1 By ERIC STRINGFELLOW Clarion-Ledger Staff Writer CHICAGO — Mamie Till Mobley remembers her son Emmett as a disciplined 14-year-old who dreamed of becoming a minister and building a church. Lindsey Hill, a childhood companion, remembers him as “Bobo,” who fed on attention and bullied others when he didn't get his way. To Phyllis Hambrick, Emmett Louis Till was a pudgy, bashful, seventh-grade classmate who stuttered and used to follow her home from school. Those 30-year-old recollections sketch a portrait of Till, a model child to adults, overbearing and comical around his chums, and timid with girls. Till was killed in 1955 after apparently whistling at a white woman in the Mississippi Delta during a summer trip to the state. His death triggered a spate of national publicity that focused atten- tion on the early stages of the civil rights movement in America. Till looked and acted more mature than other 14-year-olds. He stood 5 feet 2 inches tall, weighed 160 pounds and had brown hair and hazel eyes, his mother said during a recent interview at her Chicago home. When not in school, where he was an average student, he often hung around with his older cousins. Till was born July 25, 1941, in the Argo community on Chicago's south-western edge. Today, that neighbor-hood is a fusion of working-class fam-ilies whose children still spend summer afternoons racing tricycles on sidewalks or playing games in the Argo Elementary School yard, just as Till and his cronies did more than three decades ago. Across from the school on 64th Street is a vacant black-and-white, wood- frame residence, the house Till called home the first 10 years of his life. "This is his beginning," said 71-year-old Marie Carthan as she pointed out of her living-room window next door to Tills old house. "He played around the school and in the streets, too. We didn't have a fence then, so he would just crawl from his back yard right over here. He stuttered a lot, but I thought he was going to grow up and be a good fellow. I believed he was going to stand for something." Three blocks away is Argo Temple Church of God in Christ, where Till was a member and where he sometimes was overcome with emotion during church services, said his mother. "He was very religious," said Mobley, 63, a retired schoolteacher with the Chicago Public Schools. "One of the promises that he made to my mother was that he would build her a church." Despite Till's strong spiritual up- bringing, Mobley had some inkling that her son wasn't perfect. "I caught him dancing one day. He was doing the bunny hop. I didn't even know he could dance. He always went The Clarion-Ledger Jackson Daily News August 25, 1985 * Sunday Till’s body Found here Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, posed for the picture just before Christ- mas 1954. Till traveled from Chicago to Mississippi to visit relatives in August 1955, and had been in Mississippi seven days when he was abducted from his great-uncle’s home near Money. Till was Mobley’s only child. Mobley today lives in Chicago.
Transcript
1
By ERIC STRINGFELLOW
Clarion-Ledger Staff Writer
CHICAGO — Mamie Till Mobley
remembers her son Emmett as a
disciplined 14-year-old who dreamed of
becoming a minister and building a
church.
Lindsey Hill, a childhood companion,
remembers him as “Bobo,” who fed on
attention and bullied others when he
didn't get his way.
To Phyllis Hambrick, Emmett Louis Till
was a pudgy, bashful, seventh-grade
classmate who stuttered and used to
follow her home from school.
Those 30-year-old recollections
sketch a portrait of Till, a model child
to adults, overbearing and comical
around his chums, and timid with girls.
Till was killed in 1955 after apparently
whistling at a white woman in the
Mississippi Delta during a summer trip
to the state. His death triggered a spate
of national publicity that focused atten
tion on the early stages of the civil
rights movement in America.
Till looked and acted more mature than
other 14-year-olds. He stood 5 feet 2
inches tall, weighed 160 pounds and had
brown hair and hazel eyes, his mother
said during a recent interview at her
Chicago home. When not in school,
where he was an average student, he
often hung around with his older
cousins.
Till was born July 25, 1941, in the Argo
community on Chicago's southwestern
edge. Today, that neighborhood is a
fusion of working-class families whose
children still spend summer afternoons
racing tricycles on sidewalks or
playing games in the Argo Elementary
School yard, just as Till and his cronies
did more than three decades ago.
Across from the school on 64th Street
is a vacant black-and-white, wood-
frame residence, the house Till called
home the first 10 years of his life.
"This is his beginning," said 71-year-old
Marie Carthan as she pointed out of her
living-room window next door to Tills
old house. "He played around the school
and in the streets, too. We didn't have a
fence then, so he would just crawl
from his back yard right over
here. He stuttered a lot, but I
thought he was going to grow
up and be a good fellow. I
believed he was going to stand
for something."
Three blocks away is Argo
Temple Church of God in
Christ, where Till was a
member and where he
sometimes was overcome
with emotion during church
services, said his mother.
