As December 1955 dawned, media coverage of the Emmett Till case began to wane.1 The grand jury decision in Greenwood meant that J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant were officially free, while at the same time, jurisdictional issues preventing federal action effectively closed the door to further attempts at justice. Mamie Bradley’s controversial parting with the NAACP suddenly took her out of the spotlight, and Mose Wright’s West Coast tour had come to an end. In Chicago, Mamie was bracing herself for a Christmas alone, while Wright, Willie Reed, and Mandy Bradley were still adapting to life outside of the South. In Mississippi, the shooting of Gus Courts moved racial violence outside the realm of sex and back to the heated issues surrounding voter registration. Lastly, in Montgomery, Alabama, the bus boycott following the defiant act of Rosa Parks was about to garner steam as well as national attention.
On December 2, one day after Parks’s arrest, the Till murder and related southern atrocities were the topics of an Eisenhower cabinet meeting at the White House. The president, still recovering from his September heart attack, was absent, but Vice President Nixon presided in his stead. One issue on the agenda was the upcoming State of the Union address. A planned focus of the speech was the divisive topic of civil rights, with some emphasis on the Citizens’ Councils, founded in Mississippi eighteen months earlier in response to the Brown decision. Attorney General Brownell wanted to eliminate any language that would anger the South. He believed that threats to investigate alleged efforts to keep blacks from voting lacked solid evidence and were unnecessarily polarizing. Rather than face accusations of “waving the red flag,” Brownell reasoned, the administration should limit itself to a short statement in support of the Supreme Court’s decision and leave it at that. He also reminded his colleagues that the Department of Justice had been under intense pressure to investigate racial violence in Dixie, particularly the Till murder.2
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles listened carefully and offered his own opinions. He called the Till killing tragic, yet he worried about political and constitutional ramifications should the administration get involved. Nixon, however, proposed one way out of the dilemma by suggesting they push the issue on to Congress. If a bill came out of a congressional investigation, southern Democrats would certainly filibuster it, allowing the administration to save face while forcing the Democrats to deal with the fallout. Both Brownell and Dulles liked this idea.3
Then, suddenly, it was déjà vu all over again in Tallahatchie County. On December 3, the day after the Eisenhower cabinet discussed and essentially minimized the severity of the southern “Negro problem,” a thirty-three-year-old black man named Clinton Melton was at work at a Glendora gas station owned by a local white man named Lee McGarrh. Two other of the town’s 175 residents were J. W. Milam and his good friend Elmer Kimbell. Melton had worked for McGarrh for ten years and was popular in the community. Around 9:30 that Saturday night, a drunken Kimbell drove into the station and told McGarrh that he wanted his car filled with gas. McGarrh, in turn, told Melton to go out and take care of it, which he did. The bill came to $4.47, but when Kimbell learned this, he insisted that he had asked for only $2 worth and began threatening Melton. The attendant told Kimbell that he had simply followed McGarrh’s orders.
“Suppose I pay by check. Waddaya think you’d do about it if the check bounced?” said Kimbell, angrily.
Melton responded that he did not care how Kimbell paid because he (Melton) only worked there.
Growing more agitated, Kimbell told McGarrh that he had a “smart Negro” working for him, and said he wanted to close out his account. McGarrh sided with Melton and reminded Kimbell that he had indeed asked for a full tank. After things became more heated, McGarrh told Kimbell to “get going.”
“I’m going, but I’ll be back,” said Kimbell. Turning to Melton he promised, “I’m going to kill you.” To McGarrh he said, “I’ll see you, too.”
Kimbell then drove off, leaving behind twenty-nine-year-old John Henry Wilson, a black employee of Kimbell’s at the local cotton gin who had been riding in the car with him.4
McGarrh, fearing Kimbell would keep his word, urged Melton to go on home. Before leaving, however, Melton paused to put gas in his own car. As he got inside to leave a few minutes later, Kimbell returned to the station. Wilson, knowing what was up, ran out and begged him not to hurt Melton, but Kimbell ignored that plea and threatened to kill them both. Wilson then ran back into the store, begging McGarrh to hide him. Outside, Kimbell fired three shots at Melton, hitting him twice in the head and once in the hand, killing him instantly. McGarrh watched in horror from inside the station.5
Although the murder of Clinton Melton was by itself a senseless, tragic act, it was accompanied by a few ghosts of the recent past that gave it a bizarre twist. Store owner Lee McGarrh had been a character witness for J. W. Milam during Milam’s murder trial in September. When Elmer Kimbell drove into McGarrh’s station that December evening, he did so in Milam’s car. Immediately after the shooting, Kimbell drove to Milam’s home less than half a mile away, where O. D. Rogers, the town marshal, arrived shortly thereafter. He found Kimbell, who was receiving treatment for a slight bullet wound to his left shoulder. Rogers arrested him, but for reasons that could only make sense in Tallahatchie County, he allowed Milam to first drive Kimbell to a hospital twenty-five miles away in Clarksdale. After doctors spent about forty minutes cleaning and dressing the wound, Kimbell was taken to jail. The mysterious injury allowed Kimbell to claim self-defense by pointing to Melton as the aggressor.6
Early on, police seemed to side with Kimbell. Deputy Sheriff A. G. Thomas speculated that Melton, McGarrh, and Wilson had “ganged up” on Kimbell. As he theorized it to the New York Post, “It looks very much that way to me. I can’t say for sure but it certainly looks like there was a gun duel with three against one.” McGarrh, however, insisted that Thomas’s theory was “absolutely absurd,” and assured police that Melton was unarmed. Indeed, no weapon was found at the murder scene. The officer in charge of the investigation was outgoing sheriff H. C. Strider, who examined the bullet hole in Kimbell’s shirt and found no evidence of powder burns. They would be present, he explained, if the gunshot had been self-inflicted or occurred at close range.7
On December 24, three weeks after the shooting, Kimbell attended a preliminary hearing in Sumner, where three justices of the peace denied him bond. He was later refused a second time on January 9 by Circuit Judge Curtis Swango after Kimbell’s attorney requested bond on a writ of habeas corpus. Swango’s decision guaranteed that Kimbell would remain incarcerated until his trial, scheduled for March. Representing Kimbell was J. W. Kellum, one of the five Sumner attorneys who had aided Milam and Bryant during their murder trial three months earlier.8
For a brief moment in time, the Melton murder was not touted as a race crime because Kimbell, in his drunken state of mind, could just as easily have taken out his rage on a white attendant. However, the white community quickly made the connection and denounced the slaying. The local Lion’s Club issued a statement declaring, “We consider the taking of the life of Clinton Melton an outrage against him, the people of Glendora, as well as the entire human family. We intend to see that the forces of justice and right prevail in the wake of this woeful evil. We humbly confess repentance for having so lived as a community that such an evil occurrence could happen here.”9
Several local white citizens pledged to help Melton’s widow, Beulah, and her four young children, in the wake of the shooting. The National Council of Churches of Christ donated $1,000 to the grieving family. At a meeting of the local Lion’s Club, Methodist pastor William A. Harris demanded that the club go on record in protest of the killing. Glendora physician W. C. McQuinn promised Beulah a job, while a local planter, Michael P. Sturdivant, offered to build the family a house.10 Michael’s grandfather, M. P. Sturdivant, had owned the plantation managed by Leslie Milam in Drew where Emmett Till had allegedly been beaten and killed, thus providing another eerie connection to that notorious case. Although M.P. died in 1948, the property remained in the family.
Beulah Melton shortly received a visit from Medgar Evers, but she kindly asked that the NAACP not get involved because “that is why they [the jury in Sumner] did Mrs. Bradly [sic] like they did.” In other words, outside agitation had cost Mamie Bradley a guilty verdict, and Beulah did not want to risk the same outcome in Kimbell’s case.11
Certainly the Melton murder had all the ingredients needed to finally convict a white man for killing a black man in Tallahatchie County. Melton lived locally, was respected by black and white citizens, and was not a known crusader for black equality. Most significant, the sex taboo was not an issue. On March 13, 1956, however, Elmer Kimbell was acquitted of murder after a two-day trial, the jury believing Kimbell’s claim that he shot Melton in self-defense. Tragedy preceded the verdict when Beulah Melton’s car went off the road and into a bayou on a dark night four days before the trial began. She drowned, but the two children who were with her were rescued, just in time to join their two other siblings as orphans. The drowning was ruled an accident, the sheriff surmising that because Beulah was a new driver, she probably lost control of the car.12 Others believed that someone close to Kimbell intentionally ran her off the road. Regardless, it was clear by the verdict that in the six months since Emmett Till’s killing, things had not changed in the Mississippi Delta.
