Emmett Till; is the investigation over?

(Buzzle) March 17, 2006 – It’s been said that in Mississippi the past is never dead … "In fact, it’s not even past," the state’s favorite author, William Faulkner, is often quoted.

And so the FBI’s decision Thursday that no federal charges will be filed in the grisly 1955 killing of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a case that helped electrify the civil rights movement, was no surprise to many observers including, perhaps, District Attorney Joyce L. Chiles.

After a reopened investigation that included the exhumation of Till's body for an autopsy last June, FBI agent John G. Raucci stated that the five-year statute of limitations on federal civil rights violations had expired as the agency’s long-awaited report was handed over to Chiles.

The first black district attorney to serve three Delta counties, Chiles will decide on any state charges. Chiles did not return a call. But the Rev. Jesse Jackson told CNN reporters that he can only hope for state charges to be brought.

Fifty years is not so long ago
The internal tissue of a lifeless body immediately begins to decay, turning into gases and liquids, and if exposed to water decomposition occurs approximately four times faster.

So when they pulled the two-day-old lifeless body of the young black teenager from the Tallahatchie River during the August heat back in 1955, only an initialed silver ring on his finger made identification possible.

Emmett Till had been stripped naked, pistol-whipped, shot through the head with a .45-caliber Colt automatic and barb-wired to a seventy-four-pound cotton gin fan before he was dumped into twenty feet of the muddy Tallahatchie River.

Fourteen-year-old Till, once physically afflicted by polio, was kidnapped shortly after midnight on the twenty-eighth of August from his great-uncle’s home in the small cotton hamlet of Money, Mississippi, after he reportedly insulted and whistled at the wife of a small grocery store owner several days earlier.

Young Till had left his Chicago home on August 20, 1955, to visit relatives in Money, Mississippi, a tiny cotton hamlet (population 100) on the eastern edge of the Delta -- a crossroad too small for stop signs. This was to be a summer vacation with relatives in the Delta countryside.

But a week later, Till was driven away to a weathered plantation shed in neighboring Sunflower County, where at least two white men tortured and mutilated him. A witness heard his screams for hours until the two men finally killed him.

What the young boy said several days earlier to a white woman clerking at the small family grocery store will never be known. But Emmett Till’s death became a civil rights milestone, setting off a chain reaction that would forever change the way we think and talk about race in this country.

Civil rights icon Rosa Parks would later state she was so affected by the Till murder, she thought of him when making her decision not to sit at the back of the bus.

When her child’s body was returned home, Till’s mother held an open-casket funeral, and a photo of Till's disfigured face let the world see what was taking place in the South.

But that fall, an all-white jury acquitted two white men, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milan, who later confessed their role to a magazine reporter. Both men are deceased.

So who did FBI investigators talk to?

What is the story?

"I’d like to know that," said Robert Keglar of Charleston in Tallahatchie County, where Till’s body was found.

Keglar, whose voting rights advocate mother was killed by Klansmen nine years after Till’s murder, has his own Emmett Till story to share:

Three months after the murder of Rev. George Lee, another unresolved Mississippi civil rights ghost that remains in the state’s present, Keglar took his boy scout group camping.

Around a campfire burned down to its last embers, Keglar and his campers heard a story they would not forget.

A "very shaken" man came into Tallahatchie camp in the early morning hours and told of hearing the screams of a teenage boy being tortured and beaten to death only hours earlier in a machine shed on the Sheridan plantation outside of Drew, over in Sunflower County.

There were horrible screams, the visitor said, and when "several" men finished killing the young boy, they took his body from the barn and hauled it off. More than two men were in the lynching party, the visitor told Keglar and others as the fire smoldered. Campers finally went to sleep and when they awoke for breakfast, the visitor was gone.

"I never saw or heard from him again," Keglar said.

Meanwhile, the two half-brothers, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, after disposing of the body, were seen later that morning in a Glendora home washing off the blood, others have reported.

Also, around midnight that same day, forty-six miles away from the scout camp, the white parents of a seventeen-year-old Ruleville girl let early-morning visitors stay in their home for the night. J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, the latter her mother’s relative by marriage, were loud and nervous, she remembered.

"My parents didn’t tell me then what was going on at the time. J.W. had a full brother, Bud, and I am very sure he was with them, too. I was in bed but I could hear their voices.

The Drew woman, who asked to remain anonymous, said that years later her father told her that Milam and Bryant let him know what they had done to Emmett Till.

"They knew the law was looking for them. They also said that Carolyn Bryant was with them when they killed Emmett Till. I don’t know when Bud joined them. I think they caught up with him later. He was a nicer person than his brother and I don’t think he would have killed someone – I hope not."

