But Emmett Till means her no harm. He is in the habit of substituting whistling for words when his stutter sets in, as he does now, whistling at Bryant. Carolyn Bryant is shocked again. And so are the black teenagers watching the scene unfold. They “knew the whistle would cause trouble,” the official FBI report will read. “And they left in haste, taking Till with them.”
When Roy Bryant returns home and hears what happened, he wastes no time in conducting his own personal criminal investigation. On August 28, at 2:30 A.M., he bangs on the door at the home of Emmett’s great-uncle, Moses Wright. Roy is accompanied by his friend, J. W. “Big” Milam.
Big Milam is twelve years older than Roy Bryant. He is a hulking, extroverted Mississippian who quit school after the ninth grade and fought the Germans in World War II. Each man carries a Colt .45 handgun—a revolver for Bryant and an automatic for Milam. The men force Moses to take them to “the nigger who did the talking.”
A frightened Moses leads the two men into a small back bedroom, where Emmett and three cousins share a bed. Big Milam shines a flashlight in the boy’s face. “You the nigger who did the talking?”
“Yeah,” comes the response.
“Don’t say yeah to me. I’ll blow your head off. Get your clothes on.”
Moses and his wife beg for the two men to reconsider, even offering them money to let the whole thing slide, but Roy and Big won’t listen. They march Emmett out to Big’s pickup truck and drive off into the night.
Their plan is to take Emmett to a cliff along the Tallahatchie River, where they will pistol-whip the youth and scare him by pretending that they’re going to throw him over the side. But in the dark, Big can’t find the spot. After three hours of driving, Big drives the pickup to his own house, where he has a two-room toolshed in his backyard. They bring Emmett inside and pistol-whip him, each man smashing his face hard with his gun. But instead of backing down, Emmett is defiant. “You bastards. I’m not afraid of you. I’m as good as you are,” he tells them, his face badly bruised but not bleeding.
This sets Big Milam into a rage. “I’m no bully,” Milam will explain to
But apparently, Emmett doesn’t know his place, because he continues to tell his captors that he is their equal, and even brags about having sex with white women. This belief in the equality of blacks and whites, something that Emmett finds relatively common in integrated Chicago, infuriates Milam and Bryant. “I stood there in that shed and listened to that nigger throw that poison at me,” Milam will remember. “And I just made up my mind. ‘Chicago boy,’ I said, ‘I’m tired of ’em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I’m going to make an example of you—just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.’”
Big and Roy are no longer interested in just scaring Emmett. Now they want to murder him.
Big remembers that a nearby cotton company has just changed the fan on one of their gins. The replaced part is perfect for what Big now has in mind. The fan is enormous—three feet across and weighing seventy-five pounds. They drive to the Progressive Ginning Company, steal the discarded fan, and continue on to a hidden spot along the Tallahatchie where Big likes to hunt squirrels. They force Emmett to carry the fan to the river’s edge, then they force him to strip.
“You still as good as I am?” Big asks.
“Yeah.” Even standing naked before men two decades older than he, Emmett Till finds a way to be courageous. Blood streams down his face, and his cheekbones are broken. One of his eyes has been gouged out.
“You still ‘had’ white women?”
“Yeah.”
Big raises his .45 and shoots Emmett point-blank in the head. The bullet makes a small hole as it enters near the right ear and kills the fourteen-year-old in an instant. Big and Roy then run a strand of barbwire around Emmett’s neck and attach it to the fan. They roll his body, anchored by the giant hunk of metal, into the river, and then drive home to wash out the blood that’s pooling in the back of the pickup.
Despite the heavy fan tied around his neck, Emmett’s body drifts with the current. Three days later, fishermen find his bloated corpse bobbing in the water some eight miles downstream. His head is almost flattened from the pistol blows.
When Emmett’s body is returned to Chicago, his mother insists on an open casket at the funeral, so that the whole world can see the crime perpetrated against her son. Pictures of Emmett Till’s battered and flattened head are published in magazines nationwide. Tens of thousands attend the viewing, and public outrage about the murder spreads across the country.
But not in Mississippi. Though police later arrest Roy Bryant and Big Milam, both men are acquitted of the crime by a jury of their peers (whites) three months later. Taking advantage of the judicial concept of double jeopardy, which does not allow an individual to be tried twice for the same crime, the two men later boast to a
Until 1962 JFK was not eager to lead the fight for civil rights, knowing that taking a pro-black position could hurt him within the Democratic Party. In fact, the president’s record on race issues was middling at best when he was in the Senate. Since the landmark 1954
But beginning with his May 1961 Law Day address at the University of Georgia Law School, Bobby Kennedy made it plain he would use his Justice Department as a bully pulpit to enforce civil rights throughout America, particularly in the Deep South. He is taking up an exhausting, never-ending battle, one that originated on the day the first African slaves were brought to America in 1619. The Kennedy brothers do so with the knowledge that this intense fight will gain them a whole new group of very dangerous enemies.
Bobby Kennedy was instrumental in helping civil rights activists known as Freedom Riders travel by bus into the South to fight segregation in 1961. The Greyhound Company, fearing its buses might be vandalized, had initially denied the northern activists passage. Kennedy pressured Greyhound, and the company relented.
But RFK could not stop what happened next. As soon as the activists tried to get off some of the buses, they were beaten with pipes and clubs by angry mobs. Local law enforcement did little to stop the brutality.
Despite—or perhaps even because of—the violence, the civil rights movement continues to gain momentum, and Robert Kennedy is now paying close attention to one of its most prominent leaders, a thirty-three-year-old charismatic Baptist minister named Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Reverend King is as intense and enigmatic as President Kennedy. He is a man of deep religious values who also sleeps with women outside his marriage. His speaking tone and rhetoric are bold and impassioned, but he advocates the same nonviolence to achieve his methods as Gandhi used in India. King also appears to be a Communist sympathizer. This puts Bobby in the unlikely position of having to monitor King to determine whether the reverend is indeed a Communist, while at the same time ensuring that King is protected from harm and guaranteed free speech as he pushes the cause of civil rights. One assassination attempt has already been made on King, when a deranged black woman stabbed him in the chest in 1958, and there are constant fears that the reverend will one day be lynched during his travels through the Deep South.
Truth be told, the civil rights movement is an enormous headache for Bobby Kennedy. His main enforcement arm, the FBI, has little concern for civil rights, or even for making inroads into Bobby’s other major legal concern, organized crime. Instead, J. Edgar Hoover is entirely focused on stopping the spread of communism. He is all too happy to play the part of Pontius Pilate, washing his hands of racial bloodshed. In fact, in 1962 the FBI has only a handful of black agents in the field.
Hoover, however, does take an interest in Reverend King—but only because of the widespread belief within the FBI that the civil rights movement is part of a larger Communist plot against America. One of the bureau’s