Meanwhile, Mamie Bradley, like Beulah Melton, wanted little to do with the NAACP, but for entirely different reasons. On December 22, Mamie and her father were in New York, where Mamie was about to headline three rallies hosted by local churches. Still hurt over her rift with Roy Wilkins, she accused the NAACP, during a press conference at Harlem’s Hotel Theresa, of profiting off of the death of her son, much as Wilkins had accused her of doing. John Carthan agreed with his daughter’s criticisms, declaring that “without any doubt the NAACP is using Emmett Till and his mother.” Mamie, however, was more upset that the association dropped its plans of filing a civil suit on her behalf against Milam and the Bryants. When NAACP attorney William Henry Huff resigned as Mamie’s legal counsel following the cancellation of her West Coast tour, he saw a conflict of interest in any future representation. In his November 15 letter to Mamie, Roy Wilkins downgraded the association’s willingness to help by extending his hand only for “consultation and advice on matters in connection with your situation.”13
Because Mamie was now speaking for other organizations and no longer needed the NAACP in that regard, she felt free to offer some new demands should the organization be inclined to take her back. Although reminiscent of Anna Crockett’s ultimatum from a month earlier, the new provisions came directly from Mamie herself. She wanted at least $150 per meeting, with a promise that she would not speak at more than three meetings in a week. She also wanted her father to receive $100 per week for traveling with her. Another requirement was that the NAACP pay her household expenses. These included her monthly mortgage payment and a $400 debt left behind by her estranged husband, Pink Bradley. These terms, explained to members of the black press, seemed inexplicable in light of Mamie’s earlier attempt to reconcile with Wilkins. Her criticisms, not to mention her preconditions for a renewed partnership, would no doubt serve only to widen the divide. During the press conference, she gave newsmen copies of her November 9 letter to Wilkins and his response from November 15.14
It is unclear just how long the demand continued for public appearances. Mamie was scheduled for at least three more meetings in New Jersey on January 15, 1956, sponsored by the Goodwill Progressive Club of the Newark Church of God in Christ.15 Mose Wright remained willing to speak also, and on January 2 he addressed a crowd in Brooklyn at the First AME Zion Church, hosted by the Baptist Pastors Union. Two thousand people, including fifty ministers, attended the event. Dr. Gardner C. Taylor, who introduced Wright to the crowd, referred to the former sharecropper as not only a black hero but as an American hero who risked his life by testifying in Sumner. The following day, Wright made a surprise appearance at the NAACP annual meeting in New York City.16
Although the mass meetings continued to draw large crowds, by the first of the year they had become so routine as to rarely make headlines anymore. And they were about to be overshadowed by an announcement that can only be described as explosive. In early 1956, newspapers ran an advertisement for the January 24 edition of Look magazine, and it demanded attention. That the ad was sure to generate interest is evident by the fact that the print run for the issue was two million more than the magazine’s usual number.17 What was so intriguing about this particular ad was that it carried a photo of Emmett Till and included a bold headline that promised “for the first time . . . THE TRUTH about the Emmett Till killing.” The accompanying teaser was even more sensational:
Headlines screamed across the Nation. Millions of words were written about it. A trial would be held. Yet the truth about the Emmett Till killing in Mississippi remained hidden—until now! Now exclusively in Look magazine you can read the story—the story that the jury did not hear, that no newspaper reader ever saw . . . the brutal step-by-step full account of what happened on that fateful night. You’ll read how Till was killed, where, why and by whom! Don’t miss this shocking story in Look. It will make magazine history the minute it hits the newsstands. Get your copy of LOOK early!18
Needless to say, the promo promised quite a punch, and on January 10, when the magazine hit the stands, by most accounts, it delivered.
The story had been in the making for three months. The author was William Bradford Huie, a forty-five-year-old nationally known journalist, author, and television personality from Hartselle, Alabama. He was a 1930 graduate of the University of Alabama, and by the time he joined the navy in 1943, he had already worked for the Birmingham Post (1932–36), founded Alabama: The News Magazine of the Deep South (1937), and published his first book, Mud on the Stars (1942). Several other books followed, including The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1951) and The Execution of Private Slovik (1954), a nonfiction title about a World War II soldier executed in 1945 for desertion; Eddie Slovik was the first to meet such a fate for this charge since the Civil War. For six years, beginning in 1946, Huie served as associate editor and editor of American Mercury, and from 1951 until 1953 he hosted the CBS political program Longines Chronoscope, described as a precursor to Meet the Press. Before his death in 1986, his twenty-one books had sold twenty-seven million copies. Mamie Stover, Private Slovik, and four others were adapted into Hollywood movies.19
Huie’s unorthodox method of paying for stories, known as “checkbook journalism,” gave him a reputation among his colleagues that one fellow journalist described as “roguish,” “more talented than respectable,” “shrewd,” and “iconoclastic.” A writer who interviewed Huie in 1974 described his subject’s long career as one of “chasing stories, exposing injustice, puncturing myths and deflating false heroes.” Consequently, “he has made considerable money and no small number of enemies. . . . Prolific, sometimes profane, often provocative, he has led a fast, gadflyish, globetrotting life poking his inquisitive nose into controversy and strife.”20
Such was the man who set out to learn the facts about the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till. Huie had been in California on the set of Mamie Stover during the trial in Sumner and did not take a real interest in the case until he read newspaper reports later. The coverage, he said, was depressing; the arguments of the attorneys suffered from regional bias, making the trial “a circus.” What the case needed, he declared, was the truth, and he believed he was the one who could bring it forth.21
In early October, a week or two after the jury in Sumner freed Milam and Bryant on murder charges, Huie left his home in Alabama, drove to Greenwood, Mississippi, and checked in at the Holiday Inn. The next morning, he went to Sumner and at 8:00 A.M. strode into the offices of Breland and Whitten. A five-hour meeting with John Whitten followed.
Huie was frank with the Delta lawyer. “John, I want the truth about the Till case. I want to publish it. Whatever our racial sins down here, I like to think we are less hypocritical than some of our enemies. I like to think that truth serves decent purposes better than mystery or propaganda.” He laid out his theory about the murder. Milam and Bryant probably took the boy and meant only to whip him. But they went too far, and in a drunken state, killed him.
Whitten, no longer in the defense mode that won his clients an acquittal, said he did not know what happened to Emmett Till. He never asked either of the men if they were guilty, mainly for his wife’s sake, because she became deeply troubled over the murder. He said he only aided them because the Constitution entitled them to a defense.
Regarding Huie’s theory, however, Whitten admitted that “my assumption is about what yours is.”
Thirty-six-year-old Whitten was more circumspect than his sixty-seven-year-old partner, J. J. Breland, who entered the conversation briefly. Breland’s description of his clients was unapologetic:
Bryant and Milam? Sure, they’re rednecks—peckerwoods. We’ve sued Milam a couple of times: he’s bootlegged all his life. He comes from a big, mean, overbearing family. He’s got a chip on his shoulder. That’s how he got that battlefield promotion in Europe: he likes to kill folks. But hell, we’ve got to have our Milams to fight our wars and keep the niggahs in line. Bryant’s a scrappin’ pine-knot without a pot. . . . They shouldn’t killed that nigger. They should’a just given him Thirty-Nine [thirty-nine licks, the normative punishment for slaves]—and turned him loose. But you know how these things go. They’re likkered [liquored] up. They start off whippin’ him and he sasses one of ’em, and maybe they hit him with the axe. And then they got to finish the job.22
Not one of these men harbored any doubt that Milam and Bryant murdered Emmett Till, but Huie wanted to hear it directly from the killers themselves, and he needed these attorneys to help him. He proposed that Whitten bring J. W. Milam and Roy and Carolyn Bryant to him “in a secret rendezvous in Greenwood” where they would “tell me every last line of the truth.”23 His aim was to write a story about an “approved” murder in the state of Mississippi. In other words, a “community approved murder—a ‘policy’ murder.” Huie would pay Milam and Bryant in cash for their story and the signed releases, plus a percentage of the profits after it appeared in print. He made it clear to Whitten that he would keep their meetings secret, would not testify against the duo in court (at that point, Milam and Bryant were still facing possible indictments on kidnapping), and would carefully avoid writing the story in such a way that it would be perceived as a confession. Breland and Whitten liked the idea and promised to talk with the men. The lawyers were enthused from the beginning, but for reasons of their own. As Huie observed, “Publication of this story, with all its revolting details, is exactly what Breland’s group in Mississippi wants. They want to ‘put the North and the NAACP and the niggers on notice.’ My proposal strikes them as being a ‘good propaganda move.’”24
Huie was convinced that Milam and Bryant would talk, and for at least two reasons. First, there was no danger of a retrial on murder charges because they had been acquitted on those. Second, they would simply be swayed by the money. To help raise funds for the payoff, Huie approached Roy Wilkins and asked for $3,000 from the NAACP as a purchase price for the story and the releases. Huie also dropped a bombshell on Wilkins: “Two other men are involved: there were four in the torture-and-murder party. And if I name them I must have their releases—or no publisher will touch it. I know who these men are: they are important to the story; but I have to pay them because of their ‘risks.’”25
Huie did not say how he learned about these co-conspirators, but it seems clear by the timing that he was tipped off by Breland or Whitten, who would have remembered the courtroom testimony of Willie Reed. Reed had said in court that he saw Emmett Till on the back of a truck in Drew, driven by four white men. Shortly thereafter, he noticed Milam and others at a plantation shed, and heard sounds of a beating coming from inside. As hard as the attorneys tried to refute Reed during the trial, they may well have believed him. It is not likely that the attorneys learned about these other men through Milam and Bryant themselves. If Whitten had never asked the defendants about their own involvement, as he claimed, it follows that the brothers would not have confirmed their guilt by revealing accomplices.