"He was very religious," said
Mobley, 63, a retired
schoolteacher with the
Chicago Public Schools.
"One of the promises that he
made to my mother was that
he would build her a church."
Despite Till's strong spiritual up
bringing, Mobley had some inkling
that her son wasn't perfect.
"I caught him dancing one day. He
was doing the bunny hop. I didn't even
know he could dance. He always went
The Clarion-Ledger Jackson Daily News August 25, 1985 * Sunday
Till’s body
Found here
Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, posed for the picture just before Christ-
mas 1954. Till traveled from Chicago to Mississippi to visit relatives in August 1955,
and had been in Mississippi seven days when he was abducted from his great-uncle’s
home near Money. Till was Mobley’s only child. Mobley today lives in Chicago.
2
to church, and in our church, we didn't
dance. I knew he could shout in church,
but I didn't know he could dance," Mobley
said with a broad smile.
Mobley said her son never knew his
father, Louis Till, whom she divorced
when Emmett was 2. Louis Till died in
1943. Mobley is now married to a Cadillac
car salesman and lives in an upper-
middle-class neighborhood.
Hill remembers when Till threw his
weight around while playing marbles.
"He was a kind of a tough guy," Hill
said. "We played marbles together. If he
lost, he took all the marbles. I guess you
could call him the neighborhood bully.
He was bigger than most of us.
"He was kind of advanced for his time.
He thought a little different than most
kids our age. He would try some things
that we wouldn't try," said Hill, a pipe
fitter for CPC International Corn
Products Inc.
Curtis Jones, a cousin who was visiting
Mississippi with Till that summer, said
Till often sought attention.
"He liked to be seen. He liked the
spotlight," said Jones, now a 19-year
veteran of the Chicago Police
Department. "He was a real jolly guy,
always laughing and having fun.
You'd say something to him about his
stuttering and he'd either act like he
didn't hear you or he'd laugh it off."
Wheeler Parker, another cousin who
accompanied Till to Mississippi,
agreed. "Anytime he was around, he
was the center of attention. He had that
natural-born-leader instinct," said
Parker, a barber and an elder at Argo
Temple.
When he was 10, Till moved into a
maroon-and-white house 10 miles
away on St. Lawrence Street, then a
middle-class area but now deteriorating.
It was in this neighborhood that he met
Hambrick, one of the first girls to catch
Till's eye. She said Till, often shunned
by other classmates because of his
weight, seemed to lack self-confidence
because of his stuttering.
"They made fun of him," she said. "He
was a quiet person. I think his stuttering
was one of the things that made him
shy. Sometimes it took him forever to
get a word out.
"When it came to talking to me, I don't
remember him being as forward as
some of the other boys. He used to come
around, not to sit on the porch but more to
stand at the end of the sidewalk and talk.
"He and Marvin Childress used to walk
me home from school. Marvin was
kind of his float-mate. If Emmett
couldn't say it, Marvin was there to say it
for him," Hambrick said.
Most acquaintances say it wasn't like
Till to whistle at Carolyn Bryant, who
was minding the grocery store in
Money the day Till reportedly
whistled at her, and that he wouldn't
have had he known the implications.
But Till's cousin Jones said he wasn't
surprised by the whistle.
"I think he was capable of doing it,
with the coaxing from the boys," said
Jones, who arrived in Mississippi from
Chicago a day after the incident but
was with Till the night he was abducted
from the house of his great-uncle,
Moses Wright. "The boys had dared
him. He was trying to show them
that he wasn't afraid. He wasn't the
type that scared easily.
“The women here wouldn't have paid
any attention to it other than maybe to
look at him like he was crazy,” said
Jones, a native of Slaughter who
moved to Chicago when he was 3.
Mobley insisted that her son wasn't
flirting but was trying to stop his
stuttering.
"He had particular trouble with b's
and m's. I taught him that when he got
stuck to whistle. When he came out of
the store, somebody asked him what he
bought. At the same time, he was being
asked how did he like that white girl. He
was trying to say bubblegum, but he got
stuck. So he whistled," she said.
"I had never known Emmett to be a
flirt, but I do know that he was
becoming aware of girls. It would
have been strange for Emmett to
whistle at anybody, because if he did
I would have killed him," Mobley said.
However, Simeon Wright, Moses
Wright's son who was with Till when
the incident occurred, tells a different
story.
"He was definitely whistling at that
girl," said Wright, a pipe fitter with
Reynolds Metals. "After he whistled,
we jumped in the car and went down
the road about two miles. A car was
behind us. We thought it was following
us. We stopped and everybody jumped
out and hid in a cornfield except me. I
hid on the back seat.
