by Till-Mobley, Mamie; Benson, Christopher; Jackson, Jesse Rev (FRW)
For Willie, the relief would not last long, though. Soon, he was rushed to Michael Reese Hospital. He had suffered a nervous breakdown.
I also collapsed. The pressure had been incredible. I felt like I had been carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders and it was pure adrenaline that had helped me carry that weight. But it simply got to be too much for me. I was exhausted and had to be put under a doctor’s care.
So many lives were changed by what happened there in Tallahatchie County. In fact, the whole county went through changes. Nearly a quarter of the entire population had left by the end of the 1950s. But there was something else that was transforming.
I’m no historian. But you don’t have to be a historian to tell about the history you have lived. You just need a long memory. There are things that happened to me a long time ago that I will never forget. There are things that happened because of the things that happened to me that I will always consider.
There was no justice for me in Mississippi. Nothing about that trial was even remotely related to justice. I had a door slammed in my face. To add insult to injury, there were Southern papers and Southern politicians who had the nerve to suggest that things would have been different if we had kept our mouths shut. If only I hadn’t let the world see Emmett the way they had sent him home to me. If only the NAACP hadn’t demanded justice in a little country courthouse down there in Mississippi. If it hadn’t been for us, there could have been a different outcome in the murder trial of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam. So, it was our fault, the “outside agitators.” But what did they base that opinion on? You didn’t have to look that far to find other cases where whites had gotten clean away with murder. In fact, the same week the Sumner jury acquitted Bryant and Milam, a grand jury in Brookhaven failed to indict any of the three white men accused of murdering Lamar Smith in broad daylight. No witnesses would come forward.
I never felt that I had done the wrong thing by exposing what was going on down there. And I never will. It was the outside agitators who revealed to the world, not only the injustice I had suffered, but also the unfairness blacks were suffering every single day of the year. Even so, it would take time for me to realize everything that had happened down there in Sumner, Mississippi. Those lawyers, J. J. Breland and John Whitten and the rest, hadn’t really defended Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam so much as they had defended a way of life. Tallahatchie County was like so many other places in the Delta. The places they had always been. Tallahatchie County had a population of eleven thousand whites and nineteen thousand blacks. Almost twice as many blacks as whites, but not a single black person in that entire county was registered to vote. It was only through intimidation that white folks were able to hold on to their power and all that their power brought them. That must have been clear to somebody like Sheriff H. C. Strider. I can’t imagine that he ever would have come into office if the black majority down there had just been allowed to vote. So, the last thing people like Breland and Whitten wanted was to have the spotlight shine on their dirty little secret, to have anyone coming in from the outside telling them they couldn’t do the only thing they were used to doing: stay in power.
That’s not to say that racism wasn’t a factor. The murder of my son, after all, was a hate crime. And the acquittal of Bryant and Milam had as much to do with racism as anything. That point would be made crystal clear in an unpublished master’s thesis produced in 1963 by Hugh Stephen Whitaker at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Whitaker was sixteen years old at the time of the murder trial. As a white Tallahatchie County resident, he was able to talk to a lot of the key people involved in the trial, including jurors, defense attorneys, and Special Prosecutor Robert Smith. What Whitaker found might shock some people, but it wouldn’t surprise those of us—the black reporters and civil rights workers and witnesses—who sat in that courtroom and felt the heat.
Whitaker would write that the defense team felt they had won the case once the jury was selected. They had relied on Strider and the newly elected sheriff, Harry Dogan, who would replace Strider. These men helped the defense lawyers screen prospective jurors, since these men knew just about everybody in the county. As a result, the defense team knew more about the jury than the prosecutors did. The jurors weren’t really affected at all by the pretrial publicity, according to Whitaker. And, even though the jurors had been instructed by the judge not to talk about the case with anyone, there were wide rumors around Sumner that they were contacted by members of the White Citizens Councils to vote “the right way.” Still, even this did not have an effect on them. In fact, the evidence didn’t move the jurors one way or the other. According to Whitaker’s interviews, they were unaffected by the evidence, by their peers, by the pressure of the press and the “outside agitators.” It was like they lived in a cocoon, insulated by their own racism. They had heard Carolyn Bryant’s fantastic account long before she gave it in court, long before that testimony made it around town on the rumor mill. Whitaker would write that the jurors didn’t doubt that Bryant and Milam had killed Emmett. They didn’t doubt that at all. The jurors heard one thing that was important to them, and that was a white woman’s claim that a black boy had insulted her. That was all they needed to hear. It was all they needed to know. In the end, according to Whitaker, it was all they would consider in making up their minds.
So it looks like the jury would have voted the same way even if the NAACP and I hadn’t made all that noise in the days and weeks leading up to the trial. The outcome would have been no different even if I had chosen to stay quiet, as thousands of other black people had done when their loved ones were lynched. But there would have been one very important difference if I had not done anything, or said anything about Emmett’s murder: No one else would have known about it, and no one else would have been moved to action because of it.
