Civil Rights Events

Emmett Till -- Part Five

 

"J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant died with Emmett Till's blood on their hands," Simeon Wright, Emmett Till's cousin and an eyewitness to his kidnapping (he was with Till the night he was kidnapped by Milam and Bryant) … [years later] stated. "And it looks like everyone else who was involved is going to do the same. They had a chance to come clean. They will die with Emmett Till's blood on their hands" (Emmett 6)

 

Two women especially intrigued visitors at the trial, Mamie [Till] Bradley, mother of the victim, and Carolyn Bryant, the former high school beauty queen working at the store. A third woman, 27-year old Juanita Milam, was a less conspicuous part of the proceedings. She was the wife of J. W. Milam, and as she watched her husband's trial and sat on the stand as one of his character witnesses, she clearly wanted to be anywhere but a courtroom. Clark Porteous of the Memphis Press-Scimitar said that Juanita appeared "shocked by the proceedings," and he described her as a "sad-faced woman." Like Carolyn, Juanita said next to nothing publicly in the six decades after the trial.

 

Mary Juanita Thompson was born in Greenville, Miss., on Dec. 10, 1927, the fifth of six children born to Albert and Myrtle Thompson. She married World War II veteran John William Milam on Dec. 10, 1949, her 22nd birthday. They had two sons, Horace William, born in 1951, and Harvey, born two years later. They made their home in Glendora, Miss., where J. W. ran a store. It burned down in 1954, and after that, J. W. helped out in other family stores, did trucking and worked on local plantations.

 

The Till murder would change their lives forever. Less than a month after the verdict, journalist William Bradford Huie offered to pay the brothers $3,150 for their story. Knowing that double jeopardy prevented them from being tried again, they weaved a tale of kidnapping and murder, yet they were careful enough not to indict any accomplices. Their story, which appeared in the Jan. 24, 1956, issue of Look magazine, contains gross inaccuracies. Nevertheless, the article captivated readers all over the nation (Anderson 2).

 

Huie had gained defense attorney Breland's permission to write an article about Milam and Bryant. He would simply state facts, including quotes, without saying how he came to know them. In order to protect themselves from their Mississippi neighbors and from being indicted for crimes for which they'd not yet been tried, the brothers would publicly continue to maintain their innocence. But they would sign a release that protected Huie from a libel suit. In addition to the cash payments Milam, Bryant, and Breland's firm would each receive a significant percentage of future profits from any book or film that came out of Huie's article.

 

Breland, then 67, was a Princeton graduate and a leader in the Mississippi Citizens Council, a Main Street version of the Ku Klux Klan formed in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. Breland had originally been reluctant to take on Milam and Bryant's defense. But he came to see the prosecution as an affront against Mississippi, another assault like Black Monday, as the day of the Brown ruling on desegregation was known across the South.

 

Breland agreed to Huie's terms. "They're peckerwoods," he said of Milam and Bryant, according to accounts of the conversation in Huie's private correspondence. "But, hell, we've got to have our Milams to fight our wars and keep our niggahs in line … there ain't gonna be no integration … there ain't gonna be no nigger votin'. And the sooner everybody in this country realizes it the better. If any more pressure is put on us, the Tallahatchie won't hold all the niggers that'll be thrown into it."

 

Breland arranged a week of clandestine, nighttime meetings between Huie, Milam, and Roy and Carolyn Bryant. Frank Dean, Look's senior counsel, brought the money for the payoffs to Mississippi in a satchel. In a haze of cigarette smoke and profane justification, the brothers told their story.

 

Huie's "Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi" was published in January 1956. The article told the story of Till's murder from Milam and Bryant's point of view—a brutal tale of a beating that ended on the bank of the Tallahatchie River with a gun shot to the side of the head.

 

Huie concluded his article by indicting Mississippi for failing to convict Milam and Bryant or condemn their actions. His piece caused a firestorm.

 

His deal with the two men bound him to frame the story as they told it (Sparkman 3-4).

 

Within four years after Till murder trial, over 21% of the black population of Tallahatchie County had left.

 

For Bryant and Milam, the trial in some ways was the beginning, not the end of their troubles.  Milam's and Bryant's stores, which catered almost exclusively to local blacks, were boycotted and within fifteen months all the stores were either closed or sold (Linder 21]

 

Former friends and supporters, who never really doubted the guilt of the half-brothers to begin with, wanted nothing to do with them once their confession was in print. A year after the murder, the Milams were reported to be living on a farm in Mississippi between Ruleville and Cleveland. Around that time, Huie interviewed the brothers for a follow-up article that also appeared in Look. In the accompanying photographs, both men look happy, but it was obvious the smiles were only a facade. Huie described them as having "been disappointed," explaining further, "They have suffered disillusionment, ingratitude, resentment, misfortune," but as yet, no guilt.