The two mystery men Huie alluded to became the least of his worries, however, because he soon learned that not even Milam and Bryant were both on board. On October 17, Whitten called Huie to tell him that he would get the story, but that only one of the acquitted killers was interested in talking. This limited access may have been Whitten’s idea, because, as Huie also explained it, Whitten said it would be “easier” if Huie interviewed and received a signed release from only one of the men. Huie knew that in the end, this would be up to the publisher, but he agreed to push for it anyway. Whitten did not identify which of the two was unwilling to talk, but Huie assumed it was Milam.26
Huie envisioned a few outlets for his finished story. One possibility was that it be woven into a book. Another was to sell it as a stand-alone article to a magazine or newspaper. Besides Wilkins, who apparently was not interested, Huie sent the word out to two other influential parties, fifty-year-old Daniel Mitch, longtime editorial director of Look magazine, and Basil L. “Stuffy” Walters, fifty-nine, executive editor of Knight Newspapers and former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. It did not take long for Phyllis Jackson, Huie’s agent at MCA, to call and tell Huie that Mitch was interested.
Huie wrote Mitch that same day and laid out his plans for obtaining and paying for the firsthand account of the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till. Of concern to Huie, of course, was that he protect himself, Milam, and Bryant, and head off any legal issues for Look should the magazine publish it. He made four promises very clear. First, “I will agree never to testify against one of them; that even if I am subpoenaed, I will decline to divulge ‘sources.’” Second, he promised never to show the signed release to anyone in Mississippi or with the NAACP. Leaving the door open for a feature film, his only exception would to be to “make confidential use of it in New York or Hollywood.”
In a third stipulation, Huie said he would make no claim that his story was based on a confession by the killers. Although he “may quote directly the words of the murderers at any point in the action, I will not quote them as having said anything to me.” In other words, Huie continued, “the story will be my version of exactly what happened; exactly what was said; exactly what was done at exactly what date and hour; but I will not state, declare or claim that I had the assistance of any particular person.” There was one last issue to consider. The grand jury in Leflore County was set to meet on November 8 regarding the kidnapping charges. Huie predicted (accurately, of course) that there would be no indictment. “However,” on the off chance that there would be one, “we will hold up any publication of this story until after the trial.”
At this point in time, Mamie Bradley and the NAACP were still on good terms, and the possibility of a civil suit against Milam and Bryant still loomed. “What the Hell do I do?” asked Huie, rhetorically. “Well, I testify to the facts as I established them ‘to the best of my ability.’ I stand by the story—every line of it. It’s the truth. But as to how I came by the truth—I stand on my ‘constitutional’ right not to reveal any sources.”
Huie knew that Mitch had concerns of his own, namely, any potential legal ramifications for Look. “It is our clear understanding that when I furnish you an original copy of the signed release you will photostat it, return the original to my agent; and then, under no circumstances short of the necessity to forestall a legal action, will you ever reveal to anyone that you have it. . . . But I’m sure you understand that when I tell this murderer that his release will be kept confidential, that I will never use it except to protect you or me from a damage suit, I mean to do just that.”
It was now up to Huie and Mitch to decide upon the provisions of the release forms and how many of the men involved in the crime should sign one. “Do you insist that two murderers must sign? Or four?” Huie had other questions, and the answers were important from a legal standpoint. “Will you insist on a release from anyone else whom I reveal as having had a part in the ‘case’ but not in the abduction, torture, murder, or disposal of the body?” This was clearly a reference to Carolyn Bryant. Regarding actual accomplices, he pointed out “that two of the murderers have been indicted and tried. The other two have never been ‘publicly disclosed.’ If we do not have their releases, shall we name them in the story or not? Shall we quote them anonymously in any part of the action?”27
Mitch made Huie “a substantial offer” for the story, conditioned upon two signed releases. Yet Huie, looking for even greater possibilities—and profits—made an attempt for a better offer, which he outlined in a proposal to Walters. He wanted a $3,000 down payment upon completion of a rough draft, then another $2,000 for the final product. On top of that, he requested half of all profits realized from syndication. With Walters, Huie wanted to avoid Mitch’s requirement of two releases, which would work to Huie’s advantage. “The cheapest and easiest way for me to proceed is to go with Bryant only. He is the younger; it was his wife who was insulted; and he is flat broke. So I would hope that a publisher would accept him as sufficient.” If an agreement with Walters hinged on two signatures, however, Huie could live with that. “I think Milam’s release can be obtained if it must.” Releases from all four of the men involved, Huie now feared, “would probably be too heavy a handicap.”
One advantage to publishing the story in a newspaper was the speed at which it could appear, and if the grand jury failed to indict the men on kidnapping in November, Huie wanted to see it in print the next day. In a worst-case scenario that there was a trial, it should appear immediately following the announcement of a verdict. A magazine, by its very nature, could not be so accommodating. Due to an upcoming Christmas issue then in the works, Mitch could not promise that Look could publish the story before January.28 Whether Walters failed to bite or Mitch countered with something better is unknown, but within a few days Huie sealed the deal with Look.
Sometime during the early planning phases, Bryant got cold feet, but Whitten apparently intervened to help alleviate his fears. By October 20, three days before the planned tell-all session with Huie, Bryant made up his mind to talk, and Whitten gave Huie the news. Bryant, whom Huie described as “pretty badly shaken up,” had more to lose than he realized, but Huie did not really care. “The poor bastard!” he wrote in a letter to Mitch the next day. “He has already lost his business, and most of those people who ‘approve’ what he has done will now find ways to avoid him. Three months from now the folks who put up the money for his defense won’t speak to him on the street.” Huie knew that even though the story would not read as a confession, people would read between the lines and know who his sources actually were.
Within a few days, Milam decided that he would talk after all, and Huie and Mitch made final arrangements concerning the payout. A Look attorney would travel from New York to Mississippi with the cash. However, Huie insisted on keeping Breland, Whitten, Milam, and Bryant at ease by falsely representing this attorney as “my lawyer from Birmingham.”29
On Sunday, October 23, Huie spent the day in Sumner with Milam and Bryant at the Breland and Whitten law office and heard the half-brothers tell their story, in painstaking detail. They held the meeting in the office library, with Milam and Bryant on one side of the table, and Huie and Whitten on the other. Whitten asked all of the questions while Huie took copious notes. Milam did most of the talking.
When Huie returned to his motel in Greenwood that evening, he fired off an enthusiastic letter to Mitch. “This was really amazing, for it was the first time they have told the story. Not one of their lawyers had heard it.” Whitten even gave Huie his files on the case so that Huie could make comparisons to the story he had just heard. “Perhaps I am too close to it to appraise it,” Huie said as he began to contemplate the aftershocks, “but I can’t see how it can miss being one of the most sensational stories ever published.”30
Huie avoided details in his letter but assured Mitch that “I know every step that was taken—can verify most every word of it—and the manner in which these men operated for five hours before they finally shot this boy and threw him in the river—will make your readers gasp. Particularly, their stark explanation of their motives.” The final agreement for payment stipulated that 20 percent of Huie’s profits would go to Milam and the Bryants. Huie would pay them $3,150 against that in cash up front. Breland and Whitten would receive 10 percent after Milam and the Bryants received their portion, with a cash payment against that of $1,260. Another 10 percent would be paid out in agency commissions. They scheduled the release signing ceremony for October 28 at the Sumner law office, where a total of $4,410 would be distributed among the various parties.
At some point, Mitch changed his mind and insisted on not just two but three signed releases. Huie confirmed that he would get them from Milam, Roy Bryant, and Carolyn Bryant. Each would also initial copies of Huie’s notes wherever needed to verify accuracy. The Look attorney and Whitten would officially witness the signing by adding their own signatures to the documents. Huie reassured Mitch that “all this dealing is to be entirely secret, with me never divulging to anyone in Mississippi that I have talked with the principals.” Huie also planned to spend his week in Mississippi talking to other pertinent people, including Eula Bryant, mother of J. W. and Roy, in an effort to obtain supporting facts.
After explaining all of this to Mitch, Huie made one inexplicable comment that would not only determine the direction of his narrative but would, in effect, shape the Till story for decades to come. “Of this I am now certain: there were not, after all, four men involved in the abduction-and-murder; there were only two. So when we have these releases from Bryant and Milam and the woman, we are completely safe.”31
What led Huie to this new conclusion is unknown, but it clearly came about after his meeting with Milam and Bryant earlier that day. Was he simply taking these two men at their word? Clearly, Milam and Bryant had every motive to protect co-conspirators who could not only be tried alongside them for kidnapping but for murder as well, and Huie was astute enough to know that.32 He may have backed away from including others because they were not willing to sign releases. Or, in the end, he simply calculated the risks of involving them in the first place.33 That was certainly a concern five days earlier when he shopped the story to Basil Walters. Even when Huie was adamant that others had conspired with Milam and Bryant, he asked, “Can we safely handle the story with releases from the two men who have been disclosed and tried?” Huie answered his own question. “YES. We can, if necessary, omit the names of the other two. We can even avoid all reference to them; though I would urge any publisher to state that they were present, to quote whatever they said at any point in the action, but not to name them.”34 Whatever the reason, it became easier in the end to simply make them disappear from the story entirely.
