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What happened to the key figures in the Emmett Till case?
Devery Anderson is the author of "Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement." He shares five enduring myths about the Till case. Wochit
Although the Emmett Till case is considered by many as the catalyst for the civil rights movement, after Look magazine published the account of the kidnapping and murder as given by J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, the case fell from the news and the players in the saga all fell out of the spotlight. What happened to the key figures in the case in the years after they were momentarily thrust into the spotlight in the summer of 1955?
The only one to emerge publicly at the national level was Mamie Bradley, but it did not happen for 30 years. Things began settling down for her a few months after the murder trial when her speaking engagements ended, yet she never returned to the job he held at the Air Force office in Chicago. Instead, she enrolled at Chicago Teachers College in the fall of 1956 and graduated cum laude three and a half years later. She earned her degree in January 1960 and began teaching, first at Carter Elementary and later at Scanlon School. She retired in 1983 after a total of 23 years with Chicago’s public schools.
On June 24, 1957, after dating three years, 35-year-old Mamie Bradley married Gene Mobley, a union that lasted 43 years, ending only with Gene’s death in 2000. Bradley, who became known as Mamie Till-Mobley, never bore another child but helped nurture Gene’s two daughters after their mother moved from Chicago.
In the mid-1960s, Mobley’s mother, Alma Spearman, formed the Emmett Till Foundation, the goals of which were to build Christian character and a sense of citizenship in young people. It held its first annual banquet in Chicago in July 1966. The nonprofit organization eventually began a long tradition of awarding scholarships to deserving youth annually on July 25 — Emmett’s birthday.
Till-Mobley created an additional way of keeping her son’s memory alive by establishing a performing group in 1973, the Emmett Till Players, made up of children who memorized and recited the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Over the years they performed at schools and churches, and a decade after its founding, Till-Mobley estimated that over 200 children had been part of the troupe. In 1984, the Emmett Till Players even performed in Mississippi.
In 1975 Till-Mobley earned a master’s degree in administration and supervision from Loyola University, with an additional 45 credits toward a doctorate.
She began speaking nationally about her son after 1985. Although widowed in 2000, Mamie’s life remained eventful for the next three years as she continued her activities with the Emmett Till Foundation. She also traveled and spoke, despite the heart and kidney problems she had long battled. In fact, it was on January 6, 2003, the eve of a planned departure for a speaking event in Atlanta, that she suffered a heart attack. She died that afternoon at Jackson Park Hospital. She was 81 years old. Her memoir, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America, was published posthumously later that year.
Moses Wright, the star witness of the trial, moved to Argo Summit, Illinois, just days after the trial, too afraid to continue life in the Mississippi Delta. For most of the 22 years that followed, he lived quietly, outside of the public eye, although he traveled the West for the NAACP speaking during the month of November 1955. A year after the trial he reported that he was working odd jobs and had even gained 13 pounds since moving to the North. “I used to think I couldn’t live without seeing cotton stalks. Man, I ain’t seen cotton in a year, and I’m still living,” he told a reporter. The former preacher had already come to see the impact of the Till case for the fledgling Civil Rights Movement, and stated, almost prophetically, “What happened down there last year is going to help us all.”
Wright eventually found work as a custodian at a nightclub and later as a dishwasher at a local restaurant, working alongside a grandson. Adjusting to the big city after spending a lifetime in the rural Mississippi Delta was not easy. Wright, who left his car behind in Mississippi, never drove again after his move to Argo, but with the proximity of stores and schools, and the availability of public transportation, he didn’t need to. He gave up fishing after leaving the South, but the railroad let him use a little patch of land on which to grow a garden, which he kept up until he was 79. “That was his joy,” recalled his son, Simeon.
In 1970, Moses’s wife, Elizabeth, died, and over the next seven years, his health declined. He eventually had prostate surgery which affected the strength in his legs. Living alone, he did the best he could but in time his eyesight began to wane, and other health problems made it difficult for him to keep up his one-bedroom apartment. One time while home alone he lost his balance and fell. He remained on the floor for a day until his grandson, who had a key to the door, came to check on him. His family eventually placed him in the White Oak Nursing Home in Indian Head Park. He died on Aug. 3, 1977. The photo of Wright standing and pointing at two accused killers in Sumner remains a testament to bravery in a Mississippi courtroom.
