Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [122]
The Emmett Till case seems so straightforward, and has become so iconic, that people often mistakenly believe they know the whole story. One thing you won’t hear in Eyes on the Prize, or just about anywhere else, is that it was extremely unusual that Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were even tried for murder in the first place. In fact, no one I’ve asked in Mississippi can recall another such trial happening before then. There were a great many lynchings before then, of course, most of them now long-forgotten, but despite the fact that many of them were public events—and there are plenty of pictures to document them—no white man had ever been tried in Mississippi for lynching a black man before September 1955. What’s more, the trial of Milam and Bryant was widely regarded, at the time, to have been eminently fair (unlike the verdict). This was a universal conclusion—even the black press, outraged though they were over the verdict, devoted a lot of ink to how hard the prosecutors worked for a conviction, and how fair the judge was in presiding over the trial, the latter going so far as to exclude the testimony of Carolyn Bryant, which, he determined, served no purpose other than to inflame the jurors’ racial prejudices. James L. Hicks, the legendary pioneer black journalist, was there in Sumner and wrote:
I had come here almost with a preconceived idea that I would jeer a mockery of justice from the first day of the trial. But, as the state spun its web around the two men in five days, I stayed up late and long each night, waiting and getting ready to cheer a state which I felt was coming over to the side of decency and fair play when the rest of the world was saying that it couldn’t be done.
And up to the very moment that the jury of white sharecroppers came out of the jury room to announce their verdict, I was inwardly cheering and rooting for the people of Mississippi as loud and long as I root for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
For in the five days’ conduct of the trial, Mississippi just didn’t follow the script written for her by the rest of the world.
After my article was published, I was contacted by the son of one of those prosecutors; he later shared with me a large cache of letters his late father had received during and after the trial. There were two basic types: the first from a black or white correspondent thanking him for his courageous stand in the name of justice; the seond from a white correspondent condemning him, often obscenely, for betraying his race.
As I said, I never imagined, in 1987, that I would someday have the opportunity to confront some of the men involved in the Emmett Till case, if for no other reason than that the whole affair seemed so bizarre and archaic and otherworldly that I just assumed everyone involved in it was long dead. They were not, though most are now. J.W. Kellum died at eighty-four, less than a year after I met him. Ray Tribble died of cancer in 1998, at the age of seventy-one; a senior center in Greenwood is now named for him. John W. Whitten, Jr., succumbed to Parkinson’s in 2003, a week shy of his eighty-fourth birthday. Three years earlier, he and his wife gave a million dollars to their alma mater, Ole Miss, to build a new student golf center. Howard Armstrong died of heart failure on August 25, 2003; he was eighty-four years old. The road that leads to the cemetery where he is buried is named for him.
Roy Bryant died of cancer in 1994 at the age of sixty-three. So did his half brother, J.W. Milam, at the age of sixty in 1981. I am told that Milam’s cancer was spinal, and particularly painful. The hotel in Sumner where the jurors were sequestered