MAMIE TILL MOBLEY
Mother, now living in Chicago "It would have
been strange for Emmett to whistle at anybody."
SIMEON WRIGHT Cousin, now living in Chicago "Emmett begged
us not to tell my dad what he had done."
3
"Emmett begged us not to tell my dad
what he had done. My dad would have
sent him back home," said Wright, now
42.
Jones said Till had pictures of white
people in his wallet, including photos of
what Till said were two white girl
friends from Chicago.
"I had just bought Emmett a wallet,"
Mobley said. "Back in the '50s, when
you buy a wallet, a picture of a movie
star was always in it. That was Hedy
Lamarr. I don't know what other
pictures he had, other than family. He
did go to school with whites in Argo."
When Till moved to Chicago, he
attended an all-black school.
Ruby Coleman, Mobley's cousin, was
expecting Till to visit her in Kalamazoo,
Mich., during that summer of 1955 and
became upset when she found out that
he was going to Mississippi instead.
“I called Mamie and told her that a
child like that shouldn’t go to a place
like Mississippi,” said Coleman, who
now lives in Chicago. “He didn’t know
anything about 'yes sir’ and ‘no sir’ and
‘yes, ma’am’ and ‘no ma’am.’
“That always sticks out in my mind,"
Coleman said. "Maybe if he had come to
visit us in Michigan, he would still be
alive.”
Bryant wants the
Past to ‘stay dead’ By JOE ATKINS
Jackson Daily News Staff Writer
and TOM BRENNAN
Clarion-Ledger Staff Writer
Roy Bryant seems to be two men.
On one hand, the 54-year-old white
Delta storeowner is sick of questions
about the 14-year-old black youth he
and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were
accused and acquitted of killing 30 years
ago.
This Roy Bryant's voice becomes a growl
at the mention of Emmett Till. "He's
been dead 30 years and I can't see why
it can't stay dead," he says.
The other Roy Bryant is an agreeable
sort whose face brightens with pride
when he talks about the flowers he has
grown in front of his store. He says he
gets along fine with blacks.
"I don't mistreat a man because he's black
any more than I do a white man," he
says. "I treat a man like I want to be
treated."
The second side of Roy Bryant wants his
privacy and worries that some young
black might seek belated vengeance. He
possesses such loyalty from friends that
one of them nearly slugged a television
reporter who recently tried to interview
him.
"I don't know what happened to Emmett
Till," this Roy Bryant says.
Yet, the other Roy Bryant grumbles
darkly that he isn't making a dime out of
renewed publicity about Emmett Till's
slaying. He says his memory could be
jogged "for a bunch of money."
This Roy Bryant even thinks enough of his
notoriety to keep in his modest brick
home a video cassette of the Today
show's recent televised report on the Till
case, a show in which host Bryant
Gumbel innocently asks, "Whatever
happened to Roy Bryant?"
"Hell, no, I didn't do it!" Bryant said
during one of two recent interviews at
his store and home. "I didn't admit to it
then. You don't expect me to admit to do
it now. Of course, they couldn't do
anything to me if I did."
But, he adds, "I feel this way: If
Emmett Till hadn't got out of line, it
probably wouldn't have happened to
him."
The man who, with Milam, gained
international attention in the Emmett
Till slaying today lives an obscure life
not unlike that of 30 years ago.
He lives in a Mississippi Delta town. He
runs a store. He vigorously maintains
his innocence in Till's death.
Bryant mostly refuses to discuss the
events of that Sunday morning in August
1955, when Till was dragged from his
great-uncle's home. He and Milam told
authorities at the time they'd taken the
youth off to punish him but later re
leased him unharmed.
Bryant was described by news reports
i n 1955 a s t he hand some
exparatrooper with the beautiful wife.
Now, the good looks and the woman,
both, are gone.
Bryant has gained a thick paunch, lost
J.W. Milam sits in the courtroom of the
Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sum-
ner during the 1955 murder trial in the
Emmett Till slaying.
ED CLARK/Life magazine Time Inc.
ED CLARK/Life magazine Time Inc.
Roy Bryant, J.W. Milam' was accused of
murder in the Emmett Till slaying and,
like Milam, was acquitted.
4
much of his jet black hair and says he is
legally blind. He uses a thick magnifying
glass to read price tags when he rings
up purchases at his store.
He has been divorced for six years from
Carolyn Holloway Bryant, the dark-eyed
brunette beauty whose honor Bryant
and Milam are said to have defended 30
years ago. Bryant says both have
remarried, but their three children and
eight grandchildren keep them in touch.
"She was a good-looking woman," he
said as he watched an old film of her on
the Today report.
