Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (37 page)

There was a minister out West who was coordinating on that end. When he was informed about the circumstances, he said he would consider the situation and the possibilities. When he called back, he had good news. Wonderful news, really. They had increased the payment to three thousand dollars. Oh, my God, that would be great.

Then he called again. He said they might be able to go up to six thousand dollars, and somehow, I was told, they finally settled on five thousand.
I was so relieved when I got that information, because I would not have to be distracted by financial worries. My needs would be taken care of.

Then another call came in. This one came late, about eleven o’clock one night, directly to me. It was from New York, not California. It was Roy Wilkins. He was mad. I mean, he was
very
angry. And he bawled me out. He told me I was like all the rest, the other people, the ones he had told me about, the ones who had turned on the organization the minute they got a little attention, a little fame. They wanted everything for themselves. They weren’t loyal to the NAACP.

“But I’m not going to do that,” I said. I never would have done anything like that. I thought about all the crowds I had addressed and how I had urged everyone to support the NAACP. I remembered the work and the commitment of people like Medgar Evers, Ruby Hurley, Amzie Moore, Aaron Henry. The people who had done so much for us down in Mississippi. I had been impressed by everything they were willing to put on the line. I had learned about the supreme sacrifices of people like the Reverend George Lee and Lamar Smith. And I was moved by it all. I felt that I had become part of it all. I had come to understand things I had never understood before, about how important it was for everyone to do something, anything, whatever we could, to help in the progress we deserved to make. I thought about all that and how I had pledged my complete support to the NAACP. That’s what I had told the crowds, that I would do anything I was asked to do, and that they should do the same. And I thought about the advice I had gotten—advice that was spinning in my head as I listened to him speak, advice about how to handle these business matters and how to make sure things were taken care of and how to negotiate.

So I tried to explain to Roy Wilkins that I was not turning away from the NAACP and that I was just trying to take care of the important needs I had at that time. I even tried to explain to him what they were.

That’s when he spoke the words I can never forget. “You’re trying to capitalize on the death of your son.”

I was stunned. There was nothing to do but hang up.

Things were in such a state of turmoil over the next few days. I was deeply hurt, but I still tried to reach out, to repair what had been damaged. I even wrote a letter to Roy Wilkins. “The objective of the NAACP is of much greater concern to me than my pocketbook,” I wrote. “I set out to trade the blood of my child for the betterment of my race; and I do not wish now to deviate from that course.… Please let me go forward for the NAACP. It is a duty. I would not want it said that I did anything to shirk it.”

It was too late, though. I was told that I wouldn’t be going to California, or anywhere else. That message was confirmed in the newspapers that would report on the split, and the miscommunication, the advice I had been getting, and how some people had not been representing me well and, oh, I was just devastated.

Roy Wilkins had a job to do, and I recognized that and supported that. A war was being waged on injustice and inequality and he was the general in that war. All generals have to keep their eye on their objectives, on winning the war. They must accept that there will be casualties along the way. I just never imagined that I would wind up as one of the casualties.

The NAACP announced that it would not pursue a civil action against Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, as Attorney Huff had been considering. Such a case would have to be filed in Mississippi. The feeling now was that it would be futile after the jury acquittal in Sumner and the grand jury decision in Greenwood. The federal government had decided some time ago that it was not going to step in. So, it seemed that all the possibilities had been exhausted.

Papa Mose agreed to fill in on the West Coast speaking tour, so at least the rallies were able to continue. But it all would continue now without me.

During this period, Rayfield Mooty arranged a meeting. We were going to see an attorney somewhere up on Forty-seventh Street. He wanted me to keep it confidential and not tell anybody—not even my mother—where I was going. I agreed, even though I wondered why I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody. I was a little concerned when I arrived and saw a run-down building and had to climb those rickety steps. But I was greeted very warmly by Rayfield and an attorney. They laid out a program for me that would have allowed me to continue my speaking appearances, but under Rayfield’s management. He told me all the things he would be able to do to make it happen and to make it successful. It all sounded good and I wanted so much to be able to reach out to people again. Then he set the terms. Rayfield would be paid 40 percent of my gross earnings. The attorney would get 10 percent. I would get 50 percent, but I would have to pay all expenses out of my 50 percent. And that would be the arrangement for the next twenty years. A twenty-year contract. Now, I’m no lawyer, but I really didn’t need to be a lawyer to know that this deal didn’t sound quite right. I wasn’t sure I could even sign a twenty-year agreement to stay married to the same man. Not with the kind of experience I had been having.

I had learned quite a bit from Rayfield Mooty in those weeks we had spent together. I saw him in action and he was something to watch. I learned what it took to be a tough negotiator. When to talk, when to walk.
I learned when no was the best way to yes. But I also learned when no was just the best way, period. I appreciated the time Rayfield had spent with me, the time he had spent thinking through his plan for me. But I was going to have to let this one go. With everything that had happened, well, I just felt that it was best for me to take some time to reflect on it all. I felt that it was best for me to do that alone.

Gus Courts was a black grocer in Belzoni, Mississippi. He had been a close friend of the Reverend George Lee, and had picked up the baton after Reverend Lee was murdered. Even though he faced a great deal of risk and intimidation, he took over the NAACP recruitment and voter registration work that Reverend Lee had been doing. In the eight months that followed Reverend Lee’s murder, Courts was made to suffer for his bold decision. The White Citizens Councils blocked deliveries to his store to try to drive him out of business. When this didn’t seem to work, men came looking for him. He was shot in his store. As God would have it, he survived. But he decided he had to leave the South. Over in Mound Bayou, Dr. Howard had a similar revelation. He was on the same hit list as Courts and Medgar Evers and so many others. Dr. Howard sold his property at a great loss and moved his family to Chicago, where he set up a new medical practice. It might have seemed like the racists of Mississippi had won. But this would only be the beginning. Dr. Howard would stay active and would even get involved in politics. As a Republican. He had had his fill of Democrats down in Mississippi.

