Harold Titus's Blog - Posts Tagged "henry-loggins"
Civil Rights -- Emmett Till -- Part Three
We have only what Bryant and Milam told William Bradford Huie after the two murderers had been acquitted of Emmett Till’s murder.
The men portrayed Till as a sexually precocious youth who boasted of "having white women." Milam gave voice to the backed-in-a-corner rage of Southern white resistance. "What else could we do?" he said. "I like niggers—in their place—I know how to work 'em. But … they ain't gonna go to school with my kids. And when a nigger gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he's tired o' livin'. I'm likely to kill him. Me and my folks fought for this country, and we got some rights. … I just made up my mind. 'Chicago boy,' I said, 'I'm tired of 'em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I'm going to make an example of you—just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand'" (Sparkman 1).
Here is what Huie authored in Look Magazine.
They drove back to Milam's house at Glendora, and by now it was 5 a.m.. They had been driving nearly three hours, with Milam and Bryant in the cab and Bobo lying in the back.
Bobo wasn't afraid of them! He was tough as they were. He didn't think they had the guts to kill him.
Milam: "We were never able to scare him. They had just filled him so full of that poison that he was hopeless."
Back of Milam's home is a tool house, with two rooms each about 12 feet square. They took him in there and began "whipping" him, first Milam then Bryant smashing him across the head with those .45's. Pistol-whipping: a court-martial offense in the Army... but MP's have been known to do it.... And Milam got information out of German prisoners this way.
But under these blows Bobo never hollered -- and he kept making the perfect speeches to insure martyrdom.
Bobo: "You bastards, I'm not afraid of you. I'm as good as you are. I've 'had' white women. My grandmother was a white woman."
Milam: "Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless. I'm no bully; I never hurt a nigger in my life. I like niggers -- in their place -- I know how to work 'em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain't gonna vote where I live. If they did, they'd control the government. They ain't gonna go to school with my kids. And when a nigger gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he's tired o' livin'. I'm likely to kill him. Me and my folks fought for this country, and we got some rights. I stood there in that shed and listened to that nigger throw that poison at me, and I just made up my mind. 'Chicago boy,' I said, 'I'm tired of 'em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I'm going to make an example of you -- just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.'"
So Big Milam decided to act. He needed a weight. He tried to think of where he could get an anvil. Then he remembered a gin which had installed new equipment. He had seen two men lifting a discarded fan, a metal fan three feet high and circular, used in ginning cotton.
Bobo wasn't bleeding much. Pistol-whipping bruises more than it cuts. They ordered him back in the truck and headed west again. They passed through Doddsville, went into the Progressive Ginning Company. This gin is 3.4 miles east of Boyle: Boyle is two miles south of Cleveland. The road to this gin turns left off U.S. 61, after you cross the bayou bridge south of Boyle.
Milam: "When we got to that gin, it was daylight, and I was worried for the first time. Somebody might see us and accuse us of stealing the fan."
Bryant and Big Milam stood aside while Bobo loaded the fan. Weight: 74 pounds. The youth still thought they were bluffing.
They drove back to Glendora, then north toward Swan Lake and crossed the "new bridge" over the Tallahatchie. At the east end of this bridge, they turned right, along a dirt road which parallels the river. After about two miles, they crossed the property of L.W. Boyce, passing near his house.
About 1.5 miles southeast of the Boyce home is a lonely spot where Big Milam has hunted squirrels. The river bank is steep. The truck stopped 30 yards from the water.
Big Milam ordered Bobo to pick up the fan.
He staggered under its weight... carried it to the river bank. They stood silently... just hating one another.
Milam: "Take off your clothes."
Slowly, Bobo pulled off his shoes, his socks. He stood up, unbuttoned his shirt, dropped his pants, his shorts.
He stood there naked.
It was Sunday morning, a little before 7.
Milam: "You still as good as I am?"
Bobo: "Yeah."
