Harold Titus's Blog, page 30
August 26, 2018
Civil Rights -- Emmett Till -- Part Five
"J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant died with Emmett Till's blood on their hands," Simeon Wright, Emmett Till's cousin and an eyewitness to his kidnapping (he was with Till the night he was kidnapped by Milam and Bryant) … [years later] stated. "And it looks like everyone else who was involved is going to do the same. They had a chance to come clean. They will die with Emmett Till's blood on their hands" (Emmett 6)
Two women especially intrigued visitors at the trial, Mamie [Till] Bradley, mother of the victim, and Carolyn Bryant, the former high school beauty queen working at the store. A third woman, 27-year old Juanita Milam, was a less conspicuous part of the proceedings. She was the wife of J. W. Milam, and as she watched her husband's trial and sat on the stand as one of his character witnesses, she clearly wanted to be anywhere but a courtroom. Clark Porteous of the Memphis Press-Scimitar said that Juanita appeared "shocked by the proceedings," and he described her as a "sad-faced woman." Like Carolyn, Juanita said next to nothing publicly in the six decades after the trial.
Mary Juanita Thompson was born in Greenville, Miss., on Dec. 10, 1927, the fifth of six children born to Albert and Myrtle Thompson. She married World War II veteran John William Milam on Dec. 10, 1949, her 22nd birthday. They had two sons, Horace William, born in 1951, and Harvey, born two years later. They made their home in Glendora, Miss., where J. W. ran a store. It burned down in 1954, and after that, J. W. helped out in other family stores, did trucking and worked on local plantations.
The Till murder would change their lives forever. Less than a month after the verdict, journalist William Bradford Huie offered to pay the brothers $3,150 for their story. Knowing that double jeopardy prevented them from being tried again, they weaved a tale of kidnapping and murder, yet they were careful enough not to indict any accomplices. Their story, which appeared in the Jan. 24, 1956, issue of Look magazine, contains gross inaccuracies. Nevertheless, the article captivated readers all over the nation (Anderson 2).
Huie had gained defense attorney Breland's permission to write an article about Milam and Bryant. He would simply state facts, including quotes, without saying how he came to know them. In order to protect themselves from their Mississippi neighbors and from being indicted for crimes for which they'd not yet been tried, the brothers would publicly continue to maintain their innocence. But they would sign a release that protected Huie from a libel suit. In addition to the cash payments Milam, Bryant, and Breland's firm would each receive a significant percentage of future profits from any book or film that came out of Huie's article.
Breland, then 67, was a Princeton graduate and a leader in the Mississippi Citizens Council, a Main Street version of the Ku Klux Klan formed in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. Breland had originally been reluctant to take on Milam and Bryant's defense. But he came to see the prosecution as an affront against Mississippi, another assault like Black Monday, as the day of the Brown ruling on desegregation was known across the South.
Breland agreed to Huie's terms. "They're peckerwoods," he said of Milam and Bryant, according to accounts of the conversation in Huie's private correspondence. "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."
Breland arranged a week of clandestine, nighttime meetings between Huie, Milam, and Roy and Carolyn Bryant. Frank Dean, Look's senior counsel, brought the money for the payoffs to Mississippi in a satchel. In a haze of cigarette smoke and profane justification, the brothers told their story.
Huie's "Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi" was published in January 1956. The article told the story of Till's murder from Milam and Bryant's point of view—a brutal tale of a beating that ended on the bank of the Tallahatchie River with a gun shot to the side of the head.
Huie concluded his article by indicting Mississippi for failing to convict Milam and Bryant or condemn their actions. His piece caused a firestorm.
His deal with the two men bound him to frame the story as they told it (Sparkman 3-4).
Within four years after Till murder trial, over 21% of the black population of Tallahatchie County had left.
For Bryant and Milam, the trial in some ways was the beginning, not the end of their troubles. Milam's and Bryant's stores, which catered almost exclusively to local blacks, were boycotted and within fifteen months all the stores were either closed or sold (Linder 21]
Former friends and supporters, who never really doubted the guilt of the half-brothers to begin with, wanted nothing to do with them once their confession was in print. A year after the murder, the Milams were reported to be living on a farm in Mississippi between Ruleville and Cleveland. Around that time, Huie interviewed the brothers for a follow-up article that also appeared in Look. In the accompanying photographs, both men look happy, but it was obvious the smiles were only a facade. Huie described them as having "been disappointed," explaining further, "They have suffered disillusionment, ingratitude, resentment, misfortune," but as yet, no guilt.
Few had pity on them. Milam owned no land and could not get his former backers to rent to him. He was finally able to rent 217 acres in Sunflower County with the help of his brother-in-law and secured $4,000 to plant cotton from a Tallahatchie County bank where one of his defense attorneys, John Whitten, sat on the loan committee. Blacks would no longer work for Milam, and that forced him to pay whites a higher wage for the same work.
He reflected on how the tide had turned, saying his wife and children were having an especially hard time. "I had a lot of friends a year ago," he told Huie. "They contributed to my defense fund — at least they say they did. I never got half of what they say was contributed. I don't know what happened to it, but we never got it."
For three years, Milam held several menial plantation jobs. The Milams later moved to Orange, Texas, but stayed for only a few years, returning to live near Juanita's parents in Greenville.
He found himself back in the courtroom on occasion after the acquittal in Sumner, but his crimes -- among them writing bad checks, assault and battery, using a stolen credit card -- were miniscule when compared to the murder charge he faced in 1955. J.W. later worked as a heavy equipment operator until his retirement, which was forced upon him early because of ill health. He succumbed to cancer of the spine on New Year's Eve, 1980 at age 61.
By the time the Milams returned to Mississippi a decade after the Till trial, the outrage over the murder had subsided, and they were able to live quietly, for the most part. At some point in the 1960s, Juanita began working as a hairdresser at the Greenville Beauty Salon. In 1971, Greenville Mayor Pat Dunne declared Feb. 14-20 as National Beauty Salon Week, and Juanita served as chairwoman. In 1975, Juanita served as president of the local affiliate of the Mississippi Hairdressers and Cosmetologists Association. Clearly, Juanita felt at ease in her local community.
Juanita's only known public statements about the Till case following the trial occurred when the FBI came knocking after the federal government reopened the case in 2004. During the 1955 trial, Carolyn Bryant said Juanita had been in the Bryant's apartment behind the store the night Emmett Till came in, where she was babysitting the Bryant and Milam children. When asked about this, Juanita denied being there. "I thought I was in Greenville," she said, and insisted that "I would not have been babysittin' for her."
Juanita accused Carolyn of fabricating the entire story. "The only way I can figure it is that she did not want to take care of the store. She thought this wild story would make Roy take care of the store instead of leavin' her with the kids and the store. … the only thing to me would upset her would be if she wanted Roy to stay at the store more."
That night at the store, however, Carolyn went to a car that she said belonged to Juanita, to get a gun. The Bryants didn't own a car; the Milams did. If Juanita was not there, who was?
Students of the Till case remember seeing Juanita stand by her man during the trial and after the jury read the verdict. More than one photographer in Sumner captured her smiles as her husband was set free. That, of course, only tells part of her story.
Whether or not the 25 years she lived with J.W. after the trial, or the 33 she lived after his death were marked by pain, sadness, regret, or guilt, only those who were the closest to her might know (Anderson 5-8).
Sheriff Strider came under heavy attack in both national and Mississippi newspapers. Five black families left his delta plantation for work elsewhere. In 1957, Strider narrowly escaped an assassination attempt as he was seated in his car in front of a store in Cowart, Mississippi.
In 1985, five years after Milam died of cancer, some of Bryant's recollections of the Till case were secretly recorded on audiotape. On the tapes, Bryant says of the night of the kidnapping, "Yeah, hell we were drinking." He claims that after "we done whupped the sonofabitch," he briefly "backed out on killing the motherf----r," and decided instead to "take him to a hospital." But it soon became clear that the injuries already were too extensive for Till to survive, so they decided to "put his ass in the Tallahatchie River." Bryant did not name others involved in the crime and indicated that he never would: "I'm the only one living that knows--and that's all that will ever be known." Bryant died nine years later, also of cancer, at the age of 63.
None of the other men who participated in the kidnapping, beating, or murder of Emmett Till ever faced charges, although the Department of Justice reopened the case in 2004. In 2005, Till's body was exhumed and autopsied by the Cook County coroner. After analysis using dental comparisons, the body was positively identified as Till's. Metallic fragments in the skull suggested he was shot with a .45 caliber gun (Linder 25-29). In 2007, a grand jury decided not to indict Ms. Carolyn (Bryant) Donham, or anyone else, as an accomplice in the murder.
“I was hoping that one day she would admit it, so it matters to me that she did, and it gives me some satisfaction,” said Wheeler Parker, 77, a cousin of Emmett’s who lives near Chicago. “It’s important to people understanding how the word of a white person against a black person was law, and a lot of black people lost their lives because of it. It really speaks to history, it shows what black people went through in those days” (Perez-Pena 6)
In 2008, Duke University professor Timothy B. Tyson, received a call from Carolyn Donham’s sister-in-law, who said that she and Carolyn had liked another book of his, and wanted to meet him. It was in that meeting that she [Carolyn] spoke to him about the Till case, saying, “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.” She had lied about Till making advances toward her. She could remember nothing else that had happened in the store.
Ms. Donham told him that soon after the killing, her husband’s family hid her away, moving her from place to place for days, to keep her from talking to law enforcement.
She has said that Roy Bryant, whom she later divorced, was physically abusive to her.
“The circumstances under which she told the story were coercive,” Dr. Tyson said. “She’s horrified by it. There’s clearly a great burden of guilt and sorrow (Perez-Pena 2-7).
Nine years later Tyson published the book The Blood of Emmitt Till. On January 26, 2017, Vanity Fair published the story of Tyson’s interview with Donham. Tyson said that she had changed since Till’s murder, but she hasn’t repented. … “She was glad things had changed [and she] thought the old system of white supremacy was wrong, though she had more or less taken it as normal at the time,” Tyson told Vanity Fair.
Bryant told Tyson that she “felt tender sorrow” for Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who fought for civil rights and died in 2003 (Goronja 1-2).
Though she never stopped feeling the pain of her son's death, Mamie Till (who died of heart failure in 2003)…recognized that what happened to her son helped open Americans' eyes to the racial hatred plaguing the country, and in doing so helped spark a massive protest movement for racial equality and justice.
"People really didn't know that things this horrible could take place," Mamie Till said in an interview with Devery S. Anderson, author of Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement, in December 1996. "And the fact that it happened to a child, that make all the difference in the world" (Emmett 7).
"People often talked about Emmett, but Simeon [Wright] had a story of his own," a family spokeswoman Airicki Gordon told the Chicago Tribune. "That incident changed him as a person."
Wright went on to work as a pipe fitter and for many years remained quiet about what had happened.
The Tribune reports that he was filled with anger. But by the 2000s he was ready to talk about it.
"He really wanted people to know what happened that night," his wife Annie Wright told the paper. "There were so many versions. When I first met him, he never talked about it. But then he wanted people to know the injustices and indignities."
Wright spent recent years touring the country speaking to groups about his experiences, reports The Clarion-Ledger (Held 1).
The Justice Department is reopening the investigation of Emmett Till’s 63-year-old murder.
Works cited:
Anderson, Devery. “Widow of Emmett Till Killer Dies Quietly, Notoriously.” The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger. Feb. 27, 2014. USA Today. Web.
“Emmett Till.” Biography. July 13, 2018. A&E Television Networks. Web.
Goronja, Ariel. “Carolyn Bryant Donham: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know.” July 12, 2018. Heavy.com. Web.
Held, Amy. “Cousin Who Witnessed Emmett Till Abduction Dies at 74.” NPR. September 5, 2017. Web.
Linder, Douglas O. “The Emmett Till Murder Trial: An Account.” 2012. Web.
Perez-Pena, Richard. “Woman Linked to 1955 Emmett Till Murder Tells Historian Her Claims Were False.” New York Times. January 27, 2017. 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...
Two women especially intrigued visitors at the trial, Mamie [Till] Bradley, mother of the victim, and Carolyn Bryant, the former high school beauty queen working at the store. A third woman, 27-year old Juanita Milam, was a less conspicuous part of the proceedings. She was the wife of J. W. Milam, and as she watched her husband's trial and sat on the stand as one of his character witnesses, she clearly wanted to be anywhere but a courtroom. Clark Porteous of the Memphis Press-Scimitar said that Juanita appeared "shocked by the proceedings," and he described her as a "sad-faced woman." Like Carolyn, Juanita said next to nothing publicly in the six decades after the trial.
