Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [120]
Howard Armstrong. In 1995, he was, aside from Ray Tribble, the only living juror. In 1955, he was a thirty-six-year-old veteran of World War II, just like John Whitten, and was living in Enid, up in the northern stem of Tallahatchie County. Most of the other jurors, he said, were from other parts of the county, and he didn’t know them. They might have known him by reputation: he was a lay minister, leader of the deacons at the Mount Pisgah Baptist Church. A few years later he would be ordained, and would serve as pastor to a number of congregations for the next thirty-five years, finally retiring at the age of seventy-five, just a year before we met.
As with the others, I spoke to Armstrong on the phone first, and he invited me to come by and visit—although, like Ray Tribble, he wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about the trial. No one, he told me, had ever tried to interview him on the subject. “Ain’t a lot of people even know I served on that jury,” he said.
He was living with his wife of fifty-three years, Janie, in a small, neat house that sat up on a rise off a dirt road. In 1955, he was a farmer who made ends meet by working nights at a heating and air-conditioning factory in Grenada, Mississippi, about thirty miles away. The first he had heard of the murder of Emmett Till, he told me, was when he received his jury summons. “I didn’t have time for much news,” he explained, “working night shift and farming during the day.”
I asked him how he had felt about serving. “Really and truly,” he told me, “I can’t remember how I felt about that. I reckon I felt the way I did about serving on any other jury. I wasn’t crazy about serving on none of them…. I needed to be on my job and on the farm.” When I pressed him to tell me what else he remembered, he responded: “I don’t want to pull it up. I want to leave it out there—it’s just best to leave things alone.”
“He just never did talk about that much,” his wife, who was sitting next to him, explained.
I asked about the verdict. “I didn’t think that they presented the case to prove it,” he said of the prosecutors. “I understand that them folks was pretty much outlaws, but I didn’t know that. I heard it years later.” He was quiet for a moment. “I still don’t know.”
That truly surprised me. But he stood by it, insisting that the prosecution had not proven its case—otherwise, he said, “I’d never have voted the way I did.” When I asked him what the jury deliberations had been like, he said, “I’m sure there was a good bit of discussion. I do remember that there were at least three votes on that thing.” He must have anticipated my next question, because he quickly added, “And I voted to acquit all three times.”
I was disappointed; somehow, I had hoped he might have been that lone dissenter. I asked if he still believed they had reached the right verdict.
“I still think they were innocent,” he said. “I have no reason and no proof, and I don’t judge people. I went and done my duty, left my duty where it was at and went on to other things.” And no misgivings at all? “I served to the best of my ability, under my prayer to God for guidance and wisdom. And I stand by my decision…. I still stand by it. I think I was right.”
“I guess you know that an awful lot of people disagreed.”
“I was surprised at all the fuss,” he said. “I thought we deliberated that thing, came back with a decision and that should be it.” I asked him if racial tensions were sharpened there afterward. “There wasn’t as much tensions as there are now,” he said.
“We’ve always had some good black friends,” his wife added. “Very good.”
“Go to Charleston,” he told me, “talk to any of the blacks that was raised with me, and they’ll tell you I was anything but a racist.”
And I found that statement more disturbing than anything that Ray Tribble, or J.W. Kellum, or John Whitten had said to me. Because I believed him. I believed that Howard Armstrong was not a racist. I felt I had gotten to the point where I could spot