Enter Southern journalist William Bradford Huie:
Alabama native William Bradford Huie was a highly respected journalist. Born in 1910, he graduated with honors from the University of Alabama in 1930 and began a career in journalism. He sold his first story to True magazine while still in college. After working at several newspapers, he went to work for H.L. Mencken at Mercury Magazine. He served as a Naval officer in World War II, then returned to Mercury where he became editor. He authored numerous books and novels, several of which were made into movies. One of his books was about the execution of Private Eddie Slovik, the only US soldier escorted for desertion in World War II. During a visit to an office in the Pentagon he “obtained” a key to the numbers on the graves in the cemetery in France where Slovik was buried. Later on, when people started claiming that Bobo’s father died “for freedom”, he remembered the key and found that Louis Till was buried three graves from Slovik. He and another black soldier were executed after being found guilty of raping two Italian women and murdering another during an air raid. Although this was immaterial as far as Emmett Till was concerned, the prosecution had introduced Louis Till’s death when they put Mamie Bradly on the stand. They asked her about Emmett’s father and she answered that he had died in the service in the European Theater on July 2, 1945. The defense had no idea that he’d been executed for rape and murder and the failed to pick up on the date, which was two months after the war in Europe had come to an end. Mamie may have known that he’d been executed for rape although she later claimed she only knew it was for “willful misconduct.”
Huie, who wasn’t present for the trial, decided to offer Bryant and Milam a payment for the screen rights to their story in anticipation of making a movie about the death of Till and the subsequent trial. Since they had been acquitted, they could not be tried again for Till’s murder because of the double jeopardy clause in the US Constitution. He went to Mississippi and met with John Whitten, who was part of Bryant and Milam’s defense team – it seems that every lawyer in the Greenwood area wanted to defend them. Money poured in for their defense. Some of it came from New York and New Jersey. He asked Whitten if Milam had ever said if he had killed Till; Whitten said he had never asked. Whitten volunteered that Milam was “a killer,” that it was the reason for his battlefield commission. He commented that he was the kind of person you need around for a war. Huie came up with a plan to offer the two men a sum of money for rights to their story. Whitten said he’d ask them. Although he was there on his own, he got LOOK magazine to offer the money in exchange for an exclusive story in the magazine. Huie was criticized by members of the media for what they call “checkpoint journalism” but Huie said it never bothered him – “it gets results.”
Huie told the two men he’d meet with them over five nights and in the daytime he’d go around and verify that they were telling the truth. He promised to pay them some $4,000 but only if they told the truth. He wanted verifiable facts. Although Bryant talked some, Milam did most of the talking. Milam, who was an Army officer, was the more articulate. Milam admitted that although they hadn’t intended to kill Till, he became enraged by Till’s taunting about how black men were better lovers than whites and bragging about all the white women he had had.[1] His wallet fell out of his pocket and they found three pictures of white girls in it. Till claimed one was his girlfriend, that he had sex with her and “she loves it.” He said that although they had pistol-whipped him, Till never seemed to be frightened of them. After he became enraged, Milam shot Till in the side of the head then they dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. They had attached a heavy fan from a gin to his neck to submerge him.[2] After he had finished his story, he had Milam and both Bryants read it and initial it. It was the first that Carolyn had heard of what they had done to the boy.
When Huie’s story came out, many blacks became even more incensed then they already were and some blacks have been incensed ever since, at least in part because Mamie Till-Mosley and others, including Preacher Wright, went around the country talking about Bobo and his murder, and talking about how bad Mississippi was. One northern black woman who Huie knew told him that his Look article would affect their efforts to promote his death as a case for civil rights. Black activists and white activist/historians claim that Huie lied because he didn’t mention others who might have been involved but Huie’s intent was to tell Bryant and Milam’s story, not speculate about who did what and who didn’t. He went to Mississippi to get their story, not to investigate the crime. Witnesses had testified in Bryant and Milam’s trial that others were involved. Many were up in arms because they didn’t believe Carolyn Bryant’s account – and black activists today are STILL up in arms. Like the Jews who refuse to accept that Leo Frank might have been involved in the death of 13-year-old Mary Phagan[3], many blacks and white civil rights activists refuse to accept that Emmett Till may have actually propositioned Carolyn Bryant. And that is exactly what Emmett “Bobo” Till’s actions were, if Carolyn Bryant was truthful. Tim Tyson claims she recanted when he was interviewing here in 2008 but after his book about Till was published, Mrs. Donham and her daughter-in-law, who was present and who had typed up her manuscript, said she didn’t.[4] FBI investigators determined that Tyson had no proof of her recantation. He taped the interview but her recantation is not on it. He claims she said it while he was setting up his tape. He points to a single-sentence note he claims he wrote down at the time as proof. She definitely didn’t recant in her manuscript. Based on what Mrs. Donham said in her testimony and what she said in her manuscript, Emmett Till not only made an unwanted sexual advance, he put his hands on her, which constitutes assault.