Despite the support shown them by
white Delta residents during their trial,
Bryant and Milam were ostracized
afterward by both the white and black
communities.
Their isolation worsened after January
1956, when a shattering article by
author William Bradford Huie appeared
in Look magazine. The article quoted
Milam, who described in detail how he
and Bryant brutally beat the boy and
finally dumped him in the river after
Milam shot him.
"J.W. Milam was from Glendora. He
was acquitted in the trial, but he was
not acquitted by the people of this
area," recalls unsuccessful 1983
gubernatorial candidate Mike Sturdivant,
a large landowner in the tiny
Tallahatchie County town of Glendora.
Sturdivant knew Milam and Bryant.
"J.W. left Glendora because the people
in the area convicted him in their
relationship with him."
Bryant bitterly maintains he was driven
from the state by the same community
that rallied to his and his half-brother's
defense during the September 1955
trial.
"I had to leave to make a living; there
was nothing here for me," he said.
After the trial, he and his first wife tried
to reopen the store in Money, the scene
of the infamous wolf-whistle, but a
boycott by black customers forced its
closing.
"We had it open for three weeks and
didn't clear f 100," he said. "I saw the
handwriting on the wall."
Bryant says he did odd jobs for 75 cents
a day before learning welding at the Bell
Machine Shop in Inverness. The family
moved to Orange, Texas, in 1957,
where he spent 15 years as a boiler-
maker — the job he says cost him his
eyesight. In 1972, the Bryants returned
to Mississippi to take over a grocery
owned by one of Bryant's brothers.
"Mississippi was my home. Once you
are raised up in a state; it's home," he
says. "I wouldn't have come back to
Mississippi for a job."
For 13 years, Bryant has been satisfied
with his new life. His sister helps him
out at the store.
"It may not be much, but it's a honest
living and that's all a man can ask," he
says.
His domain now is a converted gas
station with a wooden floor. The store
is cluttered with the mainstays of small
-town living: canned goods, snacks,
cigarettes and one beer cooler.
As in 1955, Bryant today relies on credit
purchases and a black clientele. "I have
a good black business, more black
customers than whites."
Chain-smoking behind the counter
while a spotted cat sleeps nearby on a
pile of grocery sacks, Bryant talks not
of the past, but of what he has done with
the store.
He points with a dedicated gardener's
pride to the rose moss flowers growing
by a shoeshine stand outside the store.
He welcomes visitors to the cafe he built
in the back, with its three red-vinyl
booths, pool table and three-stool bar.
"It is a family type of place," he said.
"We serve plate lunches and sandwiches
and that type of stuff (publicity about
the Till slaying) just wouldn't help."
He speaks fondly of Milam, his half-
brother, who was 36 at the time of the
Till trial. Milam died of cancer of the
backbone on Dec. 31,1981.
"He was a hell of a fine fellow and
brother. He was gentle as a lamb and
helped a lot of people. He helped a lot of
people that never paid him back. "
Like Bryant, Milam spent many
years in Texas after the trial. Like
Bryant, he eventually returned to his
home state. He lived in Greenville and
worked in construction until his illness
made it impossible.
"My father never said much to me
about it and I never asked,'' says
Milam's son Bill, a 34-year-old
Greenville truck driver who attended
his father's trial along with his
brother, Harvey, who was 2 years old
at the time.
"I don't have any memories of it at all,"
Bill Milam says of the trial in
Sumner. "I was so little, didn't none of
it affect me. I never wanted to get
involved in it. Most folks I know had
never said anything about it."
Bill Milam is single. Harvey is
married and has three children, but
Bill wouldn't say where his brother
lives.
Bryant's son, Frank, shields his
mother from publicity. "She doesn't
want to make any comment on
anything and she doesn't want anyone
to try to contact her," he said.
Bryant still fears economic and
physical retaliation for the 30-year-old
incident and refuses to have his
picture taken or to have the location of
his store revealed.
"This new generation is different and
I don't want to worry about a bullet
MOSES WRIGHT
5
some dark night," he said. "This store is
all I have now, that and my
disability check."
Does he have personal regrets about
what happened in 1955?
“You mean do I wish I might wouldn't
have done it? I'm just sorry that it
happened,” Bryant said.
World watched drama
unfold in rural county
courtroom By TOMBRENNAN
Clarion-Ledger Staff Writer
SUMMER — The courtroom, with its
pastel walls and rich appointments,
exudes elegance — no scars from past
battles.
Air conditioning has replaced the
ceiling fans. Gilded chandeliers cast a
gentle glow; the glare of bare light-bulbs is
a memory. The benches are smooth and
new, not the rough wood of old.
