In a
previous post, I introduced you to historian, writer, and educator, Devery Anderson, one of the nation's leding experts on the Emmett Till murder. Devery took the time to read your questions, and has graciously taken considerable time to respond to your questions. Here is the letter he sent. Read and respond with thoughts, comments, and more questions.
Thanks again, Devery, for taking the time to converse with us.
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Thank you all for your questions, and I appreciate the opportunity to respond to you. Thanks also for your interest in the Emmett Till case.
Several of your questions asked about any regrets that J. W. Milam, Roy Bryant, or Carolyn Bryant may have had about Emmett’s murder. Neither of the men involved ever expressed any public remorse, nor have their family members. Roy Bryant took a friend of his on a “tour” of the sites involved in the murder in 1985, and his friend secretly recorded him, and Bryant seemed to brag about the whole thing, indicating that there were others involved, but that he wasn’t going to name them. Carolyn Bryant refuses to talk about the case (I wrote her and went by her house, and she won’t respond to me). The only time she is known to have talked in the last 52 years was to the FBI in 2004. If she has any regrets, she isn’t telling anyone. I don’t really know why she won’t allow anyone to talk to her. She actually didn’t tell her husband about the incident with Emmett Till—he heard about it from someone else-- then asked her about it. I believe, based on my research, that she bent the truth about what happened when she told the story in court. I don’t think she told that story to her husband.
I heard from one of her cousins that Mamie Till-Mobley and some of Moses Wright’s family had a falling out for a time, and that she blamed them for allowing Emmett to be killed. I have not been able to confirm if that is true.
The sheriff of Leflore County [H.C. Strider], where Roy Bryant lived, was said to have told Emmett’s grandmother that Bryant was a mean, cruel man, and that he had been implicated in the death of another African American the year before. I have not been able to find anything to confirm that this actually happened.
I can only assume that Emmett’s mother regretted sending him to Mississippi, although I never knew her to dwell on that, or what happened to him once he got there. She came to believe that her son died for a reason, and I think she came to dwell on that aspect of it.
I do not know if Mrs. Bryant gets threatening phone calls. She has changed her number since the last time I tried calling. She used to be listed in the phone book under her current name, Carolyn Donham, but that was before most people knew what her current name is. Since her current name and location has become more public, I believe she has stopped listing her number.
The most unique thing that I have discovered is the person who went into the store and made Emmett come out when he was talking to Carolyn Bryant. He hasn’t talked to anyone about this, at least publicly, since 1955. His name faded away from history right away. I know who he is, I am just trying to get him to talk.
I believe Mrs. Bryant did feel that justice had been done, because she wanted her husband freed, and back then, people felt that defending the honor of southern womanhood justified a crime even as brutal as murder. That was what Milam and Bryant thought they were doing.
Mrs. Bryant never expressed any feelings about the condition of Emmett’s body, or to the brutality of the murder. At the time, she and Roy had two small boys, less than four years old. They later had another son and a daughter. No one knows how she eventually came to explain the murder to them.
My use of the term “angel” in the poem was just my attempt to be artistic I guess. I believe that people have been profoundly moved by his death, but I have never seen it as something that was meant to be, nor that it had a fore-ordained purpose (which Emmett’s mother DID believe). Aside from the very human tragedy of the case that affects us all, I am trying to view it as a historian.
I have asked Emmett Till’s cousins several questions about what Emmett was like as a child, and what they witnessed at the time of the whistle in the store, and the kidnapping three days later. I have asked lots of details that I have been able to verify as either accurate or inaccurate. I feel I have the best take on what happened, and have the most detail of anyone. I wish I would have asked his mother several more questions about Emmett as a child.
After Emmett’s father died, his mother remarried twice more when Emmett was a child, and one more time after his death. Emmett and his two step fathers were close but because they, and his mother divorced, these men weren’t in his life very long. Mamie does seem calm and in control in the weeks after the trial, but she has always attributed that to the strength she was able to muster up early on. She commented once that people thought she was cold or uncaring because of that, but when you see the films of her at the funeral, she is clearly very emotional.
Mamie’s belief that Emmett did not whistle intentionally is clearly an error. Emmett did whistle at Carolyn Bryant, and it was definitely NOT misinterpreted due to his speech impediment. I spend a lot of time on this in my book (which I am still writing). His cousins who were with him are very clear about that, and they told me that Emmett talked to them afterwards about it, and plead for them not to tell his uncle Moses Wright what had happened. He knew he had done something wrong. I also believe he probably said something to Carolyn Bryant in the store that she took offense at, but not the things she claimed he said. I don’t think he meant any harm by it.