Bobo Till was definitely capable of violence, as his mother’s account of his attack on his former stepfather demonstrates. Although she and others praised him as a well-mannered boy, that incident puts the lie to their assertions. Her claims are based on her perceptions of him and the reality is that parents have no clue what their kids are like when they’re away from them after somewhere around age nine. Probably every murderer’s mother since Caine has claimed “my boy is a good boy.” She and other’s also claimed he wouldn’t have bragged about sexual conquests because “he was only fourteen.” Well, some fourteen-year-olds have sex. Do they tell their mothers? Actually, when Huie asked Mamie if Bobo was having sex, she replied that she didn’t know, that he was at the age when boys become interested in sex and that if he was, he wouldn’t tell her.[5]
Some of the blacks present that night later claimed that Till didn’t do anything but take her hand, if that. One of the girls said all he did was put the money in her hand instead of on the counter.[6] Simeon Wright claimed a half century later that there was no photograph, no one dared Till to accost Bryant and that he was the one who went in the store and he didn’t drag Till out by the arm. However, these claims were made more than fifty years after the fact after tons of publicity about the case by civil rights activists and possibly pressure from family members. Just how the family and civil rights activists have presented the story is evidenced by the sign they placed at the place where Milam and Bryant threw Till’s body in the river. The sign says it was thrown in the river “as a warning” to other blacks when they actually threw it in the river in an attempt to conceal it.[7]
There were assertions that the Klan and the White Citizens’ Council were involved. However, FBI investigators determined that none of those accused in the kidnapping and murder were Klan members or had any association with it.
The reality is that blacks and white civil rights activists have been looking for someone to prosecute for Emmett Till’s death ever since Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were acquitted. They first focused on other members of the Milam/Bryant family. Now that they’re dead, they’re focused on Carolyn Bryant Donham. They’re pressing the state of Mississippi to bring charges against her. They don’t have long to force such an action and even if they are successful, it’s doubtful she’ll live long enough to stand trial because she is an 88-year-old woman and is currently under hospice care while dying of cancer.[8] Relatives of Till formed a legacy foundation in 2005 with the goal of finding somebody to prosecute for his death.[9] The foundation is a continuation of an organization Mamie Till-Mosby formed after the NAACP withdrew their support of her speaking engagements. They managed to get the FBI to conduct an investigation which led nowhere, a grand jury that included black members refused to issue any indictments. Incidentally, although the FBI agent in charge of the investigation has commented that Donham’s manuscript and the warrant is “evidence,” the FBI has actually had the manuscript for years.[10] Every single document the foundation and other “researchers” have been able to scrounge up had been turned over to the FBI.
The Till foundation members are going after Bryant-Donham on the basis of a single comment made by Moses Wright in his testimony. He testified that he heard a voice that was “lighter” than a man’s. Trying to prosecute on the basis of this statement would be beyond impossible. Moses Wright has been dead for decades, as has everyone else known to be there that night. The Wright children were in the house and didn’t hear what was said. They have no witnesses and Wright did not identify the voice as that of a woman, much less Carolyn Bryant. Although Simeon Wright later claimed that his father said the voice was a woman, he is dead as well as his father and there is no way to corroborate what would be hearsay evidence. Mrs. Donham did not admit to being at the house when Till was taken – she said they brought him to her at the store.[11] In her testimony, she said she did not see Till again after the incident in the store so there is a conflict, but the statute of limitations on perjury is long-since past. She can also claim she did not look at him. In short, there is no case against the woman.