For five days in September 1955,
people sweated in this room on the
second floor of the Tallahatchie County
Courthouse, packed shoulder to shoulder,
riveted by the trial of two white men
charged with slaying a black youth.
When it was over, J.W. Milam and Roy
Bryant sat wreathed in the smoke of
their victory cigars and kissed their
w i v e s f o r t h e n e w s p a p e r
photographers.
Powerful images remain with some of
those who watched and participated in
the trial. They say today, with hind
sight's advantage, that the Emmett Till
trial portended the conflict to come.
The Great-uncle
“I will always vividly remember Uncle
Mose. That slight man in his white shirt
and suspenders rising from the witness
stand and pointing his gnarled finger at
Milam and Bryant as they sat
stonefaced.” — John Berbers,
reporter.
Moses Wright was Emmett Till's great
-uncle, and it was from the 64-year-old
sharecropper's cabin that Till was
abducted at 2 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 28,
1955.
Wright testified that he was awakened
by shouts, and that when he went to
the door, a man's voice said, “I want
to talk with you; I’m Mr. Bryant.”
Opening the door, he said he saw a big,
balding man with a pistol in his right
hand and a flashlight in the other. The
man told Wright, “I want that boy who
dirty-talked at Money.”
When Wright was asked to identify
the man who spoke to him that night, he
straightened and pointed directly at
Milam, saying, "There he is. That's
the man."
Uncle Mose, as he was called by
prosecutors, said Milam was
accompanied that night by another
man. Using the same gesture and
speaking the same words, Wright
identified Bryant.
On cross-examination, Wright told
defense attorney C. Sidney Carlton
that he identified Milam because of
his “big bald head.”
Jurors seized upon those words to
ignore Wright's testimony.
“He said it was a baldheaded man and
95 percent of the jury was bald-
In the 1955 photo, at left, Leflore County
Deputy Sheriff John Edd Cathran examines
the cotton gin fan used to weight Emmett
Till's body. The ring pictured above was
introduced as evidence in the trial as that
taken from Till's body.
EMMETT TILL: MORE THAN A
MURDER
Spectators jam the courtroom of the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner on
Sept. 19, 1955, the opening day of the Emmett Till trial. Seated at the desk on the
raised platform at upper left is Circuit Judge Curtis M. Swango. Prospective jurors
are seated at upper right.
6
headed,” juror James Toole of Enid re
called in a recent interview. “How
could he pick out a bald man in the
dark?”
But Wrigh t ' s t e s t i m o n y w a s
reinforced by Leflore County Sheriff
George Smith and his deputy, John
Edd Cathran, who each testified that
Milam and Bryant both admitted
abducting Till. MOSES WRIGHT
But the defendants claimed they let
“the little Negro boy go.”
J.W. Kellum, another of the five defense
attorneys, today readily acknowledges
that Wright was the state’s strongest
witness. “He was strong because even if
the boys were not the ones that did the
murder, his testimony showed they
were the ones guilty of the kidnapping.”
Wright was lauded by journalists who
covered the trial for the courage he
displayed on the witness stand.
“He was taking a tremendous risk by
pointing that shaky finger at them,” said
Murray Kempton, who covered the trial
for the New York Post and is now a
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist at
Newsday on Long Island, N.Y. “Any
drunk could have burnt him out. It was
odd that he didn't suffer for that.”
To prevent such retaliation, Wright was
whisked by car to Memphis after he
testified. There, he caught a plane to
Chicago. Wright later moved to Albany,
N.Y., where he died.
“Medgar Evers told me that we
needed to get Mose out of there,” said
Jimmy Hicks, now executive editor of
the New York Voice. Hicks covered the
trial for the Amsterdam News of Chicago
and the National Newspaper Publishing
Association, then a news wire service
for about 35 black newspapers.
“It was such an electric moment that we
all thought that the stuff
was going to really hit the
fan. Blacks just didn't testify
against whites.”
Hicks said he drove Wright
to a pecan grove about 15
miles outside Sumner
where he met Evers who,
eight years later, was shot
and killed in Jackson while
he was NAACP field
secretary for Mississippi.
Hicks, now 70, said black
reporters covering the trial
feared for their safety on the
day Wright testified.
“We had a meeting the night
before in Mound Bayou and
many people were telling us
not to go to the trial. I told
them I had a gun. There was
also a deputy who sat in front
of me the whole trial who
had a .45 strapped over
him. The plan was: someone
would take my gun and I
would snatch the deputy's gun
and provide cover while the
rest escaped jut the window,”
he said.
The Prosecution
“Curtis Swango was the best judge I
ever saw; before or after I never
thought there was one better. He ran the
trial with complete informality and at
the same time gave it tremendous
grace and gentility.”