Milam: "You still 'had' white women?"
Bobo: "Yeah."
That big .45 jumped in Big Milam's hand. The youth turned to catch that big, expanding bullet at his right ear. He dropped.
They barb-wired the gin fan to his neck, rolled him into 20 feet of water.
For three hours that morning, there was a fire in Big Milam's back yard: Bobo's crepe soled shoes were hard to burn.
Seventy-two hours later -- eight miles downstream -- boys were fishing. They saw feet sticking out of the water. Bobo (Huie 1-14)
Here is a different version of the killing.
The men drove to a barn on the farm of Leslie Milam, J.W. Milam’s brother, near Drew, Mississippi.
Willie Reed, who later would testify for the prosecution, saw at about 6:00 a.m. a white and green Chevrolet truck, with four white men riding in the cab and three black men standing in the back of the truck. Reed saw an eighth person, a black boy (presumably Till), seated in the bed of the truck. The truck, according to Reed, parked in front of the barn. Minutes later, he said, he heard "hollering" and what sounded like "whipping" coming from the barn. (In later interviews, Reed identified four men he saw entering the barn: Bryant and Milam, as well as two black men, including Levi "Too Tight" Collins (a truck driver for Milam).
Despite a different version of events offered by Bryant and Milam in their 1956 interview, Till was most likely shot and killed in Leslie Milam's barn.
…
After the pickup left the farm, it stopped briefly at J. W. Milam's store in Glendora. There, a witness noticed "blood running out of the bed of the truck and pooling on the ground." When the dripping blood was pointed out to Milam, when he returned to his truck, J. W. claimed that he killed a deer. When Milam was told it was not deer season, he allegedly pulled back the tarpaulin in the bed to reveal Till's body and said, "This is what happens to smart niggers." [FBI report, p. 64] Milam, Bryant, and the others (including "Too Tight" Collins and Otha Johnson) loaded themselves back into the truck and left town.
Bryant and Milam decided to throw Till's body into the Tallahatchie River. Before doing so, they stopped at a ginning company to steal a heavy fan that they planned to use to weight down the corpse. They drove north toward Swan Lake, crossed the bridge over the Tallahatchie, and stopped on a dirt road, near a steep bank in the river. The men tied the fan to Till's neck with barbed wire and rolled the dead fourteen-year-old into the river.
Three days later and eight miles downstream, a boy named Robert Hodges, who was fishing in the Tallahatchie, saw feet sticking out of the water. The badly beaten and bloated body was pulled from the river and loaded into a boat. Hodges and others observed a silver ring on one of the body's fingers. Called to the scene, Mose Wright looked into the boat on the riverbank and identified the body of Emmett Till. A black undertaker and his assistant lifted Till's body from the boat and placed it in a casket. The undertaker's assistant gave the ring to Wright, who later handed it over to LeFlore County Deputy Sheriff John Ed Cothran.
…
Within a day after Till's disappearance, both Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam had been arrested for his abduction. Both men admitted to taking Till from Wright's home, but insisted that they let him go in Money (Linder 16-18).
Nine years after the Huie Look Magazine article had been printed, journalist Randy Sparkman wrote: “So far, two surviving possible participants have emerged …: Henry Lee Loggins, 81, one of three African-Americans who worked for Milam and reportedly helped transport Till, witnessed his torment, and cleaned up the gore; and Carolyn Bryant Donham, 71, who may have waited in the car during the kidnapping” (Sparkman 2).
Passages cited:
Huie, William Bradford. “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi.” Look, January 1956. Web.
Linder, Douglass O. “The Emmett Till Murder Trial: An Account.” 2012. Web.
Sparkman, Randy. “The Murder of Emmett Till: The 49-Year-Old Story of the Crime and How It Came to Be Told.” Slate, June 21, 2005. Web. < http://www.slate.com/articles/news_an...