Prosecution witness Willie Reed, whose testimony placed the murder in Sunflower County and was the source that other men besides J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant were involved in the murder, knew Emmett Till only in death but remained haunted for decades by the beating sounds he heard emanating from a plantation shed on an August morning. “That’s something you never put out of your mind. I remember it like it happened yesterday,” he said in 2007.
After speaking at a few rallies following his late-night move to Chicago on the day the jury issued its verdict, Reed dropped out of sight. He had no contact with any of the other witnesses or Till family members for decades, despite living in Chicago and remaining in close proximity to many of them. He reemerged for interviews in 1999.
In Chicago, Reed obtained a new identity, or more accurately, reclaimed his old one. From the time he was 7 months old until he left Mississippi, he lived with his grandfather, Add Reed, and assumed Add’s surname. In Chicago, when Willie obtained a copy of his birth certificate in order to secure a Social Security number, he discovered that his last name was actually Louis, after his father, Joseph Louis. He went by his legal name of Willie Louis from then on, further obscuring his association with the Till case. In fact, most of his friends only learned of his role as a witness after seeing him on television in 2003. After the trial he was offered a $1,000 scholarship from the Elks Club should he have chosen to attend college, but he never took advantage of that. “I just didn’t want to do it,” he later said with regret.
Around 1959, he began working as a surgical orderly at Chicago’s Jackson Park Hospital and remained there for 47 years before retiring in 2006. While working in the intensive care unit in 1971, he met Juliet Mendenhall, then a nurse’s aide. They married in 1976 and made their home in the Englewood area. Willie, who suffered from nightmares for several years into their marriage, did not even tell his wife about his role in the Till case until 1983. His 2001 interview for the documentary, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, reunited him with Mamie Till-Mobley, whom he had not seen in 46 years. After several years of declining health, Willie Louis died of gastronomical bleeding in July 2013 at age 76.
Levi “Too Tight” Collins, one of the black field hands forced to participate in the kidnapping and murder, never got his life back on track after the case faded from the news. Following the trial, he worked odd jobs in Jackson and Memphis but disappeared again in 1957. Some said he feared revenge from local whites who worried that he might talk or by blacks angry because he hadn’t. “I’m plumb worried about the boy,” his 46-year-old father, Walter Collins, said at the time. “We used to be close. He’d come over to my place almost daily and we’d chat. Now I haven’t seen him but once in three years.”
In November 1957, Collin’s wife Treola and their four children arrived in Seattle at the invitation of Treola’s sister, who borrowed $246 from her minister and sent train tickets by way of the Memphis railroad station. “We had to slip off the plantation to catch the train, but we didn’t give our right names,” Treola explained. “We only had the clothing on our backs. I used an old bed spread for diapers on my 6-months-old baby. We had one loaf of bread and one can of peaches to eat.”
Levi surfaced long enough for the couple to divorce, because Treola eventually remarried in 1960. Levi never resumed a relationship with his children, all of whom Treola’s second husband adopted. Treola managed to create a new life for herself in Seattle, where she bore five more children. Levi was not so lucky. Family members heard enough to know that the case completely destroyed him. He became an alcoholic and schizophrenic, hearing voices and hallucinating. He died in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1992.
Henry Lee Loggins was another black man whose name has been tied to the case as an unwilling accomplice. After spending six months in jail in 1956 for theft of some iron belonging to J.W. Milam, he left Mississippi. At first, he moved to St. Louis, where he had lived a few years earlier, but then moved to Dayton, Ohio, in 1957. He did not surface publicly until July 2001 when historians David and Linda Beito found him and interviewed him over the telephone. For years he made a living in Dayton as a junkman. He later appeared in Untold Story and on a 60 Minutes segment about the case, where he denied any knowledge of, or involvement in, the Till murder. In 2005, Loggins became incapacitated after suffering a stroke but spent time in a nursing home and later at his daughter’s home recovering. He died in Dayton in October 2009. Since 1982, his stepson Johnny B. Thomas has been mayor of the village of Glendora, Mississippi, former home to both Loggins and J. W. Milam.