Mary Juanita Thompson was born in Greenville, Miss., on Dec. 10, 1927, the fifth of six children born to Albert and Myrtle Thompson. She married World War II veteran John William Milam on Dec. 10, 1949, her 22nd birthday. They had two sons, Horace William, born in 1951, and Harvey, born two years later. They made their home in Glendora, Miss., where J. W. ran a store. It burned down in 1954, and after that, J. W. helped out in other family stores, did trucking and worked on local plantations.
The Till murder would change their lives forever. Less than a month after the verdict, journalist William Bradford Huie offered to pay the brothers $3,150 for their story. Knowing that double jeopardy prevented them from being tried again, they weaved a tale of kidnapping and murder, yet they were careful enough not to indict any accomplices. Their story, which appeared in the Jan. 24, 1956, issue of Look magazine, contains gross inaccuracies. Nevertheless, the article captivated readers all over the nation (Anderson 2).
Huie had gained defense attorney Breland's permission to write an article about Milam and Bryant. He would simply state facts, including quotes, without saying how he came to know them. In order to protect themselves from their Mississippi neighbors and from being indicted for crimes for which they'd not yet been tried, the brothers would publicly continue to maintain their innocence. But they would sign a release that protected Huie from a libel suit. In addition to the cash payments Milam, Bryant, and Breland's firm would each receive a significant percentage of future profits from any book or film that came out of Huie's article.
Breland, then 67, was a Princeton graduate and a leader in the Mississippi Citizens Council, a Main Street version of the Ku Klux Klan formed in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. Breland had originally been reluctant to take on Milam and Bryant's defense. But he came to see the prosecution as an affront against Mississippi, another assault like Black Monday, as the day of the Brown ruling on desegregation was known across the South.
Breland agreed to Huie's terms. "They're peckerwoods," he said of Milam and Bryant, according to accounts of the conversation in Huie's private correspondence. "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."
Breland arranged a week of clandestine, nighttime meetings between Huie, Milam, and Roy and Carolyn Bryant. Frank Dean, Look's senior counsel, brought the money for the payoffs to Mississippi in a satchel. In a haze of cigarette smoke and profane justification, the brothers told their story.
Huie's "Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi" was published in January 1956. The article told the story of Till's murder from Milam and Bryant's point of view—a brutal tale of a beating that ended on the bank of the Tallahatchie River with a gun shot to the side of the head.
Huie concluded his article by indicting Mississippi for failing to convict Milam and Bryant or condemn their actions. His piece caused a firestorm.
His deal with the two men bound him to frame the story as they told it (Sparkman 3-4).
Within four years after Till murder trial, over 21% of the black population of Tallahatchie County had left.
For Bryant and Milam, the trial in some ways was the beginning, not the end of their troubles. Milam's and Bryant's stores, which catered almost exclusively to local blacks, were boycotted and within fifteen months all the stores were either closed or sold (Linder 21]
Former friends and supporters, who never really doubted the guilt of the half-brothers to begin with, wanted nothing to do with them once their confession was in print. A year after the murder, the Milams were reported to be living on a farm in Mississippi between Ruleville and Cleveland. Around that time, Huie interviewed the brothers for a follow-up article that also appeared in Look. In the accompanying photographs, both men look happy, but it was obvious the smiles were only a facade. Huie described them as having "been disappointed," explaining further, "They have suffered disillusionment, ingratitude, resentment, misfortune," but as yet, no guilt.
Few had pity on them. Milam owned no land and could not get his former backers to rent to him. He was finally able to rent 217 acres in Sunflower County with the help of his brother-in-law and secured $4,000 to plant cotton from a Tallahatchie County bank where one of his defense attorneys, John Whitten, sat on the loan committee. Blacks would no longer work for Milam, and that forced him to pay whites a higher wage for the same work.
He reflected on how the tide had turned, saying his wife and children were having an especially hard time. "I had a lot of friends a year ago," he told Huie. "They contributed to my defense fund — at least they say they did. I never got half of what they say was contributed. I don't know what happened to it, but we never got it."
For three years, Milam held several menial plantation jobs. The Milams later moved to Orange, Texas, but stayed for only a few years, returning to live near Juanita's parents in Greenville.
He found himself back in the courtroom on occasion after the acquittal in Sumner, but his crimes -- among them writing bad checks, assault and battery, using a stolen credit card -- were miniscule when compared to the murder charge he faced in 1955. J.W. later worked as a heavy equipment operator until his retirement, which was forced upon him early because of ill health. He succumbed to cancer of the spine on New Year's Eve, 1980 at age 61.
By the time the Milams returned to Mississippi a decade after the Till trial, the outrage over the murder had subsided, and they were able to live quietly, for the most part. At some point in the 1960s, Juanita began working as a hairdresser at the Greenville Beauty Salon. In 1971, Greenville Mayor Pat Dunne declared Feb. 14-20 as National Beauty Salon Week, and Juanita served as chairwoman. In 1975, Juanita served as president of the local affiliate of the Mississippi Hairdressers and Cosmetologists Association. Clearly, Juanita felt at ease in her local community.
Juanita's only known public statements about the Till case following the trial occurred when the FBI came knocking after the federal government reopened the case in 2004. During the 1955 trial, Carolyn Bryant said Juanita had been in the Bryant's apartment behind the store the night Emmett Till came in, where she was babysitting the Bryant and Milam children. When asked about this, Juanita denied being there. "I thought I was in Greenville," she said, and insisted that "I would not have been babysittin' for her."
Juanita accused Carolyn of fabricating the entire story. "The only way I can figure it is that she did not want to take care of the store. She thought this wild story would make Roy take care of the store instead of leavin' her with the kids and the store. … the only thing to me would upset her would be if she wanted Roy to stay at the store more."
That night at the store, however, Carolyn went to a car that she said belonged to Juanita, to get a gun. The Bryants didn't own a car; the Milams did. If Juanita was not there, who was?
Students of the Till case remember seeing Juanita stand by her man during the trial and after the jury read the verdict. More than one photographer in Sumner captured her smiles as her husband was set free. That, of course, only tells part of her story.
Whether or not the 25 years she lived with J.W. after the trial, or the 33 she lived after his death were marked by pain, sadness, regret, or guilt, only those who were the closest to her might know (Anderson 5-8).
Sheriff Strider came under heavy attack in both national and Mississippi newspapers. Five black families left his delta plantation for work elsewhere. In 1957, Strider narrowly escaped an assassination attempt as he was seated in his car in front of a store in Cowart, Mississippi.
In 1985, five years after Milam died of cancer, some of Bryant's recollections of the Till case were secretly recorded on audiotape. On the tapes, Bryant says of the night of the kidnapping, "Yeah, hell we were drinking." He claims that after "we done whupped the sonofabitch," he briefly "backed out on killing the motherf----r," and decided instead to "take him to a hospital." But it soon became clear that the injuries already were too extensive for Till to survive, so they decided to "put his ass in the Tallahatchie River." Bryant did not name others involved in the crime and indicated that he never would: "I'm the only one living that knows--and that's all that will ever be known." Bryant died nine years later, also of cancer, at the age of 63.
None of the other men who participated in the kidnapping, beating, or murder of Emmett Till ever faced charges, although the Department of Justice reopened the case in 2004. In 2005, Till's body was exhumed and autopsied by the Cook County coroner. After analysis using dental comparisons, the body was positively identified as Till's. Metallic fragments in the skull suggested he was shot with a .45 caliber gun (Linder 25-29). In 2007, a grand jury decided not to indict Ms. Carolyn (Bryant) Donham, or anyone else, as an accomplice in the murder.
“I was hoping that one day she would admit it, so it matters to me that she did, and it gives me some satisfaction,” said Wheeler Parker, 77, a cousin of Emmett’s who lives near Chicago. “It’s important to people understanding how the word of a white person against a black person was law, and a lot of black people lost their lives because of it. It really speaks to history, it shows what black people went through in those days” (Perez-Pena 6)
In 2008, Duke University professor Timothy B. Tyson, received a call from Carolyn Donham’s sister-in-law, who said that she and Carolyn had liked another book of his, and wanted to meet him. It was in that meeting that she [Carolyn] spoke to him about the Till case, saying, “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.” She had lied about Till making advances toward her. She could remember nothing else that had happened in the store.
Ms. Donham told him that soon after the killing, her husband’s family hid her away, moving her from place to place for days, to keep her from talking to law enforcement.
She has said that Roy Bryant, whom she later divorced, was physically abusive to her.
“The circumstances under which she told the story were coercive,” Dr. Tyson said. “She’s horrified by it. There’s clearly a great burden of guilt and sorrow (Perez-Pena 2-7).
Nine years later Tyson published the book The Blood of Emmitt Till. On January 26, 2017, Vanity Fair published the story of Tyson’s interview with Donham. Tyson said that she had changed since Till’s murder, but she hasn’t repented. … “She was glad things had changed [and she] thought the old system of white supremacy was wrong, though she had more or less taken it as normal at the time,” Tyson told Vanity Fair.
Bryant told Tyson that she “felt tender sorrow” for Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who fought for civil rights and died in 2003 (Goronja 1-2).
Though she never stopped feeling the pain of her son's death, Mamie Till (who died of heart failure in 2003)…recognized that what happened to her son helped open Americans' eyes to the racial hatred plaguing the country, and in doing so helped spark a massive protest movement for racial equality and justice.
"People really didn't know that things this horrible could take place," Mamie Till said in an interview with Devery S. Anderson, author of Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement, in December 1996. "And the fact that it happened to a child, that make all the difference in the world" (Emmett 7).
"People often talked about Emmett, but Simeon [Wright] had a story of his own," a family spokeswoman Airicki Gordon told the Chicago Tribune. "That incident changed him as a person."
Wright went on to work as a pipe fitter and for many years remained quiet about what had happened.
The Tribune reports that he was filled with anger. But by the 2000s he was ready to talk about it.
"He really wanted people to know what happened that night," his wife Annie Wright told the paper. "There were so many versions. When I first met him, he never talked about it. But then he wanted people to know the injustices and indignities."
Wright spent recent years touring the country speaking to groups about his experiences, reports The Clarion-Ledger (Held 1).
The Justice Department is reopening the investigation of Emmett Till’s 63-year-old murder.
Works cited:
Anderson, Devery. “Widow of Emmett Till Killer Dies Quietly, Notoriously.” The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger. Feb. 27, 2014. USA Today. Web.
“Emmett Till.” Biography. July 13, 2018. A&E Television Networks. Web.
Goronja, Ariel. “Carolyn Bryant Donham: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know.” July 12, 2018. Heavy.com. Web.
Held, Amy. “Cousin Who Witnessed Emmett Till Abduction Dies at 74.” NPR. September 5, 2017. Web.
Linder, Douglas O. “The Emmett Till Murder Trial: An Account.” 2012. Web.
Perez-Pena, Richard. “Woman Linked to 1955 Emmett Till Murder Tells Historian Her Claims Were False.” New York Times. January 27, 2017. 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...
August 19, 2018
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...
August 12, 2018
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...
August 5, 2018
Civil Rights -- Emmett Till -- Part Two
The town was rife with talk about the incident at Bryant's store. On Friday, August 26, Carolyn's husband Roy returned from Texas, where he had been hauling shrimp. That afternoon at his store, a young black customer told Roy Bryant what "the talk" was all about, and identified a visiting teenager from Chicago as the offender. … Returning home, Roy asked Carolyn if there was something she wanted to tell him. Her denial angered Roy, and he demanded to hear his wife's version of what had happened inside the store. She told him the version of events she would later repeat in his trial.
Bryant's half-brother, John W. Milam, readily agreed to help. The two men operated businesses together, played cards together, drank together, and were described in the [2004] FBI's investigation as being "particularly close." According to historian Hugh Whitaker, who interviewed dozens of Mississippians who knew Bryant and Milam, the two "were invariably referred to as 'peckerwoods,' 'white trash,' and other terms of disappropriation" (Linder 3).
William Bradford Huie’s account of Emmett Till’s abduction from Preacher Wright’s house August 24, 1955, was based on information he had gathered from Till’s abductors and the black occupants of Wright’s house.
The Negroes drove away; and Carolyn [Bryant], shaken, told [her sister-in-law] Juanita [Milam]. The two women determined to keep the incident from their "Men-folks." They didn't tell J. W. Milam when he came to escort them home.
