JACKSON - Almost 50 years since Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Chicago schoolboy, was yanked by two white men from his great-uncle's Delta cotton patch cabin, brutally killed and tossed into Tallahatchie River, his legacy refuses to die.
It became popularly known back then as the "wolf-whistle murder," based on the claim of a white woman storekeeper in the hamlet of Money that Till had suggestively smarted off to her as he left the store with his cousins.
That supposed breach of the Deep South's code of protecting white womanhood against lustful black males set off events that ended in young Till's death at the hands of the woman storekeeper's husband and his brother-in-law.
Acquitted by a Tallahatchie County jury of 12 white males in a trial scene virtually replicated in the prize-winning novel and movie "To Kill A Mockingbird," the two men three months later sold their story of how they killed Emmett Till to Look magazine.
Two weeks ago, news stories went out across the country, reporting that Till's mother, 81-year-old Mamie Till Mobley, had died.
Her decision to let the horribly battered corpse of her son lie at a Chicago church in a pine casket, open to public view by an estimated throng of 50,000 mourners who filed by, shockingly projected the case onto the nation's radar screen and stirred broad-scale resentment over the crime.
In itself, reports of her death rekindled interest in the sordid 1955 lynching, an event which for the first time thrust Mississippi's quaint system of racial justice into the gaze of the nation and the world.
Poetically, even before Mrs. Mobley's death, a nationwide reprise of the Till case had been produced for airing Jan. 20 on the PBS documentary "American Experience - The Emmett Till Story," produced by Stanley Nelson. Several national publications and TV networks earlier had given it favorable reviews.
When Roy Bryant, then 23, and his burly brother-in-law, J. W. Milam, 46, were brought to trial Sept. 14, 1955, in a steamy courtroom in the tiny town of Sumner, 70 reporters from around the United States, England and even one with the Communist Daily Worker converged to cover the trial.
Then the Jackson-based Mississippi staff correspondent for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, I was one of those reporters who covered the Till trial in its entirety, plus later events in the case.
Since I'm one of the very few surviving journalists who witnessed the trial, an integral part of an event that now is believed a triggering mechanism for the civil rights struggle to follow, NBC television network and producers of the Till documentary sought me out for interviews.
But this is not about me. It's to try and place in perspective the historic significance of the Till case and how it remains a stain on the nation's, and Mississippi's conscience.
Perhaps the most dramatic, courageous act I have ever witnessed in my journalistic career, was the sight of Till's great uncle, Mose Wright, then 64, rising out of the witness chair, and pointing a trembling finger at Milam, uttering the words, "dar he," to identify the beefy Milam as the one who burst into his cabin and with another man dragged Till outside and drove off in a pickup.
Four days later, the youth's puffy body, weighted down with a discarded cotton gin fan, was found snagged near the river bank of the Tallahatchie. Outrageously, 300-pound Tallahatchie County Sheriff Clarence Strider refused to concede the body was Till, testifying in the trial that it could have been planted by black civil rights groups.
It took only one hour and five minutes for the jury to return a not guilty verdict. This reporter, sitting in front of the flimsy wooden door to the jury room, could hear peals of laughter inside as the jury supposedly deliberated.
A paragraph from the dispatch I filed after the acquittal of Milam and Bryant (and which I have included in my "Eyes on Mississippi" book published in 2001) reads thusly:
"To the sweaty, tense courtroom audience, it was clear that not two men but a system as old as the Constitution of the United States, and a way of life which may be older, had been on trial."
Although the jury verdict and disdainful remarks made immediately after the trial by the jury foreman were a mockery of justice, those who officially represented the state of Mississippi in the trial were models of jurisprudence.
Circuit Judge Curtis Swango, whom I had known previously as a highly respected state legislative leader, maintained remarkable decorum throughout the trial, despite the emotional tension which hovered in the courtroom like the cloying summertime humidity of the Mississippi Delta.
A special prosecutor, former FBI agent Robert B. Smith III of Ripley, was appointed by then Attorney General J.P. Coleman to assist District Attorney Gerald Chatham, who earlier had announced he was retiring because of his health. Smith played a key role in finding and providing protection for several of the state's vital witnesses, including Mose Wright and 17-year-old black youth Willie Reed, who placed the two accused white men at the suspected murder scene.
A great many Mississippians, certainly in the Delta, were surprised in the first place that Milam and Bryant were indicted and brought to trial, given the hostile public opinion that existed in Tallahatchie County and environs over the case.
Few knew why that happened. Only because Coleman, backed up by Gov. Hugh White, both of whom were keenly aware Mississippi's image would be seriously damaged if the state took no action, pushed local authorities to prosecute the case to the fullest.
But the outcome of the trial, made worse three months afterwards when Milam's and Bryant's admissions of guilt appeared in Look magazine under the byline of flamboyant Alabama author William Bradford Huie, again served to hold the state up to national ridicule as somewhat of an outlaw place.
It is little comfort that Milam and Bryant, initially looked upon as local heroes in preserving the South's way of life, became outcasts in their community after the Look article was published, and were literally forced to leave the state.
Milam died in the latter 1980s and Bryant in 1994. Despite hopes of the documentary producers that the case could be reopened, I personally see little chance of that happening with both principals dead and virtually no evidentiary material available to bring a viable case.