On Monday, October 24, Huie met with Milam and Bryant in a second lengthy meeting. Following up with Mitch, he reported that “there is much that I could say about the story as it is developing—but no time or space here. I have had to change some of the conceptions I have conveyed to you in earlier memos. Two long sessions with these bully-boys have been shattering, even to a man like Whitten.” Then, easily predicting public reaction to such a sensational story, Huie concluded: “It’s an amazing, indefensible murder—and much of our story will be in the cool, factual, manner in which we let the facts indict the ‘community.’ It will shake people in Mississippi.”35
The release signing and cash payout occurred as planned in Sumner at the office of Breland and Whitten on October 28 at 7:00 P.M. At present, only the statements signed by Milam and Carolyn Bryant are available, which raises the question of whether Roy Bryant actually signed one. It is possible that Huie persuaded Mitch to go along with Whitten’s preference of only two signed releases. Or perhaps Bryant, who had grown hesitant to tell his story before being persuaded by Whitten, backed out at the last minute and left this part of the deal to Milam.
The attorney who joined Whitten as a witness was a man with the last name of Dean of the New York office of John Harding, legal counsel for Look. Dean had never been south of the Hudson River before flying to Memphis with the money and the papers, and was scared to death after he landed. Dean was so nervous over the prospect of meeting with two murderers that Huie was worried the entire deal might fall through. Everything went smoothly, however, and after the hour-long signing session, the group celebrated by drinking whiskey. Dean, finally at ease at his point, even chatted with Milam about army weapons, something that each of them apparently knew well.36
The releases do not contain admissions of any wrongdoing on the part of Milam or Carolyn Bryant, and there are significant differences between the two forms. For example, Milam confirmed by his signature that he “discussed at great length with William Bradford Huie the abduction and killing of the negro, Emmett Till, in Sumner, Miss,” and goes on to say that “I have also read and fully understand the general rough outline and notes which are to be the basis for the article or story which Mr. Huie proposes to write, which are attached hereto, initialed by me and hereby made a part of this Consent and Release.” Carolyn Bryant’s says nothing about previous discussions, only that she had read, understood, and initialed Huie’s notes. Carolyn was not present during the earlier meetings, thus the signing ceremony appears to be her only meeting with Huie. Her initials were needed to verify the accuracy of Huie’s version of the store incident and to satisfy Mitch in that regard.37
The signees agreed to a payment of $3,150, to be shared among Milam and the Bryants. Nothing was said about previous arrangements that they were to receive 20 percent of the profits in excess of the lump sum. Each also gave “my consent to William Bradford Huie, to write, (and to anyone else whom he may authorize to publish, produce, dramatize, adapt or otherwise present), an article, story, literary or dramatic work based in whole or in part upon my life and any incidents and episodes therein (hereinafter called ‘the work’) and, in particular, dealing with the death of Emmett Till in Sumner, Miss.” For Milam, this included “the extent of my participation therein.” For Carolyn Bryant, it meant “the extent of my connection therewith.” For both, “this includes the right to report any or all of the details of my private life and that of my family, and to describe me, my character and actions in such manner as Mr. Huie, in his sole judgment, believes to be accurate.” In the case of Milam, “This includes the right to portray me as one of those persons who abducted and killed the negro, Emmett Till, and to portray me, through the use of live actors, in any and all dramatic adaptations of the work.” Carolyn Bryant’s release differed only by agreeing to allow Huie to portray her “as one of those persons who was in some manner connected with the abduction and killing of the negro, Emmett Till.”38
As Huie explained it later, for him to publish as fact an account of Milam and Bryant as murderers “would be what we call ‘libel per se,’ meaning I am libeling these men when I say they murdered because they had already been tried and found not guilty of murder.” In other words, “I’ll in effect pay them for the right to libel them.”39 Lest anyone misunderstand, the document signed by Milam explained it clearly. “The foregoing consent is in no way to be regarded or considered as an admission by me, express or implied, that I am a killer or possessed of any other reprehensible characteristics, criminal or otherwise, which Mr. Huie may, in the work, attribute to me.” Milam also agreed, by his signature, to waive any right by him or his heirs to pursue legal action for this portrayal of him in whatever way Huie planned to use it, such as print media or film.40
The corresponding section in Carolyn Bryant’s release absents the phrase “that I am a killer.” The rest of the paragraph is identical to Milam’s. The documents close with the signee stating his or her understanding that the existence of his or her signed release is to remain secret unless a family member or heir decides to sue Huie or those connected with him. To safeguard against this possibility, the attorneys carefully worded the document to protect Huie of any such litigation.41
Huie put final touches to the article after taking a trip to Chicago, where he interviewed Mamie Bradley, Mose and Elizabeth Wright, and several of the teenagers who were with Till at the Bryant store in Money. The NAACP put Huie in touch with the Wrights, but because Mamie was on poor terms with Roy Wilkins and his organization by then, Huie talked with contacts at Ebony and Jet magazines, and they arranged Huie’s meeting with the slain boy’s mother.42
Soon after Huie sent in the completed article to Look, he received galley proofs for a chance to make any final corrections. He also passed a copy on to John Whitten for the attorney to look over. Whitten, fearing that town folk might learn of his secret dealings with Huie, sent the journalist some of the firm’s envelopes to use for future correspondence. He also asked Huie to avoid using his own return address, and instructed him to mark any correspondence as personal and confidential. “I have had a couple of inquiries about my important mail from Garden City, Alabama,” Whitten explained. “When the article appears they may be able to add two and two and reach some conclusions.”43
Kidnapping charges against Milam and Bryant were dropped on November 9. With the threat of a trial now out of the way, Huie could plan on a release date after the first of the year. After final corrections, the article went to press and appeared in print on January 10.
Nowhere in the four-page tell-all, titled “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” does Huie mention that he held meetings with Milam and Bryant, nor does he reveal that he ever talked to them personally. Nothing is mentioned regarding a payout for the information contained in the story. All quotations detailing the crime, except one, come from Milam. The one attributed to Bryant centers on a conversation between Milam and Bryant that Milam could have provided himself. This further raises the question as to whether Roy Bryant ever signed a release. As promised, Huie left his readers guessing as to how he had obtained his information, including the direct quotations.
The article includes an original sketch by John Groth portraying Milam, with gun in hand, standing over a naked, nearly prostrate Emmett Till. Roy Bryant and the cotton gin fan are close by. The story starts with background information on the brothers as well as Carolyn Bryant. In addition to running his grocery store in Money, Roy earned income by occasionally driving a truck for a brother. On August 24, the day Emmett Till walked into the Bryant store, Roy was hauling a truckload of shrimp from New Orleans to San Antonio, Texas, and from there he went to Brownsville, Texas.
Huie told how Till, with six other boys and a girl, took a drive in Mose Wright’s 1946 Ford and ended up at the store, three miles west of the Wright home. Huie introduced the incident that occurred at Bryant’s with a conversation between Till and the other youths standing outside. Till boasts of escapades with white women and shows off a photo of one of them that he kept in his wallet. The others taunt and dare him. “There’s a pretty little white woman in the store,” one of them said. “Since you know how to handle white girls, let’s see you go in and get a date with her.”
Huie explained the encounter between Emmett Till and Carolyn Bryant from Carolyn’s point of view, most of which was clearly based on her courtroom testimony. Till bought two-cents worth of bubble gum, and when he paid for his purchase, he squeezed her hand and asked for a date. At a break in the counter, he jumped in front of her and told her not to be afraid, that he had been with white girls before. Huie’s version adds, for the first time, that Carolyn Bryant and her sister-in-law, Juanita Milam, resolved not to tell Roy and J. W. about what happened. This decision between the women was not mentioned in court and was probably revealed to Huie by Milam or Roy. Another possibility is that Carolyn told it to Huie on the evening of the release signing ceremony.
Roy was still out of town and did not return from Texas until Friday morning at 4:00. However, “a Negro told him what ‘the talk’ was, and told him that the ‘Chicago boy’ was ‘visitin’ Preacher.’” Knowing now that Roy was aware, Carolyn reluctantly filled in the details. “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.” That night, Milam drove by the store, and Roy asked him to come back early the following morning because “I need a little transportation.” At first, Milam objected because Sunday was his only day to sleep late. Once Roy explained what it was all about, however, the protests stopped. Milam promised to be there early.
The account of their arrival at Mose Wright’s house early Sunday morning, detailing that they knocked on the door, woke up the Wrights, and demanded the boy from Chicago, all agree with Mose Wright’s courtroom testimony. It was probably retold to Huie by Mose and Elizabeth Wright during his interview with them. Here Huie added another detail that was not part of the trial transcript, which he could have received either from Milam or the Wrights. When Milam spotted Till in bed, he woke him and ordered him to get dressed. Till started to put on his socks and shoes.
“Just the shoes,” snapped Milam.
“I don’t wear shoes without socks,” Till shot back, showing little fear. He kept the men waiting while he put on his thick, crepe-soled shoes.