Incidentally, an autopsy of Till’s remains released in 2015 revealed that he was killed by 7 ½ birdshot. This is a good indication that Milam DID NOT intend to kill him. Cartridges containing birdshot are normally used to kill rats and other small rodents from a few feet away. Cartridges designed to kill humans use solid or hollow-point bullets, not birdshot. Why Milam had his pistol loaded with birdshot will never be known. Perhaps he intended to shoot Till to scare him. He told Huie that he decided to kill him because he kept going on and on about sex with white women.[12] The shot killed him because it was fired from very close range, close enough the shot entered his brain.
Then there is the matter of Emmett Till’s father. This is what Huie later told an interviewer about how the story came out:
William Bradford Huie: I was in—I wasn't in Alabama when the trial was held. I came back—I was in California working on a film, I came back to my home here in Hartsill, oh, three or four months after the trial. And uh, I picked up Look magazine one night, and I looked at the letters written in, and somebody had taken this fact: it had been discovered by then. And that—-young Till's father had been killed during the Second World War and was a soldier. And so some uh, white boy out of Harvard-—a black man would never have done this—-some white boy out of Harvard had written a poem about the irony of young Emmett Till being killed in Mississippi while his father gave his life for the proposition "All men are created equal," etc. etc. Well, I looked at it, and I said, nonsense. It doesn't happen that way. I was in the Second World War, and most black men were stevedores. They were not where they would give their lives for the proposition that all men are created equal. So I had one of the strangest experiences in my life, one of the great coincidences in my life. When I had done the story of He Slew the Dreamer, three …
William Bradford Huie: When I did-—when I wrote the, when I was doing the research for The Execution of Private Slovik, I was in the Pentagon. Ninety-six Americans were executed during the Second World War, 95 of them for murder and uh, rape, and Slovik who was executed for desertion.[13] And all 96 of those men are buried in a secret plot, uh, near, um, or adjoining an American cemetery in Northern France. And I had to-—the Army when they finally cooperated with me on the Slovik story I wanted to photograph Slovik's grave. And so I had to get, uh, permission. I had to get from them to tell me the row number and the number of Slovik's grave in this plot of 96. And the Colonel had had it for me, and they took it out of the vault, because they never expect—-it was top secret everything. On his desk he had a key, as to the numbers of the graves. There are no names on any of these graves, just numbers. But there's, on this key, there's a, there's a name and an address, who that man was. And the Colonel had to go away somewhere, and I should have been court-martialed for this, because the moment I saw it, I knew that there was a story on, in each of those numbers. So I whirled it around here, and I'm copying it down just as fast as I can. He goes away twice and I get most of the names down and I have that now. I really shouldn't say this on the air, because the Army may court-martial me for this now. But at any rate, I'm the only man outside of somewhere in the depths of the Pentagon that's got that key. And after I read this piece in Looke, I whirled around, picked up that key, and I looked just three graves from Eddie Slovik, and I saw, Private Louis Till. And this only means that the man has been executed for rape and/or murder. And I said, "Oh no, this can't be the same man." The next morning I got up and I called the Judge Advocate General of the United States Army, whom I knew. Now this man came from Georgia, he had typical Georgian racial attitudes.
William Bradford Huie: And uh, so, I called him and I said now this is the story in Mississippi, um, the boy who was killed over there, I said, "I have just found this and I want you to check it for me and tell me who it is." Uh, he was interested. About two hours later he called me and he was just overjoyed. And he says, "Goddamn Huie, that's the same damn nigger." I said, "That's that boy nigger's father." He said, "I've got the case in front of me," he says, "The most fool case of killing two Italian women during a, air raid we ever had. We hanged him in Langert." And uh, so uh, he said, I said, "Well, send me the case." And then I said, "Now listen General, let's just wait a minute." I said, "Now this boy in Mississippi never knew his father." I said, "This hasn't got anything to do with this case over there, and it doesn't excuse anybody from murder or anything of this sort." Uh, so I don't think any of this should be, I said, "I don't know whether I'm going to write the story or not," because I said, "I don't think this ought to be revealed." So [cough] we sit down down on it. Well, at any rate, later the story crept out, because he gives it out. It's too good. He has to tell Senator Eastland and so forth and they call a press conference and so forth.
