As my readers know, I have a strong passion for and identification with the brutal, cowardly torture, murder and mutilation of young Emmitt Till in 1955 in the Delta country of Northwest Mississippi. I very recently posted a small essay of both joy and pain regarding the murder of the African-American teenager from Chicago who had the spunk to whistle at a pretty white lady during a visit with relatives in Mississippi. The joy was for the news that authorities were reopening the investigation of the almost 50-year-old murder case; the pain was from the memory of those days of shame for all white Mississippians.
Today, I received an e-mail from an eminent historian from the University of Alabama, David T. Beito, who knows the case intimately. He brought my attention to an article he co-wrote, which is excerpted below. However, his e-mail gives me the opportunity to not only point readers and bloggers to a fascinating look at the case as a mystery, but to The History News Network, a valuable source for historians, writers and researchers--in other words, a lot of bloggers. It is also a source of new Blogs for us all. Check out the side bar.
Like countless black males before him, Till had received the ultimate punishment for threatening Mississippi’s rigid code of racial etiquette. In the past, the press would have ignored such a killing. But this time it was different. The Till case was a media sensation as journalists from all over the world flocked to the small town of Sumner for the trial. When a Mississippi jury acquitted Milam and Bryant in September, protests erupted in Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and many other cities. Some historians contend that the fall-out from these events sparked the beginning of the modern civil rights movement. Only three months after the trial, in December 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott was underway because Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man.
Today the Till case is once again in the news. Although Milam and Bryant are long dead, some have argued that the murder was part of a broader conspiracy. The recent trials of Byron De La Beckwith and Bobby Frank Cherry have fueled the calls from the New York Times and others to reopen the case and to prosecute possible accomplices. These calls are understandable but our investigation (which includes conversations with key witnesses) has led us to be skeptical that the mystery behind the murder can ever be solved.
Until recently, few of those familiar with the case considered it worthwhile to even ask how many people killed Emmett Till. For decades, most took their cues from journalist William Bradford Huie, who revealed in an article for Look in 1956 how Milam and Bryant, safely acquitted after their trial in September, had proudly confessed to the murder. Huie strongly implied that they were the only perpetrators. The effect of the article, appropriately titled, “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” was so profound that it pushed aside any serious discussion of accomplices for decades to come.
It had not always been so. During the last months of 1955, many journalists, civil rights activists, and law enforcement officials seriously pondered whether Milam and Bryant had help. Even the prosecutors belonged to the ranks of the conspiracy theorists. They had based much of their case on the testimony of Willie Reed, an eighteen-year old high school student. Reed described how he had observed Till, along with three whites (including Milam) and two blacks, in a pickup truck shortly after the kidnapping. The truck pulled into an equipment shed near Drew, Mississippi and he heard “licks and hollers” that sounded like a beating. The prosecutors never asked Reed to identify the other men in the truck. The press, law enforcement, and civil rights leaders, however, focused on three black employees of Milam: Levi “Too Tight” Collins, Henry Lee Loggins, and Willie Hubbard. Black journalist James Hicks alleged that the sheriff had locked up Collins and Loggins in jail during the trial under false names as part of a cover up. In November 1955, Hicks wrote an open letter to Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr., which urged the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate. The FBI briefly considered the matter but decided not to enter the case stating that it did not have jurisdiction because state lines had not been crossed.