— Murray Kempton, reporter.
Curtis M. Swango, then 47, presided
over the trial. He had earned a
reputation as one of the state's finest
trial judges since his appointment
Circuit Court bench in 1950 by then
Gov. Fielding Wright.
"You could search all of Mississippi
and couldn't put a better balanced
Circuit judge to try this case," said
defense attorney John Whitten. "He
was absolutely honest, incorruptible,
and my idea of a Southern
gentleman.”
John Popham, who covered the trial
for the New York Times, gave
Swango credit for keeping tight reins
on a potentially explosive situation,
“He decided that the courtroom would
be the center for the search for justice
and had the courage to step forward
and say, ‘Look, the law is above us
all,’ “he said.
If anything,
o b s e r v e r s
s a i d ,
S w a n g o
favored the
prosecution.
“ T h e
atmosphere
o f t h e
c o u r t ro o m
was such that
it was a
f o r e g o n e
conclusion
that they
would be
acquitted, so
Swango did his best to hold up the
standards of justice,” said Bill Minor, a
Jackson columnist who covered the trial
for the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
The soft-spoken Swango, frailer than
his strong looks suggested because of
a childhood bout with tuberculosis,
died in December 1968.
The task of convicting Milam and
Bryant fell to District Attorney Gerald
Chatham. Gov. Hugh White and Attorney
General J.P. Coleman, who had won
J.W. Milam, in the 1955 photograph above, chats with
his children in the courtroom. At left is his wife, Juanita,
and at right is his half-brother, Roy Bryant, and Bryant's
wife, Carolyn.
JUDGE SWANGO
ED CLARK/Life magazine Time Inc.
7
the Democratic primary for governor in
June 1955, decided to appoint Robert B.
Smith III of Ripley as a special
prosecutor to aid Chatham.
"Chatham had the case perfectly
prepared; he presented everything he
could," said defense lawyer Kellum. "He
was quick to comprehend the in-
competency of the evidence we tried to get
before the jury."
Chatham, 49 at the time, died within a year
after the trial. His family believes the
pressures it created were responsible for
his fatal heart attack.
"Mother always told me how it aged him
and how his health deteriorated after
that," said Gerald Chatham Jr., the
prosecutor's son who also served two
terms as district attorney in the same
district. "I remember him having violent
nosebleeds and his blood pressure
climbing after the trial, and then he died
at 50 with a massive heart attack."
The younger Chatham was only 11
years old during the trial, but remembers
the media descending on his parents'
Hernando home and interviewing the
black field hands on the family's farm in
DeSoto County.
"I am very proud of the stand he took. It was
a lot tougher then than it would be now,
but he did what was right," Chatham
said.
Chatham and Smith, a former FBI agent
and Marine officer, shocked the crowd
on the second day of the trial when they
abruptly sought and received a recess
from Swango after the final juror was
selected.
The prosecutors said they needed
additional time to locate and interview
new witnesses which Smith said "were of
major importance."
Willie Reed, 19, was the key witness
discovered during that recess.
Reed testified that on the morning of
the kidnapping he saw a boy, whom he
later identified as Till, in a pickup truck
with six men. He saw the same truck only
minutes later, Reed testified, as he passed
the farm of J.W. Milam's brother, Leslie
Milam.
In words spoken so softly that
Swango repeatedly interrupted to tell
him to speak up, Reed said he heard
moans coming from the red barn and the
sounds of "some licks." He said Milam,
wearing a pistol, walked from the building,
got a drink of water from a nearby well,
and returned inside.
The Defense
“The boys never did admit to us that they
were guilty of doing it. But it put a
question mark In your mind — that if
they did not do it, then they did know
who did. I would ask, but they never
would tell.”
— J.W. Kellum, defense attorney.
It was Milam's idea to hire all five of
the town's lawyers to defend him and
his half-brother Bryant. "He thought
that if the state was going to get a special
prosecutor, he would get all the lawyers
in Sumner," Kellum said.
Whitten, another member of the defense
team, said the defense was built around
the testimony of Dr. L.B. Otken, a
Greenwood physician.
Otken testified that the corpse pulled
from the Tallahatchie River was too
decomposed to be identified. Till had
been missing for three days when two
fishermen saw legs above the water.
The rest of the body had been kept
submerged by a 70-pound cotton gin fan
wrapped around the neck with barbed
wire.
But Otken said the body he examined
appeared to have been in the water for
at least 10 days.
"Dr. Otken convinced me then that this
can't be and is not the body of Emmett
Till," said Whitten. "I believe Dr. Otken
told the truth as he saw it. His
reputation and veracity was never
questioned, and he certainly had no ties
with the defendants."