Huie related that some black friends of his, including at least one NAACP official, were incensed when the news came out. They had been using Bobo’s death and his killers acquittal in their campaign for civil rights in Mississippi. That his father had been executed for rape and murder of white women might be construed as an indication that Emmett was a potential rapist. NAACP executive Roy Wilkins told Huie he “almost feel into the Louis Till trap.” He planned to refer to the contrast between Louis’ and Emmett’s death in a speech but at the last minute decided not to use it.
Some black activists have attempted to whitewash Louis Till’s conviction for rape and murder. Black author and civil rights activist John Edgar Wideman took up the cause of Louis Till and all but claimed he was “lynched” by white officers just like his son Emmett was “lynched” by whites in Mississippi.[14] Louis Till and Fred A McMurray, were convicted of rape of two Italian women and murder of another on the basis of testimony of another black soldier who was with them and a British soldier when they broke in on the women during an air raid on an Italian port near Rome. The records of the court martial were classified, as are all court martials, until Till’s were declassified in the wake of Bobo’s death.[15] Wideman obtained a copy of Till’s court-martial then wrote an article for Esquire and a book in which he speculated that Till might have been innocent but was convicted by racist white officers. He claimed the black soldier who testified against him did so to save his own ass. He took Till’s silence as a sign that he was reconciled that he had no hope. In short, Wideman seems to have sought to exonerate Till because he was Emmett’s father. Although some claim there is a genetic connection that may lead some to become criminals, the claim is disputed by psychologists who claim that culture, not hereditary is a determining factor in a person’s actions. Psychologists refuse to accept any finding that might indicate that there is any difference between the races, particularly anything that might suggest an inferiority of members of the Negro race.[16]
Milam claimed to Milam that Till said his grandmother was white. If so, he would have to have been referring to Louis Till’s mother because he only knew one grandmother and she was Moses Wright’s wife’s sister. If true, that might indicate why Louis Till was orphaned. However, photographs of Louis Till do not show the face of a mulatto. If he did have white ancestry – and many blacks do – it was probably further back in his ancestral line. Existing photos of Emmett Till, all black and white, indicate that his complexion was lighter than most blacks, more brown than black, which is an indication of white ancestry. In fact, when Emmett was born, he had light skin, blonde hair and blue eyes. His mother’s friends and neighbors thought she had been sleeping around – the milkman was a favorite bet, so was the iceman. They were both white. She claims she was a virgin when she got married and that Louis was the only man she’d slept with. Photos of Mamie show her as having a lighter complexion. Huie described her complexion as café a lait. Perhaps the white ancestor was on her father’s side of the family. His ancestry is irrelevant to what happened except that Milam may have told the truth about Till’s actions and claims.
Soon after the trial, Preacher Wright moved to Chicago. His wife Elizabeth had already gone; she left immediately after Emmett was taken. She is reported to have not spent another night in their house. Some, if not all, of his cousins also moved to Chicago. Mamie Bradley, her name at the time, went on a speaking tour talking about Emmett’s death. The NAACP saw her as a cash cow but she said if anyone was going to make money off of Emmett’s death, it should be her. An angry Roy Wilkins said she was capitalizing her son’s death. The organization stopped funding her and started funding Preacher Wright instead. She formed her own organization to attract donations and continued speaking. Emmett became a poster child for the civil rights movement, which was eager to point to his murder as an example of injustice in Mississippi in particular, and elsewhere in the United States, particularly the South. Before the NAACP broke ties with her, his mother is reported to have gone on the most successful fund-raising tour in the organization’s history. Alabama civil rights activist Rosa Parks was arrested the following December for refusing to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery. She claimed Emmett Till’s death had inspired her.[17]
The death of Emmett Till was made for the civil rights movement. According to their claim, he was an innocent young boy who was murdered for “whistling at a white woman.” His family – actually Mamie’s family since his father had no family – were demoralized by Bill Huie’s story and Carolyn Bryant’s testimony. Mamie and others who knew Emmitt later claimed he couldn’t have done the things she had accused him of. They justified their beliefs with the “he was just fourteen” statement. None of them had been in the store and they had no idea what had happened, but they begin to think they did. One of the two girls who was in the group with Bobo claimed she watched him through the window and all he did was put the money in her hand instead of on the counter. (There was evidently a practice in local stores that whenever a black man bought something from a white woman, they put the money on the counter rather than putting it in her hand and touching her.) One of the men claimed Bobo was only in the store for less than a minute. Obviously, no one timed the incident so they really had no idea how long he was in the store. Moreover, no one heard the conversation. They only knew that she had come running out of the store and Bobo had wolf whistled at her, and that she went to the car and got a pistol.