When she awoke at sunrise, all three men had left.

"I never knew what happened to them after they left our house. I think they knew the law was going to catch up with them. And I think they felt safe, since most of the officers were covering for them, anyway. I don’t know if they turned themselves in, let themselves be found or if they were picked up by the sheriff and charged.

"I still can’t believe how they put our family in such danger; there was so much turmoil after Emmett Till was killed. People in Drew – black and white – were threatening to kill each other’s entire families. Some were threatening to kill as many as ten members of another person’s family as payback."

* * *

Till’s mother, Mamie Carthan, was born to John and Alma Carthan in the small cotton town of Hazelhurst, not far from Money. When she was two-years-old, her family moved to Illinois where she grew up and eventually married.

Emmett would never know his father, who was shipped out to Europe as an Army private. Mamie and Louis Till separated in 1942. But his father’s silver ring was given to the young man as a remembrance.

Prior to his journey to Mississippi, Emmett's mother had cautioned him to "mind his manners" with white people, she would later write. She told her boy not to fool with white people down there: "If you have to get on your knees and bow when a white person goes past, do it willingly." These were the days of Jim Crow laws, she explained.

But something happened when Till went inside the small Money grocery story owned by the Bryants; Carolyn Bryant later asserted that Till had grabbed her at the waist and asked her for a date. In the Sumner trial, Bryant said that Till used "unprintable" words.

When his cousin took him outdoors, Emmett allegedly said, "Bye, baby." He had a slight stutter that Bryant might have misinterpreted.

Others have speculated that he might have been mildly retarded and any unexpected behavior on his part might easily be misconstrued. Another possibility – he stuttered and may have accidentally made a whistling sound as he tried to correct what he said.

But when Roy Bryant, 29, returned to home from a road trip three days after his wife’s encounter with Till, it seemed that nearly everyone in Tallahatchie County knew about the incident, and every conceivable version. Bryant decided that he and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, 40, would meet Sunday to "teach the boy a lesson."

At around 2:30 a.m. on August 28, Bryant went to the Mose Wright home, Till’s great uncle, on the outskirts of Money and demanded to talk with Till.

Both Bryant and Milam forced their way into the back bedroom where Till was sleeping, woke him up and made him go outside to the car. That was the last time anyone in Till’s family saw him alive.

Within only one day, perhaps setting a Mississippi record for a white on black crime, officers from Tallahatchie County and nearby Leflore County arrested Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam in Leflore County and charged them with murder.

Both were jailed in Greenwood, Mississippi and held without bond after admitting they had taken Till from his great-uncle's home – but had turned him loose the same night.

As word first got out that Emmett Till was missing, NAACP leaders Medgar Evers and Amzie Moore quickly became involved, disguising themselves as cotton pickers and going into the cotton fields searching for anything that would help find the young Delta visitor.

Moore would later surmise, after collecting stories first hand from the field laborers, that "more than 2,000 families" had been murdered and lynched over the years, with their bodies thrown into the region’s swamps, rivers and bayous.

It was possible that relatives of Till were hiding him out of fear for the youth’s safety, some believed, or that Till had been sent back to Chicago. As the search progressed, one witnesses told the Sheriff that Mrs. Bryant had identified Till that night.

Then Bryant and Milam changed their story, claiming they later found out Till was not "the one" who allegedly insulted Mrs. Bryant, and again claimed they had released him.

Journalist Hodding Carter in nearby Greenville filed UP wire story reporting that a 17-year-old fisherman Robert Hodges found Till's decomposed body barb wired to a seventy-four-pound cotton gin fan and floating in the Tallahatchie River 12 miles North of Money. Till had been stripped naked, pistol-whipped and shot through the head with a .45-caliber Colt automatic before he was thrown into the muddy river, the sheriff’s report concluded.

In an editorial appearing that Friday, September 2, Carter asserted that "people who are guilty of this savage crime should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," a brave suggestion for any Mississippi newspaper editor to make and remain out of harm's way, including Carter who would later win a Pulitzer Prize for his civil rights reporting.

Till’s body was first taken to Greenwood of Leflore County, even though the body was found in Tallahatchie County after he was killed in Sunflower County – all three counties now represented by district attorney Chiles.

Soon the body was moved to an undertaker in Tutwiler to be embalmed and shipped by rail to Chicago.

Woodrow Jackson of Tutwiler in Tallahatchie County will not forget the day he was assigned to embalm Emmett Till’s body. His first task was to drive 42 miles to Greenwood and pick up the young man’s corpse and then bring it back to the Tutwiler Funeral Home.

