by Radley Balko
At the time of his death, George Washington Lee was one of the most successful self-made black men in the South. He was born in Edwards, Mississippi, a small town just east of Jackson, to a minister father and sharecropping mother. After graduating high school, Lee moved to New Orleans to work on the shipping docks. Between shifts he took a correspondence course in typesetting, a trade that would later provide a platform for his activism. In the 1930s, he returned to Mississippi to take a job as a minister in Belzoni, a town that would soon see enough civil rights violence to earn the nickname “Bloody Belzoni.”
By the late 1940s, Lee was pastor at four Humphreys County churches, owned a grocery store, and ran a printing press. He was the first black man since Reconstruction to register to vote in the county. In the late 1940s, he and Gus Courts, another black grocer in the county, began a campaign to register the county’s black voters. By 1953, Lee and Courts had registered more than ninety black Belzonians for the polls. It had been decades since a black resident had voted in any election. In retaliation, the local Citizens’ Council—a “main street” offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan—launched bank boycotts against the two men’s businesses. Blacks whose names appeared on voter rolls were threatened. Some were evicted from their homes. Many lost their jobs.
Just a few days before his death, Lee received an explicit threat demanding that he remove his name from the county voter rolls. He refused. Lee’s wife would later say that just hours before her husband was killed, two white men had come to their home. Though she couldn’t hear what they said, the conversation between the men and her husband sounded tense. She later said she believed George Lee knew he was about to be murdered and left the house that night to spare her life.
After Lee’s death, Sheriff Ike Shelton and the Humphreys County coroner convened to investigate. The coroner hastily assembled an inquest jury of white men, all members of the local Citizens’ Council. The inquest determined that Lee’s death was accidental—that all of Lee’s injuries were the result of his car slamming into the frame house. Shelton and the coroner announced that there was no need for further investigation or an autopsy.
Unsatisfied, Lee’s family hired two black physicians to perform a private autopsy. The doctors found hundreds of pieces of buckshot in Lee’s head. When asked to explain the lead in Lee’s skull, Sheriff Shelton responded they were likely pieces of fillings from Lee’s dental work, which he speculated must have been jarred loose by the impact of the crash. The press played along. Jackson’s Clarion-Ledger reported Reverend Lee’s death under the headline, “Negro Leader Dies in Odd Accident.”
After pressure from Lee’s family, the NAACP, and the young activist Medgar Evers, US attorney general Herbert Brownell Jr. ordered the FBI to investigate the matter. FBI agents eventually confirmed what was already obvious to Lee’s family and the civil rights community: Lee had been murdered. They conducted tests on the metal found in Lee’s head and car and confirmed it to be number 3 buckshot.
Shelton had no choice but to concede that Lee’s death may not have been an accident. But he still refused to investigate the crime as racial violence. “If Lee was shot,” he told local journalists, “it was probably by some jealous nigger. [Lee] was quite a ladies’ man.” The Humphreys County coroner convened a second inquest. That inquest changed the original determination about Lee’s death. The new cause: “hemorrhage and asphyxiation from a wound.” The manner: “murder by persons unknown.”
By 1956, the FBI had zeroed in on two white suspects, Peck Ray and Joe Watson, both members of the local Citizens’ Council. But the Justice Department decided the case wasn’t covered under federal civil rights law because the FBI couldn’t definitively determine that Lee was killed for his voting rights activism. Instead, FBI agents presented their evidence to Humphreys County district attorney Stanny Sanders. He refused to prosecute. Sanders argued that the evidence just wasn’t convincing, and even if it was, he doubted any Humphreys County grand jury would indict. He said he also feared that trying the two white men for the murder of a black activist “could cause a deterioration of racial relations.”