Around the time of the fiftieth anniversary of Emmett Till’s death, a number of people started “researching” the event – working on books, film projects and the like. By this time most of those who played a role in the incident had died. Those who were still alive were approaching old age, or were already elderly. Moses Wright passed away in 1977. His wife Elizabeth had died seven years previously. Mamie Till-Mobley had written a book about her son’s death – she died of heart failure the same year it was published in 2003. Researchers started claiming there were inconsistencies in what Carolyn Bryant told her husband’s lawyer and what she said in court. They started looking for someone to prosecute. A black doctor named Howard had gone around drumming up witnesses to testify against Bryant and Milam. He found one witness named Willy Reed who claimed he had heard the sound of beatings coming from Leslie Milam’s barn, and that he had seen J.W. Milam come out of the barn and get a drink out of a well. Leslie Milam managed a farm in an adjoining county. If Reed’s accusations were true, the trial would have had to have been held in Sunflower County rather than Tallahatchie County and the judge would have had to declare a mistrial.[18] He also claimed to have seen three white men in Milam’s truck with three blacks in the back, one of which he claimed was Emmett Till. Two black men who worked for J.W. Milan were claimed to have been with him and Bryant when they abducted Till and subsequently killed him. A story circulated that they were being held under assumed names in a jail in another town so they couldn’t testify. Both men denied that they played any part in the murder. Reed left Mississippi for Chicago after the trial and had a nervous breakdown shortly after he got there. Bryant and Milam had both been dead for some time, as had Leslie Milam. Carolyn Bryant Donham, however, was still alive. They began focusing on her as someone guilty of – something!
Simeon Wright, Preacher Wright’s youngest son who had been 12 at the time, wrote a book in which he contested Carolyn Bryant’s version of events. He claimed he was the one who went in and got Bobo and that he didn’t drag him out as she claimed. He claimed Bobo was in the store “less than a minute.” He also said that there was no picture, that Bobo never made any claim about having had sex with white women, that there was no dare. Whether his version is true or not will never be known since he is now deceased. It is possible that Simeon carried a lot of guilt. He also claimed that his father had told him that the voice he heard outside after they took Bobo out was a woman. Members of the family gave interviews on camera about the event – fifty years after it happened. Curtis Jones, the cousin who came down from Chicago after Bobo claimed he was present at the store but later recanted on his version of events when he realized -or was coerced into believing – he didn’t get there until Saturday after the event on Wednesday evening. Fifty years is a long, long time and although we like to think we have perfect memories of events, the reality is that we can’t even remember what happened five minutes ago! This is especially true as we get older. Our perception of events are colored by what we’ve heard from others, read, dreamed or imagined. People involved in the same event may remember it differently – and probably will. In Vietnam I was on an airplane that blew two main gear tires when the pilots were backing out of our parking spot. The copilot remembered that the tires had blown right after we pulled off of the runway after landing. I had another memory of something happening to me. I believed for years it happened but then it came to me that it had happened to a buddy and what I was remembering was the mental picture I had as he described it to me. Memory cannot be trusted.