"There was a patrol car in front and one in back. Billy Ray Cole, a state highway patrolman from Tutwiler, told me not to stop for anything, and I didn’t," he said.

Jackson reached Tutwiler at approximately 4 p.m. and worked on Till’s body all through the night, until 8 the next morning.

"It was terrible and that’s why it took a long time. I remember thinking his body must have been in the water for three or four days and maybe longer. It was clear to me that he died from blows to the right side of his head."

When Jackson finished his work, he put Emmett Till’s body in a shipping case and sent him home by train to his mother. "I never met his mother, but I always hoped I helped her in some way."

Home to Chicago
IN CHICAGO, HORRID pictures of the young man’s corpse appeared in Jet magazine, drawing national attention. Over 100,000 people walked by his open casket before the funeral took place; hundreds of thousands read about his murder. Emmett Till’s mother insisted the world see what was done to her son.

In the 2005 film documentary "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till," Mamie Till recalled telling the Chicago funeral director, "If you can’t open the box, I can. I want to see what’s in that box."

What she found was the already decomposing body of her son, which had spent three days in a bayou of the Tallahatchie River. The mother was purposeful as she described what she saw, wrote film critic Roger Ebert:

"She always thought her son's teeth were ‘the prettiest thing I ever saw.’ All but two were knocked out. One eyeball was hanging on his chin. An ear was missing. She saw daylight through the bullet hole in his head. His skull had been chopped almost in two, the face separated from the back of the head."

Emmett Till’s mother made history as thousands of Chicagoans filed past her son’s remains. "A photograph in Jet magazine made such an impression that fifty years later, ‘60 Minutes’ reporter Ed Bradley remembered seeing it; he discussed it on his program with Keith Beauchamp as ‘a much younger man who saw the photo and became obsessed with the case.’"

It took young Beauchamp nine years to investigate the Till lynching and his work was considered "primarily responsible for the Justice Department reopening the case."

Beauchamp proposed that 14 people were involved in some way in the murder, including five black employees of the white men, as well as Carolyn Bryant who still resides in the Delta town of Greenville. Four other named suspects are still alive.

Beauchamp used old black and white television and newsreel footage, including shots of Milam and Bryant before, during and after the trial. Till’s cousins who were in the house the night Till was kidnapped were interviewed. The filmmaker also paid tribute to the courage of Mose Wright, "who in the courtroom fearlessly pointed out the men who had taken Emmett, when such an act was a death sentence in Mississippi."

Mamie Till died in January 2003, "just a little too soon to learn that the case had been reopened."

Rumors kept circulating about Till’s death, especially in Drew, only a few miles from plantation’s machine shed where Till was tortured and murdered. Whispers that a woman’s voice was heard in the dark when Till was taken from his uncle’s home.

"There were so many rumors. We all knew, right away, that Emmett Till was killed in Sunflower County and not over in Tallahatchie County," Woodrow Jackson said.

"There were others involved besides Milam and Bryant. And we knew that some of the witnesses were held in Charleston’s jail during the trial."

"Papa" Mose Wright had claimed hearing a woman’s voice from the truck. Till’s great-uncle was at home when Milam and Bryant broke into his house to kidnap his great-nephew, Till.

Simeon Wright, his son, who later became a Chicago minister, often tells of hearing his father recount to him and others "They took Emmett out to the truck to ask, ‘Is this one?’ And a female voice said ‘Yes.’"

" … get the FBI on the case … "
August 30, 1955
To: Mr. Gloster B. Current, Director, Branches NAACP, New York, New York
From: Medgar W. Evers, Field Secretary, Mississippi

On Sunday, August 28 at 2 A.M., a fourteen year old Negro boy, Emmett Till of Chicago, was forced from his home at Money, Leflore County, Mississippi, by three white men and a white woman who alleged that Till had made remarks that were displeasing to a white grocery owner's wife. One man has been apprehended by the Sheriff of Leflore County, the other man is being sought. If it is possible to get the FBI on the case, maybe we can get some results.

Emmett Till never knew his father; his mother received a letter three years earlier from the Department of Defense informing her, without a full explanation, that her husband had been killed in Italy due to "willful misconduct."

Staunch segregationist and cotton planter Senator James O. Eastland from Sunflower County had dug up "information" on Louis Till's past and leaked it to the press.

According to Eastland’s version, the U. S. Army had executed Private Till in Italy in 1945 "for raping two Italian women and killing a third." The senator’s insinuation was that Emmett's behavior ran in the family.