By Thursday afternoon, Carolyn Bryant could see the story was getting around. She spent Thursday night at the Milams, where at 4 a.m. (Friday) Roy got back from Texas. Since he had slept little for five nights, he went to bed at the Milams' while Carolyn returned to the store.
During Friday afternoon, Roy reached the store, and shortly thereafter a Negro told him what "the talk" was, and told him that the "Chicago boy" was "visitin' Preacher." Carolyn then told Roy what had happened.
Once Roy Bryant knew, in his environment, in the opinion of most white people around him, for him to have done nothing would have marked him for a coward and a fool.
On Friday night, he couldn't do anything. He and Carolyn were alone, and he had no car. Saturday was collection day, their busy day in the store. About 10:30 Saturday night, J. W. Milam drove by. Roy took him aside.
They agreed to find Till and take him away.
J. W. "Big Milam" is 36: six feet two, 235 pounds; an extrovert. Short boots accentuate his height; khaki trousers; red sports shirt; sun helmet. Dark-visaged; his lower lip curls when he chuckles; and though bald, his remaining hair is jet-black.
He is slavery's plantation overseer. Today, he rents Negro-driven mechanical cotton pickers to plantation owners. Those who know him say that he can handle Negroes better than anybody in the country.
Big Milam soldiered in the Patton manner. With a ninth-grade education, he was commissioned in battle by the 75th Division. He was an expert platoon leader, expert street fighter, expert in night patrol, expert with the "grease gun," with every device for close range killing. A German bullet tore clear through his chest; his body bears "multiple shrapnel wounds." Of his medals, he cherishes one: combat infantryman's badge.
Big Milam, like many soldiers, brought home his favorite gun: the .45 Colt automatic pistol.
"Best weapon the Army's got," he says. "Either for shootin' or sluggin'."
Big Milam reached Money a few minutes shy of 2 a.m., Sunday, August 28. The Bryants were asleep; the store was dark but for the all-night light. He rapped at the back door, and when Roy came, he said: "Let's go. Let's make that trip now."
Roy dressed, brought a gun: this one was a .45 Colt. Both men were and remained -- cold sober. Big Milam had drunk a beer at Minter City around 9; Roy had had nothing.
There was no moon as they drove to Preacher's house: 2.8 miles east of Money.
Preacher's house stands 50 feet right of the gravel road, with cedar and persimmon trees in the yard. Big Milam drove the pickup in under the trees. He was bareheaded, carrying a five-cell flashlight in his left hand, the .45 in the right.
Roy Bryant pounded on the door.
Preacher: "Who's that?"
Bryant: "Mr. Bryant from Money, Preacher."
Preacher: "All right, sir. Just a minute."
Preacher came out of the screened-in porch.
Bryant: "Preacher, you got a boy from Chicago here?"
Preacher: "Yessir."
Bryant: "I want to talk to him."
Preacher: "Yessir. I'll get him."
Preacher led them to a back bedroom where four youths were sleeping in two beds. In one was Bobo Till and Simeon Wright, Preacher's youngest son. Bryant had told Preacher to turn on the lights; Preacher had said they were out of order. So only the flashlight was used.
The visit was not a complete surprise. Preacher testified that he had heard of the "trouble," that he "sho' had" talked to his nephew about it. Bobo himself had been afraid; he had wanted to go home the day after the incident. The Negro girl in the party urged that he leave. "They'll kill him," she had warned. But Preacher's wife, Elizabeth Wright, had decided that the danger was being magnified; she had urged Bobo to "finish yo' visit."
"I thought they might say something to him, but I didn't think they'd kill a boy," Preacher said.
Big Milam shined the light in Bobo's face, said: "You the nigger who did the talking?"
"Yeah," Bobo replied.
Milam: "Don't say, 'Yeah' to me: I'll blow your head off. Get your clothes on."
Bobo had been sleeping in his shorts. He pulled on a shirt and trousers, then reached for his socks.
"Just the shoes," Milam hurried him.
"I don't wear shoes without socks," Bobo said: and he kept the gun-bearers waiting while he put on his socks, then a pair of canvas shoes with thick crepe soles.
Preacher and his wife tried two arguments in the boy's behalf.
"He ain't got good sense," Preacher begged. "He didn't know what he was doing. Don't take him."
"I'll pay you gentlemen for the damages," Elizabeth Wright said.
"You niggers go back to sleep," Milam replied.
They marched him into the yard, told him to get in the back of the pickup and lie down. He obeyed. They drove toward Money.
Elizabeth Wright rushed to the home of a white neighbor, who got up, looked around, but decided he could do nothing. Then, she and Preacher drove to the home of her brother, Crosby Smith, at Sumner; and Crosby Smith, on Sunday morning, went to the sheriff's office at Greenwood.
The other young Negroes stayed at Preacher's house until daylight, when Wheeler Parker telephoned his mother in Chicago, who in turn notified Bobo's mother, Mamie Bradley, 33, 6427 S. St. Lawrence.
Their intention was to "just whip him... and scare some sense into him" (Huie 6-10).
According to Hugh Whitaker, master’s thesis student at Florida State, Milam had threatened Preacher Wright.
Milam asked Wright if he knew anybody there. Wright replied, “No, Sir. I don’t know you.”
Milam: “How old are you?”
Wright: “Sixty-four.”
Milam: “Well, if you know any of us here tonight, then you will never live to get to be sixty-five” (Whitaker 1).
Simeon Wright, Emmett Till’s cousin, gave a different account.
When [my father] opened the door, he saw two white men standing on the porch. One of them - J. W. Milam, we would learn later – was tall, thickset, and balding; he had a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other. The second man was almost as tall but not as heavy; he was the one who had spoken, Roy Bryant. A third man stood behind Bryant, hiding his face from Dad. Dad believed he was a black man, someone who knew us.
The white men entered the house through our front guest room, where Wheeler and Maurice were sleeping. Dad woke Wheeler up first. Milam told Dad that Wheeler was not the boy he was looking for; he was looking for the fat boy from Chicago. Then I heard loud talking in my bedroom.
In my half-conscious state, I had no idea what was going on. Was I dreaming? Or was it a nightmare? Why were these white men in our bedroom at this hour? I rubbed my eyes and then shielded them, trying to see beyond the glare of the flashlight. The balding man ordered me to go back to sleep.
Dad had to shake Bobo for quite a while to wake him up. When he finally awoke, the balding man told Bobo to get up and put his clothes on. It was then that I realized they had come to take him away. It wasn’t clear to me what was going on and why they wanted just him. At first I thought they had come to send him back to Chicago, but that didn’t make sense at all.
I was lying there, frozen stiff and not moving, when my mother rushed into the room. She began pleading with the men not to take Bobo. I could hear the fear in her voice. She broke into a mixture of pleas and tears as she practically prayed for Bobo, asking the men not to harm him. The men ignored her, urging Bobo to hurry up and get dressed. He was still somewhat groggy and rubbing his eyes, but he quickly obeyed. My mother then offered them some money not to take Bobo away. I was now fully awake but still not moving. It was now crystal clear to me that these men were up to no good. They had come for Bobo, and no amount of begging, pleading, or payment was going to stop them. Although Dad had two shotguns in his closet, the 12-gauge and a .410, he never tried to get them. If Dad had made a break for his guns, none of us would be alive today. I believe Milam and Bryant were prepared to kill us all at the slightest provocation. I am glad that Dad didn’t do anything to put us all in danger.
Suddenly, the same panic I had felt after Bobo had whistled at Mrs. Bryant returned, and it was all I could do to stop trembling with fear, realizing that Bobo was not only in trouble but in grave danger. My fear soon escalated into terror, and I was still frozen stiff in my bed, unable to move or to say anything. My mother’s pleas continued as the men pushed the now-dressed Bobo from the room. Bobo left that room without saying one word. There is no way I could have done that. Everyone along Dark Fear Road would have heard my screams.
At the time I didn’t know what happened next, but according to my dad, the men took Bobo out to a car or truck that was waiting in the darkness. One of the men asked someone inside the vehicle if this was the right boy, and Dad said he heard a women’s voice respond that it was. Then the men drove off with Bobo, toward Money....(Wright 1).
Author Douglas O. Linder presented a third narrative.
On the evening of the 27th, Bryant and Milam, along with Carolyn Bryant and Johnny Washington (a black man who performed odd jobs for Bryant) set off in a pickup looking for their target. Spotting a black teenager walking home with some molasses and snuff, Bryant ordered Washington to throw the boy in the back of the truck, and Washington did so. When Carolyn emerged from the truck to tell Bryant, "That's not the nigger! That's not the one!", Bryant ordered Washington to throw him out the truck. The teenager landed head first, losing his front teeth.
Within the next few hours, Bryant and Milam somehow learned that the wolf-whistler was staying at the home of "Preacher" Moses Wright. At 2:30 a.m., a vehicle with headlights off pulled up in front of Wright's home east of Money. Till and his relations had arrived home after a night of drinking and looking for girls in Greenwood, Mississippi, but were asleep when a voice called out, "Preacher, Preacher!" When Wright went to the door, the man identified himself as Roy Bryant and said that he wanted to talk to "a fat boy" from Chicago. Standing on the porch with Bryant were Milam and a black man, hiding his face, who (according to his own later admission) was Otha Johnson, Milam's odd-job man. The men searched the occupied beds looking for Till. Coming to Till's bed, Milam shined a flashlight in the boy's face and asked, "You the niggah that did the talking down at Money?" When Till answered, "Yeah," Milam said, "Don't say 'yeah' to me, niggah. I'll blow your head off. Get your clothes on." Warning the Wrights they'd be killed if they told anyone they had come by, Milam and Wright ushered Till out of the house and to their parked vehicle. Standing on the porch looking out into the dark, Moses Wright heard a woman's voice--possibly Carolyn Bryant's--from inside the vehicle tell the abductors they had found the right boy (Linder 14)
Works cited:
Huie, William Bradford. “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi.” Look, January 1956. Web.
Linder, Douglas O. “The Emmett Till Murder Trial: An Account.” 2012. Web.
Whitaker, Hugh. “Two Accounts of the Abduction of Emmett ("Bobo") Till.” A Case Study in Southern Justice: The Emmett Till Case. Web. < http://famous-trials.com/legacyftrial.... >
Wright, Simeon. “Two Accounts of the Abduction of Emmett ("Bobo") Till.” Web. http://famous-trials.com/legacyftrial....
Bryant's half-brother, John W. Milam, readily agreed to help. The two men operated businesses together, played cards together, drank together, and were described in the [2004] FBI's investigation as being "particularly close." According to historian Hugh Whitaker, who interviewed dozens of Mississippians who knew Bryant and Milam, the two "were invariably referred to as 'peckerwoods,' 'white trash,' and other terms of disappropriation" (Linder 3).
William Bradford Huie’s account of Emmett Till’s abduction from Preacher Wright’s house August 24, 1955, was based on information he had gathered from Till’s abductors and the black occupants of Wright’s house.
The Negroes drove away; and Carolyn [Bryant], shaken, told [her sister-in-law] Juanita [Milam]. The two women determined to keep the incident from their "Men-folks." They didn't tell J. W. Milam when he came to escort them home.
By Thursday afternoon, Carolyn Bryant could see the story was getting around. She spent Thursday night at the Milams, where at 4 a.m. (Friday) Roy got back from Texas. Since he had slept little for five nights, he went to bed at the Milams' while Carolyn returned to the store.
During Friday afternoon, Roy reached the store, and shortly thereafter a Negro told him what "the talk" was, and told him that the "Chicago boy" was "visitin' Preacher." Carolyn then told Roy what had happened.
Once Roy Bryant knew, in his environment, in the opinion of most white people around him, for him to have done nothing would have marked him for a coward and a fool.
On Friday night, he couldn't do anything. He and Carolyn were alone, and he had no car. Saturday was collection day, their busy day in the store. About 10:30 Saturday night, J. W. Milam drove by. Roy took him aside.
They agreed to find Till and take him away.
J. W. "Big Milam" is 36: six feet two, 235 pounds; an extrovert. Short boots accentuate his height; khaki trousers; red sports shirt; sun helmet. Dark-visaged; his lower lip curls when he chuckles; and though bald, his remaining hair is jet-black.
He is slavery's plantation overseer. Today, he rents Negro-driven mechanical cotton pickers to plantation owners. Those who know him say that he can handle Negroes better than anybody in the country.
Big Milam soldiered in the Patton manner. With a ninth-grade education, he was commissioned in battle by the 75th Division. He was an expert platoon leader, expert street fighter, expert in night patrol, expert with the "grease gun," with every device for close range killing. A German bullet tore clear through his chest; his body bears "multiple shrapnel wounds." Of his medals, he cherishes one: combat infantryman's badge.