The men portrayed Till as a sexually precocious youth who boasted of "having white women." Milam gave voice to the backed-in-a-corner rage of Southern white resistance. "What else could we do?" he said. "I like niggers—in their place—I know how to work 'em. But … they ain't gonna go to school with my kids. And when a nigger gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he's tired o' livin'. I'm likely to kill him. Me and my folks fought for this country, and we got some rights. … I just made up my mind. 'Chicago boy,' I said, 'I'm tired of 'em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I'm going to make an example of you—just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand'" (Sparkman 1).
Here is what Huie authored in Look Magazine.
They drove back to Milam's house at Glendora, and by now it was 5 a.m.. They had been driving nearly three hours, with Milam and Bryant in the cab and Bobo lying in the back.
Bobo wasn't afraid of them! He was tough as they were. He didn't think they had the guts to kill him.
Milam: "We were never able to scare him. They had just filled him so full of that poison that he was hopeless."
Back of Milam's home is a tool house, with two rooms each about 12 feet square. They took him in there and began "whipping" him, first Milam then Bryant smashing him across the head with those .45's. Pistol-whipping: a court-martial offense in the Army... but MP's have been known to do it.... And Milam got information out of German prisoners this way.
But under these blows Bobo never hollered -- and he kept making the perfect speeches to insure martyrdom.
Bobo: "You bastards, I'm not afraid of you. I'm as good as you are. I've 'had' white women. My grandmother was a white woman."
Milam: "Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless. I'm no bully; I never hurt a nigger in my life. I like niggers -- in their place -- I know how to work 'em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain't gonna vote where I live. If they did, they'd control the government. They ain't gonna go to school with my kids. And when a nigger gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he's tired o' livin'. I'm likely to kill him. Me and my folks fought for this country, and we got some rights. I stood there in that shed and listened to that nigger throw that poison at me, and I just made up my mind. 'Chicago boy,' I said, 'I'm tired of 'em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I'm going to make an example of you -- just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.'"
So Big Milam decided to act. He needed a weight. He tried to think of where he could get an anvil. Then he remembered a gin which had installed new equipment. He had seen two men lifting a discarded fan, a metal fan three feet high and circular, used in ginning cotton.
Bobo wasn't bleeding much. Pistol-whipping bruises more than it cuts. They ordered him back in the truck and headed west again. They passed through Doddsville, went into the Progressive Ginning Company. This gin is 3.4 miles east of Boyle: Boyle is two miles south of Cleveland. The road to this gin turns left off U.S. 61, after you cross the bayou bridge south of Boyle.
Milam: "When we got to that gin, it was daylight, and I was worried for the first time. Somebody might see us and accuse us of stealing the fan."
Bryant and Big Milam stood aside while Bobo loaded the fan. Weight: 74 pounds. The youth still thought they were bluffing.
They drove back to Glendora, then north toward Swan Lake and crossed the "new bridge" over the Tallahatchie. At the east end of this bridge, they turned right, along a dirt road which parallels the river. After about two miles, they crossed the property of L.W. Boyce, passing near his house.
About 1.5 miles southeast of the Boyce home is a lonely spot where Big Milam has hunted squirrels. The river bank is steep. The truck stopped 30 yards from the water.
Big Milam ordered Bobo to pick up the fan.
He staggered under its weight... carried it to the river bank. They stood silently... just hating one another.
Milam: "Take off your clothes."
Slowly, Bobo pulled off his shoes, his socks. He stood up, unbuttoned his shirt, dropped his pants, his shorts.
He stood there naked.
It was Sunday morning, a little before 7.
Milam: "You still as good as I am?"
Bobo: "Yeah."
Milam: "You still 'had' white women?"
Bobo: "Yeah."
That big .45 jumped in Big Milam's hand. The youth turned to catch that big, expanding bullet at his right ear. He dropped.
They barb-wired the gin fan to his neck, rolled him into 20 feet of water.
