACP would look. There were others—newspaper writers and politicians—who warned that “outside agitators” were threatening the outcome of the case. In other words, by talking about it, by condemning a system of racism that was supported by elected officials, by criticizing a law enforcement officer who was practically standing in the courthouse door blocking all fairness and integrity, by insisting that justice be done, we actually were risking that justice would be undone. How ridiculous. How telling.
First of all, the so-called outside agitators, like me, were only pushing for the conviction of two murderers, Bryant and Milam. If Mississippi citizens really were fair-minded, as the editorial writers argued, then they would have supported a just outcome in this case. They would have done that no matter how much outside agitation there might have been. There would be no way for a fair-minded jury to consider anything else, under any circumstances. After all, a fair-minded person is not going to be petty and make a decision just out of spite, just to make a point to outside agitators. If that was even a possibility, as some people in Mississippi were suggesting, then the people who would be sitting in judgment wouldn’t be fair-minded to begin with. And, if that was the case, then we had very good reason to be concerned, we had the right to speak out, and we had the duty to agitate. That was, after all, the American way.
Instead of serving the ends of justice, it was beginning to seem like the trial was serving the ends of ego. It wasn’t the state of Mississippi versus Bryant and Milam. It was the state of Mississippi against just about everybody, to prove a point: that all the state’s critics were wrong. It made me think that there was some other purpose here. The murder case had two defendants, and a whole state on the defensive. So, it was beginning to seem like a decision had been made that there would be a fair, impartial trial. And then Bryant and Milam would be acquitted. I was getting the sickening feeling that I just might see these murderers go free.
As it turns out, Henry Huff would not make the trip to Mississippi after all. He developed a problem with his foot and couldn’t travel. Daddy and Rayfield would travel with me. I would have to rely on the Mississippi state prosecutors for any legal advice I might need while there. The money we got from the donations at the funeral, all the public events, and from the unions would cover our expenses. Rayfield worked out all the arrangements. We were ready to go. I don’t know that we were ready for what we would encounter. But I was as firm, as decisive as I had ever been. I was channeling my anger now in the direction where it should have been going. I wanted to rip the sheets off the state of Mississippi, shine the light on the night riders, who seemed to be in charge. They had brought the worst of Mississippi racism right to our Chicago doorstep and I was going to take a little Chicago right back down to them. “Someone is going to pay for this,” I declared. “The entire state of Mississippi is going to pay.”
Once we made the decision to go to Mississippi for the trial, there was still another very important thing we had to figure out. Where would we stay? Even under normal circumstances, we really would have had to think about something like that. We would have had to think about it long and hard. There was no hotel or rooming house that we knew about that would accommodate blacks in Sumner, where the trial would take place. If we stayed with other black families in town, well, that could put those families in danger. It was that bad down there, and we surely didn’t want to cause problems for anybody. Of course, we also had to think about our own safety, and that was no small thing, either. Somewhere in all the discussions, somebody was able to work things out with Dr. T.R.M. Howard, a contact of the NAACP, and also William Dawson, the powerful congressman from Chicago. Dr. Howard was the man who had made the statement to the press at Midway Airport in Chicago on the day they found Emmett’s body that “There will be hell to pay in Mississippi.”
Dr. Howard was a very successful surgeon, and he was a major force in the push for civil rights in Mississippi. He had a huge estate in Mound Bayou, an all-black town that had been founded by an ex-slave. It was roughly an hour’s drive from Sumner. Dr. Howard would keep us safe there at his place. As it turns out, all black folks attending the trial from outside Mississippi would stay in Mound Bayou, a number of them at Dr. Howard’s place. Now, to work out how to make it into Mound Bayou. Getting us there was almost like traveling the underground railroad in reverse, with “conductors” and safe houses along the way. There was a whole lot of anxiety about black folks traveling the roads of Mississippi about that time. There was some talk about how state troopers would target black folks who were involved in civil rights organizing. The word was that some officials would pass along license plate numbers to Ku Klux Klan members, who would lay in wait on dark, lonely roads. In Mississippi in the fifties, “driving while black” could be a capital offense.
Our plan involved several steps and, of course, quite a few people to make sure there were no missteps. We knew we could expect a hostile reception by Mississippi white folks. I mean, that whole state was on edge. So everything had to work smoothly. Rayfield, Daddy, and I flew into Memphis on Friday, September 16. When we got off the plane, there was a delegation to receive us, and all I know is that they took us to the home of a prominent black dentist. I say home, but it really looked more like a mansio
n to me, and there was a huge feast prepared in our honor. I was so amazed that black people were living like this in the South. All the places I’d ever seen were, well, they were a lot more modest. In fact, some had been pretty basic. Shotgun houses where you could look through the cracks in the floorboards and see the chickens underneath, scratching and whatnot.
The next morning, Saturday, September 17, we were driven to Clarksdale, Mississippi. The Clarksdale connection had been set up by Bishop Ford. We were taken to the home of his brother. It was Bishop Ford’s brother who saw us safely to Dr. Howard’s house in Mound Bayou. Dr. Howard would look after us from that point until the trial was over.
We learned very quickly that Dr. Howard was as friendly and generous as he was well off. And he was very well off. His huge home rested comfortably on nearly two hundred acres, sort of a farm, sort of a ranch. He also had set up a zoo in Mound Bayou. He felt that black children ought to at least know what it was like to see exotic animals. And where else were they going to be able to do that? He kept monkeys and alligators and peacocks and all sorts of exotic fish. There was a public swimming pool he had built for local residents. And he believed in creating greater opportunities for people who worked for him. He had come to Mound Bayou as chief surgeon at the Taborian Hospital. Later he formed his own Friendship Clinic. He would provide training and tutoring for nurse’s aides, take them up to Memphis, have them tested and certified to become nurses so they could take advantage of the greater job opportunities they might find in the big city. It was fascinating to learn about Dr. Howard, a man who could have rested comfortably with his fortune and never worried about a thing. But he didn’t seem comfortable at all resting with his own while there was so much deprivation around him. He didn’t seem like a man who could just sit back and refuse to get involved. He was committed to making things better.