The coroner’s role in George Lee’s death was a powerful demonstration of just how inseparable the office was from local law enforcement. When Sheriff Shelton proclaimed Lee’s death an accident, the coroner and his jury affirmed the sheriff’s proclamation, despite ample evidence that Lee had been murdered. When the FBI presented overwhelming proof of a homicide, Shelton changed his mind. The coroner and his jury then changed their opinion to match the sheriff’s new theory. All the while, the jury itself was selected from the same white supremacist group to which Lee’s likely killers belonged. And not surprisingly, the coroner and his jury made little effort to uncover their identities.
By November 1955, the number of registered blacks in Humphreys County dropped to two. Peck Ray and Joe Watson both died free men in the 1970s. No one has ever been tried for George Lee’s murder.
Three months after Lee’s murder, a fisherman found the bloated, disfigured corpse of Emmett Till in the muddy Tallahatchie River. The fourteen-year-old boy’s body had been weighted down with a cotton gin fan that had been tied to his neck with barbed wire.
Today, the general details of Till’s murder are well known, and his story is remembered as a touchstone moment in the story of civil rights in America. But less well known is the role the county coroner and Mississippi’s death investigation system played in covering for the men who murdered him.
On August 24, 1955, Till and some neighborhood friends visited the Bryant Grocery and Meat Market. Till, from Chicago, was visiting family in and around the town of Money, Mississippi. Till bought some gum and chatted briefly with Carolyn Bryant, the white wife of the store’s proprietor. By some accounts, as he and his friends departed, Till allegedly told the woman, “Bye, baby,” and waved. By other accounts, he may have “wolf-whistled.” According to Bryant, Till grabbed her and made sexually suggestive remarks.
Of course, even if Bryant’s worst account of Till’s actions had been true, it amounted at most to harassment or minor assault. But by stepping out of his place, by disrespecting a white woman, Till had broken Southern code. Bryant left the store to retrieve a gun from her car. Till and his friends piled into a car and sped off.
Three days later, Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his half brother, J. W. Milam, broke into the home where Till was staying and abducted him at gunpoint. They’d later tell Look magazine that they beat Till, shot him in the head, and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. The fisherman found Till’s body four days later, early in the morning of August 31.
What happened next would later help a jury set Till’s killers free. Local authorities knew the teen had been missing for days, so once his body was found, both Tallahatchie County Sheriff Clarence Strider and Leflore County Sheriff George Smith had good reason to suspect the corpse was Till’s. Law enforcement summoned the boy’s uncle, Mose Wright, to the riverside to identify the body. Wright would later testify that as he approached the body, he could immediately tell it was his nephew. He also saw officials remove from Till’s hand a ring that had been carved with the initials of Till’s father. Strider called an undertaker to pick up Till’s body and take it to a funeral home in Greenwood. The undertaker would later find that the ring had been inscribed with the initials “LT.” Till’s father was named Louis Till. He had been executed in Italy when he was stationed there with the US Army. The ring was included in the personal effects the army returned to his wife, Mamie, in Chicago. She had given it to Emmett.
Initially, local officials appeared to be outraged by Till’s murder. In the days immediately following the abduction, witnesses identified Bryant and Milam as the men who took Till from his uncle’s home. Sheriff Strider told the New York Post that a coroner’s inquest had been scheduled, and that once the inquest determined Till was murdered in Tallahatchie County, “we’re going to charge those men with murder.”
Yet according to the Leflore
County justice of the peace, the ensuing death investigation was “not exactly an inquest” but “more of a post-mortem.” No one ever requested an autopsy. In fact, Till wouldn’t be autopsied until decades later. Local officials made only the sparest effort to preserve the evidence that would confirm that the body was Till’s. C. A. Strickland, a twelve-year veteran of the Greenwood, Mississippi, police department’s “collision department,” used a low-end field camera to take some snapshots of the body as it lay on a table at the Century Burial Funeral Home. The only physician to examine Till’s body was a local doctor named Luther Otken. He was not a forensic pathologist and had no training in postmortem examinations. At trial, Otken was asked whether he had examined Till’s body. He answered that he was only asked to “view” it. After describing in some detail the body’s condition—“badly swollen, badly bloated” and putting off a “terrific” odor—he testified that the body was “in an advanced state of decomposition.”