District Attorney Gerald Chatham, whose impassioned closing arguments in the case captivated everyone present, passed away only one year after his attempt to convict the two half-brothers. Because of notoriety in the Till case, the death of this otherwise unknown country lawyer was noted in the New York Times. Ill health had forced his retirement in January 1956. He suffered not only from high blood pressure but from nose bleeds so severe that he was often admitted to the hospital, where doctors had to pack his head in ice to stop them.
Chatham returned to private practice in Hernando, Mississippi, but on Oct. 9, 1956, he came home after speaking at an event, took a nap, and later that evening died of a massive heart attack.
Hamilton Caldwell, the elected attorney for Tallahatchie County who served on the prosecution team, lived for seven years after the trial. He was out of office and serving as vice president of the Bank of Charleston when he drowned in Enid Lake on Sept. 3, 1962. He had been fishing alone in his boat and for reasons unknown, fell overboard as he headed back to shore. He was 64.
Robert Smith, the special prosecutor sent by the governor’s office to aid Chatham in the state’s case against Milam and Bryant, went back to his law practice in Ripley after the trial. He rarely talked about the case. “I’ve come to understand that not a lot of people in those days would have taken that case,” said son Fred in 2003. “I know now it took a lot of courage.” Bobby Elliot, a former law partner of Smith’s, remembered how surprised people were that Smith agreed to do it. “That wasn’t the popular thing to do back then.”
On Dec. 4, 1967, he was at work in Chancery Court and appeared fine. Yet privately, he was masking unbearable pain and went home later that morning and shot himself. Although he did not allude to his father’s suicide, Smith’s son, Bruce, explained in 2005 that his father had been battling alcoholism. “He had a sad life in a way, in his later years.” Smith’s obituary noted that he had helped with “important criminal cases” in his career, but it failed to mention the Till trial in particular.
The five defense attorneys who represented Milam and Bryant remained in Sumner. Sidney Carlton, former president of the Mississippi State Bar Association, died first in 1966 at age 50 after suffering a heart attack. Eighty-year-old Jesse J. Breland, the oldest member of the team, died one year later at Washington County General Hospital in Greenville after a long illness.
J.W. Kellum was one of three members of the defense team who lived for at least four decades after the trial and witnessed Mississippi’s transformation to an integrated society. In 1979, he sat for an interview, alongside civil rights activist Amzie Moore, for the PBS series, Eyes on the Prize. “As far as a fair trial is concerned,” Kellum said, there was no proof that his clients “were the criminal agent.” Had there been a conviction, he believed the Supreme Court would have overturned it. Kellum said this during a new era, however, and he noted with pride that blacks then served on juries, and that more were practicing law. “I would say that Mississippi now is part of the New South.”
Kellum, a self-taught lawyer who never attended college, passed the state bar exam in 1939 and practiced law until his death in July 1996. The year before he died, Kellum insisted that for him, the Till affair was “just another case over the desk.” He said that he asked Milam and Bryant early on if they were guilty of the murder, and both denied that they were. “I believed them,” he insisted, “just like I would if I was interrogating a client now. I would have no reason to think he’s lying to me.” Forty years after representing them, he claimed he still believed in their innocence. “I would have to see something ... But they told me they did not [commit the murder]. They told the other lawyers that they did not.”
After his wife Ruth died in 1992, Kellum remarried. He died four years later.
John Whitten also practiced law until the end of his life. Betty Pearson, a Sumner resident angered by the acquittal, refused to speak to Whitten for over six months after the trial. Yet in 2006, she remembered him as “a wonderful man,” one whom she remained close to for the rest of his life.
At Breland’s request, Whitten maintained the firm’s name as Breland and Whitten after his partner’s death. The firm continues to this day, still housed in the same office where Milam and Bryant talked to reporter William Bradford Huie.
Toward the end of his life, Whitten worked in his law office occasionally, but by then his son John Whitten III did the bulk of the firm’s legal work. He had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease since the late 1980s and died in February 2003.