Milam was careful not to indict others. He does not allude to anyone waiting outside who identified Till as the “right one,” as Wright had confidently done in court. Milam’s version maintains that they were already sure. “Milam and Bryant would have stopped at the store for Carolyn to identify him. But there had been no denial,” Huie explained. “So they didn’t stop at the store. At Money, they crossed the Tallahatchie River and drove west.”
The brothers were not set on killing Till at first. Their plan was simply to “whip him . . . and scare some sense into him.” To do that, they drove for three hours looking for a spot that Milam had discovered a year earlier while hunting geese. He called it “the scariest place in the Delta” with a 100-foot drop down to the water and another 100 feet to the bottom of the river after you hit. Milam wanted to teach the big talking black boy a lesson by standing him at the edge and forcing him to look down below. “Brother, if that won’t scare the Chicago __________, hell won’t.” They failed to find the place, however, and drove back to Milam’s house in Glendora instead. Till, alone in the back of the truck, never made an attempt to flee, and Huie explained why. “Bobo wasn’t afraid of them! He was tough as they were. He didn’t think they had the guts to kill him. According to Milam, ‘We were never able to scare him. They had just filled him so full of that poison that he was hopeless.’”
Their plans to spare Emmett Till of a brutal death changed, Milam said, after they took him to a toolshed behind Milam’s house and began taking turns pistol-whipping him. Even then, Till never cried out or gave in. “You bastards,” he screamed, defiantly, “I’m not afraid of you. I’m as good as you are. I’ve ‘had’ white women. My grandmother was a white woman.”
To Milam, those words signified a death wish. His next decision was rooted in a lifelong rage that he would now take out on a fourteen-year-old boy:
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’ve 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,” Huie wrote. Milam remembered that new equipment had recently been installed at a cotton gin and that there was an old, discarded fan nearby. “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.” So Milam made Emmett Till load it. Milam and Bryant then drove the boy out to a spot on the Tallahatchie River, about a mile and a half from the home of his friend L. W. Boyce. Huie did not remind his readers, but Boyce had been a character witness for Milam during the murder trial. Milam forced Till to pick up the gin fan and carry it to the riverbank. “Take off your clothes,” Milam ordered. It was now 7:00 A.M., and as Till stood there naked, Milam asked him two final questions.
“You still as good as I am?”
“Ya,” Till answered, defiantly.
“You still ‘had’ white women?”
“Yeah.”
Milam next fired a shot point-blank into Till’s head. Because the boy moved slightly to the left, the bullet hit him just above the right ear, and he fell to the ground. Next, the men took barbed wire, tied the fan to Till’s neck, and rolled him into twenty feet of water. Returning to Milam’s, they spent the next three hours holding a bonfire. It took that long to burn Till’s crepe-soled shoes.
Huie may have meant to prick the consciences of Mississippians; or, he simply believed he was stating a fact by closing his essay with a scathing assessment. “The majority—by no means all, but the majority—of the white people in Mississippi 1) either approve Big Milam’s action or else 2) they don’t disapprove enough to risk giving their ‘enemies’ the satisfaction of a conviction.”44
The impact of the story was both immediate and immeasurable. This was predicted even before its release. Roy Wilkins became aware of the article and its contents several days before promos began running, as Huie had obviously kept him in the loop. He urged NAACP branch officers to use the article to their advantage to further the association’s goals. He gave them a heads-up:
Next Tuesday, January 10, Look magazine will publish a startling article on the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi. The magazine will be dated January 24, but will go on sale January 10.
This article will be certain to cause fresh nation-wide discussion of the brutal killing of the 14-year-old boy for which no one has been punished.
When the magazine appears and you have seen the article, please write without further delay to both Senators from your state and to the Congressman from your district, reminding them of the Till murder and asking that this session of Congress pass civil rights bills to give the Department of Justice authority to act in such cases as the Till killing.
Ask for an anti-lynching bill. Ask for a stronger civil rights division in the Department of Justice. Ask for laws to guarantee the security of the person.
Ask for the passage of civil rights bills to protect citizens in the right to vote.45
On Thursday, January 13, three days after “Shocking Story” went public, Michigan representative Charles Diggs Jr. stood before the House of Representatives. After receiving unanimous consent to speak, he read the piece into the Congressional Record. To him, there was no question as to the source of the details in the article. “The stunning revelations are so detailed and stated so positively, the magazine’s journalistic integrity and knowledge of libel law is so well established there is no doubt in my mind that the information came directly from the killers themselves, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant.” He theorized that the men, safe from further prosecution, “apparently grasped at the opportunity of selling this exclusive story for an undoubtedly handsome financial reward.”46
Within days, two southern congressmen responded to Diggs by castigating Huie’s summation that the murder had the approval of white Mississippians. John Bell Williams, a four-term Democrat from Raymond, Mississippi, said the article “contains the most unfair, vicious, vindictive, baseless, scurrilous, scathing, and libelous indictment ever labeled against a State of this Union.” It was a “lie out of the whole cloth, embellished with the products of a depraved imagination and is an act of journalistic prostitution of the lowest form.” He read into the Record a January 11 editorial, published in the Jackson State Times, that blasted Huie.47 South Carolina representative L. Mendel Rivers, during a one-minute speech from the House floor, introduced an article by Davis Lee, black publisher of the Newark Telegraph. After a seven-week stay in Mississippi, Lee had become convinced that the Magnolia State “is no worse than any other state in the union,” and that the Till murder could have happened anywhere under similar circumstances. Lee’s observations convinced him that “white people in Mississippi love and respect their Negro employees.”48 Rivers did not mention that Lee had already become a poster boy for segregationists. After the announcement of the Brown decision twenty months earlier, Lee published an editorial criticizing integration, and thus clearly established himself as an appeaser of southern whites. The editor of the McComb (Miss.) Enterprise Journal happily reprinted Lee’s latest assessment and gave him a renewed voice in the South.49 Clearly, Lee, a northerner, was a godsend to Dixie whites, but he was hardly representative of its black population.
It was no surprise that in Chicago, Mamie Bradley read the Huie piece immediately. Her instant response was that Milam and Bryant lied about her son. The boy she knew “would never brag about the women he had. How could he? He was only 14.” The “Shocking Story” was the most recent in a series of personal blows. The trial verdict in Sumner, the dismissal of kidnapping charges in Greenwood, not to mention the murder itself, all left her devastated. “I don’t see how much more I can stand, how I can go on. These terrible lies they tell to try and explain away killing a child in cold blood. They aren’t human, they’re beasts. And nobody does anything about them.” Carolyn Bryant fared no better in Mamie’s eyes. “That woman . . . I don’t see how she can sleep at night.”50
Although the article has typically been touted as a “confession,” it does not fit that description if remorse and penitence are to be implied by such a definition. Neither did it read as one. Had the signed releases been forced into the open, one would see that Milam only agreed to let Huie portray him as a killer, and did so in return for money.
That the acquitted half-brothers immediately distanced themselves from the story further negates the idea that it should be taken as a confession. Newsmen began tracking down the pair right away, but anyone who asked was met with denials by both Milam and Bryant. Unknown to anyone asking, that was all part of the deal. “I don’t know a damn thing about it, and you can quote me on that,” Milam told newsmen. “There’s nothing I can do about someone’s imagination but I didn’t have nothing to do with killing anyone.” Bryant’s response sounded more canned. “I haven’t seen the article, but if it’s anything I am supposed to have said, I deny it. I don’t have any comment until we finish talking to our lawyers.” Milam also said he was even mulling over the idea of filing a libel suit against the magazine, and claimed to have hired John Whitten to explore the possibility. Whitten, getting in on the act himself, told the press that he was still deciding what to do, but believed a suit, if filed, would be handled by a federal court, through a New York attorney.51
Within a few days, however, Milam admitted to reporter Jay Milner that he was not sure if he really had grounds for winning a lawsuit because “that guy that wrote it was careful not to say where he got his information and he didn’t quote me directly.” Actually, Huie did quote Milam directly, but never mentioned that he heard the story from Milam himself. Milam did note with a smile that the article “was written from a Mississippi viewpoint. I’ve gotten a lot of letters from people complementing me for what Look said I did.” He showed the reporter a stack of fourteen that he had received that day alone.52
Four years later, Huie revealed that the denials Milam and Bryant made to the press had been carefully crafted by Huie himself.53 When Huie answered questions from curious reporters following the release of the article, he stood by the story but said little else. In a statement issued through Look, he explained, “In researching the Till story for Look magazine, I talked to all the important sources in Mississippi.” Yet, true to his word, he refused to reveal identities. “I cannot, as a responsible newsman[,] enumerate these sources by name.” “For the same reasons,” Huie continued, “I cannot answer any questions as to whether or not I personally talked with any particular individuals in the Till case.” He insisted that “the Look article is completely accurate. Look published it only after being thoroughly satisfied of that fact.” The magazine’s attorney, John Harding, also pointed out that no one connected to the case had contacted the publication to dispute the details.54
For most readers, none of that made any difference. However careful Huie was in protecting his sources legally, few saw Huie’s “Shocking Story” as anything but an admission of murder by Milam and Bryant. The public denials of the acquitted killers notwithstanding, the article prompted immediate calls for authorities to empanel a new grand jury to once again consider kidnapping indictments against them. Because they had never been tried and acquitted on those charges, they could legally be charged again if there was evidence to warrant it. The loudest voice insisting on a renewed effort was that of Roy Wilkins, who sent a telegram to Mississippi governor-elect J. P. Coleman urging him to act. Coleman was still serving as state attorney general until his inauguration on January 17. “If nothing is done to make them pay for at least one of their crimes, not only is Mississippi disgraced but our country will be held up for international ridicule. Accordingly, we urge you to act promptly to save the good name of our country and to salvage what you can for the State of Mississippi.” In a separate letter to Look, Wilkins had words for Huie, who raised too many questions by never identifying his sources. “Who stands behind these ‘facts,’ Mr. Huie?”55
The man who had the power to call a grand jury was Arthur Jordan, circuit judge over Leflore County, but even his hands were tied. He explained to the press that in order to proceed, he would have to call a special grand jury with only a twenty-day notice. Because his schedule was already full, this would be impossible. The next term of court for Greenwood was not slated until May, and Jordan still had cases to preside over in four other counties before then. Even so, his only role in the matter would be to empanel the jury. Any decision to indict would be up to the men selected to serve. Jordan was not optimistic. “Nobody will indict anybody just on the basis of an article in a magazine.” Should there be an indictment and the case go to trial, it would all be a waste of time without Huie’s cooperation anyway. The district attorney could not force him to go to the state to testify, but Huie could do so voluntarily. In a separate interview with the Washington Afro-American, Jordan admitted that in that case, testimony from Huie “might carry some weight.”56 For Huie, who had already promised to protect his sources, testifying voluntarily was not an option.