For a moment, I had been part of something, the beginning of something that now seemed to be leaving me behind. That was something I had to accept and, even though there was so much despair for me, I was comforted by the thought that Emmett would not be forgotten. By December, in Montgomery, Alabama, something was happening. The spark of Emmett had caught fire. Another mother figure would warm our hearts, nurture our spirits, inspire our work. I had been there at the center of the media storm and I understood what she was experiencing. I knew the tests she would have to endure. I knew these things and I reached out to her. I did it quietly. I did it privately. I did it through prayer.

 P
eople were determined to keep Emmett Till alive. The tragedy had moved them to tears. The injustice had made them angry enough to fight back. And the unanswered questions, well, they kept nagging for some kind of resolution.

Jimmy Hicks, the reporter for the
Baltimore Afro-American
, couldn’t let it go. In the weeks following the murder trial in Sumner, he published his series revealing all the things that had gone on behind the scenes, all the efforts by the reporters and the authorities in that frantic search for the surprise witnesses. The series was published in several black newspapers. But Jimmy Hicks still couldn’t let it go. He went back down there to Mississippi and covered the kidnapping grand jury in Greenwood. He did that even though he admitted that, like so many of the rest of us during the murder trial, he also had been afraid of those white folks. This was a man who was bold enough to want to be among the first reporters to fly up in a rocket ship, whenever we got to that point, and he, too, had been afraid of those folks in Mississippi. That was how bad things had been. And that was how courageous all the people were to stick with it down there, in the face of all that intimidation.

Jimmy Hicks kept pushing the questions about Levy “Too Tight” Collins and Henry Lee Loggins, the two black men people believed to have been in the back of the truck with Emmett. Hicks had been told that these black men had been kept in the Charleston jail by Sheriff Strider to keep them from testifying. But the prosecutors didn’t follow up on this. The prosecutors accepted Strider’s assurance that it was not true. And the black reporters were not allowed to visit the jail. So all they had were the rumors and the source stories. The rumors were persistent and just kept
swirling around and growing until they became the stories that other people would report. Others would come forward after the trial to say they, too, had seen the truck that morning, the one with whites up front and blacks in the back. They would say, off the record, that they later saw two black men washing blood from the back of that truck, blood these men said was from deer hunting. It was not deer hunting season. During the murder trial, many people had begun to feel that Collins and Loggins had been killed to keep them quiet. But Jimmy Hicks couldn’t let it go. He was a reporter every day of his life and he knew when he was onto something. He was convinced of it. But he had run up against that wall of indifference and racist hostility down in Tallahatchie County, and, in the end, he just could not break through it. He urged the federal government to investigate possible obstruction of justice. And he wrote about it.

L. Alex Wilson couldn’t let it go, either. He had covered the murder trial for the
Tri-State Defender
from his Memphis base. His publisher, John H. Sengstacke, had offered a reward for information on Emmett’s killers. But that wasn’t all that was done. Alex Wilson spent four days after the trial working with informants in the Delta tracking down Too Tight. He wrote a front-page story for the
Chicago Defender
about the “four harrowing, danger-filled days” it took for him to find Too Tight, to lure him into a gambling game that never happened, and finally to convince him to drive to Chicago with Wilson. As it turns out, Henry Lee Loggins had already gone to St. Louis. At the Chicago offices of the
Defender
, Too Tight was interviewed by the paper’s general counsel, with the publisher and Wilson. The entire interview was published in the paper and included in Christopher Metress’s book. But, after all the speculation, all the effort to find him and to get him to talk, Levy “Too Tight” Collins didn’t help resolve a thing. He said he was working in Clarksdale, another Mississippi Delta town, with Henry Lee Loggins the entire time of the trial. They were driving a gravel truck for J. W. Milam’s brother-in-law, Melvin Campbell. He said he had never been to Papa Mose’s house in Money and he didn’t feel Milam had anything to do with Emmett’s death. “No, I believe he was too nice a man to do it,” he said.

As it turns out, though, Jimmy Hicks might have had some pretty good sources after all. Eight years later, when Hugh Whitaker would work on his master’s thesis at Florida State University, he would talk to people who never would have given up any information to black reporters. He was white and he came from Tallahatchie County. There was no wall for him, just open doors. People told him things. He interviewed defense attorney J. J. Breland and others, who told him that Collins and Loggins had been held in the county jail at Charleston. Whitaker was told that Sheriff Strider
had issued the order and that these two men were held under assumed names, probably so that they could be hidden in the jail records, as well as in their cells.

We can only wonder now why somebody might have wanted to keep these two men away from everybody during the trial, to keep them from talking. If Collins and Loggins knew anything at all about what had happened to Emmett, then we can only wonder why they were still around to have the chance to talk about it at all.

After the first of the year, there would be yet another shock, at least for those who ever believed Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam were not guilty of murder. In the January 24, 1956, issue of
Look
magazine, William Bradford Huie, a white Alabama writer, reportedly paid nearly four thousand dollars to interview Bryant and Milam to get their account of how they murdered my son.

The tale that unfolded in
Look
was horrible. In fact, it was unbearable. And that was not just because of the description the killers gave of that night of terror, but also because of the distorted picture of Emmett that was presented.

In the
Look
version of events, Carolyn Bryant was not in the truck when Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam took Emmett from the house; this story never mentioned that anyone else had come to the house with them, ignoring Papa Mose’s version of events. Carolyn Bryant was never involved in any way in identifying Emmett, according to this account, even though Bryant and Milam had both told Sheriff George Smith and his deputy that she had been involved. They had said they let Emmett go after bringing him before her to identify.