The last surviving member of the defense team was Harvey Henderson, who continued to practice law, albeit part time, up until his death in October 2007. He was active in his local community, was a lifelong member of the Sumner Rotary Club and had also served as its president. The West Tallahatchie School District retained him as its attorney for over 50 years, and he also served as the legal counsel for Mississippi’s first chapter of Habitat for Humanity, which was formed in Tallahatchie County. He refused all requests for interviews about the Till case.
Judge Curtis Swango, who impressed spectators with his fairness during the trial, remained on the bench of Mississippi’s 17th judicial district for the next 13 years. In 1968, a respiratory condition sent him to the hospital, followed by several months of treatment for tuberculosis at the Mississippi State Sanatorium in Simpson County. He died there in December 1968. Divorced and without children, at his death, he was survived only by his mother and a brother. “He was widely praised for his conduct of the Emmett Till murder case in Tallahatchie County,” noted his obituary, “and was recognized as one of the foremost trial judges in the state.”
The two sheriffs in the case remained active in the years after the kidnapping and murder, although each was completing his term at the time. Former Leflore County Sheriff George Smith, who arrested Milam and Bryant on kidnapping charges, wanted to forget all about his role by the time a reporter asked him about it two years later. “I hate to even mention the case, it was the only thing to mar my four years in office,” he said. “Don’t quote me on anything. I don’t want my name ever printed again in connection with the people involved in this case.”
Smith later served a second term as sheriff from 1964 until 1968. This time, he succeeded his former deputy, John Ed Cothran, who had helped with the kidnapping investigation and served as a witness for the prosecution.
Smith, an avid outdoorsman, was a member of the Parker-Gary Hunting Club and was planning a busy season when he died unexpectedly in 1975 at the age of 72.
Former Tallahatchie sheriff Henry Clarence Strider, who aided the defense at the trial and claimed the body retrieved from the river was not that of Emmett Till, planned to run for the office again in 1959 after sitting out the required minimum of one term, but he changed his mind at the urging of his wife after he barely escaped an assassination attempt in 1957. While he sat in his car outside of a store in the town of Cowart, someone fired a shot at his head, missing him, but striking the metal piece between the window and windshield. Strider claimed that the shooter had been sent down from Chicago by the NAACP for the express purpose of killing him, and that the would-be assassin was known to black workers living on Strider’s plantation. Strider also maintained that the governor of Illinois refused to extradite the mysterious gunman back to Mississippi for trial, thus the entire matter was dropped. Still fearing for his life in 1963, Strider declined to run for his former job yet again.
By 1962, Strider was chairman of the State Game and Fish Commission. In February of that year, state officials tried to keep black student James Meredith from registering at Old Miss, and the defiance of the governor, Ross Barnett, made national news. Strider, ever the segregationist, announced during the conflict that 250 supervisors and game wardens were ready to aid Ole Miss in preserving its white-only student body should they be needed.
In February 1965, Strider won a special election to the state Senate, where he represented Grenada, Yalobusha and Tallahatchie counties for the next five years. In addition to his role with the Game and Fish Commission, he was a member of the Public Property, Transportation, and Water and Irrigation committees, and chairman of the Penitentiaries Committee.
In July 1968, Strider admitted on the floor of the state Senate that he had paid for votes during his 1951 campaign for Tallahatchie County sheriff. He disclosed this as the Senate debated a bill that provided for absentee voting for teachers and students. “In those days you didn’t win elections, you bought them,” he told his colleagues. He said that he paid out a total of $30,000 for blank absentee ballots reserved for people who had indicated they would not be present on Election Day.
Although he is remembered for regularly insulting the black press in the hot, crowded courtroom in Sumner, his election to the Senate after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 forced him to deal with a black constituency who finally had the power of the ballot. Yet Strider would have been happy to rid the Delta of its black citizens. In February 1966, he co-sponsored a bill to relocate Mississippi blacks to other states, as a new farm bill was making it harder for laborers to earn a living. A proposed relocation commission would seek federal funds for the removal of those who wanted to go. “If they (Negro farm workers) feel like they are put upon or have to live in tents and opportunities are brighter somewhere else, we’ll be glad to get them there,” said Strider’s co-sponsor, Sen. Robert Crook of Ruleville. Nothing ever came of the proposal, however.
