Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [117]
He was actually one of five; it is said that the defendants hired every lawyer in Sumner so that the state would not be able to appoint any of them a special prosecutor on the case. Kellum gave one of two closing statements for the defense, during which he told the jurors that they were “absolutely the custodians of American civilization” and implored them, “I want you to tell me where under God’s shining sun is the land of the free and the home of the brave if you don’t turn these boys loose—your forefathers will absolutely turn over in their graves!”
Kellum was a twenty-eight-year-old grocery clerk who had never attended college when, in 1939, he took the state bar exam, passed it, and immediately started a solo law practice. For more than fifty years his office was a plain, squat concrete structure bulging with messy piles of books and files and papers, unremarkable but for its proximity to the courthouse. We talked there for ninety minutes, and he never once grew defensive or refused to answer a question. At the start, he told me, he had regarded the defense of Bryant and Milam as “just another case over the desk.” Had he ever asked them if they killed Emmett Till?
“Yeah,” he said, “they denied that they had did it.”
I asked if he had believed them. “Yeah, I believed them,” he replied, “just like I would if I was interrogating a client now. I would have no reason to think he’s lying to me.”
I quoted his statement about the jurors’ forefathers turning over in their graves if the defendants were convicted. What had he meant by that? “Their forefathers, possibly, would not have ever convicted any white man for killing a black man,” he explained. I asked Kellum if he’d had any misgivings about appealing to the jury’s racial attitudes that way. “No, not at the time,” he replied.
“Did you feel the same way at the time?” I asked.
“Not now,” he said. He told me about a Vietnamese boy he sponsored in 1975, after the fall of Saigon. I restated the question. “Put it this way,” he said. “I didn’t feel that it was justifiable in killing an individual, regardless of what his color might be. I didn’t think any white man had a right to kill an individual—black individual—like he was a dog.”
How, then, could he have so passionately implored the jury, in his closing argument, to rule in a way that would nullify those very values? “I was trying to say something that would meet with—where they would agree with me, you see. Because I was employed to defend those fellas. And I was going to defend them as much as I could and stay within the law. Those statements were not—I received no admonition during the argument from the judge at all.”
“So you just looked at it as part of your job?”
“Part of the day’s work,” he said.
Did he now believe that Bryant and Milam had, in fact, murdered Till?
“I would have to see something,” he said. “But they told me they did not. They told the other lawyers that they did not. I have not seen anything where it was supposed to have been an admission of guilt on their part.”
If that statement were true, it would make him quite possibly the only man alive at the time who had not read or at least heard about Huie’s Look article. But I didn’t press him on it, didn’t call him a liar. The strange thing is that, in my memory, I had always pressed J.W. Kellum hard, maybe even a bit too hard; for ten years, I felt a bit guilty about how pointedly I had posed difficult questions to a rather genial octogenarian who had graciously invited me into his office and offered me as much of his time as I wanted. Today, though, when I read through the transcript of that conversation, I can’t help feeling that I was too easy on the man. I guess we all make accommodations with the past.
THE ARISTOCRAT
It is not widely known, but shortly after they were acquitted, Roy