I had to consider all of that, as I went through the lineup of speaking appearances arranged by the NAACP that October. I was on the cusp of my thirty-fourth birthday, on the brink of being reborn. I had been so naive for so much of my life. I had lost my darling son and my own innocence all at the same time. But I hadn’t been alone. The entire country had been forced to open its eyes, too.
Emmett represented so many things to so many people. To Bryant and Milam, he had represented everything they had refused to recognize in black people. He was confident and self-assured, and he carried himself with a certain dignity they felt they had to beat down, beat back, beat to a bloody pulp. To little black children who gazed upon the images of my son in the pages of Jet magazine, Emmett was the face of a harsh reality that left no place to hide. To all black people, he was a reminder of the common problem we faced in this country, whether we lived in the North or the South. He was a unifying symbol. And his name would be spoken at so many rallies and fund-raisers and even in congressional hearings.
We were in the television age now, and the media had seen the light. Many of the reporters who covered that travesty in Mississippi had been awakened to the great social and legal injustices confronting us. These were hard things to forget. And injustice would be a recurring theme playing out in the months and years to come. Those people down there in Mississippi thought that they could stage-manage a trial, and force people to accept their warped version of reality. They thought wrong. Those lawyers down in Mississippi figured they had stopped the NAACP in its tracks. They miscalculated. They might have won a battle, but they were about to lose the war.
Things would never be the same again. No one could plead ignorance. Everyone had to take responsibility for what our society had become. Anybody who did anything to make it happen. Anybody who did nothing to stop it from happening. There could no longer be any innocent bystanders. For an entire nation, the murder of Emmett Till marked the death of innocence.
CHAPTER 21
The story broke around the middle of October. We were in Washington. And that kind of made sense, the timing and all. This was all about politics, every last part of it: the trial,
the intimidation, and now the revelation.
The Washington trip had been arranged as part of a national drive to push for an end to racial intolerance. It was called the “Spiritual Mobilization,” and we would travel to a number of cities to appeal to people to get involved and, of course, to contribute to the cause. It was a very busy and stressful time. I was making two or even three speeches in a single day. Rayfield, Aunt Lizzy, and Bishop Isaiah Roberts traveled with me to Washington, so that helped me a lot. Now, everyone had always known that getting the federal government involved would be a very important part of the drive. We had asked for a meeting with Maxwell Raab. He was the secretary to President Eisenhower’s cabinet and the White House aide on minority affairs. We were told that Raab had a very heavy schedule and that he would not be able to meet with us. But, at least there had been a response. President Eisenhower never even answered the telegram I had sent asking for his help with a federal investigation of Emmett’s murder.
We also had wanted to schedule a hearing before the Senate Subcommittee on Civil Rights while we were in Washington. But we were sent regrets by Senator Thomas Hennings, the chairman of that subcommittee. Unfortunately, we were told, there would be no session during our visit. There was no word on any future hearings. That really shouldn’t have surprised us. The chairman of the full committee, the one that basically controlled Senator Hennings’s subcommittee, was Mississippi’s own Senator James O. Eastland, who had fought tooth and nail to resist any desegregation in his state. I would find out that Senator Eastland had another card up his sleeve in this dirty little political game, and he would use his government connections to play it.
Despite the fact that the federal government was leaving us out in the cold, the main event of our trip would go very well. About six thousand people would attend the mass meeting that had been scheduled. A second meeting would be arranged for the overflow crowd of more than four thousand.
The headline for the day, though, would not be the story about mass meetings or racial intolerance or calls for government action. The headline would be a story that was leaked to the Southern press. It was the story of Louis Till. It finally would clear up for me what the army had meant when it had classified his cause of death as “willful misconduct.” But it would do a whole lot more than that. Private Louis Till was court-martialed and, on February 17, 1944, he was found guilty of murdering an Italian woman and raping two others. He was hanged on July 2, 1945, and buried in a military cemetery in Naples. The execution order was signed by General Dwight David Eisenhower.
The uproar was deafening. That story was used in Mississippi just the way it was intended by the people who leaked it. For people who didn’t know any better, it would provide the justification for everything that happened to Emmett. The suggestion was clear: “Like father, like son.” That story fed the most horrible stereotypes and played on the greatest fear white Southerners had about desegregation. It was an irrational notion that more contact between blacks and whites would mean greater risk for white women. Oh, it was terrible.
It was so unfair, too. Especially since these same records that had been given so easily to reporters were never released to me. I had tried. And that was on the record. Among the other documents that were released with this revelation was a 1948 letter. It had been written by the lawyer Joseph Tobias on my behalf and it sought an explanation of why benefits were cut off. The records that were coming out now showed why I could never get an explanation from the army, from Louis Till’s commanding officer, or from the chaplain. Even many years later, when I filed a Freedom of Information Act request, the documents I received were so censored that it wound up being a waste of my money. The army, it seems, only released this kind of information to the next of kin. Louis and I had been separated, so he had listed an uncle as his next of kin. The only reason I ever got any information at all was that I was listed on the allotment Louis had worked out. But that was it. After our efforts failed in 1948, I had settled into the uncertainty of it all, feeling that I would never find out what had happened. I never imagined I would find out like this.