Like Sheriff Smith, Strider was a hunter. On Dec. 27, 1970, Strider died of a heart attack while on a deer hunt in Issaquena County; his body was shortly discovered by others. Gov. John Bell Williams flew to Clarksdale to attend the funeral. In 1981, a portion of Mississippi 32 was designated as the Henry Clarence Strider Memorial Highway.
A year after the murder trial, co-defendant J.W. Milam was living on a farm between Ruleville and Cleveland. Several months after that, William Bradford Huie interviewed the brothers for a follow-up article to his “confession” piece from a year before. It, too, appeared in Look magazine. In the accompanying photographs, both men appear happy, but it was obvious that the smiles were only a façade. Huie described them as having “been disappointed,” explaining further that, “They have suffered disillusionment, ingratitude, resentment, misfortune,” but as yet, no guilt. Few had pity on them, even those who had earlier been supportive. Milam owned no land and could not get his former backers to rent to him. He was finally able to rent 217 acres in Sunflower County with the help of his brother-in-law and secured a $4,000 furnish (the funds to plant a cotton crop) from a Tallahatchie County bank where one of his defense attorneys, John Whitten, sat on the loan committee. Blacks would no longer work for Milam, and he was forced to pay higher wages to whites for the same work.
For three years after the trial, Milam held several menial plantation jobs. In 1958 he was living in a tenant house on a plantation owned by a Citizen’s Council member. On Valentine’s Day, the New York Post reported that Milam had been seen standing in a bread line waiting to receive rations from the Welfare Department. The black Pittsburgh Courier picked up on the story, also. The director of the Washington County welfare department would not confirm or deny the Post report, but Milam adamantly declared it false. Despite admitting to hard times a year earlier when talking to Huie, Milam bluntly told an inquiring reporter for Jet magazine, “Quote me as saying the New York Post is a g----d liar. I’m standing here with’a ass-pocket full of money.”
The Milams later moved to Orange, Texas, but returned to Greenville after only a few years. They would make their home at 615 Purcell St., where J.W. would live out the rest of his life. The house was a converted into African American Methodist Church in Greenville’s black section.
Milam would have a few run-ins with the law while living in Greenville. In 1969 he was convicted in City Court for writing a bad check and fined $55. Three years later the same court fined him $300 and sentenced him to 60 days in jail for using a stolen credit card. Four months after that, he was convicted of assault and battery, fined $30, and sentenced to 10 days in jail.
By the time the Milams returned to Mississippi a decade after the Till trial, the outrage over the murder had subsided, and they were able to live quietly, for the most part. Milam eventually found work as a heavy equipment operator but that ended due to declining health. After a very long and painful illness, he succumbed to cancer on New Year’s Eve, 1980 at age 61. He and his wife Juanita were rumored to have divorced at some point, but this was not true.
Because J.W. never held a permanent job, Juanita began working as a hairdresser at the Greenville Beauty Salon in the 1960s, where she remained until owner Thelma Wood retired and closed the shop around 1990.
Although she enjoyed a long and steady career, Juanita’s life was never the same after the murder of Emmett Till, and she appeared genuinely sad most of the time. Her depression had not been a part of her life prior to the notorious lynching that thrust her family into the spotlight. Despite her personal suffering, she was generous with her family and friends and managed to maintain many of her life-long interests. She was an avid reader and football fan. An active Methodist, she bought a keyboard and learned to play a few hymns to help her congregation enjoy the benefit of music.
Juanita never remarried after J.W.’s death, nor did she allow herself any further romance. She later sold her home on Purcell Street and eventually moved to Ocean Springs, Mississippi. After J.W.’s death, Juanita became estranged from Roy and Carolyn Bryant, and they never spoke again. Juanita and Carolyn saw each other, but did not speak, at the funeral of Milam and Bryant sibling Dan Milam, who died in 1999. Juanita stormed out of the service after Milam and Bryant family members became involved in a confrontation over blame in Emmett Till’s death.
Juanita, who was politically liberal, maintained interracial friendships, and her best friend for many years was a black neighbor woman. Juanita suffered a stroke in 2008, and in October of that year, her oldest son, Horace “Bill” Milam, died at age 57. After several years of declining health, Juanita died in Ocean Springs on Jan. 14, 2014, at age 86.