Within hours of the discovery of Till’s body, Sheriff Strider made arrangements to have the young boy buried in Mississippi. Till’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, was still in Chicago. By the time she learned that her son’s body had been found, his corpse was already headed to the cemetery. She quickly contacted an uncle in the town of Sumner and asked him to put a stop to the burial. When the uncle arrived at the cemetery, they had already dug Till’s grave.
The family had Till’s body moved to a black-owned funeral home in the town of Tutwiler. (The boarded-up, run-down remains of that funeral home still stand today, along with a sign memorializing the fact that Till’s body had been prepared there.) After preparation, the body was shipped from the depot across the street to Chicago by train.
Till’s murder sparked anger and outrage all over the country. NAACP chief Roy Wilkins issued a public statement declaring that “the state of Mississippi has decided to maintain white supremacy by murdering black children.” The black activist T. R. M Howard declared that there would be “hell to pay.” Editorial boards across the country condemned not only the killing but the entire state of Mississippi.
Such blanket condemnations were understandable, and in many ways justified, but they also provoked a defensive reaction. While Bryant and Milam were initially scorned by local white residents, the criticism from outsiders sparked a backlash. Disgust at Till’s murder morphed into resentment of Northerners and integrationists. J. J. Breland, a local lawyer and leader of one of the Citizens’ Councils, was initially shocked by the killing and declined a request to represent Bryant and Milam. But as the denunciation of Mississippi mounted, he changed his mind. He began to see the case as a front-line battle in the war against integration. “They’re peckerwoods,” he’d later tell the journalist William Huie, using a crude term for poor, uneducated Southern whites. “But, hell, we’ve got to have our Milams to fight our wars and keep our niggahs in line. There ain’t gonna be no integration. There ain’t gonna be no nigger votin’. And the sooner everybody in this country realizes it the better. If any more pressure is put on us, the Tallahatchie won’t hold all the niggers that’ll be thrown into it.”
Led by Sheriff Strider—the same man who had vowed that Till’s killers would be brought to justice—local authorities backtracked and began to publicly question what had previously been a slam-dunk murder prosecution. Strider and the local coroner had locked Till’s coffin with the seal of the state of Mississippi and made Till’s uncle sign a form promising never to open it. Mamie Till Bradley broke that promise. When she opened the coffin, she discovered that her son’s body had been packed with lime, a chemical commonly thought at the time to hasten the process of decomposition. It was a clue of what was to come: local authorities were preparing a defense for Till’s killers.
Outraged not only at her son’s murder but at the way his body had been handled, Mamie Till Bradley followed the lead of George Lee’s widow and insisted on an open-casket funeral. Photos of Emmett Till’s corpse ran in Jet magazine, sparking more national outrage.
On the day of the funeral, Strider gave Till’s killers a gift. He publicly claimed he was never certain that the body recovered from the river was Till’s. It was a baffling thing to say. Strider was the official who released the body to Till’s family. If he had doubts about the identity of the corpse, he not only may have sent Till’s relatives the wrong body, but he would have likely prevented the investigation of a separate murder.
But Strider’s comments achieved their intended effect. They set off a host of conspiracy theories, including claims that Till had never been killed at all, but had been secretly sent back to Chicago or was being hidden by his family—all part of a vast conspiracy among Northern agitators to force integration on Mississippi. The local white residents who initially shunned Bryant and Milam later raised over $10,000 for the two men’s defense—about $90,000 today.
The trial began on September 19, twenty-two days after the murder. The state’s failure to perform an autopsy was a critical part of the defense. Breland seized on that fact, using it to argue to the jury the theory that Sheriff Strider had already advanced in public—that the body recovered from the river was someone other than Emmett Till.
The only doctor to look at Till’s body played along. “From the condition that you saw the body in, in your opinion, could anybody have identified any particular person as being that body?” Breland asked Dr. Otken.