Black journalist James Hicks had stayed on the Till case since the trial, and naturally followed the Huie story with vested interest. It had been two months since he had written his open letter to Attorney General Herbert Brownell and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, wherein he named probable accomplices of Milam and Bryant.57 In the January 21, 1956, edition of the Baltimore Afro-American, he published another such letter, this time prompted by the Huie revelations. This one was directed to Brownell alone.
Hicks was none too happy with Brownell as it was. Back in December, a delegation of five women from various organizations met with Brownell about the many abuses endured by southern blacks, especially those in Mississippi. Juanita Mitchell, an attorney for the National Council of Negro Women, admonished Brownell to strengthen federal statutes as a means to probe southern racial problems without hindrance. Brownell promised to consider the concerns of the group and offered to meet with them again after the president’s State of the Union message in January. One of the women present mentioned Hicks’s November letter, in which Hicks named individuals and spelled out a course of action for the FBI. Brownell rejected Hicks’s charges as “groundless.” Hicks later read about the attorney general’s criticisms in a New York newspaper.58
Hicks believed, in light of the Look article, that he was having the last laugh. To him, however, the situation was not funny. “Mr. Milam is quoted from direct quotes all through the article. Now, Mr. Brownell, you are a lawyer, and you know that if a magazine or any publication charges a man with murder in direct quotes, that man can sue the magazine or newspaper for libel in any court in this nation AND FORCE THAT MAGAZINE OR NEWSPAPER TO EITHER PROVE HE COMMITTED THE MURDER OR COLLECT DAMAGES TO THE AMOUNT OF HARM HE HAS SUFFERED BY SUCH A CHARGE.”
Hicks believed that Milam’s inaction, despite early threats to sue, was telling. “A Mississippi jury acquitted him of murder and he is in an ideal position to sue. But he is not suing.” Hicks said he had even talked with Look’s attorney, John Harding, who was sure that Look would win a lawsuit in the unlikely event that there would be one. “Mr. Attorney General, you are the highest lawyer in the land—what would be the best guarantee that any editor would want in a case like this? That’s right—an affidavit signed by J. W. Milam in which he admits to the magazine that everything in the article is true. That’s the only kind of guarantee that any publication with the national standing of Look Magazine could accept under the circumstances.” Did Harding alert Hicks to the releases signed in Sumner? Harding knew that the statements made no admissions of guilt, but ethical boundaries should have kept him from telling anyone about them at all, especially a loose cannon such as Hicks. Harding may have provided Hicks with a hypothetical scenario, or Hicks’s talk of affidavits was all conjecture on his part. Either way, his theory was nearly spot on. “What I now say is that Milam and Bryant have confessed their killing of Emmett Till and there is a strong suggestion that they were paid a handsome sum for the confession.” Hicks publicly challenged Brownell to intervene by concluding his letter with six words: “It’s your move, Mr. Attorney General!”59
Brownell ignored Hicks altogether and was not swayed when former California congressman Sam Yorty wrote and urged, as thousands had before him, that Brownell see “that justice is done in this case.” On February 12, Warren Olney, assistant attorney general, responded to Yorty and assured him that the Justice Department shared the congressman’s views about the horrific nature of the murder. Regardless, nothing pointed to the crime as anything other than a state matter.60
In the end, Huie’s “Shocking Story” only confirmed the fact that two men got away with murder. It would not serve as a springboard for justice, and Mississippi officials never tried to prosecute the men again.
The varied responses to the article were hardly a surprise. Huie received around 5,000 letters, and the sentiments of the authors sat anywhere along the spectrum. Some pledged financial support to Milam for doing what was to them an honorable deed. Others accused Huie of being a “nigger-lover.” Still others read “Shocking Story” as Huie’s attempt “to make a Negro child into something detestable.” In its March 6 and March 20, 1956, issues, Look published a total of nineteen letters to the editor about the article.61
Editorials in northern and southern papers clearly demonstrated these diverse attitudes. The New York Post declared that “if a slaying can not only be committed but proclaimed—and that is what the Look report suggests—there is no longer any semblance of protection for the civil rights of Negroes in that state. . . . The Till case haunts the national conscience, and this article, until or unless it is successfully disputed, is a sensational and decisive exhibit.” The Greenwood Morning Star denounced the piece and the magazine that gave it a forum. Huie’s claim that the murder was approved by the state of Mississippi was especially disturbing. “It is this insinuation which marks Look magazine as the bitter enemy of the South and the South’s way of life.”62
Amid the outcry over the story, one development was completely unexpected, but it demonstrated that Huie planned to cash in on the Till case for some time to come. Within days after Look hit the stands, papers reported that Huie, Mamie Bradley, J. W. Milam, and Roy Bryant were all parties in a movie deal with Lloyd Royal, president of Panorama Productions and owner of a movie theater chain in Meridian, Mississippi. When the story broke, Royal was in New York with an associate, T. V. Garroway, to secure a deal with Huie, who was slated to write the script. Huie also contracted with the New American Library to write a book building upon his “Shocking Story.”
The film was to be called The Emmett Till Story, and Royal hoped to begin shooting in Money and Sumner in less than a month. Till family members had already signed contracts and Royal was in negotiations with Milam and Bryant. Huie was not worried, however. Should the brothers fail to sign on, “we will be willing to take the risks involved. But we intend to use real names and places and the real locale of the killing.”63 If there were any risks to consider, they would have only involved Roy Bryant. The releases that Milam and Carolyn Bryant signed in Sumner already gave Huie and anyone working with him the right to portray them in film. Publicly claiming he still had to negotiate with them was probably necessary to conceal the fact that they had actually given the go-ahead three months earlier.
A follow-up story soon reported that the acquitted pair did sign on, as expected. Twenty-seven-year-old actor and Arkansas native Cecil Scaife told the press he hoped to play Milam in the film, although casting had not yet started.64 As Royal explained it, “We don’t plan to make a documentary. We are going to dramatize a story based on the known facts. We’re a Mississippi company and we’re not going to do anything to hurt Mississippi. The releases we have obtained give us the final say on what goes into the picture.” Royal said he was even working out details for financing and distribution of the film with forty-five-year-old Arthur B. Krim, entertainment lawyer and, since 1951, chairman of United Artists.