Roy Bryant’s life, like that of his brother J.W.’s, was filled with hardship. After a black boycott forced the closure of his store three weeks after his release from jail, the family moved to Indianola, in Sunflower County. There, Roy reportedly found work as a mechanic. After laboring at odd jobs for 75 cents a day, he attended welding school nine miles away in Inverness, at the Bell Machine Shop. In 1985 Bryant reported to the Clarion Ledger that his welding made him legally blind. He suffered from optic nerve degeneration in both eyes, and his left eye was further damaged after a small piece of steel became lodged in it.
Bryant had other ambitions before settling on welding school. In May 1956, the Delta Democrat-Times, responding to rumors that Bryant had become an Indianola policeman, learned that he had sought a job with the local force, but was turned away. “He applied with us,” confirmed Indianola police chief, Will Love, “but he does not work here.”
Six months later on Nov. 19, Roy and Carolyn Bryant were riding as passengers in a car driven by Carolyn’s 18-year-old brother, James Holloway, in Greenville, when they were involved in a head-on collision at about 1:45 a.m. The second vehicle was driven by a black airman who was stationed at the Greenville Air Force Base. All three were treated for minor injuries at Greenville’s General Hospital and released. The four-paragraph article in the Delta Democrat–Times reporting the accident mentioned nothing of the Bryants’ notoriety in the Till case, although the Chicago Defender shortly learned of the story and reported that fact. That same day, perhaps for reasons brought on by the accident, Carolyn gave birth to her third son, Frankie Lee.
By the fall of 1957, Roy was working as a welder in Morgan City, Louisiana. The Bryants shortly moved to Orange, Texas, where a daughter was born two years later. Because Carolyn had been sick with the measles during her pregnancy, her daughter was born deaf. Sometime later, the family relocated to Vinton, Louisiana, just thirteen miles away, where Roy continued to weld for a steel company. They bought a home there and lived in Vinton until returning to Mississippi in 1973.
When Roy, Carolyn, and the two youngest children left Louisiana in 1973 and returned to Mississippi, they relocated to Ruleville, in Sunflower County. Roy went back into the grocery business by taking over a small store that had been run by family members.
At some point, Roy and Carolyn Bryant’s marriage developed serious problems, and it became unbearable for Carolyn. Even her mother-in-law, Eula Bryant, saw it. Eula, whom Carolyn described as tough and outspoken, asked Carolyn in front of Roy many times why she stayed married to him. Eula died in August 1974. A year later on Aug. 15, Carolyn left Roy and two months after that, filed for divorce. Their divorce papers describe Roy as having been guilty of “habitual cruel and inhuman treatment of her and of habitual drunkenness.” Perhaps Roy’s demons had concerned his mother because she had once endured similar abuses from her second husband, Henry Bryant. Carolyn asked for sole custody of their daughter, the complaint read, because “said child needs the care and guidance which only a devoted mother can give.” Roy failed to dispute any of the allegations. When the divorce was finalized two months later on Oct. 28, 1975, sole custody went to Carolyn. Roy was granted visitation and ordered to pay $75 per month in child support beginning Nov. 1. A lump sum of $6,300 for alimony was due by Dec. 1.
After their return to Mississippi, the Bryants managed to continue a low-profile existence, despite living in close proximity to the land of the Till murder. In fact, in 1977, both Roy and his brother, James Bryant, were listed as two of five challengers to Ruleville’s incumbent aldermen. In the end, the brothers lost, each receiving the least number of votes of all the candidates. James garnered 53 while Roy received only 45. The winners received between 270 and 530 votes. Roy married Vera Jo Orman, an accountant at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, in May 1980. They remained in Ruleville.