For three hours that morning, there was a fire in Big Milam's back yard: Bobo's crepe soled shoes were hard to burn.
Seventy-two hours later -- eight miles downstream -- boys were fishing. They saw feet sticking out of the water. Bobo (Huie 1-14)
Here is a different version of the killing.
The men drove to a barn on the farm of Leslie Milam, J.W. Milam’s brother, near Drew, Mississippi.
Willie Reed, who later would testify for the prosecution, saw at about 6:00 a.m. a white and green Chevrolet truck, with four white men riding in the cab and three black men standing in the back of the truck. Reed saw an eighth person, a black boy (presumably Till), seated in the bed of the truck. The truck, according to Reed, parked in front of the barn. Minutes later, he said, he heard "hollering" and what sounded like "whipping" coming from the barn. (In later interviews, Reed identified four men he saw entering the barn: Bryant and Milam, as well as two black men, including Levi "Too Tight" Collins (a truck driver for Milam).
Despite a different version of events offered by Bryant and Milam in their 1956 interview, Till was most likely shot and killed in Leslie Milam's barn.
…
After the pickup left the farm, it stopped briefly at J. W. Milam's store in Glendora. There, a witness noticed "blood running out of the bed of the truck and pooling on the ground." When the dripping blood was pointed out to Milam, when he returned to his truck, J. W. claimed that he killed a deer. When Milam was told it was not deer season, he allegedly pulled back the tarpaulin in the bed to reveal Till's body and said, "This is what happens to smart niggers." [FBI report, p. 64] Milam, Bryant, and the others (including "Too Tight" Collins and Otha Johnson) loaded themselves back into the truck and left town.
Bryant and Milam decided to throw Till's body into the Tallahatchie River. Before doing so, they stopped at a ginning company to steal a heavy fan that they planned to use to weight down the corpse. They drove north toward Swan Lake, crossed the bridge over the Tallahatchie, and stopped on a dirt road, near a steep bank in the river. The men tied the fan to Till's neck with barbed wire and rolled the dead fourteen-year-old into the river.
Three days later and eight miles downstream, a boy named Robert Hodges, who was fishing in the Tallahatchie, saw feet sticking out of the water. The badly beaten and bloated body was pulled from the river and loaded into a boat. Hodges and others observed a silver ring on one of the body's fingers. Called to the scene, Mose Wright looked into the boat on the riverbank and identified the body of Emmett Till. A black undertaker and his assistant lifted Till's body from the boat and placed it in a casket. The undertaker's assistant gave the ring to Wright, who later handed it over to LeFlore County Deputy Sheriff John Ed Cothran.
…
Within a day after Till's disappearance, both Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam had been arrested for his abduction. Both men admitted to taking Till from Wright's home, but insisted that they let him go in Money (Linder 16-18).
Nine years after the Huie Look Magazine article had been printed, journalist Randy Sparkman wrote: “So far, two surviving possible participants have emerged …: Henry Lee Loggins, 81, one of three African-Americans who worked for Milam and reportedly helped transport Till, witnessed his torment, and cleaned up the gore; and Carolyn Bryant Donham, 71, who may have waited in the car during the kidnapping” (Sparkman 2).
Passages cited:
Huie, William Bradford. “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi.” Look, January 1956. Web.
Linder, Douglass O. “The Emmett Till Murder Trial: An Account.” 2012. Web.
Sparkman, Randy. “The Murder of Emmett Till: The 49-Year-Old Story of the Crime and How It Came to Be Told.” Slate, June 21, 2005. Web. < http://www.slate.com/articles/news_an...
Civil Rights -- Emmett Till -- Part Four
Local authorities covered Till's body with lime, nailed his coffin shut, and tried for a quick, local funeral. Till's mother insisted her son's body be returned to Chicago for burial (Sparkman 3).