Mamie Bradley confirmed after the first reports made the news that she had indeed signed a contract just after the first of the year and hired an attorney to advise her. “My contract gives me the right to pass on the script and I will exercise that right vigilantly to see that it gives a truthful portrayal.” Bradley was adamant that she would not allow her son to be portrayed as he had been in the Look article. “Emmett was no superman and saying that he took all that beating without begging for mercy or that he kept talking back to them to the very end just isn’t true. They were only trying to justify why they did it.”65
Despite early enthusiasm over this project, the film never came to fruition, and the reasons for that are unknown. Huie did fill his contract with the New American Library, producing the book Wolf Whistle, and Other Stories in 1959. The first chapter dealt with the Till case. He finished a screenplay for an Emmett Till film in 1960, but by then Royal was out of the deal and Huie was negotiating with Louis de Rochemont, cocreator of the theatrical newsreels The March of Time and producer of such full-length features as The House on 92nd Street (1945) and Windjammer (1958). De Rochemont, known as the father of the docudrama, may have naturally been drawn to the Till story. However, Huie reported in a 1977 interview that although he had signed a contract with RKO Pictures and had written the script, the producer canceled the project. A footnote to the interview explained that, “given the style of movies at the time, there seemed no way to make a film about two men who casually murder a boy and then escape punishment with the blessings of their peers.” The script still sits unproduced in Huie’s papers at Ohio State University.66
As Huie predicted, his “Shocking Story” eroded the support that Milam and Bryant had gained before and just after the trial. When Huie met up with the pair the following year, he reported that friends had abandoned them and that misfortune was plaguing them both.67
Just after the release of the Look piece, newspapers began reporting that Mississippi governor-elect Coleman spoke about the case to interviewer Dick Smith of radio station KXOL in Fort Worth, Texas. “So far as I am concerned, they both [Milam and Bryant] should have been convicted and electrocuted.” He was quick to criticize the NAACP and Charles Diggs for coming to the trial and stirring up trouble. Had they stayed away, “we would have got the job done.”68
When news of the interview hit, Coleman denied these statements. A reporter from the Memphis Press-Scimitar read Coleman a United Press dispatch in which Look attributed the quotes to the governor-elect. Coleman still denied making such statements. “To begin with, Mississippi no longer electrocutes. We use the gas chamber. Secondly, I have been judge and attorney general for so many years I would never make such a statement without having sat in on the evidence. I did not hear the evidence in this case.” Look, however, insisted that the interview had been recorded and forwarded to New York, where it was released. Coleman admitted that he had talked with Smith by phone several days earlier, but he believed it to have been nothing more than a casual exchange. “I guess I should have declined to talk at all,” said Coleman, regretfully. “I didn’t regard it as a news release conversation.”69
Huie’s “Shocking Story” has received both undue praise and unwarranted criticism in the decades since it appeared. On the one hand, it convinced many holdouts who would not believe it before that Milam and Bryant were guilty of murder, and it served as a constant reminder to the state of Mississippi that it had, through its court system, delivered an injustice. As such, the acquitted brothers were no longer heroes, but quickly became pariahs in their communities. However, because Huie willingly accepted their version of the story, which portrayed them as the only perpetrators, the article created and perpetuated a false narrative that has unfortunately been given an authoritative status. Its portrayal of Emmett while in the store as attempting to assault Carolyn Bryant, and at the murder site as fearlessly standing up to the men who killed him, has also made his death a little more bearable for many and justified it for not a few.70
Huie knew that his article would leave some lingering questions unanswered, especially those raised during the trial by Mose Wright and Willie Reed, who claimed others were present at both the kidnapping and murder. The Tri-State Defender reported on the Look piece several days in advance of the magazine’s release and noted that it “was able to obtain some additional factual information, heretofore unrevealed about the kidnapping and murder.” The Defender would only state that this information came from an informant. It is clear, however, that the source was none other than Huie himself.71 This “informant” was already thoroughly familiar with even minute details from Huie’s article. For example, the Defender source noted that the cotton gin where the men got the fan was called the Progressive Ginning Company, located nearly three and a half miles from the town of Cleveland, in Bolivar County. Huie named the gin in “Shocking Story” as well. Notes in Huie’s correspondence indicate that he was likely the source also.72
Because the Tri-State Defender story had been written in advance of the release of the issue of Look containing “Shocking Story,” it is clear that Huie initiated the conversation with the paper, and not the other way around, as the Defender would not have known that the article was even forthcoming. Huie had already built rapport with Defender publications and seemed proud of it. In the letter he wrote to Dan Mitch as he began working out the details for “Shocking Story,” Huie asked Mitch to stress some facts to Look’s lawyer in case the lawyer had liberal leanings. “Tell him that 16 years ago I was ‘honored’ by the NAACP; that on my wall hangs a scroll presented me by the Chicago Defender for ‘symbolizing the best in American democracy’; that the Pittsburgh Courier has raised money for me; that the American Civil Liberties Union has field actions on my behalf; and that I have the respect of virtually every literate Negro in the country.”73 Although the last boast was an exaggeration, Huie believed he had standing with the paper.
Many of the details revealed by Huie as an informant to the Tri-State Defender were identical to what was forthcoming in Look. There is an added detail about the black man who told Bryant about Emmett Till’s behavior at his store. “For his own protection, I cannot reveal his name.”74 If protecting the man was an issue, that probably meant that he was still in the South, where his safety would have been jeopardized. This is important because rumors began to surface later that the informant was one of Till’s cousins.75 These relatives were no longer in Money, however, but had all moved to Chicago just after the murder trial ended. Huie knew this as well because he went to Chicago to interview them.
Huie, as informant, completely dismissed Mose Wright’s claim that a third man stood on the porch during the kidnapping, calling it “a myth, sheer nonsense,” because Milam and Bryant would never take a black man along for a mission such as this. Nor was there a woman in the car. “It is not reasonable to believe that Mrs. Bryant would leave her two children alone in the store at 2 A.M. nor is it logical to think that Mr. Bryant would permit such.”76 Still, Huie does not explain at all how Wright could have seen a third man on the porch and heard a voice from the car if no one was there. Apparently, neither did the Defender press him on it.
As to Willie Reed’s testimony about the men, the truck, the shed, and the beating on a Sunflower County plantation, “That was a coincidence.” As Huie explained it, a truck of the same make and color as Milam’s, carrying three whites in front, and a few blacks in back, did drive onto the plantation and into the shed. “This was a fishing party. The truck backed up to the barn and a boat was moved out onto the truck.” Huie said the moaning sounds that Reed heard were only noises made by people playing around as they loaded up the boat.77
Huie’s version of the events surrounding the death of Emmett Till, both in Look and in his lesser-known but important account as an informant to the Tri-State Defender, appeared on the surface to settle the matter. Following a host of rumors, denials, stories of money, greed, and movie deals, the Till case had taken a sensational turn. As Deltans woke up to the fact that two acquitted killers lived among them, most wanted not only to cease talking about the matter but to put it behind them forever.
Shortly after the release of “Shocking Story,” a series of articles appeared in the Los Angeles–based black weekly the California Eagle, beginning with its January 26 issue. The five-part series claimed to unfold the truth about the Till murder, but the dramatic details differed substantially from Huie’s account.78
The articles were written by a journalist under the pseudonym Amos Dixon. An introductory note in the first installment described Dixon as a white southerner who had covered the murder trial in Sumner and “talked freely to those who knew what happened.”79 Unlike Huie, Dixon maintained that Milam and Bryant had accomplices, and he names them. His account aligns more closely with the testimonies of Willie Reed, Mandy Bradley, and Add Reed, which “Shocking Story” ignored completely. Midway through publication of the series, a thirty-five-page booklet appeared, titled Time Bomb: Mississippi Exposed and the Full Story of Emmett Till, and it told a similar story as Dixon had provided. It was written by Olive Arnold Adams, wife of New York Age Defender publisher Julius Adams. A seven-page chapter dealt specifically with the Till case.80
Dr. T. R. M. Howard was clearly the driving force behind each of these investigative endeavors, and a primary source of information. Details he provided in published speeches are quoted or paraphrased by Dixon and Adams, but not acknowledged. For example, Howard’s revisionist description of Emmett Till’s wolf whistle claims that Carolyn Bryant did not even hear it. This is repeated by Dixon and Adams. So, too, are Till’s cries of “Lord have mercy, mama save me,” which Howard claimed Willie Reed heard the dying boy utter from inside the shed, but which Reed never stated in his courtroom testimony.81
Howard had been a columnist for the California Eagle in 1933 and 1934, and Loren Miller, who took over ownership of the paper from Charlotta Bass in 1951, had been friends with Howard for over twenty years. Howard also had a connection with Adams, made evident by the fact that he wrote the foreword to Time Bomb. He even referred to a book in progress that he and Adams were writing together. For whatever reason, however, that book was never published.82
It appears that Adams likely relied exclusively on Howard for her narrative. Dixon, on the other hand, seems to have done some independent research, for at times he differs from both Howard and Adams. Some of the details in each of their works contradicts early statements of witnesses and others, and, unfortunately, the authors never explain why. In that regard, the inconsistencies raise more questions than they answer. However, the most important revelations of Dixon and Adams concern accomplices. The names of Levi Collins and Henry Lee Loggins were well known to the press by the third day of the trial, but Howard later learned of the involvement of another black man. At first, Howard could not identify him by name, but in the month after the trial, he announced from Los Angeles that the mysterious third man on the back of the truck was someone named “Hubbard.” Dixon identified him as Willie Hubbard.83 Hubbard had been a friend of Loggins, and the two men had dated a pair of sisters. When Loggins referred to him in 2001, he remembered him as Joe Willie Hubbard.84
Dixon names Loggins and Hubbard as the two on the truck who held down Emmett Till to prevent him from escaping. For reasons unknown, when Adams referred to them in Time Bomb, she used pseudonyms, even though their real names had already appeared in the press by this time. Loggins became “Wiggins”; she referred to Hubbard as “Herbert”; and Frank Young, the field hand who first tipped off Howard about the beating of Till on the Drew plantation, became “Fred Yonkers.” Dixon says that the white men in the front of the truck with J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant were Leslie Milam “and another brother who has never been completely identified.” Adams does not name them, but simply refers to them as “two other persons” who were in the cab of the truck.85
Unlike Adams, Dixon reported gruesome details of the beating and death of Emmett Till. The source of this information would have been Loggins’s father, Dewitt, who got the story directly from his son. In his open letter to Attorney General Brownell and FBI director Hoover, published in the Washington Afro-American the previous November, Hicks identified Dewitt as a reluctant but willing source.86 For the Eagle article, Dixon either talked to Dewitt Loggins or else learned the story from Howard. Either way, Dixon’s description is particularly disturbing:
With Henry Lee Loggins holding the victim, the Milams led by J. W. began beating Emmett about the head with their pistols. He began to cry and beg for mercy. That only whetted their hatred. They smashed his head in, beat it to a pulp.