 

Few had pity on them. Milam owned no land and could not get his former backers to rent to him. He was finally able to rent 217 acres in Sunflower County with the help of his brother-in-law and secured $4,000 to plant cotton from a Tallahatchie County bank where one of his defense attorneys, John Whitten, sat on the loan committee. Blacks would no longer work for Milam, and that forced him to pay whites a higher wage for the same work.

 

He reflected on how the tide had turned, saying his wife and children were having an especially hard time. "I had a lot of friends a year ago," he told Huie. "They contributed to my defense fund — at least they say they did. I never got half of what they say was contributed. I don't know what happened to it, but we never got it."

 

For three years, Milam held several menial plantation jobs. The Milams later moved to Orange, Texas, but stayed for only a few years, returning to live near Juanita's parents in Greenville.

 

He found himself back in the courtroom on occasion after the acquittal in Sumner, but his crimes -- among them writing bad checks, assault and battery, using a stolen credit card -- were miniscule when compared to the murder charge he faced in 1955. J.W. later worked as a heavy equipment operator until his retirement, which was forced upon him early because of ill health. He succumbed to cancer of the spine on New Year's Eve, 1980 at age 61.

 

By the time the Milams returned to Mississippi a decade after the Till trial, the outrage over the murder had subsided, and they were able to live quietly, for the most part. At some point in the 1960s, Juanita began working as a hairdresser at the Greenville Beauty Salon. In 1971, Greenville Mayor Pat Dunne declared Feb. 14-20 as National Beauty Salon Week, and Juanita served as chairwoman. In 1975, Juanita served as president of the local affiliate of the Mississippi Hairdressers and Cosmetologists Association. Clearly, Juanita felt at ease in her local community.

 

Juanita's only known public statements about the Till case following the trial occurred when the FBI came knocking after the federal government reopened the case in 2004. During the 1955 trial, Carolyn Bryant said Juanita had been in the Bryant's apartment behind the store the night Emmett Till came in, where she was babysitting the Bryant and Milam children. When asked about this, Juanita denied being there. "I thought I was in Greenville," she said, and insisted that "I would not have been babysittin' for her."

 

Juanita accused Carolyn of fabricating the entire story. "The only way I can figure it is that she did not want to take care of the store. She thought this wild story would make Roy take care of the store instead of leavin' her with the kids and the store. … the only thing to me would upset her would be if she wanted Roy to stay at the store more."

 

That night at the store, however, Carolyn went to a car that she said belonged to Juanita, to get a gun. The Bryants didn't own a car; the Milams did. If Juanita was not there, who was?

 

Students of the Till case remember seeing Juanita stand by her man during the trial and after the jury read the verdict. More than one photographer in Sumner captured her smiles as her husband was set free. That, of course, only tells part of her story.

 

Whether or not the 25 years she lived with J.W. after the trial, or the 33 she lived after his death were marked by pain, sadness, regret, or guilt, only those who were the closest to her might know (Anderson 5-8).

 

Sheriff Strider came under heavy attack in both national and Mississippi newspapers.  Five black families left his delta plantation for work elsewhere.  In 1957, Strider narrowly escaped an assassination attempt as he was seated in his car in front of a store in Cowart, Mississippi.

 

 In 1985, five years after Milam died of cancer, some of Bryant's recollections of the Till case were secretly recorded on audiotape.  On the tapes, Bryant says of the night of the kidnapping, "Yeah, hell we were drinking."  He claims that after "we done whupped the sonofabitch," he briefly "backed out on killing the motherf----r," and decided instead to "take him to a hospital."  But it soon became clear that the injuries already were too extensive for Till to survive, so they decided to "put his ass in the Tallahatchie River."  Bryant did not name others involved in the crime and indicated that he never would: "I'm the only one living that knows--and that's all that will ever be known."  Bryant died nine years later, also of cancer, at the age of 63.

 

None of the other men who participated in the kidnapping, beating, or murder of Emmett Till ever faced charges, although the Department of Justice reopened the case in 2004.  In 2005, Till's body was exhumed and autopsied by the Cook County coroner.  After analysis using dental comparisons, the body was positively identified as Till's.  Metallic fragments in the skull suggested he was shot with a .45 caliber gun (Linder 25-29). In 2007, a grand jury decided not to indict Ms. Carolyn (Bryant) Donham, or anyone else, as an accomplice in the murder.