Later, at the Illinois Central Station in Chicago, a large crowd watched five men lift a paper wrapped bundle containing the body of Till and place it in a waiting hearse. As they did so, Mamie Bradley wailed, "Oh, God. Oh, God. My only boy." Bradley insisted that her boy be displayed in an open casket so that viewers could see the gruesome damage inflicted by the murderers. Approximately 50,000 persons filed by Till's casket in the funeral chapel at 4141 Cottage Grove. Bradley told reporters, "Unless an example is made of the lynchers of Emmett, it won't be safe for a Negro to walk the streets anywhere in America." Bradley said she was determined to see her son's killers executed. Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley joined the fight for justice, wiring President Eisenhower with a call for federal action against the lynchers (Linder 17).
In the weeks that passed between Till's burial and the murder and kidnapping trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, two black publications, Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender, published graphic images of Till's corpse.
By the time the trial commenced—on September 19, 1955—Emmett Till's murder had become a source of outrage and indignation throughout the country (Emmett 4).
In the first few days following the discovery of Till's body, there was reason to hope that justice might follow. Mississippi Governor Hugh White telegrammed District Attorney Gerald Chatham "urging vigorous prosecution of the case." For his part, Chatham said, "Murder is murder whether it is black or white, and we are handling this case like all parties are white." Mississippi citizens expressed shock over the crime. Ben Roy, a white merchant in Money, told reporters, "Nobody here, Negro or white, approves of things like that." Local newspapers added their condemnation. The Greenwood Commonwealth editorialized, "The citizens of this area are determined that the guilty parties shall be punished to the full extent of the law."
Then everything changed. When Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the NAACP, described Till's killing as a "lynching" and opined that "the state of Mississippi has decided to maintain white supremacy by murdering children," many Mississippians were deeply offended and angered. According to historian Hugh Whitaker, the strident remarks of Wilkins and other northern opponents of segregation caused the local power structure to dig in, and throw its support to Bryant and Milam, two men they otherwise might have been happy to see put away. All five lawyers in the town of Sumner, where the Bryant-Milam trial would be held, agreed to serve as defense counsel. One of the defense lawyers acknowledged later that he only agreed to represent Bryant and Milam after "Mississippi began to be run down" (Linder 18).
On September 3, two days before a grand jury in Tallahatchie County would indict Bryant and Milam on both murder and kidnapping charges, the County's sheriff, H. C. Strider, made the surprising statement that he doubted the body pulled from the Tallahatchie River was that of Emmett Till. Strider told reporters "the body looked more like that of a grown man instead of a young boy" and had probably been in the river "four or five days"--too long to have been the body of Till, abducted just three days earlier. Strider expressed his opinion that Till "is still alive." The theory for a murder defense, with the now obvious support of the County's sheriff, had been laid.
In 1955, none of the black residents of Tallahatchie County were registered voters and thus, under the jury selection rules then in place, no black was eligible to serve as a juror. During the six hours of jury selection, the county's sheriff-elect assisted the defense team, advising the lawyers as to which jurors were "doubtful" and which were "safe." All of the twelve white men seated for the jury seemed safe. One of the defense attorneys said later, "After the jury was chosen, any first-year law student could have won the case."
When the state began presenting its case in the Bryant-Milam murder trial, more than seventy reporters (some from as far away as London), photographers, and radio and television newspersons packed the courtroom.
Asked to identify the two men, [Moses] Wright rose dramatically from the stand and pointed his finger directly at the defendants. Wright also told jurors he identified the body pulled from the river as being Emmett Till and that he was "looking right at" the undertaker as he pulled the ring with the inscription "L.T." from one of Till's fingers. He also identified the silver ring in the courtroom, one of the prosecution's key exhibits, as being the ring he saw removed from Till's body.