In 1978, Roy Bryant lost his permit to handle food stamps for one year because he was allowing customers to purchase non-food items with their coupons. In 1982, the Inspector General’s office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture learned that Bryant had been purchasing food stamps at a discount for cash and then selling them back to the government at full value. In October 1983, Bryant was indicted on five counts of food stamp fraud, pleaded not guilty and was scheduled for a December trial. On Dec. 7, however, Bryant changed his plea to guilty on two counts in exchange for the government dropping the rest. Bryant returned to court for sentencing two months later, and through the pleadings of his attorney, he was given only three years probation and ordered to pay a $750 fine. Bryant had retained state senator Robert L. Crook of Ruleville as his counsel. Crook told the court that 53-year-old Bryant “is a good citizen of Ruleville, who is disabled and has been in very poor health a number of years, who has attempted to work despite that circumstance, and to be gainfully employed in the course of running his own store.” He was caring for both his wife and disabled sister and was an honorably discharged veteran of the Army. As to the charges against him, however, “He knows he has made a mistake.”
Bryant promised to obey the law respecting food stamp regulations going forward but found himself unable to resist the temptation to repeat the same violations only a few years later. In February 1987, he was again caught purchasing food stamps at a cash discount, and this time, his sister, Mary Louise Campbell, who worked as a cashier at the store, was indicted along with him the following September as a co-conspirator on six counts of food stamp fraud. Bail was set for Bryant at $10,000, and for Campbell at $5,000. Campbell pleaded guilty to count four on Nov. 23, and Bryant pleaded guilty on counts five and six. Campbell did not receive any prison time, but Bryant, having been convicted four years earlier for the same crime, received a two-year prison sentence and was ordered to turn himself in to the attorney general on April 4, 1988. Before leaving office in 2001, President Bill Clinton pardoned Campbell. Bryant served eight months of his term.
Bryant attended the first town meeting of the administration of Shirley Edwards, the town’s first black mayor, and complained of burglaries at his fireworks store and poor performance by police in stopping it. Reminiscent of his actions in his most famous dirty deed, Bryant had no trouble taking the law into his own hands and threatened to do so. “If I catch one out there this big [raising his hands two and a half feet off the floor], I’m going to twist his damn head off.” Edwards did not hesitate in telling a reporter that “Bryant is a vicious man … If my people did not deal or trade with him, he couldn’t stay here.”
Bryant began battling cancer and diabetes. Beginning around September 1993, he underwent radiation treatments for the next year and lost 35 pounds. Two months before his death, he spoke for two hours to a reporter for the Palm Beach Post but refused to say much about the Till case. He again denied that he had anything to do with the murder and matter-of-factly said, “I have no idea” who killed the Chicago youth when the reporter asked. Bryant believed that his acquittal in the Till case meant that people should leave that past alone. The case that brought him worldwide notoriety in 1955 was to him, “just something in the past. You have to leave it alone, live your life. You can’t just sit around and cry over spilt milk.” His frustration was caused in part by the occasional threats he received by crank callers. “They say: ‘We don’t like what you did a few years ago. We’re comin’ over to get you.’ I say, ‘Well, bring your g----d ass on over—what’s taking you so long?”
Bryant died of cancer on Sept. 1, 1994, at the Baptist Hospital in Jackson. When Vera Jo Bryant died in May 2012, her obituary mentioned nothing about her marriage to Roy, and only listed her parents and a brother as family members who had preceded her in death. She was, however, buried next to her infamous husband whom she was married to for 14 years.
Within a few months of the murder, another brother, Leslie Milam, who ran the plantation on which Emmett Till was murdered, was “requested” to leave because many of the black laborers working there were leaving the farm out of fear. He shortly found a new job on a plantation in the nearby town of Cleveland. Fifteen years later in February 1971, he was arrested, and four months after that, convicted of illegally possessing over 500 methamphetamine pills, popularly known as speed. He was sentenced to one year at Parchman state prison. His defense attorney was J.W. Kellum.
Although never charged or tried, the biggest burden he carried throughout his life was his involvement in the Emmett Till murder. On Thursday, Aug.t 29, 1974, local minister Macklyn Hubble received a call from Leslie’s wife, Frances. Hubble, who had been pastor of the First Baptist Church in Cleveland, Mississippi, since 1962, knew the family, and Frances asked him to come to the Milam home at Leslie’s request. When he arrived he was ushered into a room where he saw Leslie laying on a couch, near death. Frances left the room and Hubble pulled up a chair. Leslie, so weak that he could barely whisper, was nevertheless anxious to talk and immediately told Hubble that he wanted to get something off his chest. He proceeded to confess that he had been involved in the murder of Emmett Till, which had occurred 19 years and one day earlier. Leslie provided no details of the crime, but Hubble could see that he was remorseful. Leslie Milam died the following morning. Hubble officiated at the funeral a few days later.