Tallahatchie County Sheriff Clarence
Strider also testified that the body
couldn't be Till's.
But Kellum now says there is no
doubt that Till was the victim pulled
from the muddy river. The key to the
defense, he said, was the lack of evi
dence tying Milam and Bryant to the
killing.
“I knew it was Emmett Till,” Kellum said.
“Our whole case was that you got the
wrong people; there was no evidence
that either one of these boys were the ones
who killed him.
“We put Strider on the stand just for
the psychological effect of having the
county's law enforcement officer
testifying for the defense," he said.
Whitten said he never confronted
Milam or Bryant to determine their
involvement in the crime. "If I went to
the moral heart of every case that
came to me, I'd starve to death," he
said.
The first defense decision, Kellum
said, was to keep Milam and Bryant
from testifying.
"Our position was that anything they
said might hurt them," he said.
The Mother
“When I first looked at Emmett's
body, my first reaction was, 'My God!
What is this?' It looked like it came
from outer space. If there was anything
I could do to disclaim that body, I
would have done it.” — Mamie Till
Mobley, Till's mother.
It was through Mamie Till Mobley's
testimony that prosecutors tried to
refute the challenge to the body's identity.
“I knew it (was Emmett) without a
shadow of a doubt,” she said on the
stand.
Mobley also identified a ring
removed from the body as belonging
to her ex-husband, Emmett's father Louis
Till, which she later gave to her son.
The silver band carried a simple in
scription of May 25, 1943 and the initials
"L.T."
Whit ten said that the ring caused a
furor among defense attorneys. "We
didn't know about it and she made
such a good impression that the ring
was their (the state's) key," he said.
The jury never heard the defense's
cross-examination of Mobley; Swango
ruled it had no bearing on what happened
on Aug. 28. During the cross-examination,
Mobley said she warned her son
before he left Chicago to "be humble to
white people and watch your step"
during the Mississippi visit.
8
“She was extraordinarily con
strained with a majestic maternal dig
nity,” recalls columnist Kempton. “But she
certainly caused resentment because she
was anything but a country colored: she
was very sophisticated.”
The Brunette
“Mrs. Bryant was such a pretty
young woman, so sure and confident but
so shy and retiring. She knew how to
handle herself and how to deal with
people, both black and white. It came
from working in those stores.” — John
Whitten, defense lawyer.
It had been four years since Carolyn
Holloway, as a 17-year-old, had left
high school in Indianola to marry
Bryant.
Bryant supplemented his income
driving trucks and was off on a run to
Brownsville, Texas, when Till and his
cousins visited the store in Money on
Aug. 24. Carolyn Bryant was alone
behind the counter.
She said that at about 8 p.m., a "Negro
man" with "a Northern brogue" entered
the store. Mrs. Bryant never identified
the man.
After the customer bought some candy,
Mrs. Bryant testified, he grabbed her
hand. She said she struggled to get free,
but he followed her to the cash register
and grabbed her waist and said, "How
about a date. I’ve been with white women
before."
Mrs. Bryant said another black then
came into the store and dragged the
man outside by the arm. She said she
went to her sister-in-law's car, parked in
front of the store, to get a gun she knew
was kept under the seat. Then, she said,
the person who had grabbed her
whistled. Mrs. Bryant recreated the
whistle — a wolf-whistle — for those in the
packed courtroom.
The jury did not hear her account.
Swango refused to admit it as evidence,
saying it was not directly related to Till's
death.
"The defense was built on emotion and
Mrs. Bryant was the key," said Bill Sorrels,
now a professor at Mississippi University
for Women but then a reporter covering
the trial for The Commercial Appeal in
Memphis. "In the context of those days,
no attractive woman was going to be
whistled at by a young Chicago black in
Mississippi."
The Verdict
“The whole thing is closed and shut and
it should stay that way. The pros
ecutors didn't bring in any proof and
didn't prove nothing.”
— Jim Penning-ton, juror.
Milam and Bryant were acquitted after
65 minutes of deliberation by the all-
white-male jury.
I was sitting close to the jury room and
heard them inside laughing and talking,"
columnist Minor recalls. "The hour was just
for show. They reached their verdict in
five minutes."
Juror Toole today agrees that it was
easy to reach the verdict. "We took
what came across and they never
proved them boys were at that place at that
time," he says.
Both Toole and Jim Pennington of Webb,
another juror, said they do not regret the
decision they helped to make 30 years ago.
"We were just doing our civic duty. There
was no pressure," Pennington says.
Jimmy Hicks, one of the leading black
reporters of the time, said that, despite
the high expectations of his colleagues, the
acquittal came as no surprise. "It was
just one of those things where blacks lost
another one, but it would have been pretty
hard to convict anyone on the evidence
brought out during the trial. They just
didn't have the smoking gun," he said.