Emmett fell to the floor, still crying and begging. Their frenzy increased. The blows fell faster. The frenzy mounted higher. The killers kicked and beat their victim. Finally the cries died down to a moan and then ceased.
The Milams and Bryant thought their victim was dead.
A new panic seized them. What to do with the body? J. W. rose to the occasion: throw the body in the Tallahatchie river.87
As for Howard, his role in seeking justice in this case was nearing an end. He had recently learned that he was on a “Special Death List” of 100 people slated to be killed off by white supremacists by the first of the year. He had just sold all 720 acres of his property outside Mound Bayou for $200,000, and was spending less time in Mississippi. When rumors surfaced that he was moving from the state, he assured a curious reporter that “I have no intention of leaving Mississippi at this time.” By April, however, he decided to move to Chicago.88
The Dixon and Adams reports, as sensational as they were, barely caused a ripple, but the alleged involvement of Collins and Loggins in the Till murder was not entirely forgotten, even in the aftermath of Huie, who completely eliminated them from the story. On February 28, 1956, a delegation from the National Council of Negro Women came to the FBI office in Washington, DC, and met with Hoover and Louis B. Nichols, assistant to the director. One of the women, Juanita Mitchell, spoke impassionedly about several issues. With regard to the Till case, she wanted to know why the Bureau had not conducted an investigation in response to Hicks’s November letter to Brownell and Hoover. The FBI had decided back in December not to act upon it.
This exchange prompted Hoover to find out why Collins and Loggins had never been interviewed by the Criminal Division, and why this information had never been presented to him in a brief. F. L. Price explained to Hoover about the September 30 memorandum that had requested an investigation to determine whether a civil rights violation had occurred. Price approved the investigation on October 4, and the Memphis office turned in its report eight days later, which was based in part on the Memphis agents’ interview with Robert Smith.89
Mitchell’s comments renewed discussions of Hicks’s letter, which had been written after the FBI’s October decision to take no action. Price again preferred not to act. “After having read the open letter which Hicks wrote and was published in the Afro-American and being subject to Mrs. Mitchell’s emotional tirades, I frankly doubt the advisability of interviewing Hicks unless it is a matter of last resort,” he wrote. “The very moment that we interview Hicks we can expect to have a story that we are investigating the Till case.” Price clearly wanted to avoid that, but he advised Hoover about possible action that the Bureau could take, all of which Price was still reluctant to pursue:
I am wondering if we are on sound ground to send a memorandum to the Attorney General and ask for instructions and then go ahead in the absence of instructions and interview Hicks. It seems to me that if we do want to go ahead and seek to verify whether or not Collins and Loggins were in the Charleston jail as alleged by Mrs. Mitchell, we might do this without interviewing Hicks. After all, Hicks got his information from Dr. Howard and if we interview Hicks we would then have to go to Howard.
If you feel that we should go ahead on this in the absence of a directive from the Department, would it not be better to locate Collins who was interrogated by the attorney for the Chicago defender [sic] and whose statement was published in the papers, interview the cook at the jail who allegedly fed these individuals and verify that Collins and Loggins were working in Mississippi while the trial was going on.90
No further discussion about possible action exists in the FBI’s Till file, which indicates that the entire matter was dropped at this time. However, a few weeks later, black leaders in Mississippi made a last-ditch effort to get Loggins to open up. In mid-March, a writer researching the Till case learned that the field hand had been jailed in Sumner on a theft charge. Loggins was still working for J. W. Milam at the time, and it was Milam who issued the complaint. Apparently Milam had obtained two discarded trucks and kept them on the plantation he was managing. Loggins allegedly sold the scrap metal from the vehicles to R. L. and J. C. Smart, two brothers living in Glendora. When Milam spotted the three black men cutting up the metal with a torch, he confronted them at gunpoint and had all three arrested.91
Black leaders hoped that the rift between Loggins and Milam would finally prompt Loggins to tell everything he knew about the Till murder. They immediately devised a plan to clear Loggins of the charge, move him out of the area, and provide him with a home, job, and money. When told about the efforts to help him, Loggins agreed to go along with the arrangement.
Bail for Loggins was set at $700 and was quickly paid. The group retained Abe Sherman, a white lawyer from Clarksdale, to help free Loggins, and the next day Sherman drove to Sumner. When Sherman learned that Milam was involved in the case, he grew reluctant, but kept with his client nevertheless.
Although Tallahatchie County sheriff Harry Dogan tried to release Loggins, surprisingly, Loggins refused to leave the jail. “That boy don’t want to come out,” Dogan told the group waiting outside. When a black newsman went in to persuade Loggins to leave, Loggins, whom the Daily Defender reporter described as “frightened, dirty, and badly in need of a haircut,” screamed out, “I don’t know you. I want to see Mr. Milam.” Loggins finally agreed to leave the cell only if his father came to get him. At that point, Sherman went home to Clarksdale, and reporters went looking for Dewitt Loggins.
After searching for two hours, they found him on a plantation near Minter City. He agreed to go with them to Sumner but wanted to wait until dark. However, when the men went to his home at 7:00 P.M. to pick him up as planned, he was gone. “He had to go away with his boss,” his wife, Sarah, informed them. “He told me to tell you he just had to go.” While explaining this to the reporters, she made a gesture in the direction of a bayou nearby. The group then went to Glendora to find a friend of Henry Lee’s who would go to the jail and try to convince him to leave.
When they arrived back at the Sumner jail, Sheriff Dogan and attorney Sherman were waiting. Loggins’s friend went inside and talked to the frightened inmate for half an hour, but Loggins told him to tell the men outside to “come back tomorrow.” Dogan, still waiting outside himself, called Loggins to the jail window.
“These folks have spent all day trying to help you,” Dogan said. “You can come out if you want to.”
“No sir, I don’t want to come out,” Loggins yelled back.
Dogan, frustrated, told a reporter to try talking to the inmate. The newsman then tried to get Loggins to sign the bond, but Loggins refused.
“Why won’t he come out?” the bewildered reporter asked a white official standing nearby.
“It’s simple, boy,” he answered. “J. W. Milam put him here and told him that when he wanted him out he would get him out.”
Loggins remained adamant and told the men that he would not come out, even if they came back for him the next day. Finally, the group left.92
The following day, Loggins was arraigned before Judge James McClure and sentenced to six months in jail for obtaining money under false pretenses. J. W. Kellum, attorney for the Smarts, was able to secure the two brothers’ freedom by arguing that Loggins alone was responsible for the theft. “These two niggers came to Milam’s place in broad daylight with blow torches to cut up that iron, and no nigger in his right mind would come to Milam’s place to do wrong.” Loggins did not have a lawyer, and Mississippi law did not require that one be appointed for him. As Loggins began his sentence, a relative told the Daily Defender, “That boy knows too much about the Till child for his own good. He should leave Mississippi and never come back.”93 Eventually, that is what happened.
That same month, Dr. T. R. M. Howard spoke to a crowd of 3,000 in Chicago at the Greater Bethesda Baptist Church at a meeting sponsored by the United Packinghouse Workers of America. He introduced Willie Reed to the crowd and described him as ill and without friends since moving to Chicago. In response, several in the audience donated cash on the spot to help the struggling teen.
During the meeting, Ralph Helstein, union president and a member of the Civil Rights Committee for the AFL-CIO, called the Montgomery Bus Boycott, now in its fourth month, a “demonstration of passive resistance in the best tradition of Mahatma Ghandi [sic].” Howard also relayed a message from Martin Luther King Jr., who had been leading the boycott almost from the start. King’s message through Howard was to “tell the folks in Chicago we have enlisted in this fight for the duration.”94
King, of course, saw both the fight and its duration in the context of the efforts in Montgomery. But his words would prove prophetic in describing something much larger and grander, a burgeoning movement that would later be defined by a decade of triumph, to be sure, but one also marked by struggle, confrontation, and bloodshed. In time, King would see that bigger picture, and eventually came to foresee his own martyrdom, which would occur just twelve years after the bus boycott began. In doing so, he would link both himself and the boy from Chicago as martyrs in that movement. “Today it is Emmett Till, tomorrow, it is Martin Luther King. Then in another tomorrow it will be somebody else.”95
The boycott in Montgomery was a continuation of a grassroots momentum that had begun a few months earlier. There was no turning back after the world saw Emmett Till’s battered face in Chicago and heard the words “not guilty” echo out of Sumner. For the civil rights movement to succeed, however, it had to move forward and focus on its ultimate goals of freedom and equality for all. As a consequence, the succeeding generation would learn little about the lynching of the Chicago boy. Yet the brutal nature of the crime and the injustice tied to it meant that it could not stay buried forever. A resurrection was inevitable, and Emmett Till eventually reemerged into the public consciousness. This happened simply because it had to.
For some, however, the fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago never really went away. Nor could he.