Deputy Sheriff John Ed Cothran testified that after his arrest J. W. Milam freely admitted kidnapping Till from Wright's home. Then three surprise witnesses placed the defendants at Leslie Milam's barn in the early morning of August 28. Most compelling was the testimony of Willie Reed, who said that after he witnessed Milam, Bryant, and several other men park a pickup on Milam's property, he heard "licks and hollering" from within the barn. (Two potential key witnesses, both blacks who allegedly assisted with the abduction and murder of Till, were unavailable to the prosecution. Both Leroy "Too Tight" Collins and Henry Loggins, who prosecutors assumed only to be missing, were actually being held under false identities in a jail in Charleston, Mississippi under orders of Sheriff Strider, who had thrown the full weight of his office behind the defense efforts.)
On Thursday afternoon, the state rested and the defense presented its first witness, Carolyn Bryant. Testifying with the jury excused, Carolyn Bryant described the August 24 incident at Bryant's Grocery & Meat Market. Bryant said that "just after dark" with her alone in the store, Till strongly gripped her hand as she held it out on the candy counter to collect money. She said she jerked her hand loose "with much difficulty" as Till asked her, "How about a date, baby?" When she tried to walk away, she stated, Till grabbed her by the waist and said, "You needn't be afraid of me. I've"--and here Bryant said Till used an "unprintable word"--"white women before." Bryant testified, "I was just scared to death." After listening to Bryant's testimony, Judge Curtis Swango ruled it inadmissible though, as courtroom observers noted, every juror undoubtedly had heard Bryant's story already anyway.
Sheriff H. C. Strider took the stand as a witness for the defense. Strider claimed, based on his experience, that the body found in the Tallahatchie River must have been there from "ten to fifteen days." He insisted the corpse was unidentifiable, claiming, "All I could tell, it was a human being." H. D. Malone, Till's embalmer, added support to the defense theory by testifying the body was so decomposed it had to have been in water for at least ten days and was "bloated beyond recognition."
It is safe to say that almost no one, not the prosecution witnesses and not the jurors, really believed the body pulled from the river was not that of Emmett Till. The testimony of Strider, Malone, and a white physician merely provided the jury with the "reasonable doubt" excuse it wanted to acquit Milam and Bryant.
After brief testimony from five character witnesses for Milam and Bryant, closing arguments began. … Defense attorneys, for their part, told jurors, "Every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to set these men free."
When the jurors were sent out to begin deliberations, according to Hugh Whitaker, Sheriff-elect Dogan told jurors to wait a while before coming out to make "it look good." The jurors enjoyed Cokes before returning 68 minutes later to the courtroom to announce their verdict of "Not Guilty," explaining that the state had not proved the identity of the body. Many people across the nation were outraged both by the decision and the state’s decision not to indict Milam and Bryant on the separate charge of kidnapping. Six weeks after the murder trial, a Leflore County grand jury refused to indict Bryant and Milam on kidnapping charges, and both men were released from custody.
The jury's verdict provoked both angry editorials and calls for federal legislation to protect the civil rights of black Americans. Protest rallies, drawing thousands in some cases, were held in several cities. In the south, the verdict seemed to spell the end to the system of "noblesse oblige," and marked the real beginning of the civil rights movement in that part of the country. In parts of Mississippi, at least, the verdict seemed a declaration of open season on blacks for even small offenses. Two months after the verdict, a white man killed a black gas station attendant at a service station in Glendora after an argument about the amount of gas the attendant put in his car. (The killer, Elmer Kimbell, was acquitted after trial in the same Sumner courtroom where Bryant and Milam heard a jury foreman announce, "Not Guilty.") (Linder 18-21)
Works cited:
“Emmett Till.” Biography. July 13, 2018. A&E Television Networks. Web.
Linder, Douglass O. “The Emmett Till Murder Trial: An Account.” 2012. Web.
Sparkman, Randy. “The Murder of Emmett Till: The 49-Year-Old Story of the Crime and How It Came to Be Told.” Slate. June 21, 2005. Web. < http://www.slate.com/articles/news_an...