Ethel Payne, a writer at the Chicago Defender, dug into the matter. She reported that the judge advocate general would never release such information to the press, and hadn’t done it in this case. The army had rigid rules about the release of records like those. The reporters who broke the story wound up giving credit where it was due: Senator Eastland had helped.
This was an outrage and, while I was caught off guard in Washington trying to answer reporters’ questions while preparing for the speech later that day, Attorney William Henry Huff was in Chicago blaming Mississippi’s two senators, Eastland and John Stennis, for the controversy. The whole business was insulting, unfair, and misleading. And, it seems, it was starting to cause a breach in my relationship with the NAACP. Roy Wilkins reportedly told someone he was glad he hadn’t gotten caught in that “Louis Till trap.” Apparently, he had intended to include a reference to Louis and his service to the country in some remarks he had been planning to make. I was demoralized by something that was not even my fault, and certainly wasn’t Emmett’s. In a strange way, he was being held to account for a father he never knew. Even worse, there was some talk that Louis himself could have been misjudged.
The most terrible stories were told to me. Nightmare stories about how a number of black soldiers were treated during World War II. With the revelation about Louis, I began to hear from his army friends. The unit he served in was an all-black unit made up mostly of fellows from the Chicago area, so it was not hard for them to locate me. Louis’s friends told me they thought he had gotten set up. First, they didn’t believe Louis was capable of doing what he was accused of doing. Second, there was a larger problem the black soldiers were dealing with. It was a problem that had followed them overseas from the United States. Gene’s brother, Wealthy, talked about it, too. He had served in Europe and recalled how black soldiers would get roused at three in the morning. Military police would look over the black soldiers in formation. The MPs would bring in local women who would point out someone in the line. One night, Wealthy recalled, a woman was walking the line and stopped when she got to his section of the formation. He knew what that meant and he was terrified. He began to sweat, knowing that black soldiers who got pointed out at three in the morning were always taken away. They were not brought back. He knew he hadn’t done anything wrong, but that didn’t seem to matter. As it turned out, the woman pointed to the man standing next to Wealthy, not that he found a whole lot of relief in that. That man was taken away and he was never seen again. Wealthy was distressed about it. The man slept in the bunk next to his, and Wealthy knew the man had been in his bunk every night.
It seemed that the army really didn’t need much more proof than a late-night identification to take black soldiers out. But based on what Louis’s friends told me, it seemed the real offense wasn’t always against white women. Often, it really was against white men. A number of women in those late-night lineups, it seems, were only identifying the men who slept with them, not men they were accusing of rape. There were rules about soldiers fraternizing with local women—white women. But for many of the white officers and soldiers from the South, there also was a custom about that sort of thing. They wouldn’t tolerate seeing a black soldier with even a picture of a white woman, let alone a relationship. There were friends of Louis’s in the service who wondered whether he really was guilty. Like Wealthy had wondered about that fellow in the bunk next to his. But they could only wonder.
Louis died before he could see what would happen to his son. Bo died before he could learn about what had happened to his father. Yet they were connected in ways that ran as deep as their heritage, as long as their bloodline. I was left behind to think about all the ways they were connected. J. W. Milam had served in World War II. He had become a lieutenant. He was just the kind of tough guy the army would honor, reward with a field commission. I couldn’t help thinking about so many Milams a
nd Bryants in the armed services, good ole boys. I couldn’t help thinking about how much power these men would have had over the lives of black soldiers, just as they would one day have again back home on their farms and their plantations. I couldn’t help thinking about all of that, and how maybe, just maybe, Louis Till had been set up, as his friends believed. So, in the end, Eastland and his supporters just might have been right after all. Maybe Emmett did wind up like his father, an echo of what had happened ten years earlier. Maybe they both were lynched.
The timing of the revelation could not have been better for people with the worst of intentions. On November 8, 1955, the grand jury of Leflore County, Mississippi, sat to consider whether to indict Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam in Emmett’s kidnapping. Under Mississippi law at the time, Bryant and Milam could have faced ten years in prison, or even death, if convicted. Bryant had admitted to the kidnapping when he was questioned by Leflore County Sheriff George Smith. Milam admitted to it when he was questioned by Smith’s deputy, John Ed Cothran. The sheriff and the deputy were both called to testify at the grand jury hearing in Greenwood. Papa Mose and Willie Reed also were called and they both traveled back to Mississippi from Chicago to testify. Papa Mose spent about twenty-four minutes with the grand jury, and Willie spent about nineteen. In the end, it seemed like a waste of time. Nothing seemed to matter to whites in the Delta. Despite the testimony, despite the admission by Bryant and Milam, the grand jury refused to indict. This was outrageous even to people who might have quibbled over whether there had been a strong enough case for conviction in the murder trial. This had been an open-and-shut case. But, of course, the grand jury sat within a couple of weeks of the Louis Till story, which had been widely circulated in the area. And that might have been all the “evidence” that was needed for people who wanted to rush to judgment. I was physically ill. The Chicago Sun-Times published an editorial on the Greenwood grand jury that pretty much said it all: “There was no lack of evidence that would have justified an indictment by any grand jury.… Somewhere along the line something went wrong—and it was a shameful, evil wrong.”