Sometime around 2004 members of Mamie Till-Mosely’s family journeyed to Mississippi to meet with FBI agents in an attempt to have them open a case against Carolyn Bryant. Mississippi is a conservative state but its justice system, like the justice systems in nearly every state and the Federal Department of Justice, had been taken over by political progressives devoted to the concept of social justice. Prosecutors who weren’t even born in the 1950s and 60s were reopening old cases related to the civil rights movement, particularly the murder of Medgar Evers, a NAACP official who was shot at his home in Jackson in 1963. Evers was allegedly “investigating” the death of Emmett Till. Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and Marine Corps veteran who had fought on Guadalcanal and was wounded on Tarawa, was charged with the crime. Beckwith was tried twice; both trials ended with a hung jury. Evers’ widow pursued the case. Reporters from the Jackson Clarion-Ledger investigated Beckwith’s previous trial and found that jurors had been investigated illegally by a state agency. The state used that as grounds for a new trial. Beckwith protested that it was double jeopardy but a court ruled that it wasn’t. Prosecutors were able to coerce a former Klan member to testify that Beckwith had boasted of killing Evers at Klan meetings and he was convicted. Others who had been involved in notorious murders in the 50s and 60s were also convicted. The success in those cases convinced the Till family and various civil rights activists that they would be able to convict Carolyn Bryant. The trouble was, they had no evidence, just opinion.
Emmett Till’s relatives were convinced that “evidence” uncovered by a film maker and certain authors was enough to get Carolyn Bryant, who had divorced Roy Bryant in 1975 and remarried, indicted for murder, kidnapping or something. They asserted that she had lied in her court testimony because she added things that weren’t mentioned in her “statement” to Roy’s attorney. They managed to convince the FBI to investigate and the “evidence” was presented to a grand jury. However, their “evidence” was likely to lead to a no bill and that is exactly what happened. Then in 2017 Timothy Tyson’s book The Blood of Emmett Till came out. Tyson claimed in the book that Carolyn Bryant Donham had “recanted” her testimony. The Till relatives thought again that they had her. Tyson obtained Mrs. Donham’s unpublished memoir and turned a copy over to the FBI after submitting the original to the UNC archives. However, the FBI determined that Tyson lacked proof of a recantation and Mrs. Donham and her daughter-in-law, who was present when Tyson interviewed her, denied that she had recanted. Once again, Till’s relatives were disappointed.
The latest “new development” was the discovery of an unserved warrant for Carolyn Bryant’s arrest for kidnapping followed by Tyson’s “release” of Mrs. Donham’s manuscript to the media. Black activists went into a North Carolina nursing home where they thought Mrs. Donham was to harass her, but she wasn’t there. The family, represented by the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, a 501c (3) charitable organization run by family members, is pressing Mississippi to reopen the case in hopes of having Mrs. Donham indicted for kidnapping. All I can say is “good luck”! There are no longer any witnesses to testify against her and even though the memoir is revealing in that she says she lied to her husband that Till was not the one who had accosted her in the store, her description of the incident is the same that she gave to the court with the exception that she said she screamed for help in the memoir. She did not mention that she screamed in her testimony.
Did Emmett Till assault Carolyn Bryant and did he say the things she testified that he did? While there’s no way to be certain, it’s extremely likely that he did. The later claims by members of the Wright family that he didn’t are suspect. The passing off of his alleged remarks with the comment “he was only fourteen” is not only meaningless, but smacks of disinformation.
Was Carolyn Bryant present at Preacher Wright’s house when Emmett Till was taken? I don’t know, but I doubt it. If she was, she didn’t admit to it in the memoir. Wright does not claim that she was. He told the court that he heard someone in the yard with “a lighter voice” but he also told the court he couldn’t tell whether Bryant and Milam were in a car or a truck. (They were in Milam’s green and white 1955 ½ ton Chevrolet pickup.) Simeon Wright claimed his father told him the voice was a woman but he and his father are both dead. The witness who testified that he saw Emmett Till in the back of J.W. Milam’s pickup did not mention a woman – he said he saw three white men in the cab and two black men in the back with Till. William Bradford Huie said that Mrs. Bryant didn’t know what they had done to Till until she heard it in the law office where he met with Bryant and Milam.
Chances are, Carolyn Holloway Bryant Donham will be dead soon. Hopefully, her death will not make the news and the Till Legacy Foundation won’t find out about it. If they do, they or their supporters will do something. They’re too filled with hatred not to.
Note – The Leflour County grand jury just announced that they are not going to indict Carolyn Bryant Donham based on the ancient warrant. Wheeler Parker, who is not a blood relative of Emmett Till, made a statement to the press in which he lamented that the state of Mississippi failed to convict Till’s killer. Parker went to Mississippi with Till on the train and was present at Bryant’s store when the incident happened.