Later, at the Illinois Central Station in Chicago, a large crowd watched five men lift a paper wrapped bundle containing the body of Till and place it in a waiting hearse. As they did so, Mamie Bradley wailed, "Oh, God. Oh, God. My only boy." Bradley insisted that her boy be displayed in an open casket so that viewers could see the gruesome damage inflicted by the murderers. Approximately 50,000 persons filed by Till's casket in the funeral chapel at 4141 Cottage Grove. Bradley told reporters, "Unless an example is made of the lynchers of Emmett, it won't be safe for a Negro to walk the streets anywhere in America." Bradley said she was determined to see her son's killers executed. Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley joined the fight for justice, wiring President Eisenhower with a call for federal action against the lynchers (Linder 17).
In the weeks that passed between Till's burial and the murder and kidnapping trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, two black publications, Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender, published graphic images of Till's corpse.
By the time the trial commenced—on September 19, 1955—Emmett Till's murder had become a source of outrage and indignation throughout the country (Emmett 4).
In the first few days following the discovery of Till's body, there was reason to hope that justice might follow. Mississippi Governor Hugh White telegrammed District Attorney Gerald Chatham "urging vigorous prosecution of the case." For his part, Chatham said, "Murder is murder whether it is black or white, and we are handling this case like all parties are white." Mississippi citizens expressed shock over the crime. Ben Roy, a white merchant in Money, told reporters, "Nobody here, Negro or white, approves of things like that." Local newspapers added their condemnation. The Greenwood Commonwealth editorialized, "The citizens of this area are determined that the guilty parties shall be punished to the full extent of the law."
Then everything changed. When Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the NAACP, described Till's killing as a "lynching" and opined that "the state of Mississippi has decided to maintain white supremacy by murdering children," many Mississippians were deeply offended and angered. According to historian Hugh Whitaker, the strident remarks of Wilkins and other northern opponents of segregation caused the local power structure to dig in, and throw its support to Bryant and Milam, two men they otherwise might have been happy to see put away. All five lawyers in the town of Sumner, where the Bryant-Milam trial would be held, agreed to serve as defense counsel. One of the defense lawyers acknowledged later that he only agreed to represent Bryant and Milam after "Mississippi began to be run down" (Linder 18).
On September 3, two days before a grand jury in Tallahatchie County would indict Bryant and Milam on both murder and kidnapping charges, the County's sheriff, H. C. Strider, made the surprising statement that he doubted the body pulled from the Tallahatchie River was that of Emmett Till. Strider told reporters "the body looked more like that of a grown man instead of a young boy" and had probably been in the river "four or five days"--too long to have been the body of Till, abducted just three days earlier. Strider expressed his opinion that Till "is still alive." The theory for a murder defense, with the now obvious support of the County's sheriff, had been laid.
In 1955, none of the black residents of Tallahatchie County were registered voters and thus, under the jury selection rules then in place, no black was eligible to serve as a juror. During the six hours of jury selection, the county's sheriff-elect assisted the defense team, advising the lawyers as to which jurors were "doubtful" and which were "safe." All of the twelve white men seated for the jury seemed safe. One of the defense attorneys said later, "After the jury was chosen, any first-year law student could have won the case."
When the state began presenting its case in the Bryant-Milam murder trial, more than seventy reporters (some from as far away as London), photographers, and radio and television newspersons packed the courtroom.
Asked to identify the two men, [Moses] Wright rose dramatically from the stand and pointed his finger directly at the defendants. Wright also told jurors he identified the body pulled from the river as being Emmett Till and that he was "looking right at" the undertaker as he pulled the ring with the inscription "L.T." from one of Till's fingers. He also identified the silver ring in the courtroom, one of the prosecution's key exhibits, as being the ring he saw removed from Till's body.