John Herbers, who covered the trial for
United Press, thought the state proved
its case but understood why Milam and
Bryant were acquitted. "It was a simple
case that an all-white-male jury wasn't
going to convict two of their neighbors for
killing a black," he said.
Defense lawyer Whitten said the verdict
must be understood in the context of the
times.
“Under the system as it then existed,
these people got a fair trial. Nobody was
threatened and nobody was bribed.”
“It was not a morality play of good vs.
evil as it is often made out to be. The
evil is in the act, the tragedy of a young
boy's death, and whatever cover-up oc
curred.” — John Popham, reporter.
Poor economy
past
H a u n t D e l t a
Towns
By JOE ATKINS
Jackson Daily News Staff Writer
MONEY — Leaning against his fa
ther's pickup truck, 13-year-old
Edward Cochren peered across a dirt
lot at the abandoned store, a
ramshackle, two-story hull protected
from intruders by rotting pillars, a nest
of irritable wasps and years of Delta
dust.
"I wonder how something like that
could happen," said the black youth.
"Ever since there's been a world,
there's been wrongdoing going on,"
said his father, 71-year-old Jimmy
Cochren, a lifelong farm worker who
still "picks up" what few jobs are
available these days around this rural
Leflore County community of a couple
dozen souls.
The elder Cochren remembers that a
14-year-old black youth from Chicago
named Emmett Till whistled at a
white woman outside this same store 30
years ago Saturday and paid for it with
his life.
He also remembers that 25 miles
northwest of Money in the Tallahatchie
County town of Sumner, the two white
men accused of murdering Emmett
Till were tried and acquitted in Sep
tember 1955 while the world watched.
The towns of Money and Sumner
today look a great deal like the
photographs and film clippings that
catapulted both into the international
spotlight in the late summer and
early fall of 1955.
The racism believed to have
ultimately killed Emmett Till still runs
9
deep in the hearts of some.
"Wouldn't you have done the same
thing?" snapped an elderly white woman
in Money when asked recently her
feelings about Emmett Till's death.
"He (Till) just wanted to stir up trouble
and see what he could get away with."
Most whites say they aren't familiar with
the incident or prefer not to talk about it.
"I've been living here 13 years and I'd
never heard of it," says Sumner town
clerk Bonnie Cheshier, 40, a white
Arkansas native.
"People in the county are still
embarrassed by it," said William M.
Simpson, 36, a white Sumner native
who teaches history at Louisiana College
in Pineville, La.
Most blacks and whites today agree
that, over the past 30 years, the two
towns' evolution has resulted in
improved race relations amid a
declining economy.
"There's just as much difference
between night and day as between now
and then," said Roosevelt Sutton, a 65-
year-old black man who lives just
southeast of Sumner in Webb.
Today, blacks here vote, patronize the
same businesses as whites and even
hold a few public offices. Yet, jobs and
housing are scarce and blacks remain on
the bottom economically.
Mechanization on the plantation has
drastically reduced jobs for poor and
middle-class blacks and whites. Many
plantation owners — saddled with
i nc r e a s i n g p r o d u c t i o n c o s t s ,
indebtedness, low crop prices, reduced
profits and increased competition
from foreign markets — barely
make ends meet.
M o n e y i s s t i l l a r e m o t e ,
unincorporated outpost along Money
Road between the Illinois Central Gulf
railroad tracks to the east and the
Tallahatchie River to the west. The
nearest town of any size is
Greenwood, 10 miles to the south.
Money boasts a white church and a
black church, two general stores, a post
office housed in a mobile home and a
grain storage and marketing company
that used to be a cotton gin.
Beyond the railroad tracks are cotton
fields stretching toward the horizon.
The handful of homes in Money is
mostly near the river, on the west side
of the road.
"There never was a whole lot to it to
start with," chuckled 65-year-old
Wallace Lay, white owner of Lay's
Trading Post in Money. But, he
said, "It's changed. At one time,
you couldn't drive down the blacktop
for all the cars on Saturday. 'Bout all
the blacks are gone."
Harold Terry, 62, a white U.S.
Department of Agriculture agent
who lives on nearby Whaley Road,
agrees. "There were tenant houses up
Roy Bryant's Grocery & Meat Market is shown in this photograph taken in the
Delta town of Money in 1955, when Emmett Till reportedly made a pass at whis-
tled at her as he left the store.
The cabin of Moses Wright, Emmett Till’s great-uncle, as it appeared in the summer of
1955. The 14-year-old Till was taken from the cabin by two men in the early morning