[1] Till apparently took his wallet with him when they took him and they found the picture of the white girl.
[2] The fan turned out not to be heavy enough for the swift current and the body drifted several miles downstream and hung up in a drift.
[3] I personally believe that Mary Phagan’s death was accidental but it occurred because she fell while Frank was having sex with her, probably from behind, and she hit her head on a lathe.
[4] Mrs. Donham’s daughter-in-law claims that Tyson had promised to help them get her manuscript published but he claims he made no such promises. He did submit the manuscript to the University of North Carolina archives. He made a copy and gave it to the FBI to review.
[5] Mrs. Mosley does not admit to talking to Huie in her memoir. However, he described her home as it was in his article “Wolf Whistle,” on the second story of a two-story building. She was there with her boyfriend Gene Mosley and a police officer who had been detailed as her bodyguard.
[6] Although I have not been in the store where the incident took place, there were several similar stores around where I grew up. My uncle operated one for a while. Although they had electric lighting, they were dimly lit. I find it doubtful that outside observers could have seen far into the store.
[7] They failed to weight it down properly. The fan was attached to his neck and his body floated free. Had they weighted down his feet, it probably wouldn’t have been found. The current was strong enough to move the body and the fan. Still, if it hadn’t hit a snag, it might have floated all the way down the river to the Yazoo then into the Mississippi and all the way to New Orleans. It might have never been found.
[8] After word of the discovery of the ages-old warrant against Carolyn Bryant and Tyson’s release of her manuscript, black activists in North Carolina stormed a nursing home where they thought she was. This shows how callous they are. As it turns out, she is not in North Carolina.
[9] There doesn’t seem to be any public record of the finances of this organization. I found one site that shows them with just under $1 million but whether this is how much revenue they have or how much they have collected is unclear.
[10] The ancient warrant the foundation uncovered is evidence, but it’s a state of Mississippi warrant, not a Federal warrant, and the FBI has no jurisdiction over it. Furthermore, a grand jury met in Greenwood after Bryant and Milam were acquitted to consider indictments for kidnapping but their proceedings resulted in a “no bill.” In short, the warrant is for a crime for which the actual kidnappers were never charged. Good luck proving something with that warrant!
[11] In the Look article, Huie related that Milam and Bryant said they did not take Till to Bryant. Milam told Wright they were there to get the “boy who did the talking” in Money and Wright took them to him.
[12] It is possible that Till really didn’t have good sense, as Preacher Wright told Milam when he and Bryant came to his house to get him. He said the boy “didn’t know what he was doing.” Till may have not had the sense to shut up, but kept going on and on and making Milam madder and madder. Milam was not the kind of man to make mad.
[13] Huie is referring to the 96 men who were executed in the European Theater. There were others in Asia and Australia.
[14] Technically, Emmett Till wasn’t “lynched,” he was murdered. The word “lynch,” which dates back to the Revolutionary War, was coined in reference to what was known as “Lynch’s law” in Central Virginia where a judge ordered the hanging of Tories who had collaborated with the British. The true definition of “lynch” is “to put to death (as by hanging) by mob action without legal approval or permission.”
[15] It is true that some 80% of the American soldiers executed for crimes in Europe were black. What this means is unclear. Does it mean white officers were more likely to convict black soldiers of capital crimes or does it mean that blacks were more likely to engage in such offenses. With the exception of Slovik, all of the men executed in Europe were convicted of rape and/or murder.
[16] “Negro” is the correct term, “African” is not because there are other races on the African continent than Negro.
[17] Rosa Parks was an activist. She was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and had attended a seminar at the notorious Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee a few weeks before her famous protest. Although she claimed to have not been a member, she had been involved with Communist Party in Alabama, as had her husband. Four other black women had been arrested before she was. They filed the suit against the Montgomery bus company that led to the changing of the company policy.
[18] Certain black activists believed the Tallahatchie County jury was going to acquit the two men. If they did, they couldn’t be tried again. However, if the judge declared a mistrial because of Reed’s testimony, Sunflower County might be able to arrest and indict them and try them again. Reed, who was only eighteen at the time, was promised that he’d be moved to Chicago if he testified.