Big Milam, like many soldiers, brought home his favorite gun: the .45 Colt automatic pistol.
"Best weapon the Army's got," he says. "Either for shootin' or sluggin'."
Big Milam reached Money a few minutes shy of 2 a.m., Sunday, August 28. The Bryants were asleep; the store was dark but for the all-night light. He rapped at the back door, and when Roy came, he said: "Let's go. Let's make that trip now."
Roy dressed, brought a gun: this one was a .45 Colt. Both men were and remained -- cold sober. Big Milam had drunk a beer at Minter City around 9; Roy had had nothing.
There was no moon as they drove to Preacher's house: 2.8 miles east of Money.
Preacher's house stands 50 feet right of the gravel road, with cedar and persimmon trees in the yard. Big Milam drove the pickup in under the trees. He was bareheaded, carrying a five-cell flashlight in his left hand, the .45 in the right.
Roy Bryant pounded on the door.
Preacher: "Who's that?"
Bryant: "Mr. Bryant from Money, Preacher."
Preacher: "All right, sir. Just a minute."
Preacher came out of the screened-in porch.
Bryant: "Preacher, you got a boy from Chicago here?"
Preacher: "Yessir."
Bryant: "I want to talk to him."
Preacher: "Yessir. I'll get him."
Preacher led them to a back bedroom where four youths were sleeping in two beds. In one was Bobo Till and Simeon Wright, Preacher's youngest son. Bryant had told Preacher to turn on the lights; Preacher had said they were out of order. So only the flashlight was used.
The visit was not a complete surprise. Preacher testified that he had heard of the "trouble," that he "sho' had" talked to his nephew about it. Bobo himself had been afraid; he had wanted to go home the day after the incident. The Negro girl in the party urged that he leave. "They'll kill him," she had warned. But Preacher's wife, Elizabeth Wright, had decided that the danger was being magnified; she had urged Bobo to "finish yo' visit."
"I thought they might say something to him, but I didn't think they'd kill a boy," Preacher said.
Big Milam shined the light in Bobo's face, said: "You the nigger who did the talking?"
"Yeah," Bobo replied.
Milam: "Don't say, 'Yeah' to me: I'll blow your head off. Get your clothes on."
Bobo had been sleeping in his shorts. He pulled on a shirt and trousers, then reached for his socks.
"Just the shoes," Milam hurried him.
"I don't wear shoes without socks," Bobo said: and he kept the gun-bearers waiting while he put on his socks, then a pair of canvas shoes with thick crepe soles.
Preacher and his wife tried two arguments in the boy's behalf.
"He ain't got good sense," Preacher begged. "He didn't know what he was doing. Don't take him."
"I'll pay you gentlemen for the damages," Elizabeth Wright said.
"You niggers go back to sleep," Milam replied.
They marched him into the yard, told him to get in the back of the pickup and lie down. He obeyed. They drove toward Money.
Elizabeth Wright rushed to the home of a white neighbor, who got up, looked around, but decided he could do nothing. Then, she and Preacher drove to the home of her brother, Crosby Smith, at Sumner; and Crosby Smith, on Sunday morning, went to the sheriff's office at Greenwood.
The other young Negroes stayed at Preacher's house until daylight, when Wheeler Parker telephoned his mother in Chicago, who in turn notified Bobo's mother, Mamie Bradley, 33, 6427 S. St. Lawrence.
Their intention was to "just whip him... and scare some sense into him" (Huie 6-10).
According to Hugh Whitaker, master’s thesis student at Florida State, Milam had threatened Preacher Wright.
Milam asked Wright if he knew anybody there. Wright replied, “No, Sir. I don’t know you.”
Milam: “How old are you?”
Wright: “Sixty-four.”
Milam: “Well, if you know any of us here tonight, then you will never live to get to be sixty-five” (Whitaker 1).
Simeon Wright, Emmett Till’s cousin, gave a different account.
When [my father] opened the door, he saw two white men standing on the porch. One of them - J. W. Milam, we would learn later – was tall, thickset, and balding; he had a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other. The second man was almost as tall but not as heavy; he was the one who had spoken, Roy Bryant. A third man stood behind Bryant, hiding his face from Dad. Dad believed he was a black man, someone who knew us.
The white men entered the house through our front guest room, where Wheeler and Maurice were sleeping. Dad woke Wheeler up first. Milam told Dad that Wheeler was not the boy he was looking for; he was looking for the fat boy from Chicago. Then I heard loud talking in my bedroom.
In my half-conscious state, I had no idea what was going on. Was I dreaming? Or was it a nightmare? Why were these white men in our bedroom at this hour? I rubbed my eyes and then shielded them, trying to see beyond the glare of the flashlight. The balding man ordered me to go back to sleep.
Dad had to shake Bobo for quite a while to wake him up. When he finally awoke, the balding man told Bobo to get up and put his clothes on. It was then that I realized they had come to take him away. It wasn’t clear to me what was going on and why they wanted just him. At first I thought they had come to send him back to Chicago, but that didn’t make sense at all.
I was lying there, frozen stiff and not moving, when my mother rushed into the room. She began pleading with the men not to take Bobo. I could hear the fear in her voice. She broke into a mixture of pleas and tears as she practically prayed for Bobo, asking the men not to harm him. The men ignored her, urging Bobo to hurry up and get dressed. He was still somewhat groggy and rubbing his eyes, but he quickly obeyed. My mother then offered them some money not to take Bobo away. I was now fully awake but still not moving. It was now crystal clear to me that these men were up to no good. They had come for Bobo, and no amount of begging, pleading, or payment was going to stop them. Although Dad had two shotguns in his closet, the 12-gauge and a .410, he never tried to get them. If Dad had made a break for his guns, none of us would be alive today. I believe Milam and Bryant were prepared to kill us all at the slightest provocation. I am glad that Dad didn’t do anything to put us all in danger.
Suddenly, the same panic I had felt after Bobo had whistled at Mrs. Bryant returned, and it was all I could do to stop trembling with fear, realizing that Bobo was not only in trouble but in grave danger. My fear soon escalated into terror, and I was still frozen stiff in my bed, unable to move or to say anything. My mother’s pleas continued as the men pushed the now-dressed Bobo from the room. Bobo left that room without saying one word. There is no way I could have done that. Everyone along Dark Fear Road would have heard my screams.
At the time I didn’t know what happened next, but according to my dad, the men took Bobo out to a car or truck that was waiting in the darkness. One of the men asked someone inside the vehicle if this was the right boy, and Dad said he heard a women’s voice respond that it was. Then the men drove off with Bobo, toward Money....(Wright 1).
Author Douglas O. Linder presented a third narrative.
On the evening of the 27th, Bryant and Milam, along with Carolyn Bryant and Johnny Washington (a black man who performed odd jobs for Bryant) set off in a pickup looking for their target. Spotting a black teenager walking home with some molasses and snuff, Bryant ordered Washington to throw the boy in the back of the truck, and Washington did so. When Carolyn emerged from the truck to tell Bryant, "That's not the nigger! That's not the one!", Bryant ordered Washington to throw him out the truck. The teenager landed head first, losing his front teeth.
Within the next few hours, Bryant and Milam somehow learned that the wolf-whistler was staying at the home of "Preacher" Moses Wright. At 2:30 a.m., a vehicle with headlights off pulled up in front of Wright's home east of Money. Till and his relations had arrived home after a night of drinking and looking for girls in Greenwood, Mississippi, but were asleep when a voice called out, "Preacher, Preacher!" When Wright went to the door, the man identified himself as Roy Bryant and said that he wanted to talk to "a fat boy" from Chicago. Standing on the porch with Bryant were Milam and a black man, hiding his face, who (according to his own later admission) was Otha Johnson, Milam's odd-job man. The men searched the occupied beds looking for Till. Coming to Till's bed, Milam shined a flashlight in the boy's face and asked, "You the niggah that did the talking down at Money?" When Till answered, "Yeah," Milam said, "Don't say 'yeah' to me, niggah. I'll blow your head off. Get your clothes on." Warning the Wrights they'd be killed if they told anyone they had come by, Milam and Wright ushered Till out of the house and to their parked vehicle. Standing on the porch looking out into the dark, Moses Wright heard a woman's voice--possibly Carolyn Bryant's--from inside the vehicle tell the abductors they had found the right boy (Linder 14)
Works cited:
Huie, William Bradford. “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi.” Look, January 1956. Web.
Linder, Douglas O. “The Emmett Till Murder Trial: An Account.” 2012. Web.
Whitaker, Hugh. “Two Accounts of the Abduction of Emmett ("Bobo") Till.” A Case Study in Southern Justice: The Emmett Till Case. Web. < http://famous-trials.com/legacyftrial.... >
Wright, Simeon. “Two Accounts of the Abduction of Emmett ("Bobo") Till.” Web. http://famous-trials.com/legacyftrial....
July 29, 2018
Civil Rights Events -- Emmett Till -- Part One
The murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till August 28, 1955, in Money, Mississippi, the photographic evidence presented in national news outlets of the brutality administered, and the acquittal of Till’s murderers September 23 are credited by many historians as the major impetus for the advent of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Martin Luther King Jr. would write that Till’s murder “was one of the most brutal and inhuman crimes of the 20th century.” One hundred days after Till's murder, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama city bus, sparking the yearlong Montgomery Bus Boycott. … "I thought about Emmett Till, and I couldn't go back [to the back of the bus], Parks wrote (Emmett 4).
Emmett Louis Till was born on July 25, 1941, in Chicago, the only child of Louis and Mamie Till. Till never knew his father, a private in the United States Army during World War II.
Mamie and Louis Till separated in 1942, and three years later, the family received word from the Army that the soldier had been executed for "willful misconduct" while serving in Italy (Emmett 2), the misconduct being the rape of two women and the murder of another.
Defying the social constraints and discrimination she faced as an African-American woman growing up in the 1920s and '30s, Mamie Till excelled both academically and professionally.
She was only the fourth black student to graduate from suburban Chicago's predominantly white Argo Community High School, and the first black student to make the school's "A" Honor Roll. While raising Emmett Till as a single mother, she worked long hours for the Air Force as a clerk in charge of confidential files.
Emmett Till, who went by the nickname Bobo, grew up in a thriving, middle-class black neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. The neighborhood was a haven for black-owned businesses, and the streets he roamed as a child were lined with black-owned insurance companies, pharmacies and beauty salons as well as nightclubs that drew the likes of Duke Ellington and Sarah Vaughan.
Those who knew Till best described him as a responsible, funny and infectiously high-spirited child. He was stricken with polio at the age of 5, but managed to make a full recovery, save a slight stutter that remained with him for the rest of his life.
With his mother often working more than 12-hour days, Till took on his full share of domestic responsibilities from a very young age. "Emmett had all the house responsibility," his mother later recalled. "I mean everything was really on his shoulders, and Emmett took it upon himself. He told me if I would work, and make the money, he would take care of everything else. He cleaned, and he cooked quite a bit. And he even took over the laundry."
Till attended the all-black McCosh Grammar School. His classmate and childhood pal, Richard Heard, later recalled, "Emmett was a funny guy all the time. He had a suitcase of jokes that he liked to tell. He loved to make people laugh. He was a chubby kid; most of the guys were skinny, but he didn't let that stand in his way. He made a lot of friends at McCosh."
In August 1955, Till's great uncle, Moses Wright, came up from Mississippi to visit the family in Chicago. At the end of his stay, Wright was planning to take Till's cousin, Wheeler Parker, back to Mississippi with him to visit relatives down South, and when Till, who was just 14 years old at the time, learned of these plans, he begged his mother to let him go along.
Initially, Till's mother was opposed to the idea. She wanted to take a road trip to Omaha, Nebraska, and tried to convince her son to join her with the promise of open-road driving lessons.
But Till desperately wanted to spend time with his cousins in Mississippi, and in a fateful decision that would have grave impact on their lives and the course of American history, Till's mother relented and let him go.
On August 19, 1955—the day before Till left with his uncle and cousin for Mississippi—Mamie Till gave her son his late father's signet ring, engraved with the initials "L.T."
The next day she drove her son to the 63rd Street station in Chicago. They kissed goodbye, and Till boarded a southbound train headed for Mississippi. It was the last time they ever saw each other (Emmett 3-4).