Deputy Sheriff John Ed Cothran testified that after his arrest J. W. Milam freely admitted kidnapping Till from Wright's home. Then three surprise witnesses placed the defendants at Leslie Milam's barn in the early morning of August 28. Most compelling was the testimony of Willie Reed, who said that after he witnessed Milam, Bryant, and several other men park a pickup on Milam's property, he heard "licks and hollering" from within the barn. (Two potential key witnesses, both blacks who allegedly assisted with the abduction and murder of Till, were unavailable to the prosecution. Both Leroy "Too Tight" Collins and Henry Loggins, who prosecutors assumed only to be missing, were actually being held under false identities in a jail in Charleston, Mississippi under orders of Sheriff Strider, who had thrown the full weight of his office behind the defense efforts.)
On Thursday afternoon, the state rested and the defense presented its first witness, Carolyn Bryant. Testifying with the jury excused, Carolyn Bryant described the August 24 incident at Bryant's Grocery & Meat Market. Bryant said that "just after dark" with her alone in the store, Till strongly gripped her hand as she held it out on the candy counter to collect money. She said she jerked her hand loose "with much difficulty" as Till asked her, "How about a date, baby?" When she tried to walk away, she stated, Till grabbed her by the waist and said, "You needn't be afraid of me. I've"--and here Bryant said Till used an "unprintable word"--"white women before." Bryant testified, "I was just scared to death." After listening to Bryant's testimony, Judge Curtis Swango ruled it inadmissible though, as courtroom observers noted, every juror undoubtedly had heard Bryant's story already anyway.
Sheriff H. C. Strider took the stand as a witness for the defense. Strider claimed, based on his experience, that the body found in the Tallahatchie River must have been there from "ten to fifteen days." He insisted the corpse was unidentifiable, claiming, "All I could tell, it was a human being." H. D. Malone, Till's embalmer, added support to the defense theory by testifying the body was so decomposed it had to have been in water for at least ten days and was "bloated beyond recognition."
It is safe to say that almost no one, not the prosecution witnesses and not the jurors, really believed the body pulled from the river was not that of Emmett Till. The testimony of Strider, Malone, and a white physician merely provided the jury with the "reasonable doubt" excuse it wanted to acquit Milam and Bryant.
After brief testimony from five character witnesses for Milam and Bryant, closing arguments began. … Defense attorneys, for their part, told jurors, "Every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to set these men free."
When the jurors were sent out to begin deliberations, according to Hugh Whitaker, Sheriff-elect Dogan told jurors to wait a while before coming out to make "it look good." The jurors enjoyed Cokes before returning 68 minutes later to the courtroom to announce their verdict of "Not Guilty," explaining that the state had not proved the identity of the body. Many people across the nation were outraged both by the decision and the state’s decision not to indict Milam and Bryant on the separate charge of kidnapping. Six weeks after the murder trial, a Leflore County grand jury refused to indict Bryant and Milam on kidnapping charges, and both men were released from custody.
The jury's verdict provoked both angry editorials and calls for federal legislation to protect the civil rights of black Americans. Protest rallies, drawing thousands in some cases, were held in several cities. In the south, the verdict seemed to spell the end to the system of "noblesse oblige," and marked the real beginning of the civil rights movement in that part of the country. In parts of Mississippi, at least, the verdict seemed a declaration of open season on blacks for even small offenses. Two months after the verdict, a white man killed a black gas station attendant at a service station in Glendora after an argument about the amount of gas the attendant put in his car. (The killer, Elmer Kimbell, was acquitted after trial in the same Sumner courtroom where Bryant and Milam heard a jury foreman announce, "Not Guilty.") (Linder 18-21)
Works cited:
“Emmett Till.” Biography. July 13, 2018. A&E Television Networks. Web.
Linder, Douglass O. “The Emmett Till Murder Trial: An Account.” 2012. Web.
Sparkman, Randy. “The Murder of Emmett Till: The 49-Year-Old Story of the Crime and How It Came to Be Told.” Slate. June 21, 2005. Web. < http://www.slate.com/articles/news_an...
