The Clarion-Ledger Jackson Daily News August 25, 1985 * Sunday 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 attention 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, woodframe residence, the house Till called home the first 10 years of his life. Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, posed for the picture just before Christmas 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. "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 upbringing, 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 Till s body Found here 1
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. MAMIE TILL MOBLEY Mother, now living in Chicago "It would have been strange for Emmett to whistle at anybody." 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 uppermiddle-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, SIMEON WRIGHT Cousin, now living in Chicago "Emmett begged us not to tell my dad what he had done." 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 2 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.
"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 girlfriends 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 released him unharmed. 3 ED CLARK/Life magazine Time Inc. J.W. Milam sits in the courtroom of the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner during the 1955 murder trial in the Emmett Till slaying. 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. Bryant was described by news reports in 1955 as the hand some exparatrooper with the beautiful wife. Now, the good looks and the woman, both, are gone. Bryant has gained a thick paunch, lost
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 boilermaker 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 halfbrother, 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 4 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 MOSES WRIGHT 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
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 EMMETT TILL: MORE THAN A MURDER 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 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. the trial. They say today, with hindsight's advantage, that the Emmett Till trial portended the conflict to come. The Great-uncle I will always vividly remember Un cle 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 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. -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- 5
headed, juror James Toole of Enid recalled in a recent interview. How could he pick out a bald man in the dark? But Wright's tes 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. ED CLARK/Life magazine Time Inc. 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. 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 dep uty 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 room was such that it was a f o r e g o n e conclusion that they would be JUDGE SWANGO 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 6
the Democratic primary for governor in June 1955, decided to appoint Robert B. Smith III of Ripley as a spe cial 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 incompetency 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 evidence tying Milam and Bryant to the killing. I knew it was Emmett Till, Kellum said. 7 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 inscription of May 25, 1943 and the initials "L.T." Whitten said that the ring caused a furor among defense at torneys. "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-exami nation 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.
She was extraordinarily constrained with a majestic maternal dignity, 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 iden tified 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 re porter covering the trial for The Com mercial 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 prosecutors 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 allwhite-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. 8 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 occurred. John Popham, reporter. Poor past H a u n t Towns By JOE ATKINS Jackson Daily News Staff Writer economy D e l t a MONEY Leaning against his father'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 September 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
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 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 whistled at her as he left the store. 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 inc 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 ED CLARK/Life magazine Time Inc. 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 hours of Aug. 28, 1955. 9 ED CLARK/Life magazine Time Inc. profits and increased competition from for eign 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
and down this road, a lot of black people. It's the change in farming operations," he said. No one knows this better than Louvenia Jones, a 63-year-old black woman living in a brick home built by the owner of a local plantation. Only one of her 12 children now lives in the Money area. "They've all grown up... married and gone in different directions," she said. Tenant farmers and small farmers now are rarities in the countryside surrounding Money. Modern plantations use machines to pick cotton and chemicals do the work the cotton choppers used to do. Leflore County had a 11.4 percent unemployment rate in July, once a prime month for chopping cotton, BETTY PEARSON compared with the state's July unemployment rate of 10.9 percent and the nation's rate of 7.4 percent. Even when cotton choppers are needed today, the work is temporary and precariously kept. "Used to, I'd chop cotton all day for $2.50. You can make $35 to $40 a day now," Jones said. But, she added, "If you stump your toe, you're fired." Like Money, Sumner has seen vast changes that contradict the languid air of tranquility it inherits from the Cassidy Bayou drifting along a treelined channel northwest of the town square. "It is a quiet, docile community," said 39-year-old Sumner Drug Store pharmacist Spencer Hudson with a pride typical of residents in the town. "Sumner is the oasis of the Delta." The neat, well-groomed town square, which forms a circle around the recently renovated Tallahatchie County Courthouse and a Confederate statue, seems a picture of stability. Despite its small size, Sumner has two drug stores, two insurance agencies, a grocery, barber shop, laundry, flower shop, dental clinic, medical clinic, bank, savings and loan association, automobile dealership, lawyers offices and Mississippi Power & Light Co. offices. A uniform-making factory owned by Angelica of St. Louis recently located near Sumner, bringing 125 new jobs. Still, even the textile jobs and the nearabsence of empty storefronts in Sumner couldn't prevent a 10.2 percent unemployment rate in Tallahatchie County in July. With the lack farm workers for farm workers, the agriculture-based economy has put financial straps on retail merchants who depend upon farm income for their business. The bulk of Sumner's population which has dropped from 550 in 1955 to 462 today, is white. Yet more blacks than whites are seen milling around the town square each day. To tell you the truth, around here, said Jimmy La 23-year-old black from Sui said he works as a mechanic chopper when work is available. It s hard to get jobs. Bank of Sumner President C. Wood, 45, who is white, said largest source of income is government welfare checks. "The economy is so dependent on agriculture. Any town that depends almost 100 percent on agriculture... it's kind of a gloomy attitude," Wood said. I've never known farmers to be as pessimistic as they are now, says Betty Pearson, 63, who with her husband operates a 2,000-acre cotton and soybean plantation south of Sumner near Webb. We're just absolutely tied to farm ing and farming is bad right now, agrees Frank Mitchener, 51, a Sumner town 10 alderman and large cotton, soy bean and rice farmer who served as president of the National Cotton Council in 1981 and 1982. There is growing pessimism of the economic conditions in this part of the country. Even with the economic miseries, race relations in Money and Sumner have come far since 1955, blacks and whites say. I think it has come around 75 percent, said R.H. Bearden, a 67-yearold black man and retired school principal from Sumner. At least blacks vote now. They register. They vote for who they please. In 1955, 63.5 percent of Tallahatchie County s residents were black but no blacks were registered to vote. Only a handful of Leflore County's sizable black population was registered. Today, 57 percent of Tallahatchie County's 17,157 registered voters are black. Roughly 52 percent of Leflore County's 27,000 registered voters are black. But racism is still a problem, aggravated by white resentment to the growing dependence of poor blacks on the federal government for subsistence. "They got too used to things being given to them," grumbled a white businessman in Sumner recently when asked about race relations since Emmett Till's death. An elderly white man in Money agreed even as he pointed out that many white, well-to-do landowners are equally dependent on federal loans to finance their farm operations. "I think they were prejudiced in that day. I think they are still prejudiced in the Delta. It runs too deep," said the Rev. Millard Caulder, 33, white pastor of the 183-member First Baptist Church in Sumner. Jimmy Cochren also once harbored some of those deep feelings. "I had a lot of thoughts against whites," the elder Cochren said. "When I became a born-again Christian, I put all those thoughts out. I forgive 'em."
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