The plan had been to stay in “the small northern Mississippi town of Money” for two weeks. “Emmett sampled the Mississippi life of his cousins during the first three days of his visit: picking cotton, shooting off fireworks, stealing watermelons, and swimming in a snake-infested pond” (Linder 2) .
In an article for Look Magazine, which appeared in January 1956, investigative reporter William Bradford Huie wrote: About 7:30 pm, eight young Negroes -- seven boys and a girl -- in a '46 Ford had stopped outside [Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market]. They included sons, grandsons and a nephew of Moses (Preacher) Wright, 64, a 'cropper. They were between 13 and 19 years old. Four were natives of the Delta and others, including the nephew, Emmett (Bobo) Till, were visiting from the Chicago area.
Bobo Till was 14 years old: born on July 25, 1941. He was stocky, muscular, weighing about 160, five feet four or five. Preacher later testified: "He looked like a man."
Bobo's party joined a dozen other young Negroes, including two other girls, in front of the store. Bryant had built checkerboards there. Some were playing checkers, others were wrestling and "kiddin' about girls."
Bobo bragged about his white girl. He showed the boys a picture of a white girl in his wallet; and to their jeers of disbelief, he boasted of success with her.
"You talkin' mighty big, Bo," one youth said. "There's a pretty little white woman in the store. Since you know how to handle white girls, let's see you go in and get a date with her?"
"You ain't chicken, are yuh, Bo?" another youth taunted him (Huie 5).
Huie explains: Carolyn Holloway Bryant is 21, five feet tall, weighs 103 pounds. An Irish girl, with black hair and black eyes, she is a small farmer's daughter who, at 17, quit high school at Indianola, Miss., to marry a soldier, Roy Bryant, then 20. The couple have two boys, three and two; and they operate a store at a dusty crossroads called Money: post office, filling station and three stores clustered around a school and a gin, and set in the vast, lonely cotton patch that is the Mississippi Delta.
Carolyn and Roy Bryant are poor: no car, no TV. They live in the back of the store which Roy's brothers helped set up when he got out of the 82nd Airborne in 1953. They sell "snuff-and-fatback" to Negro field hands on credit: and they earn little because, for one reason, the government has been giving the Negroes food they formerly bought.
Carolyn and Roy Bryant's social life is visits to their families, to the Baptist church, and, whenever they can borrow a car, to a drive-in, with the kids sleeping in the back seat. They call Shane the best picture they ever saw.
For extra money, Carolyn tends store when Roy works outside -- like truck driving for a brother. And he has many brothers. His mother had two husbands, 11 children.
On Wednesday evening, August 24, 1955, Roy was in Texas, on a brother's truck. He had carted shrimp from New Orleans to San Antonio, proceeded to Brownsville. Carolyn was alone in the store. But back in the living quarters was her sister-in-law Juanita Milam, 27, with her two small sons and Carolyn's two. The store was kept open till 9 on week nights, 11 on Saturday.
When her husband was away, Carolyn Bryant never slept in the store, never stayed there alone after dark. Moreover, in the Delta, no white woman ever travels country roads after dark unattended by a man.
This meant that during Roy's absences -- particularly since he had no car -- there was family inconvenience. Each afternoon, a sister-in-law arrived to stay with Carolyn until closing time. Then, the two women, with their children, waited for a brother-in-law to convoy them to his home. Next morning, the sister-in-law drove Carolyn back.
Juanita Milam had driven from her home in Glendora. She had parked in front of the store to the left; and under the front seat of this car was Roy Bryant's pistol, a .38 Colt automatic. Carolyn knew it was there. After 9, Juanita's husband, J. W. Milam, would arrive in his pickup to shepherd them to his home for the night (Huie 4-5).
Challenged by his peers, Till entered the Bryant store. Accounts of what happened inside varied, considerably. Carolyn Bryant’s testimony during the trial of her husband and brother-in-law was condemnatory.
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 ((Linder 8).
Years later, Simeon Wright, Emmett’s cousin, offered this account.
As we reached Bryant’s store, we continued our usual small talk and banter. We were still excited about the day’s events and happy to be in town together. We all got out of the car and were milling around in the front of the store when Wheeler [Emmett’s cousin] went in to buy a pop or some candy. Bobo went in after him; then Wheeler came out, leaving Bobo in there alone.
Maurice immediately sent me into the store to be with Bobo. He was concerned about Bobo being in the store alone because of what had happened on the previous Sunday, when Bobo had set his fireworks off inside the city limits. He just didn’t know the Mississippi rules, and Maurice felt that someone should be with Bobo at all times.
For less than a minute he was in the store alone with Carolyn Bryant, the white woman working at the cash register. What he said, if anything, before I came in I don’t know. While I was in the store, Bobo did nothing inappropriate. He didn’t grab Mrs. Bryant, nor did he put his arms around her – that was the story she later told to the court. A counter separated the customers from the store clerk; Bobo would have had to jump over it to get to Mrs. Bryant. Bobo didn’t ask her for a date or call her “baby.” There was no lecherous conversation between them. And after a few minutes he paid for his items and we left the store together. We had been outside the store only a few seconds when Mrs. Bryant came out behind us, heading straight to her car. As she walked, Bobo whistled at her. I think he wanted to get a laugh out of us or something. He was always joking around, and it was hard to tell when he was serious. It was a loud wolf whistle, a big-city “whee wheeeee!” and it caught us all by surprise. We all looked at each other, realizing that Bobo had violated a longstanding unwritten law, a social taboo about conduct between blacks and white in the South. Suddenly we felt we were in danger, and we stared at each other, all with the same expression of fear and panic. Like a group of boys who had thrown a rock through somebody’s window, we ran to the car. Bobo, with a slight limp from the polio he’d contracted as a child, ran along with us, but not as panic-stricken as we were. After seeing our fright, it did slowly dawn on him that he had done something wrong (Wright 1).
Newspaperman Devery Anderson offered a slightly different interpretation. Till entered the store and purchased bubble gum; when he left, Carolyn followed him to the door. A Northerner unfamiliar with Southern etiquette, he then waved, said "goodbye" (not "goodbye, ma'am"), and, according to family members, directed a wolf-whistle at the young white woman. She became upset and went toward a car -- to get a gun, according to trial testimony. Till and his frightened companions got in their own car and sped off toward home (Anderson 1)
Thus had been set the pretext for a horrible crime.
Works cited:
Anderson, Devery. “Widow of Emmett Till Killer Dies Quietly, Notoriously.” The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger. Feb. 27, 2014. USA Today. Web.
“Emmett Till.” Biography. July 13, 2018. A&E Television Networks. Web.
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.
Wright, Simeon. “Two Accounts of the Incident at Bryant's Grocery & Meat Market.” Simeon’s Story: An Eyewitness Account of the Kidnapping of Emmett Till. Web. http://famous-trials.com/legacyftrial....
Martin Luther King Jr. would write that Till’s murder “was one of the most brutal and inhuman crimes of the 20th century.” One hundred days after Till's murder, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama city bus, sparking the yearlong Montgomery Bus Boycott. … "I thought about Emmett Till, and I couldn't go back [to the back of the bus], Parks wrote (Emmett 4).
Emmett Louis Till was born on July 25, 1941, in Chicago, the only child of Louis and Mamie Till. Till never knew his father, a private in the United States Army during World War II.
Mamie and Louis Till separated in 1942, and three years later, the family received word from the Army that the soldier had been executed for "willful misconduct" while serving in Italy (Emmett 2), the misconduct being the rape of two women and the murder of another.
Defying the social constraints and discrimination she faced as an African-American woman growing up in the 1920s and '30s, Mamie Till excelled both academically and professionally.
She was only the fourth black student to graduate from suburban Chicago's predominantly white Argo Community High School, and the first black student to make the school's "A" Honor Roll. While raising Emmett Till as a single mother, she worked long hours for the Air Force as a clerk in charge of confidential files.
Emmett Till, who went by the nickname Bobo, grew up in a thriving, middle-class black neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. The neighborhood was a haven for black-owned businesses, and the streets he roamed as a child were lined with black-owned insurance companies, pharmacies and beauty salons as well as nightclubs that drew the likes of Duke Ellington and Sarah Vaughan.
Those who knew Till best described him as a responsible, funny and infectiously high-spirited child. He was stricken with polio at the age of 5, but managed to make a full recovery, save a slight stutter that remained with him for the rest of his life.
With his mother often working more than 12-hour days, Till took on his full share of domestic responsibilities from a very young age. "Emmett had all the house responsibility," his mother later recalled. "I mean everything was really on his shoulders, and Emmett took it upon himself. He told me if I would work, and make the money, he would take care of everything else. He cleaned, and he cooked quite a bit. And he even took over the laundry."
Till attended the all-black McCosh Grammar School. His classmate and childhood pal, Richard Heard, later recalled, "Emmett was a funny guy all the time. He had a suitcase of jokes that he liked to tell. He loved to make people laugh. He was a chubby kid; most of the guys were skinny, but he didn't let that stand in his way. He made a lot of friends at McCosh."
In August 1955, Till's great uncle, Moses Wright, came up from Mississippi to visit the family in Chicago. At the end of his stay, Wright was planning to take Till's cousin, Wheeler Parker, back to Mississippi with him to visit relatives down South, and when Till, who was just 14 years old at the time, learned of these plans, he begged his mother to let him go along.
Initially, Till's mother was opposed to the idea. She wanted to take a road trip to Omaha, Nebraska, and tried to convince her son to join her with the promise of open-road driving lessons.
But Till desperately wanted to spend time with his cousins in Mississippi, and in a fateful decision that would have grave impact on their lives and the course of American history, Till's mother relented and let him go.
On August 19, 1955—the day before Till left with his uncle and cousin for Mississippi—Mamie Till gave her son his late father's signet ring, engraved with the initials "L.T."
The next day she drove her son to the 63rd Street station in Chicago. They kissed goodbye, and Till boarded a southbound train headed for Mississippi. It was the last time they ever saw each other (Emmett 3-4).
The plan had been to stay in “the small northern Mississippi town of Money” for two weeks. “Emmett sampled the Mississippi life of his cousins during the first three days of his visit: picking cotton, shooting off fireworks, stealing watermelons, and swimming in a snake-infested pond” (Linder 2) .
In an article for Look Magazine, which appeared in January 1956, investigative reporter William Bradford Huie wrote: About 7:30 pm, eight young Negroes -- seven boys and a girl -- in a '46 Ford had stopped outside [Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market]. They included sons, grandsons and a nephew of Moses (Preacher) Wright, 64, a 'cropper. They were between 13 and 19 years old. Four were natives of the Delta and others, including the nephew, Emmett (Bobo) Till, were visiting from the Chicago area.
Bobo Till was 14 years old: born on July 25, 1941. He was stocky, muscular, weighing about 160, five feet four or five. Preacher later testified: "He looked like a man."
Bobo's party joined a dozen other young Negroes, including two other girls, in front of the store. Bryant had built checkerboards there. Some were playing checkers, others were wrestling and "kiddin' about girls."
Bobo bragged about his white girl. He showed the boys a picture of a white girl in his wallet; and to their jeers of disbelief, he boasted of success with her.
"You talkin' mighty big, Bo," one youth said. "There's a pretty little white woman in the store. Since you know how to handle white girls, let's see you go in and get a date with her?"
"You ain't chicken, are yuh, Bo?" another youth taunted him (Huie 5).
Huie explains: Carolyn Holloway Bryant is 21, five feet tall, weighs 103 pounds. An Irish girl, with black hair and black eyes, she is a small farmer's daughter who, at 17, quit high school at Indianola, Miss., to marry a soldier, Roy Bryant, then 20. The couple have two boys, three and two; and they operate a store at a dusty crossroads called Money: post office, filling station and three stores clustered around a school and a gin, and set in the vast, lonely cotton patch that is the Mississippi Delta.
Carolyn and Roy Bryant are poor: no car, no TV. They live in the back of the store which Roy's brothers helped set up when he got out of the 82nd Airborne in 1953. They sell "snuff-and-fatback" to Negro field hands on credit: and they earn little because, for one reason, the government has been giving the Negroes food they formerly bought.
Carolyn and Roy Bryant's social life is visits to their families, to the Baptist church, and, whenever they can borrow a car, to a drive-in, with the kids sleeping in the back seat. They call Shane the best picture they ever saw.
For extra money, Carolyn tends store when Roy works outside -- like truck driving for a brother. And he has many brothers. His mother had two husbands, 11 children.
