September 23, 1955: Two men are found not guilty of murder. They went on to brag about how they got away with it.
Emmett Louis Till was born on July 25, 1941 in Chicago. His father, Louis, would enter the U.S. Army after his mother, Mamie, kicked him out of the house for being abusive. He would be executed in Italy following a 1945 court-martial for the murder of a local woman.
Mamie was born in Mississippi, and, as a small child, moved north with her family in what has become known as the Great Migration of African-Americans in search of better civil rights and working conditions. They lived on the South Side of Chicago, in a sub-neighborhood called Argo, a.k.a. Little Mississippi. When Emmett was 6 years old, he contracted polio, leaving him with a stutter. He and his mother moved to Detroit, where she married a man named Pink Bradley. The marriage didn't last, and they moved back to Chicago, although she kept the name Mamie Till Bradley.
Statistics on lynchings began to be collected in 1882. Between then and 1955, more than 500 African-Americans had been killed by extrajudicial violence in Mississippi alone, and more than 3,000 across the South. Most of the incidents took place between 1876 and 1930. Though far less common by the mid-1950s, these racially motivated murders still occurred.
Flag flown outside NAACP headquarters in New York, 1936 to 1938. They stopped when the owner of the building
threatened them with eviction.
Throughout the South, interracial relationships were prohibited, as a means to maintain white supremacy and "purity." Even the suggestion of sexual contact between black men and white women could carry severe penalties for black men.
In 1955, Mamie's uncle, 64-year-old Mose Wright, visited her and Emmett in Chicago during the Summer, and told stories about living in the Mississippi Delta. Emmett wanted to see for himself. Wright planned to accompany Till with a cousin, Wheeler Parker; another cousin, Curtis Jones, would join them soon after.
Wright was a sharecropper and part-time minister who was often called "Preacher." He lived in Money, a small town in the Delta that consisted of three stores, a school, a post office, a cotton gin, and a few hundred residents, 8 miles north of Greenwood. Before Emmett departed for the Delta, his mother cautioned him that Chicago and Mississippi were two different worlds, and he should know how to behave in front of whites in the South. He assured her he understood.
Emmett took the Illinois Central Railroad down, and arrived in Money on August 21, 1955. On August 24, a cousin, Maurice Wright, drove Emmett and some other black boys, relatives and neighbors, to Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market, to buy candy. The Market was owned by Roy Bryant, 24, and his wife, Carolyn, 21. Carolyn was in the front of the store. Her sister-in-law, Juanita Milan, was in the back, watching some white children.
What happened next is in dispute. One witness said that one of the boys dared Emmett to flirt with Carolyn. Another said that this did not happen. Emmett's cousins Simeon Wright and Wheeler Parker both said that Emmett "wolf-whistled" at Carolyn. His mother would later tell a reporter that, because of his stutter, Emmett had trouble pronouncing the letter B, and that whistling sometimes helped. This backs up the suggestion that he had tried to order bubble gum.
At the trial, Carolyn testified that Emmett grabbed her hand and said, "How about a date, baby?" She said she got away, and that he then grabbed her waist and said, "What's the matter baby, can't you take it?" And then one of the other boys grabbed Emmett and got him out of there.
In 2008, 53 years later, Bryant admitted that she had made this up, and said, "Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him." Supposedly, there was a white man in the store, who confirmed that Emmett said nothing inappropriate to her. There was a checkers game going on out front, and one of the white men involved said that Emmett did whistle, but at an impressive move made in the game, a completely harmless gesture.
Roy Bryant was on a hunting trip, and did not return until August 27. He heard about what happened from one of the checkers players, and was angry at Carolyn for not telling him herself. In the middle of the night on August 28, Roy and his half-brother, John William Milam, broke into Mose Wright's house with a gun, and kidnapped Emmett.
Emmett was found 3 days later, by boys fishing in the Tallahatchie River. Emmett's face had been beaten beyond recognition, and his body had been weighted down with an electric fan whose cord was tied around it. He had just turned 14 years old.
Mamie Till Bradley demanded an open-casket funeral in Chicago: She wanted people to see what was done to him. Gruesome postmortem photos appeared in Jet magazine.