Carolyn Bryant is perhaps frozen in memory as the 21-year-old local beauty working behind a counter in a country store where Emmett Till fatefully crossed her path in 1955. She turned 84 years old in July 2018 and has, for decades, been a devoted mother and grandmother and enjoys a close relationship with her family. Carolyn, for her part, has wanted only to live quietly, out of the spotlight.
She learned American Sign Language and became very proficient at it so that she could communicate with her daughter. On one occasion, her skills allowed her to come to the rescue of a deaf woman who had been in a car accident, comforting her until paramedics arrived. She also was quite talented at making jewelry, which she sold at arts and craft shows until the early 2000s.
Like Mamie Till-Mobley, Carolyn experienced the pain of losing a child, or in her case, two. In September 1995, her firstborn, Roy Bryant Jr., passed away of cystic fibrosis. In April 2010, Frank, her youngest son, died of heart failure. Her faith in God sustained her through these two losses, and she believes her sons are now together. She says she places God first and her children second in her life.
Two months after Frank’s death, Carolyn put her home in Greenville up for sale and moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, to live with her surviving son. She brought along her dog, a 16-year-old Shih Tzu, but by July 2012, the dog had died, but her son surprised Carolyn with another of the same breed.
Lasting romantic love eluded Carolyn, however. After her divorce from Roy Bryant in 1975, she remarried at least twice. In 1984 she wed Greenville resident Griffin Chandler, an employee at U.S. Gypsum. The marriage ended three and a half years later with Chandler’s death. The widowed Carolyn soon married again, this time to former Leland police officer David Donham. In 1988, Carolyn began attending Mississippi Delta Junior College in Moorhead and took classes as a part-time student until 1990. The Donhams eventually divorced. With the help of her brother, Thomas Holloway, Carolyn moved to Brookhaven into a small home after her divorce, where she lived until Thomas died in 2000. After that, she returned to Greenville to be near Frank.
In June 2010, Carolyn joined Facebook, establishing a profile with a username that kept her actual identity hidden. Five months later, she both posed and answered the question as to what constitutes the real qualities in a man. Her answer was that they must be ethical and stand up for a good cause. If this seemed to hint of her first husband’s attempt to preserve the sanctity of her white womanhood, which propelled both her and him into the public eye, she was quick to add that a real man will respect others and refrain from bullying.
With the encouragement of her daughter-in-law, Marsha Bryant, Carolyn agreed to write her memoir. However, Frank Bryant’s death took a toll on her and the project stalled. When the FBI investigated the case from 2004–5, Carolyn became a focus. In February 2007, Joyce Chiles, district attorney for Sunflower County where the murder occurred, called a grand jury to hear evidence against Carolyn for possible manslaughter charges. In the end, the racially mixed jury refused to indict, citing a lack of evidence. “I feel like the district attorney used us as scapegoats,” said black jury member Otis Johnson. “To me, it seems like they just wanted to put on a show and go through the process to make people happy.”
A year later, Marsha Bryant arranged for Carolyn to meet with historian Tim Tyson, and, for the only time besides speaking to the FBI a few years earlier, Carolyn granted two recorded interviews. It was during these sessions that she allegedly recanted her courtroom testimony that Emmett Till grabbed her by the waist and propositioned her. “Honestly, I just don’t remember. It was fifty years ago,” Tyson says she told him before he set up his recorder. “You tell these stories for so long that they seem true, but that part is not true.” Marsha Bryant, however, says she was present for the interviews and that Carolyn never said these words or otherwise recanted. Carolyn suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, is losing her eyesight, and mostly relies on a wheelchair. She has said privately that the Emmett Till case has kept her a prisoner.
Devery S. Anderson is the author of Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement. This article is a condensed and updated version of Chapter 10 of the book.