Counting on Time to Break a Silence

SUMNER, Miss. —  Almost as soon as the Emmett Till trial ended, the people involved began to scatter away from Tallahatchie County. Blacks and whites alike slipped gratefully into ordinary lives, keeping to themselves what they saw on the night he was murdered.

In the 49 years that have passed, the death of the 14-year-old black youth became a defining event in American civil rights history, the subject of ballads and poems. Talk at the time placed additional people -- as many as 10, including at least two black men and one white woman -- at or near the scene of the crime. But there has been no systematic inquiry into their involvement.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it was reopening the investigation into Till’s death, wagering that the passage of time would make it easier for people to say what they knew.

“People’s relationships change ... loyalties change,” said Alvin Sykes, an independent Kansas City, Kan., researcher who plans to assist in the inquiry. “Conscience, over the years, changes, as they get closer to their own mortality.... The demographics change. The structure of the system changes.”

Physically, the town of Sumner is not much changed from the summer of 1955. In the tiny towns of the north Mississippi Delta, residential streets end abruptly in flat plains of electric-green farmland, heavy with humidity, while crops rise in all directions like a living carpet. Whole panels of plaster have fallen from the ceiling in the county courthouse in which journalists from around the country crowded to scribble notes about race in the rural South.

Sumner’s whites did not support Till’s killers -- the families were ostracized after the two white men charged were acquitted. The intrusion of scornful outsiders, one resident said, seemed a more elemental threat.

“We protected our own,” said Cliff Chandler, 70, who is white. “We were clannish. I think in the end, we were protecting ourselves from the North.”

In recent years, however, a membrane has broken, releasing enough information to justify pursuing the investigation.

Nine years ago, a 24-year-old documentary filmmaker from Brooklyn began coaxing black residents to tell him what had happened. Keith Beauchamp gradually accumulated 80 hours of footage from witnesses, some so nervous that he filmed them in silhouette.

Beauchamp shared his footage with law enforcement authorities in an effort to persuade them to reopen the case.

“I was amazed, when I was there, on how I convinced some of these people to talk,” said Beauchamp, now 32. “They felt it wasn’t going to be any harm. They felt they could tell a story to a young man.”

Beauchamp’s film, “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till,” is scheduled to open within three weeks, he said.

Till’s death was wrapped in rumor from the beginning. The Chicago boy was visiting relatives in Money, Miss. One afternoon -- on a dare from his cousins -- he went into Roy Bryant’s grocery store, where he was alone with the shopkeeper’s young wife, Carolyn. She later alleged that the boy had spoken lewdly to her. When she stepped out onto the porch, his cousins heard him give a flirtatious-sounding whistle.

In the rural, segregated South, the act was so unthinkable that Chandler, who worked at a Chevrolet dealership several towns away, heard about the whistle through the grapevine the same day, he said.

“The mores of the South were such that a black man, when he met a white lady on the street, he got off the sidewalk,” he said.

Three days later, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, burst into Till’s grandfather’s house in the early-morning hours and took the boy from his bed. His body was later found by fishermen in the Tallahatchie River. When his mother decided to hold an open-casket funeral in Chicago, thousands flooded the streets to see his mutilated remains.

The trial was a sensation. Minnie Mitchell, then a 21-year-old black farm wife, recalled propping a radio on her porch and turning up the volume so she could listen to testimony while she was picking cotton. David Jordan, then a black 19-year-old college student, recalled walking down a residential street and hearing the same broadcast from every house’s windows.

Anger surged through young black men in the area that summer, said Jordan, now a Mississippi state senator. “We were ready to die,” he said. “We were angry young men. We talked about that. We thought of violence as a way of fighting back.”

In September, a jury of white males deliberated for about an hour before acquitting Bryant and Milam. Later, they confessed to killing Till, selling the story to Look magazine.

Both men have since died. But others, long rumored to have insight into the slaying, are still alive.

“I think if you were there, you’re probably a little bit nervous now,” said Stanley Nelson, a filmmaker whose documentary “The Murder of Emmett Till” aired on PBS last year. “This is the federal government looking at you. You don’t know what’s going to happen.”

The most pointed silence has come from Carolyn Bryant, who divorced her husband after the trial.

Bryant, who would be 70 years old, left Mississippi and is not known to have spoken publicly about the case. Cousins of Till’s, who were among the witnesses, said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that they remembered hearing a woman’s voice identify Till from inside Roy Bryant’s vehicle.

Carolyn Bryant could not be located for this article.

“I think now people want to know the truth before she dies,” Jordan said. “I don’t think anyone is going to hate anyone now. It would be more or less pity.”

Another long-silent player is Henry Lee Loggins, a black laborer who left Mississippi after the trial. Loggins, now 80, along with Leroy “Too Tight” Collins, worked for Milam and was alleged to have played some role in the killing. Collins died in 1993, according to historian David Beito of the University of Alabama.

Beauchamp said Loggins spoke extensively to him, giving a detailed description of the crime and its perpetrators. But when reached at his home in Ohio, Loggins told The Times that he had no knowledge of the crime. “I told him I don’t know nothing about it,” Loggins said. “I don’t go by hearsay. I wasn’t there.”

“I ain’t gonna be lying,” Loggins said. Till “was my race. I wouldn’t lie.”

If Collins and Loggins were involved, they were almost certainly unwilling participants, Jordan said. “If these two men were working for the perpetrators, then they at that time were doing what they were [told] to do,” he said. “They need to come forward and tell it.”

The renewed interest in the Till murder comes amid convictions in the South in recent years in connection with a number of civil-rights-era killings, including Bobby Frank Cherry’s conviction in a Birmingham, Ala., church bombing that killed four black girls more than 40 years ago.

There’s little question that there were more than two people involved in killing Till, said Christopher Metress, an associate professor of English at Samford University in Birmingham, who edited “The Lynching of Emmett Till,” a compilation of news reports and writings on the case.

Whether they are alive is another story. The Justice Department would not comment on possible prosecutions, saying the investigation was open.

“People have been keeping very good secrets for a very long time,” Metress said.

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Times staff writers Rennie Sloan and John Beckham contributed to this report.