As it turned out, Louis Till was executed after the war. Till’s mother had tried for many years to find out what had happened, according to journalist Christopher Benson, who co-wrote a book with Mrs. Till-Mobley that was published in 2004 after her death. What Till’s mother finally received, was a notice from the military that her spousal allotment was being terminated.

What was an allotment for Emmett had been taken away. And she never really knew what the cause was, except that the language in the letter included the words "willful misconduct." It was only after the murder trial that the cause was publicized, and she discovered then that Louis Till was accused of murder, rape and murder in Italy, and that he was executed.

"The execution order was signed by General Dwight David Eisenhower. And it was a curious thing to her because after that -- I mean, it came as a shock to her, and it came after the murder trial but before the grand jury was to be convened to -- to consider a kidnapping charge, which was separate from the murder. And she believed always that this was a deliberate attempt to influence the grand jury, which didn’t hand down an indictment, as it turned out," Benton wrote.

After Eastland’s intervention, Mobley sought to learn more about her former husband’s execution by talking to some of Louis Till’s Army buddies, eventually discovering "this was a common thing that occurred among blacks in the military, who were marched out at, you know, 2:00 in the morning or so and told to line up, and identified by women in Europe as men they had had relations with or men they were accusing of something."

This death was different
Like countless blacks before and after him, Emmett Till received the ultimate punishment for threatening Mississippi’s rigid Jim Crow laws of racial behavior. In the past, the press would have ignored such a killing. However, this time it was very different for several reasons, said several older Delta black residents who agreed to meet and talk about the nearly fifty-year-old case:

"He was just a kid, that’s why this murder was so different than all of the rest."
Nettie Davis makes her point for a second time during an early evening conversation. Davis and others are patient in offering northern guests what facts they know about Emmett Till’s murder on this cool, fall evening forty-eight years after the murder.Their memories bring fresh reality to the story on this night.

"You need to understand. There had been other murders. Joe Pullen, George Lee. Horrible murders. But Emmett was a young boy, just 14, and he didn’t know the rules. Emmett’s mother said she tried to tell him, but he couldn’t have really understood how much different things were in the Delta than they were in Chicago," Davis states.

How could black parents ever protect their children in those days? What if you had a precocious child who might be misunderstood? How would you keep an active child quiet?

"Well, you didn’t take your children out very much," one man offers. "You tried to protect them by keeping them away from places where they could get into trouble or be hurt or see something bad. But you didn’t talk a lot about these things, because a child shouldn’t have to be scared."

A close friend of Davis’s had remained on the periphery of this conversation, but pulled his chair closer and began to talk about his own experiences regarding his sister and Emmett Till’s lynching.

She was also 14 at the time of Till’s death and a student at the Drew Colored School. She was so traumatized and angry at the time, she has never spoken to a white person since, he said. Maybe it would be good for his sister, if she would speak to someone now about her feelings.

He drew out his cell phone and offered to try to set up an interview with her. After a few rounds over the phone with her brother, the sister said she might talk, after all.
An appointment was made for a week later but fell through when she backed out that morning. His sister cannot get over the trauma, her brother said.

* * *

The Justice Department reopened the Emmett Till case last year, prompted by meetings with Beauchamp, who said he found investigative errors and that some people involved in the crime were still living.

Before 1994, all federal criminal civil rights violations carried a five-year statute of limitations, even in cases involving death. In 1994, the law was amended to provide the death penalty in such cases, but the law cannot be applied retroactively, said FBI spokeswoman Deborah Madden.

"It's up to Mrs. Chiles now and the state of Mississippi that's been given a rare chance to redeem themselves," said Till's cousin Simeon Wright told CNN reporters. Wright was with the teen the night of the murder.

"They claim that they have changed. We're going to see. We're going to stand back and watch what happens."

In recent years, there have been limited attempts to complete unfinished business from the civil rights era.

In 1994, Byron de la Beckwith was convicted for the 1963 sniper killing of NAACP leader Medgar Evers. However, rumors persist that Beckwith only assisted another Klansman from Greenwood in the murder, a man who introduced Beckwith into the Klan.

In Alabama, Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted in 2002 of killing four black girls in the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963. The year before, Thomas Blanton was convicted.

Last June, Edgar Ray Killen, an 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klansman, was convicted of manslaughter in the killings of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

But civil rights observers question why nine other men involved are still free.

Will Mississippi's ghosts ever come to rest?

Not without reconciliation, and reconciliation without truth simply is not possible, said Chaney’s brother Ben, who later established the James Chaney Foundation.

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