“I don’t think you could,” he responded.
“Now suppose it had been another person’s brother, could he have identified it in your opinion?”
“I doubt it.”
“Or if it had been a person’s son, could a mother have identified that body, in your opinion?”
“I doubt it.”
Breland continued to press. “Doctor, from your experience and study and your familiarity with the medical authorities, what, in your opinion, had been the length of time that the body had been dead, if it had been in the open air?”
“I would say eight to ten days.” Till had only been missing for three. The defense also argued that the state’s strongest piece of physical evidence—the ring—could have been planted. After instilling in the all-white, all-male jury sufficient doubt about Till’s body, Breland closed with an appeal to racial solidarity. “I’m sure that every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men in the face of that [outside] pressure,” he said.
And they did. The jury took just a little over an hour to acquit. One juror later reportedly said, “If we hadn’t stopped to drink pop, it wouldn’t have taken that long.”
The following year, safe from state prosecution by the Constitution’s prohibition on double jeopardy, Bryant and Milam admitted to killing Emmett Till in an interview with Look magazine. They were paid $4,000 for their story.
On June 1, 2005, fifty years after Emmett Till was first pulled from the Tallahatchie, he was exhumed from his grave in Chicago. Surrounded by squad cars, Till’s body was taken to the office of the Cook County, Illinois, medical examiner. The remains were in nearly pristine condition, protected over the years by a glass partition that had been put into place after his mother’s demand for an open-casket funeral. The following day, his body was autopsied for the first time. Doctors also conducted a CT scan. The results of the scan showed metal fragments inside Till’s cranium, indicating that the boy had been shot. DNA testing then confirmed what had been obvious from the beginning—this was the body of Emmett Till. In 2017, more than sixty years after the fact, Carolyn Bryant told historian Timothy B. Tyson that her account of the precipitating incident—that Till had grabbed her and made crude remarks to her—was not true.
Again and again, black Mississippians disappeared, were abducted and never again seen alive, were murdered in the dead of night, or were struck down in broad daylight. And again and again, the state’s compromised death investigation system responded with a cascade of failures—or didn’t respond at all. Between 1956 and 1959 alone, at least ten black men were killed by white
men in Mississippi in racially motivated attacks. None resulted in a conviction. In other cases, while racism was the likely motivation, it’s difficult to say for certain because the local coroner didn’t bother to investigate. And those are merely the deaths that were in some way recorded.
Coroner obstruction also played a large but often overlooked role in what is probably the most notorious crime in Mississippi history—the June 1964 murder of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. It’s one of the most infamous and well-documented incidents of the civil rights era. National anger over the killings moved Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the following year. The subsequent FBI investigation into the murders is the subject of the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning, a 1990 television movie, and a Norman Rockwell painting. But few of the popular depictions of the crime and subsequent investigation have addressed the way the state’s death investigation system ran interference for the mob that carried out the murders.
The story begins in the years leading up to the famous killings with several other suspicious beatings and deaths. All of the victims were black, and all involved the same Neshoba County sheriff’s deputies later implicated in the Freedom Summer killings. The first incident occurred in October 1959, when Officers Lawrence Rainey and Richard Willis shot and killed twenty-seven-year-old Luther Jackson on the side of the road. After shooting Jackson, Rainey radioed the sheriff’s department for help. “Come on down here,” he said. “I think I have killed a nigger.” Despite two witnesses who said Jackson did nothing to provoke the shooting, the Neshoba County coroner quickly ruled the shooting a justifiable homicide. Three years later, Rainey and Neshoba County Sheriff Ethel “Hop” Barnett shot and killed twenty-seven-year-old Otis Nash as they transported him to a mental institution. The deputies claimed Nash tried to grab a gun from the glove compartment of the squad car, even though he was handcuffed in the back seat at the time. The coroner again ruled the killing a justifiable homicide.