This time, the rednecks had gone too far. Governor Hugh White sent a telegram to the NAACP, saying, "Mississippi does not condone such conduct," and saying that local authorities should pursue a "vigorous prosecution." Leflore County Deputy Sheriff John Cothran stated, "The white people around here feel pretty mad about the way that poor little boy was treated, and they won't stand for this." Letters to the editor appeared in local newspapers, admitting that white actions like these did more damage to the South than any black actions did.
The bigots, naturally, fought back. They falsely reported riots in the funeral home in Chicago. Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam appeared in photos smiling and wearing military uniforms, and Carolyn Bryant's beauty and virtue were extolled.
Bryant and Milan were indicted for murder on September 3. The trial was held at the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi. District Attorney Gerald Chatham was the prosecutor, and he was pessimistic about getting a conviction from an all-white jury. The jury was all-white because jurors are selected from voter rolls, and black people were not permitted to vote in Mississippi, despite the 15th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States officially guaranteeing them that right.
County Sheriff Clarence Strider served as the defense attorney. He said, "The last thing I wanted to do was to defend those peckerwoods. But I just had no choice about it."
The main defense argument was that the body pulled from the river could not be definitively identified, and that Emmett Till might be still alive and missing, perhaps in hiding, to set up the good white people of Mississippi.
Sheriff Strider was told that there were 2 black witnesses who could back up the prosecution's case. He had them found, and kept them in jail for the duration of the trial, to keep them from testifying. This should have not only produced a mistrial, but gotten Strider disbarred. In contrast, Judge Curtis Swango was hailed for his even-handedness, and no one has ever alleged any misconduct on his part.
Mose Wright did not see the murder, but he did identify Milam as one of the kidnappers. It was said to be the first time in the South that a black man had testified to the guilt of a white man in court and lived.
On September 23, the all-white, all-male jury acquitted both defendants, after a deliberation of 1 hour and 7 minutes. One juror said, "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have taken that long." Basically, they took just enough time to make it look like they had to give it some thought, when they didn't: They were never going to vote to convict, no matter what the evidence said.
Protected against double jeopardy, Bryant and Milam struck a deal with Look magazine in 1956, to tell their story to journalist William Bradford Huie for between $3,600 and $4,000. The interview took place in the law firm of the attorneys who had defended Bryant and Milam. Huie did not ask the questions; Bryant and Milam's own attorneys did. Neither attorney had heard their clients' accounts of the murder before.
According to Huie, the older Milam was more articulate and sure of himself than the younger Bryant. Milam admitted to shooting Till, and neither of them believed they were guilty or that they had done anything wrong. Milam said, "What else could I do? He thought he was as good as any white man."
Emmett Till was as good as any white man. Certainly, he was better than the two white men who premeditatedly murdered him in cold blood.
D.A. Chatham's health suffered as a result of the trial, and he died a little over a year later, only 50 years old. His son, Gerald Chatham Jr., who was 11 years old at the time of the trial, would later serve two terms as District Attorney in the same district. Judge Swango died in 1968.
Unrepentant to the end, Clarence Strider died in 1970; J.W. Milam, in 1981; Roy Bryant, in 1994. Carolyn Bryant divorced Roy in 1981, remarried, and became known as Carolyn Bryant Donham. As of September 23, 2022, she is still alive. None of these 4 guilty people ever spent a day in prison. A historical marker now stands outside the remnants of the grocery store, which has yet to be torn down.
Mose Wright left Mississippi for Chicago, never to return. He lived until 1977. Mamie Till-Mobley, having remarried, lived until January 6, 2003, at the age of 81.
The treatment of Emmett Till by the State of Mississippi, both before and after his death, inspired 2 young black men to become civil rights activists. You might know their birth names: Malcolm Little and Cassius Clay. You surely know the names they chose for themselves, the names by which they became better known: Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali.
One more analogy: Trent Lott was born on October 9, 1941 in Grenada, Mississippi. In 1972, he was elected to Congress. In 1989, he was elected to the Senate. In 1996, he became the U.S. Senate's Majority Leader.
