The Blood of Emmett Till(68)

Any thought that the case would fade as 1955 turned into 1956 would soon vanish, thanks to the ongoing protests but also to the work of William Bradford Huie, a seventh-generation Alabama novelist and journalist with an inflamed ambition and iridescent imagination. In January 1956 Look magazine, with one of the largest circulations in the country, published Huie’s “Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi.”27 In addition to copies for their nearly four million subscribers, Look printed an extra two million for the newsstands.28 Three months later the story was reprinted for eleven million subscribers to the Reader’s Digest.29 Huie’s story would shape America’s imagination of the Till case for fifty years.

Huie began working on the Till case a month or so after the acquittals.30 In Sumner he met with J. J. Breland, pointing out that the truth of what happened had never been established. “And this lawyer said, ‘Well, I’d like to know what happened. I never asked them whether they killed the boy or not.’?”31 A pioneer in what would later be derided as “checkbook journalism,” Huie told Breland that Look would pay Milam and Bryant $4,000 to give their account. Breland called in the killers and relayed Huie’s offer. Because they had been acquitted, they could not be tried again for the same crime; therefore, without shame or law to impede them, and with cash on the table, there was no reason not to go public with their version of events. They accepted. There would be $1,000 for the law firm and $3,000 to be divided between Milam and Bryant in exchange for the story of Till’s kidnapping, beating, and murder. Huie would state the facts, including quotes, without saying how he had gotten them; that would allow the half-brothers to maintain some pretense of innocence. And they would sign a waiver not to sue Huie for libel. Breland then set up a week of secret meetings at the law firm at night. After Look’s senior counsel showed up with a satchel full of cash, J. W. Milam and Roy and Carolyn Bryant told Huie their story through a haze of cigarette smoke, with Milam doing most if not all of the talking.32

If any of them mentioned a physical assault of any kind on Carolyn, Huie did not report it, which seems unlikely given his penchant for the sensational. In this version Emmett Till of Chicago, visiting his country kinfolks in Mississippi, boasted to his young cousins about having had sex with a white girl. Outside Bryant’s Grocery the youths dared Till to ask Carolyn Bryant for a date. He did so. Hearing the tale, Milam and Bryant kidnapped the boy from his great-uncle’s farmhouse, intending merely to beat him, but Till taunted them with stories of having sex with white girls and proclaimed his own equality. In short, the boy virtually committed suicide.

“We were never able to scare him,” Milam told Huie. “They had just filled him so full of that poison he was hopeless.” The men took turns smashing Till across the head with their .45s. The boy never yelled, but continued to say things like “You bastards. I’m not afraid of you. I’m as good as you are. I’ve ‘had’ white women. My grandmother was a white woman.” Milam made their case:

Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless. I’m no bully; I never hurt a nigger. I like niggers—in their place—I know how to work ’em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain’t gonna vote where I live. If they did, they’d control the government. They ain’t gonna go to school with my kids. And when a nigger even gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he’s tired o’ livin’. I’m likely to kill him. Me and my folks fought for this country and we have some rights. . . . Goddam you, I’m going to make an example of you—just so everybody can know where me and my folks stand.33

And so, Milam said, they drove to the cotton gin, forced Till to carry the heavy fan to the truck, took him to the riverbank, shot him in the head, and rolled him into the river.34 In this version, it was a “coincidence” that Till’s ignorant bravado met Milam’s ignorant brutality at just the wrong place and time, “too soon after the Supreme Court had decreed a change in the Delta ‘way of life.’?”35 This was not a tell-all; for one thing, Huie knew that more than two people were involved in the murder of Emmett Till, but he decided to forget that inconvenient fact because it would cost too much to get releases to print their names.36 In Milam and Bryant’s version the one person who receded further from view was the real-life fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, with his slight stutter, his imitations of Red Skelton and Jack Benny, and his ability to see second base in a loaf of bread.

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The real Emmett Till was also not in evidence at the national protests that continued well into the spring of 1956, but his family and their Mississippi allies certainly were. T. R. M. Howard’s finest hour came at what A. Philip Randolph billed as “the Historic Madison Square Garden Civil Rights Rally,” otherwise known as the “Heroes of the South” rally. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters did much of the organizing, and In Friendship, a fundraising organization, did the rest. Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, Stanley Levison, Norman Thomas, and other liberals, radicals, and labor activists in New York founded In Friendship in early 1956, using the energy around the Till case and the Montgomery Bus Boycott to fund the boycott and to assist grassroots activists in the South who suffered economic reprisals for their civil rights activities. The Heroes of the South rally, set for May 24, 1956, at Madison Square Garden, was their first big project.37