The jury took 67 minutes to make the verdict. According to Steve Whitaker, who interviewed the jury members seven years later, most of them fully believed that Milam and Bryant were guilty, even though they voted “not guilty.” Harry Dogan, the incoming sheriff of Tallahatchie County, asked them to take a little time before announcing their verdict in order to “make it look good.”
Mamie was very open about the murder, in that she was always willing to talk about it. I probably talked to her on the phone 50 times before she died, and she could always talk about every aspect of it easily.
The people I have interviewed, besides Mamie Till-Mobley, are Wheeler Parker, who took the train with Emmett to Mississippi, Simeon Wright, who was in the bed with Emmett when he was kidnapped (both of these men were with Emmett at the store also, when he whistled at Carolyn Bryant). I interviewed Willie Reed, the surprise witness for the prosecution, who heard Emmett being beaten and killed in the barn. I also interviewed two reporters who covered the trial, and one woman who sat through the trial.
As far as Emmett’s own religious beliefs, he did attend church each week, and according to his mother, he became a born-again Christian after he became a teenager. His cousin, Wheeler Parker, who is a minister himself, says he doesn’t remember a religious side to Emmett necessarily, and said that back then, kids absolutely HAD to go to church, EVERY Sunday.
The Crisis did not devote much to the case – there were only a few issues during the trial that devoted any attention to it –I have them. As far as my book goes, I am still writing it and I expect it to be a year before I turn the full manuscript in.
The Till case, as it relates to the Civil Rights Movement, is seen as inspiring people to act, and the first action that followed it was the Montgomery Bus Boycot a few months later. This is something that historians have only begun to fully understand in the last twenty years. In the years just following the Till case, it was overshadowed by other events, and the people who were the key players in the case fell into obscurity. It is only in retrospect now that people see it as a major event that inspired protests and actions in the Movement.
There had been thousands of lynchings in the south prior to the Till murder, but his is the most famous because he was not from the South, was a child, and his mother insisted on showing the world the brutality of the crime by having an open-casket funeral. Lynchings had become more rare in the years preceeding Emmett’s death. More followed as KKK members and others in the South tried to fight integration and voter registration for blacks.
The only action to try to prosecute Milam and Bryant after the murder trial was to indict them on kidnapping charges a month and a half later, but the grand jury failed to indict. The FBI investigation that occurred between 2004-2006 was an attempt to prosecute others who are still living, and who may have been involved. In February 2007, the grand jury heard evidence linking Carolyn Bryant to the kidnapping but failed to indict her.
Moses Wright let the men take Emmett only because they threatened his life and had a gun. Had he attempted to stop them, they likely would have killed everyone in the house – at least Moses and his wife. Plus, he never imagined they would kill him. He thought they were going to take him away, whip him, then bring him home.
Emmett’s mother and Carolyn Bryant never spoke, and she never had any direct contact with anyone from Milam nor Bryant’s family. Mamie told me once she would be willing to talk with her, mother to mother. She felt no anger toward her.
I have completed most of my research for my book, but still go to Mississippi two or three times a year to try to find out more information. There are still a few people I want to interview. I hope to do it soon.
Mamie didn’t necessarily use her son’s death as evidence of white supremacist attitudes but just the events surrounding Emmett’s death, and the fact that the men got away with murder, and the jury was willing to allow that without any conscience, is the evidence that it really hard to escape. Mamie only had to be aware of the facts surrounding the kidnap, murder, and attitude of the sheriff and jury to see it for what it was.
I think the men who killed Emmett were able to become as angry as they did because they were raised to see certain actions as big, big taboos in the South. That taboo was any amount of social interaction between whites and blacks. Blacks were seen as so inferior, in fact, that there had been a long tradition of killing -- and getting away with it in the South. In Mississippi alone there were over 500 documented lynchings between 1888-1955. In the entire South, there were several thousand.
Mamie did tell Emmett how to behave in the South, and did this very forcefully before he left.
Although Emmett’s killers knew he was a boy, they later got angry when the reporter who interviewed them and paid them for their confession, phrased their crime as the “murder of a child.” I think, however, because they never showed any remorse, that to them, he was just another “nigger.” His age made no difference.
Carolyn Bryant is still alive, is 74 years old, and lives in Greenville, Mississippi. She and Roy Bryant divorced in 1979 and she has since remarried three times. Her name now is Carolyn Donham.
I don’t know Carolyn Bryant’s current attitude toward blacks, or civil rights. She will not talk to anyone about this case, and no one from her family will talk about her or the case publicly.
When the FBI reopened the case, they were trying to find others who may have been involved, and to try to get more facts about the murder, since it had never been investigated all that well to begin with. They were not going after Milam and Bryant, who were both dead anyway, so there was no violation of the double jeopardy law.
I hope this answers everything. Feel free to write me further at
devery@emmetttillmurder.com, or post more questions on the blog.
Thanks again for this opportunity!
Devery