 

“I was hoping that one day she would admit it, so it matters to me that she did, and it gives me some satisfaction,” said Wheeler Parker, 77, a cousin of Emmett’s who lives near Chicago. “It’s important to people understanding how the word of a white person against a black person was law, and a lot of black people lost their lives because of it. It really speaks to history, it shows what black people went through in those days” (Perez-Pena 6)

 

In 2008, Duke University professor Timothy B. Tyson, received a call from Carolyn Donham’s sister-in-law, who said that she and Carolyn had liked another book of his, and wanted to meet him.  It was in that meeting that she [Carolyn] spoke to him about the Till case, saying, “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”  She had lied about Till making advances toward her.  She could remember nothing else that had happened in the store. 

 

Ms. Donham told him that soon after the killing, her husband’s family hid her away, moving her from place to place for days, to keep her from talking to law enforcement.

 

She has said that Roy Bryant, whom she later divorced, was physically abusive to her.

 

“The circumstances under which she told the story were coercive,” Dr. Tyson said. “She’s horrified by it. There’s clearly a great burden of guilt and sorrow (Perez-Pena 2-7).

 

Nine years later Tyson published the book The Blood of Emmitt Till.  On January 26, 2017, Vanity Fair published the story of Tyson’s interview with Donham.  Tyson said that she had changed since Till’s murder, but she hasn’t repented. … “She was glad things had changed [and she] thought the old system of white supremacy was wrong, though she had more or less taken it as normal at the time,” Tyson told Vanity Fair.

 

Bryant told Tyson that she “felt tender sorrow” for Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who fought for civil rights and died in 2003 (Goronja 1-2).

 

Though she never stopped feeling the pain of her son's death, Mamie Till (who died of heart failure in 2003)…recognized that what happened to her son helped open Americans' eyes to the racial hatred plaguing the country, and in doing so helped spark a massive protest movement for racial equality and justice.

 

"People really didn't know that things this horrible could take place," Mamie Till said in an interview with Devery S. Anderson, author of Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement, in December 1996. "And the fact that it happened to a child, that make all the difference in the world" (Emmett 7).

 

"People often talked about Emmett, but Simeon [Wright] had a story of his own," a family spokeswoman Airicki Gordon told the Chicago Tribune. "That incident changed him as a person."

 

Wright went on to work as a pipe fitter and for many years remained quiet about what had happened.

 

The Tribune reports that he was filled with anger. But by the 2000s he was ready to talk about it.

 

"He really wanted people to know what happened that night," his wife Annie Wright told the paper. "There were so many versions. When I first met him, he never talked about it. But then he wanted people to know the injustices and indignities."

 

Wright spent recent years touring the country speaking to groups about his experiences, reports The Clarion-Ledger (Held 1).

 

The Justice Department is reopening the investigation of Emmett Till’s 63-year-old murder.

 

 

Works cited:

 

Anderson, Devery.  “Widow of Emmett Till Killer Dies Quietly, Notoriously.”  The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger.   Feb. 27, 2014.   USA Today.  Web.  <https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/27/emmett-till-juanita-milam/5873235/.>

 

“Emmett Till.”  Biography.   July 13, 2018.  A&E Television Networks.  Web.  <https://www.biography.com/people/emmett-till-507515.>

 

Goronja, Ariel.  “Carolyn Bryant Donham: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know.”  July 12, 2018.  Heavy.com.  Web.  <https://heavy.com/news/2018/07/carolyn-bryant-donham/.>

 

Held, Amy.  “Cousin Who Witnessed Emmett Till Abduction Dies at 74.”  NPR.  September 5, 2017.  Web.  <https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/05/548647220/cousin-who-witnessed-emmett-till-abduction-dies-at-74.>

 

Linder, Douglas O.  “The Emmett Till Murder Trial: An Account.”  2012.  Web.  <http://famous-trials.com/legacyftrials/till/tillaccount.html.>

 

Perez-Pena, Richard.  “Woman Linked to 1955 Emmett Till Murder Tells Historian Her Claims Were False.”  New York Times.  January 27, 2017.  Web.  <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/us/emmett-till-lynching-carolyn-bryant-donham.html.>

 

Sparkman, Randy.  “The Murder of Emmett Till: The 49-Year-Old Story of the Crime and How It Came To Be Told.”  Slate.  June 21, 2005.  Web.  < http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2005/06/the_murder_of_emmett_till.html.>