On Wednesday evening, August 24, 1955, Roy was in Texas, on a brother's truck. He had carted shrimp from New Orleans to San Antonio, proceeded to Brownsville. Carolyn was alone in the store. But back in the living quarters was her sister-in-law Juanita Milam, 27, with her two small sons and Carolyn's two. The store was kept open till 9 on week nights, 11 on Saturday.
When her husband was away, Carolyn Bryant never slept in the store, never stayed there alone after dark. Moreover, in the Delta, no white woman ever travels country roads after dark unattended by a man.
This meant that during Roy's absences -- particularly since he had no car -- there was family inconvenience. Each afternoon, a sister-in-law arrived to stay with Carolyn until closing time. Then, the two women, with their children, waited for a brother-in-law to convoy them to his home. Next morning, the sister-in-law drove Carolyn back.
Juanita Milam had driven from her home in Glendora. She had parked in front of the store to the left; and under the front seat of this car was Roy Bryant's pistol, a .38 Colt automatic. Carolyn knew it was there. After 9, Juanita's husband, J. W. Milam, would arrive in his pickup to shepherd them to his home for the night (Huie 4-5).
Challenged by his peers, Till entered the Bryant store. Accounts of what happened inside varied, considerably. Carolyn Bryant’s testimony during the trial of her husband and brother-in-law was condemnatory.
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 ((Linder 8).
Years later, Simeon Wright, Emmett’s cousin, offered this account.
As we reached Bryant’s store, we continued our usual small talk and banter. We were still excited about the day’s events and happy to be in town together. We all got out of the car and were milling around in the front of the store when Wheeler [Emmett’s cousin] went in to buy a pop or some candy. Bobo went in after him; then Wheeler came out, leaving Bobo in there alone.
Maurice immediately sent me into the store to be with Bobo. He was concerned about Bobo being in the store alone because of what had happened on the previous Sunday, when Bobo had set his fireworks off inside the city limits. He just didn’t know the Mississippi rules, and Maurice felt that someone should be with Bobo at all times.
For less than a minute he was in the store alone with Carolyn Bryant, the white woman working at the cash register. What he said, if anything, before I came in I don’t know. While I was in the store, Bobo did nothing inappropriate. He didn’t grab Mrs. Bryant, nor did he put his arms around her – that was the story she later told to the court. A counter separated the customers from the store clerk; Bobo would have had to jump over it to get to Mrs. Bryant. Bobo didn’t ask her for a date or call her “baby.” There was no lecherous conversation between them. And after a few minutes he paid for his items and we left the store together. We had been outside the store only a few seconds when Mrs. Bryant came out behind us, heading straight to her car. As she walked, Bobo whistled at her. I think he wanted to get a laugh out of us or something. He was always joking around, and it was hard to tell when he was serious. It was a loud wolf whistle, a big-city “whee wheeeee!” and it caught us all by surprise. We all looked at each other, realizing that Bobo had violated a longstanding unwritten law, a social taboo about conduct between blacks and white in the South. Suddenly we felt we were in danger, and we stared at each other, all with the same expression of fear and panic. Like a group of boys who had thrown a rock through somebody’s window, we ran to the car. Bobo, with a slight limp from the polio he’d contracted as a child, ran along with us, but not as panic-stricken as we were. After seeing our fright, it did slowly dawn on him that he had done something wrong (Wright 1).
Newspaperman Devery Anderson offered a slightly different interpretation. Till entered the store and purchased bubble gum; when he left, Carolyn followed him to the door. A Northerner unfamiliar with Southern etiquette, he then waved, said "goodbye" (not "goodbye, ma'am"), and, according to family members, directed a wolf-whistle at the young white woman. She became upset and went toward a car -- to get a gun, according to trial testimony. Till and his frightened companions got in their own car and sped off toward home (Anderson 1)
Thus had been set the pretext for a horrible crime.
Works cited:
Anderson, Devery. “Widow of Emmett Till Killer Dies Quietly, Notoriously.” The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger. Feb. 27, 2014. USA Today. Web.
“Emmett Till.” Biography. July 13, 2018. A&E Television Networks. Web.
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.
Wright, Simeon. “Two Accounts of the Incident at Bryant's Grocery & Meat Market.” Simeon’s Story: An Eyewitness Account of the Kidnapping of Emmett Till. Web. http://famous-trials.com/legacyftrial....
July 22, 2018
Civil Rights Events -- Introduction
I am about to embark on a series of posts that will convey information about important racial clashes in our country’s recent past, events that illustrate simultaneously pernicious racism and manifest progress toward the seemingly ephemeral goal of achieving racial equality. Why? Because I am a white man who lived during this time period, who feels the guilt of my race’s inhumanity, who since adulthood has been an active student of our nation’s past, who for 32 years was a public school instructor, who as a novelist recognizes that drama can be a useful tool to achieve beneficial purposes.
I had just turned 21 in 1955 when Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi. I had finished my junior year at UCLA, on my way to earning a bachelor’s degree in history. I had begun reading Bruce Catton’s remarkable series about the battles of the Army of the Potomac. My interest in the Civil War whetted, I would over the next ten years read many books that informed me of the cruelties inflicted personally and institutionally upon the African race.
I do not recall being aware of Emmett Till’s murder at that time, but I was indeed cognizant of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama and the names Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. Then came the raucous in Little Rock, Arkansas, the images of an isolated black girl walking toward the entrance of a previous all-white high school as adult whites – mothers included – flanked her, gesticulating, faces emitting hate.
I had had two open-minded, kind-hearted parents to influence me during my formative years. Although we had lived in a town outside Nashville, Tennessee, for two years – I was 9 when we left for California – we never did live in close proximity to African Americans. I do not recall having black classmates in my elementary and secondary school grades. My parents never succumbed to the white cultural attitude that blacks were inferior and a personal or economic threat. My mother became a member and, for one term, the president of the Pasadena Interracial Club. One evening a man came to our front door in Pasadena, California. My father, a proof reader for a Los Angeles newspaper, answered the knock. A neighbor presented him a petition he wanted signed – a declaration that blacks should not be permitted to reside in our neighborhood. My father refused to oblige. His action is one of my fondest memories of my parents.
I lived in a low-rent dormitory of sorts my graduate year at UCLA. Our large room accommodated six people. One of them was a six foot five or six inch ex-navy black man named Bill. We struck up a somewhat restrained white/black friendship. We spent most of our time together in the confines of our room. He was athletic. He had tried out for Johnny Wooden’s varsity basketball team and had been cut – no criticism of his ability; he was good. We played a recreational game once against some other UCLA recreational team. I recall how out-of-my-league I felt. Bill scored almost all of our team’s points. As the year progressed, I developed the impression that he wanted to test my apparent indifference that he was black. He asked me once to shave his armpits. I declined. (I wonder still what he had concluded) The ending semester of my graduate year I was student teaching an America history class (eleventh grade) in the nearest high school to the UCLA campus. The last day of the school year my supervising teacher assigned me to conduct the class while she finished making out student report cards. I invited Bill to speak to the class about his racial experiences. He did. The students – all of them white -- listened raptly. He had been looked at suspiciously by school personnel when he had entered the building to come to my room. He left elated. I was very pleased. I believe the experience expelled any doubt he might have had about me racially.
I taught one year in a combined junior and senior high school in northern Los Angeles -- 1957 to 1958. It had a racially and ethnically mixed student body: whites, blacks, many Latinos. It was a beneficial experience for me perspective-wise. Student strengths, deficiencies, challenges are universal. It was painful to see eleventh grade students reading on the second and third grade reading level and my being unable to do anything useful to rectify it.
I was teaching English to seventh graders in Orinda, California, when Southern lunch counters were being occupied by black college students like John Lewis and then to eight graders during the Freedom Rides and in 1963 during the Birmingham campaign in integrate department stores and then in 1964 when horrible murders were committed in Mississippi resulting from civil rights activists’ attempts to have African-Americans registered to vote. Then Selma occurred, followed by the march upon the Alabama capitol. 1968 brought us Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis and rioting in major cities and the Algiers Motel incident in Detroit. So much horror to witness on television, so much revulsion to read about!
One year during the 1970s I taught a one-quarter elective that covered all of these events. Another year I had two English classes read Dick Gregory’s autobiography Nigger. Over the years I had my gifted and talented English classes read Richard Wright’s Black Boy. The children of upper middle class, college educated white parents, my students needed exposure to what it had been like –as best as I could intimate – to be black in America.
I would like to do more intimating now. I wish I still had the reading material I had when I was teaching. Thankfully, I have the internet.
I had just turned 21 in 1955 when Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi. I had finished my junior year at UCLA, on my way to earning a bachelor’s degree in history. I had begun reading Bruce Catton’s remarkable series about the battles of the Army of the Potomac. My interest in the Civil War whetted, I would over the next ten years read many books that informed me of the cruelties inflicted personally and institutionally upon the African race.
I do not recall being aware of Emmett Till’s murder at that time, but I was indeed cognizant of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama and the names Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. Then came the raucous in Little Rock, Arkansas, the images of an isolated black girl walking toward the entrance of a previous all-white high school as adult whites – mothers included – flanked her, gesticulating, faces emitting hate.
I had had two open-minded, kind-hearted parents to influence me during my formative years. Although we had lived in a town outside Nashville, Tennessee, for two years – I was 9 when we left for California – we never did live in close proximity to African Americans. I do not recall having black classmates in my elementary and secondary school grades. My parents never succumbed to the white cultural attitude that blacks were inferior and a personal or economic threat. My mother became a member and, for one term, the president of the Pasadena Interracial Club. One evening a man came to our front door in Pasadena, California. My father, a proof reader for a Los Angeles newspaper, answered the knock. A neighbor presented him a petition he wanted signed – a declaration that blacks should not be permitted to reside in our neighborhood. My father refused to oblige. His action is one of my fondest memories of my parents.
I lived in a low-rent dormitory of sorts my graduate year at UCLA. Our large room accommodated six people. One of them was a six foot five or six inch ex-navy black man named Bill. We struck up a somewhat restrained white/black friendship. We spent most of our time together in the confines of our room. He was athletic. He had tried out for Johnny Wooden’s varsity basketball team and had been cut – no criticism of his ability; he was good. We played a recreational game once against some other UCLA recreational team. I recall how out-of-my-league I felt. Bill scored almost all of our team’s points. As the year progressed, I developed the impression that he wanted to test my apparent indifference that he was black. He asked me once to shave his armpits. I declined. (I wonder still what he had concluded) The ending semester of my graduate year I was student teaching an America history class (eleventh grade) in the nearest high school to the UCLA campus. The last day of the school year my supervising teacher assigned me to conduct the class while she finished making out student report cards. I invited Bill to speak to the class about his racial experiences. He did. The students – all of them white -- listened raptly. He had been looked at suspiciously by school personnel when he had entered the building to come to my room. He left elated. I was very pleased. I believe the experience expelled any doubt he might have had about me racially.
I taught one year in a combined junior and senior high school in northern Los Angeles -- 1957 to 1958. It had a racially and ethnically mixed student body: whites, blacks, many Latinos. It was a beneficial experience for me perspective-wise. Student strengths, deficiencies, challenges are universal. It was painful to see eleventh grade students reading on the second and third grade reading level and my being unable to do anything useful to rectify it.
I was teaching English to seventh graders in Orinda, California, when Southern lunch counters were being occupied by black college students like John Lewis and then to eight graders during the Freedom Rides and in 1963 during the Birmingham campaign in integrate department stores and then in 1964 when horrible murders were committed in Mississippi resulting from civil rights activists’ attempts to have African-Americans registered to vote. Then Selma occurred, followed by the march upon the Alabama capitol. 1968 brought us Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis and rioting in major cities and the Algiers Motel incident in Detroit. So much horror to witness on television, so much revulsion to read about!
One year during the 1970s I taught a one-quarter elective that covered all of these events. Another year I had two English classes read Dick Gregory’s autobiography Nigger. Over the years I had my gifted and talented English classes read Richard Wright’s Black Boy. The children of upper middle class, college educated white parents, my students needed exposure to what it had been like –as best as I could intimate – to be black in America.
I would like to do more intimating now. I wish I still had the reading material I had when I was teaching. Thankfully, I have the internet.
July 6, 2018
"Alsoomse and Wanchese" Scenes, Chapter 25, Pages 255-257
Thomas Harriot stood on the starboard side of the Dorothy’s quarterdeck watching beneath its furled sails the Bark Raleigh one hundred rods ahead being towed by oarsmen in long boats toward the narrow exit of Sutton Pool. Ebb tide had begun, the bells of St. Andrew’s having minutes before struck two o’clock. Ushered similarly through the thirty yard passageway into Plymouth Sound, the Dorothy would join its companion ship, unfurl its sails, and begin the two to three-month journey to Bahia de Santa Maria, somewhere between Spanish Florida and Norumbega. The sky was clear, the breeze gentle. The colors of the multiplicity of craft in the large inlet pool of water -- between the mouths of the Tamar and Plym Rivers -- and the colors of the shops along the streets of the Barbican connoted extemporaneous celebration.