In 2002, Lott spoke at a dinner in celebration of the 100th birthday of Strom Thurmond, the longtime Senator who, in 1948, as Governor of South Carolina, led a 3rd-party campaign for President on an anti-civil rights platform. Lott said, "Let me say something about my home State: When Strom Thurmond ran for President, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either." The backlash was such that Lott had to step down as Majority Leader, although he served in the Senate for another 4 years.
Trent Lott was elected to Congress at age 31, to the Senate at 47, and Majority Leader at 55. As of September 23, 2022, he is approaching his 81st birthday.
Emmett Till would be the same age. It is possible he could have died at any time in the interim. He could have served in Vietnam and been killed there. He could have fallen victim to illness or accident. Or, some other bigot could have taken matters into his own hands. But it would hardly be out of the ordinary for him to still be alive in 2022.
He should have had a full life. Instead, he was murdered as a boy of 14 -- not because he thought he was as good as a white man, but because an evil white man believed he wasn't.
The historical marker marker for Emmett Till's murder is a short walk from a bridge over the Tallahatchee River. But this is not the bridge that country singer Bobbie Gentry would later write about in her 1967 Number 1 hit "Ode to Billie Joe." That bridge, which collapsed in 1972 and was replaced, is 9 miles downstream.
The historical markers marking the locations of the murders of Emmett Till and of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, 9 years later, are 117 miles apart.
UPDATE: In 2022, Carolyn Bryant Donham gave a 99-page memoir, titled I Am More Than a Wolf Whistle, to the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, with an agreement that UNC would hold it privately until the year 2036. She died on April 25, 2023. As far as is known, she was the last surviving person who knew what really happened.
*
September 23, 1955 was a Friday. These baseball games were played that day:
* The New York Yankees played a doubleheader against their arch-rivals, the Boston Red Sox, at Fenway Park in Boston. The Red Sox won the opener, 8-4. Bob Cerv hit a home run. The Yanks won the nightcap, 3-2. Gil McDougald hit a home run. Mickey Mantle was injured, and did not play in either game. Over the 2 games, Ted Williams went 2-for-7 with a walk. Jackie Jensen homered in both games for the Sox.
* The New York Giants lost to the Philadelphia Phillies, 5-1 at the Polo Grounds. Willie Mays went 0-for-4.
* The Washington Senators swept a doubleheader from the Baltimore Orioles, 6-4 and 7-3 at Griffith Stadium in Washington.
* The Chicago White Sox beat the Kansas City Athletics, 12-4 at Comiskey Park in Chicago.
* The Milwaukee Braves beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 4-2 at the first Busch Stadium (formerly the last Sportsman's Park) in St. Louis. Warren Spahn was the winning pitcher, and hit a home run. So did Eddie Mathews, and George Crowe hit 2. Hank Aaron, however, went 0-for-4. Stan Musial went 1-for-3 with a walk.
* The Brooklyn Dodgers and the Pittsburgh Pirates were rained out at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. The game was made up as part of a doubleheader the next day. The Pirates swept, 4-3 and 6-1. It didn't matter, as the Dodgers had already clinched the National League Pennant.
In the opener, Dick Hall went the distance for the win. Carl Erskine started for the Brooks, and was shaky. The Dodgers blew a 3-0 lead, and Gene Freese hit what turned out to be a game-winning home run off Don Bessent in the bottom of the 8th inning. Jackie Robinson went 1-for-4, and then did not play in the nightcap.
In that game, Bob Friend went the distance for the win. Billy Loes started for Dem Bums, but it would be a rookie named Sandy Koufax who turned out to be the losing pitcher.
* The Cleveland Indians and the Detroit Tigers were rained out at Briggs Stadium in Detroit. (The ballpark was renamed Tiger Stadium in 1961.) The game was made up as part of a doubleheader the next day. The Indians swept, 8-2 and 7-0. In the 1st game, American League Rookie of the Year Herb Score outpitched Frank Lary. Hank Aguirre had an unusual shutout in the 2nd game: He allowed only 3 hits, but walked 10 batters, and only struck out 3. Al Kaline went 2-for-7 over the 2 games.
* And the Chicago Cubs and the Cincinnati Redlegs (as the Reds were known from 1954 to 1958) were not scheduled.