Raleigh’s protracted project had begun.
How many evenings he had spent educating himself in the popular taverns here carousing with the port’s numerous ship masters and captains! He and Raleigh’s “gentlemen travelers” – he one of them -- had spent the past two nights in these same taverns awaiting departure. April 27, 1584, etched in his brain, to be etched, he fervently wished, in history!
The painter John White joined him at the gunwale. They watched silently the Bark Raleigh float through the narrow exit way, the side of its three-story square blockhouse a scant twenty yards from the ship’s starboard rigging.
“What would our patron say if the ebb current and those wherries pulling us took our starboard spars into the blockhouse?” White muttered.
“Would you draw a picture of it?” Harriot answered, grinning at the deck.
“I will need to husband my allotment of paper. Better subjects many longitudes beyond wait to be replicated.”
Harriot half-turned. “I have seen your painting of the savage that Frobisher brought back in 1576 and the woman and child from the 1577 expedition. I have been wanting to ask you about them.”
“Ask.”
“What … did you see? Are these people so behindhand as to be mentally deficient? I do not know what to expect.”
White leaned against the gunwale, his long coat bending near his right hip. “I saw human beings, who think, who suffer, who in our presence sought of hide human emotion.”
“What was their sense of us, as best you could tell?”
White moved his left foot ahead of his right. He looked across the deck where another gentleman traveler, Benjamin Wood, was scrutinizing the left side of the narrow exit. “I wish there had been some way besides the use of gestures and facial expressions to communicate. What they thought and felt I can only imagine.”
“What did you think they felt?”
“Fear. Despair. Resignation. We uprooted them, Harriot. We took them to London as specimens! What they could have told us, if they had survived and learned our language!”
Raleigh’s protracted project had begun.
How many evenings he had spent educating himself in the popular taverns here carousing with the port’s numerous ship masters and captains! He and Raleigh’s “gentlemen travelers” – he one of them -- had spent the past two nights in these same taverns awaiting departure. April 27, 1584, etched in his brain, to be etched, he fervently wished, in history!
The painter John White joined him at the gunwale. They watched silently the Bark Raleigh float through the narrow exit way, the side of its three-story square blockhouse a scant twenty yards from the ship’s starboard rigging.
“What would our patron say if the ebb current and those wherries pulling us took our starboard spars into the blockhouse?” White muttered.
“Would you draw a picture of it?” Harriot answered, grinning at the deck.
“I will need to husband my allotment of paper. Better subjects many longitudes beyond wait to be replicated.”
Harriot half-turned. “I have seen your painting of the savage that Frobisher brought back in 1576 and the woman and child from the 1577 expedition. I have been wanting to ask you about them.”
“Ask.”
“What … did you see? Are these people so behindhand as to be mentally deficient? I do not know what to expect.”
White leaned against the gunwale, his long coat bending near his right hip. “I saw human beings, who think, who suffer, who in our presence sought of hide human emotion.”
“What was their sense of us, as best you could tell?”
White moved his left foot ahead of his right. He looked across the deck where another gentleman traveler, Benjamin Wood, was scrutinizing the left side of the narrow exit. “I wish there had been some way besides the use of gestures and facial expressions to communicate. What they thought and felt I can only imagine.”
“What did you think they felt?”
“Fear. Despair. Resignation. We uprooted them, Harriot. We took them to London as specimens! What they could have told us, if they had survived and learned our language!”
July 1, 2018
"Alsoomse and Wanchese" Scenes, Chapter 20, Pages 196-197
The drums had begun before three of Tessicqueo’s braves escorted Wanchese out of Mattosh’s longhouse. A large crowd of villagers had formed a large semi-circle in the assembly area in front of Tessicqueo’s residence. Dark clouds were scurrying across the morning sky, wind rippling longhouse entrance flaps and edges of aprons and cloaks. A shrill cry rose from the people when Wanchese appeared inside the semi-circle. He saw women amongst them, many clutching knives. He imagined them cutting off his fingers, toes, ears, genitalia after Megedagik had killed him. He saw his body being burned in a great fire.
Tessicqueo was seated on a sculptured log, his elite men standing adjacent to him. Commoners dared not obstruct his vision. Tessicqueo would have his spectacle. Subjected to frequent Mandoag raids, Tessicqueo’s braves had been trained to be vicious. Fairness accorded strangers was prohibited. Wanchese thought that Pomeiooc was becoming such a village.
Upon Tessicqueo’s signal the middle of the semi-circle of watchers opened. Ten to twelve warriors danced within. They were brandishing invisible arrows, spears, and clubs. Their warbling cries were shrill. They weaved about him, their footfalls in rhythm to the beating of drums. They swooped in at him thrusting their “weapons.” He would have enjoyed sending one of them sprawling. Outwardly, he appeared stoic. Save your energy for Megedagik. Be calm. He had been taught during his manhood training that a warrior must control his muscles so as to receive better his opponent’s blows, so as not to be stiff but be quick in reflex.
He would need to be very quick. And smart.
He did know how to fight.
The middle of the semi-circle opened; the warriors exited. Watchers near the opening cheered. One large figure entered. Megedagik.
He extended his arms, turned his head left and right to the cheering crowd. Red lines marked his forehead, cheeks, and the shaved sides of his head. Two parallel lines, one red and the other black, divided horizontally his muscular body. Turning toward Wanchese, he leaped high and forward. He landed -- feet widely separated – ten feet away in a menacing crouch. Wanchese said: “You look pretty.”
Megedagik roared. His shoulders hunched, his arms extended like the legs of a crab, bent at the waist, he stepped forward.
The crowd was instantly silent.
Up on the balls of his feet, chest almost parallel to the ground, taking swift, short steps, Wanchese moved to Megedagik’s left. Keep yourself loose, he told himself. Wait for his attack.
Megedagik went for Wanchese’s neck. Wanchese struck the Nansemond warrior’s left hand away with his right. With his other hand Megedagik grabbed Wanchese’s left wrist. Wanchese struck Megedagik’s left eye with the heel of his right fist.
Megedagik stepped back. They stared at each other.
Megedagik closed. Wanchese drove his right knee into Megedagik’s lower left leg. Megedagik closed his arms around Wanchese’s upper body, straightened him, locked his hands, squeezed.
Tessicqueo was seated on a sculptured log, his elite men standing adjacent to him. Commoners dared not obstruct his vision. Tessicqueo would have his spectacle. Subjected to frequent Mandoag raids, Tessicqueo’s braves had been trained to be vicious. Fairness accorded strangers was prohibited. Wanchese thought that Pomeiooc was becoming such a village.
Upon Tessicqueo’s signal the middle of the semi-circle of watchers opened. Ten to twelve warriors danced within. They were brandishing invisible arrows, spears, and clubs. Their warbling cries were shrill. They weaved about him, their footfalls in rhythm to the beating of drums. They swooped in at him thrusting their “weapons.” He would have enjoyed sending one of them sprawling. Outwardly, he appeared stoic. Save your energy for Megedagik. Be calm. He had been taught during his manhood training that a warrior must control his muscles so as to receive better his opponent’s blows, so as not to be stiff but be quick in reflex.
He would need to be very quick. And smart.
He did know how to fight.
The middle of the semi-circle opened; the warriors exited. Watchers near the opening cheered. One large figure entered. Megedagik.
He extended his arms, turned his head left and right to the cheering crowd. Red lines marked his forehead, cheeks, and the shaved sides of his head. Two parallel lines, one red and the other black, divided horizontally his muscular body. Turning toward Wanchese, he leaped high and forward. He landed -- feet widely separated – ten feet away in a menacing crouch. Wanchese said: “You look pretty.”
Megedagik roared. His shoulders hunched, his arms extended like the legs of a crab, bent at the waist, he stepped forward.
The crowd was instantly silent.
Up on the balls of his feet, chest almost parallel to the ground, taking swift, short steps, Wanchese moved to Megedagik’s left. Keep yourself loose, he told himself. Wait for his attack.
Megedagik went for Wanchese’s neck. Wanchese struck the Nansemond warrior’s left hand away with his right. With his other hand Megedagik grabbed Wanchese’s left wrist. Wanchese struck Megedagik’s left eye with the heel of his right fist.
Megedagik stepped back. They stared at each other.
Megedagik closed. Wanchese drove his right knee into Megedagik’s lower left leg. Megedagik closed his arms around Wanchese’s upper body, straightened him, locked his hands, squeezed.
June 26, 2018
"Alsoomse and Wanchese" Scenes -- Chapter 18, Pages 177-179
Abukcheech and Alsoomse were suddenly alone.
She looked at him. He was as unattractive as she remembered. Yet he stimulated her mind.
He smiled. “I will be doing all the talking. Neither you nor I will like that. I want to know your thoughts.”
She blinked.
“Ah. That is how we will communicate? One blink means ‘yes.’ Two blinks mean ‘no.’”
Alsoomse moved her left hand.
He squinted.
She moved the hand again, frowned, immediately winced.
“Does that mean ‘no’?”
She moved her right hand.
“Right hand means ‘yes’; left hand means ‘no’?”
She moved her right hand.
“Then I will begin.”
He rubbed his left cheekbone, withdrew his left forefinger, looked at it, afterward grimaced. “Strange. Sometimes the body does something intentional the mind does not order, or does not know it has ordered. I look at you, I see the damage, and my finger goes to that place on my cheek.”
She blinked. She wondered if her eyes were betraying her thoughts.
“I witnessed what happened. I asked later why it happened. Therefore, I know certain things.” Seated on the upended, thick block of wood that Sokanon had occupied, Abukcheech placed the palms of his hands over his bony knees. “My first question is, ‘Do you regret what happened?’”
Alsoomse felt her eyes jump. She looked inwardly.
Two women conversing passed by the nearest wall.
He awaited her answer. Which was it? She moved her right hand.
He nodded. He closed his legs, scratched awkwardly the left side of his head. “You had to think.” He leaned forward. “Why?”
She frowned, moved her left hand.
“No, you have to answer. It is important to know.”
She stared at him, her lips tight.
“I told you when we spoke before that you wanted to be a man.” His right thumb and forefinger rubbed the sides of his jaw. “He hit you. He did not kill you. Are you glad now that you are not a man?”
What was this weak little man’s message?
“Do you regret speaking like a man because of this injury?”
Of course! She moved her right hand.
“But you have other reasons, I think.” He looked at his active forefinger, curled it, looked at her. “Because you did, you caused other people injury, hardship.”
She blinked, closed her eyes, moved the hand.
“Then maybe you have learned that freedom to speak, or act, requires self-discipline. Perhaps you have learned that what you do affects others. Nobody is really independent.” He gazed at her.
Who was he to judge?
“A wise man knows that. A true woman knows that.”
She resented his superiority.
“A good woman helps her man become wise.”
A “good” woman cannot oppose injustice?
“Your eyes tell me you want vengeance.”
She scowled, jerked her right hand.
“How can you take vengeance without risking or burdening other people?”
She had no answer.
“I believe it is better to be good to people you care about and to accept what you cannot control.”
Is that what he thought he was doing with her? All the while adding wood to her anger?
“I have talked enough.”
She closed her eyes. She recalled Sunukkuhkau’s ferocious face.
“I will stay here until your cousin returns.”
Do as you wish.
She looked at him. He was as unattractive as she remembered. Yet he stimulated her mind.
He smiled. “I will be doing all the talking. Neither you nor I will like that. I want to know your thoughts.”
She blinked.
“Ah. That is how we will communicate? One blink means ‘yes.’ Two blinks mean ‘no.’”
Alsoomse moved her left hand.
He squinted.
She moved the hand again, frowned, immediately winced.
“Does that mean ‘no’?”
She moved her right hand.
“Right hand means ‘yes’; left hand means ‘no’?”
She moved her right hand.
“Then I will begin.”
He rubbed his left cheekbone, withdrew his left forefinger, looked at it, afterward grimaced. “Strange. Sometimes the body does something intentional the mind does not order, or does not know it has ordered. I look at you, I see the damage, and my finger goes to that place on my cheek.”
She blinked. She wondered if her eyes were betraying her thoughts.
“I witnessed what happened. I asked later why it happened. Therefore, I know certain things.” Seated on the upended, thick block of wood that Sokanon had occupied, Abukcheech placed the palms of his hands over his bony knees. “My first question is, ‘Do you regret what happened?’”
Alsoomse felt her eyes jump. She looked inwardly.
Two women conversing passed by the nearest wall.
He awaited her answer. Which was it? She moved her right hand.
He nodded. He closed his legs, scratched awkwardly the left side of his head. “You had to think.” He leaned forward. “Why?”
She frowned, moved her left hand.
“No, you have to answer. It is important to know.”
She stared at him, her lips tight.
“I told you when we spoke before that you wanted to be a man.” His right thumb and forefinger rubbed the sides of his jaw. “He hit you. He did not kill you. Are you glad now that you are not a man?”
What was this weak little man’s message?
“Do you regret speaking like a man because of this injury?”
Of course! She moved her right hand.
“But you have other reasons, I think.” He looked at his active forefinger, curled it, looked at her. “Because you did, you caused other people injury, hardship.”
She blinked, closed her eyes, moved the hand.
“Then maybe you have learned that freedom to speak, or act, requires self-discipline. Perhaps you have learned that what you do affects others. Nobody is really independent.” He gazed at her.
Who was he to judge?
“A wise man knows that. A true woman knows that.”
She resented his superiority.
“A good woman helps her man become wise.”
A “good” woman cannot oppose injustice?
“Your eyes tell me you want vengeance.”
She scowled, jerked her right hand.
“How can you take vengeance without risking or burdening other people?”
She had no answer.
“I believe it is better to be good to people you care about and to accept what you cannot control.”
Is that what he thought he was doing with her? All the while adding wood to her anger?
“I have talked enough.”
She closed her eyes. She recalled Sunukkuhkau’s ferocious face.
“I will stay here until your cousin returns.”
Do as you wish.
June 22, 2018
"Alsoomse and Wanchese" Scenes, Chapter 8, Pages 77-80
Granganimeo’s wife Hurit, standing a canoe’s length away in the village lane, was staring at them. She approached.
“Weroansqua,” Sokanon greeted.
Instantly, Alsoomse rose. The back of her left hand covering her mouth, she faced about.
“Sokanon. Alsoomse. You are teaching these children well.” Hurit looked at Wapun and Pules, who were watching her with large eyes. “Is that not so?” she said to them.
“Yes, Weroansqua, they are very good,” Wapun answered.
Pules nodded vigorously.
“I am pleased.” Hurit looked at Alsoomse, then Sokanon. “I have a duty I want you to perform.”
Sokanon’s eyes flitted.
I want both of you to accompany me to Croatoan, tomorrow. To serve me. Together with Allawa, and two other young women.”
Alsoomse’s cheekbones tingled. Her arms felt the rush of adrenaline.
She had expected criticism.
“Both of you appear surprised.” Hurit’s amused smile enhanced her unaffected beauty.
“Weroansqua, we will serve you well,” Sokanon answered.
Hurit nodded. Her face hardened.
“You should know that Croatoan’s weroansqua has asked me to attend a meeting she is to have with Piemacum’s important men, believing, we suspect, that Piemacum wants her to submit herself and her people to his authority.”
Alsoomse felt a second surge of adrenaline. Quick to exhibit temper, her face burned.
The Croatoan were gentle people! Her father Matunaagd had said so, often! For some time now they had been led by a woman, which explained, probably, their peaceful manner. A thought occurred to her. “Weroansqua,” she said, “I believe I know her purpose.”
“Which is …?”
“Your presence will answer Piemacum’s question without the weroansqua needing to give it.”
Hurit nodded, a slow backward and forward acknowledgment. “You are perceptive, Alsoomse. You are your father and mother’s daughter.” She paused, looked at Alsoomse soberly. “But in other ways you are not nearly so. You disturb me.”
Alsoomse’s face blanched.
Sokanon interrupted. “Is Granganimeo to accompany us?”
What other ways? Alsoomse thought.
“No, Sokanon. His or Wingina’s presence would cause a fight.” Hurit’s face softened. “I am to go alone. Men do not usually fight women.”
“We leave then … when?”
“Immediately after the casting of tobacco. Several of our men will take us there in two canoes. They will not be men of high station.” For the first time Hurit looked at Nuna and Odina. “I will need Machk to be one of them. Please tell him.”
“I will, weroansqua,” Nuna responded.
Sokanon made a small hand gesture. Hurit raised her eyebrows. “I will need somebody to look after my mother. She is not strong.” Her face apologized.
“I am certain one of your friends here will do that.”
Simultaneously, Nuna and Odina nodded.
“Then everything is arranged.” Hurit turned, took two steps toward the lane, and stopped. Pivoting, she regarded Alsoomse. “One other matter.” Her eyes examined the length of Alsoomse’s body. “I expect you, Alsoomse, to show your high station the entire time we are there. That means necklaces, Alsoomse. Bracelets. Beads hanging from your ears. You will be representing this village, not yourself. Do you have them?”
“Yes.”
“I should not have to ask.”
“No.” Here was the expected criticism. She felt the start of a second burn.
Hurit studied her, too lengthily.
The burn reached Alsoomse’s ears.
“Why do you do this? Are you not proud of your parents’ standing?” Hurit looked at Alsoomse’s legs. “No tattoos, not even on your calves. Your cousin has them” – she pointed – “there, and there, and on her arms. She wears a nice shell necklace. Polished bones hang from her ears. Every day. Why must you be so different?”
She wants to know; I will tell her!
“We are different people.”
“That is obvious.”
“I love my cousin.” Alsoomse’s eyes combatted Hurit’s sarcasm. “I respect her for who she is. It is not because she is my cousin or she is the daughter of parents of high station. It is because of who she is.”
“We all judge people that way.”
“I know some who do not. Also, some people of high station expect to be treated well but do not deserve it.” She was thinking of Askook.
Hurit’s left index finger touched the outer side of her left breast. Her fingers curled, became a fist. “Are you saying that people who are leaders, who take responsibility for the welfare of their followers, should not be treated with respect?”
“No, weroansqua, I do not.” Both sides of her face were hot. “I am saying that people like me born into high station should have to earn respect, not demand it. That is why I live here, outside the gate to the compound. I do not want anyone to believe I demand respect.”
Alsoomse moved her right foot forward, traced a line in the sandy earth. “I believe also that people not born of high station deserving respect should receive it.”
Fists pressed against her sides, Hurit studied her. “You are outspoken in your beliefs.”
“I spoke them because you asked.”
The flesh beneath her chin stretched, Alsoomse maintained eye contact. Peripherally, Odina and Nuna were figures of stone.
Hurit’s irises remained centered. “You should know, Alsoomse, that there are people in this village, and at Dasemunkepeuc, who believe that you are dangerous. Strong-headed dangerous. My husband has spoken of it. Our kwiocosuk has spoken of it. You risk punishment, from Kiwasa, from your leaders. I will expect you to keep your thoughts to yourself while we are at Croatoan. I have … tolerated your independence, until now. I must be certain that you will say or do nothing to damage our purpose.” Her eyes bored.
“Your answer?”
She would be truthful, not weak. “I respect you and all of our leaders. I will do nothing to hurt our people.”
“You will wear ornaments that signify your station?”
Alsoomse hesitated. “Yes, weroansqua, I will.”
“Weroansqua,” Sokanon greeted.
Instantly, Alsoomse rose. The back of her left hand covering her mouth, she faced about.
“Sokanon. Alsoomse. You are teaching these children well.” Hurit looked at Wapun and Pules, who were watching her with large eyes. “Is that not so?” she said to them.
“Yes, Weroansqua, they are very good,” Wapun answered.
Pules nodded vigorously.
“I am pleased.” Hurit looked at Alsoomse, then Sokanon. “I have a duty I want you to perform.”
Sokanon’s eyes flitted.
I want both of you to accompany me to Croatoan, tomorrow. To serve me. Together with Allawa, and two other young women.”
Alsoomse’s cheekbones tingled. Her arms felt the rush of adrenaline.
She had expected criticism.
“Both of you appear surprised.” Hurit’s amused smile enhanced her unaffected beauty.
“Weroansqua, we will serve you well,” Sokanon answered.
Hurit nodded. Her face hardened.
“You should know that Croatoan’s weroansqua has asked me to attend a meeting she is to have with Piemacum’s important men, believing, we suspect, that Piemacum wants her to submit herself and her people to his authority.”
Alsoomse felt a second surge of adrenaline. Quick to exhibit temper, her face burned.
The Croatoan were gentle people! Her father Matunaagd had said so, often! For some time now they had been led by a woman, which explained, probably, their peaceful manner. A thought occurred to her. “Weroansqua,” she said, “I believe I know her purpose.”
“Which is …?”
“Your presence will answer Piemacum’s question without the weroansqua needing to give it.”
Hurit nodded, a slow backward and forward acknowledgment. “You are perceptive, Alsoomse. You are your father and mother’s daughter.” She paused, looked at Alsoomse soberly. “But in other ways you are not nearly so. You disturb me.”
Alsoomse’s face blanched.
Sokanon interrupted. “Is Granganimeo to accompany us?”
What other ways? Alsoomse thought.
“No, Sokanon. His or Wingina’s presence would cause a fight.” Hurit’s face softened. “I am to go alone. Men do not usually fight women.”
“We leave then … when?”
“Immediately after the casting of tobacco. Several of our men will take us there in two canoes. They will not be men of high station.” For the first time Hurit looked at Nuna and Odina. “I will need Machk to be one of them. Please tell him.”
“I will, weroansqua,” Nuna responded.
Sokanon made a small hand gesture. Hurit raised her eyebrows. “I will need somebody to look after my mother. She is not strong.” Her face apologized.
“I am certain one of your friends here will do that.”
Simultaneously, Nuna and Odina nodded.
“Then everything is arranged.” Hurit turned, took two steps toward the lane, and stopped. Pivoting, she regarded Alsoomse. “One other matter.” Her eyes examined the length of Alsoomse’s body. “I expect you, Alsoomse, to show your high station the entire time we are there. That means necklaces, Alsoomse. Bracelets. Beads hanging from your ears. You will be representing this village, not yourself. Do you have them?”
“Yes.”
“I should not have to ask.”
“No.” Here was the expected criticism. She felt the start of a second burn.
Hurit studied her, too lengthily.
The burn reached Alsoomse’s ears.
“Why do you do this? Are you not proud of your parents’ standing?” Hurit looked at Alsoomse’s legs. “No tattoos, not even on your calves. Your cousin has them” – she pointed – “there, and there, and on her arms. She wears a nice shell necklace. Polished bones hang from her ears. Every day. Why must you be so different?”
She wants to know; I will tell her!
“We are different people.”
“That is obvious.”
“I love my cousin.” Alsoomse’s eyes combatted Hurit’s sarcasm. “I respect her for who she is. It is not because she is my cousin or she is the daughter of parents of high station. It is because of who she is.”
“We all judge people that way.”
“I know some who do not. Also, some people of high station expect to be treated well but do not deserve it.” She was thinking of Askook.
Hurit’s left index finger touched the outer side of her left breast. Her fingers curled, became a fist. “Are you saying that people who are leaders, who take responsibility for the welfare of their followers, should not be treated with respect?”
“No, weroansqua, I do not.” Both sides of her face were hot. “I am saying that people like me born into high station should have to earn respect, not demand it. That is why I live here, outside the gate to the compound. I do not want anyone to believe I demand respect.”
Alsoomse moved her right foot forward, traced a line in the sandy earth. “I believe also that people not born of high station deserving respect should receive it.”
Fists pressed against her sides, Hurit studied her. “You are outspoken in your beliefs.”
“I spoke them because you asked.”
The flesh beneath her chin stretched, Alsoomse maintained eye contact. Peripherally, Odina and Nuna were figures of stone.
Hurit’s irises remained centered. “You should know, Alsoomse, that there are people in this village, and at Dasemunkepeuc, who believe that you are dangerous. Strong-headed dangerous. My husband has spoken of it. Our kwiocosuk has spoken of it. You risk punishment, from Kiwasa, from your leaders. I will expect you to keep your thoughts to yourself while we are at Croatoan. I have … tolerated your independence, until now. I must be certain that you will say or do nothing to damage our purpose.” Her eyes bored.
“Your answer?”
She would be truthful, not weak. “I respect you and all of our leaders. I will do nothing to hurt our people.”
“You will wear ornaments that signify your station?”
Alsoomse hesitated. “Yes, weroansqua, I will.”
