I. Mamie Carthan became Mamie Till after her marriage to Louis Till in 1940, which ended with his death in 1945. Mamie Till became Mamie Mallory after a brief remarriage in 1946. Her name changed to Bradley after another marriage in 1951. She was Mamie Bradley during most of the years covered by this book. She married one last time in 1957, becoming Mamie Till-Mobley, under which name she published her 2004 memoir. To avoid confusion, and also to depict her as a human being rather than an icon, I generally refer to her by her first name. No disrespect is intended. The same is true of Emmett Till and Carolyn Bryant.
2
BOOTS ON THE PORCH
It was probably the gunshot-thud of boots on the porch that pulled Reverend Moses Wright out of a deep sleep about two in the morning on Sunday, August 28, 1955.1 Wright was a sixty-four-year-old sharecropper, short and wiry with thick hands and a hawksbill nose. An ordained minister in the Church of God in Christ, Wright sometimes preached at the concrete-block church tucked into a cedar thicket just a half mile away; most people called him “Preacher.” Twenty-five white-tufted acres of cotton, almost ready for harvest, stretched out behind his unpainted clapboard house in a pitch-black corner of the Mississippi Delta called East Money.2 He had lived his entire life in the Delta, and he had never had any trouble with white people before.
The old but well-built house would be called a “shack” in a certain stripe of sympathetic news story, but it was the nicest tenant house on the G. C. Frederick Plantation. Mr. Frederick respected Reverend Wright and let his family occupy the low-slung four-bedroom house where he had lived himself before he built the main house. Its tin roof sloped toward the persimmon and cedar trees that lined the dusty road out front. A pleasant screened-in porch ran its entire face. From the porch two front doors opened directly into two front bedrooms; there were two smaller bedrooms stacked behind those.3
The accounts of what happened in the Wright home that morning vary slightly, but the interviews given to reporters soon after the event seem to be the most reliable. “Preacher! Preacher!” someone bellowed from inside the screened porch. It was a white man’s voice. Wright sat up in bed. “This is Mr. Bryant,” said another white man. “We want to talk to the boy. We’re here to talk to you about that boy from Chicago, the one that done the talking up at Money.”4 Wright thought about grabbing his shotgun from the closet; instead he pulled on his overalls and work boots and prepared to step outside.5
Still asleep were his three sons, Simeon, Robert, and Maurice; his wife, Elizabeth; and three boys from Chicago visiting for the summer: his two grandsons, Curtis Jones and Wheeler Parker Jr.; and his nephew Emmett, whom they all called “Bobo.” Somehow Wright had gotten wind of a story involving Bobo at Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in Money. At first Wright had feared trouble might come of it, but the vague details seemed trifling and convinced him that repercussions were unlikely.6 Otherwise he would have put his niece’s boy on the next train home. Now that he had angry white men at his door, he decided to stall, hoping that Bobo would scamper out the back door and hide. Then Wright would tell the men that the boy had taken the train for Chicago on Saturday morning. “Who is it?” he called out.7
In the darkness Wright heard rather than saw Elizabeth head quickly for the two back rooms to wake the boys. Simeon slept in one of the blue metal beds with his beloved cousin Bobo.8 Robert slept in another bed in the same room. Curtis stayed by himself in the other back room. In the second front bedroom the two sixteen-year-olds, Wheeler and Maurice, shared a bed. Eight people in mortal danger.9
Elizabeth later told reporters, “We knew they were out to mob the boy.” There was neither time nor necessity to talk about what to do. Her only recourse was obvious: “When I heard the men at the door, I ran to Emmett’s room and tried to wake him so I could get him out the back door and into the cotton fields.”
Wright slowly stepped out of his bedroom and onto the porch, closing the door behind him. In front of him stood a familiar white man, six feet two inches and weighing 250 pounds. “That man was Milam,” the minister said later. “I could see his bald head. I would know him again anywhere. I would know him if I met him in Texas.”10 In his left hand the imposing Milam carried a heavy five-cell flashlight. He hefted a U.S. Army .45 automatic in his right.11
Wright did not recognize the rugged-looking man, six feet tall and perhaps 190 pounds, who had identified himself as “Mr. Bryant” and stood just behind Milam, though his small grocery store was not three miles distant.12 Wright could see that he, too, carried a U.S. Army .45. When both men pushed past him into the house, he could smell them; at that point they had been drinking for hours.13
Standing by the door just inside the screened porch, a third man turned his head to one side and down low, “like he didn’t want me to see him, and I didn’t see him to recognize him,” the preacher said.14 Wright assumed the third man was black because he stayed in the shadows, silent: “He acted like a colored man.”15 This was likely one of the black men who worked for Milam. Or, if Wright’s intuition was mistaken, it might have been a family friend of the Milam-Bryant family, Elmer Kimbell or Hubert Clark, or their brother-in-law Melvin Campbell.16
Echoing Bryant, Milam said, “We want to see the boy from Chicago.”17
Wright slowly and deliberately opened the other bedroom door, the one leading into the front guest room where the two sixteen-year-olds slept. The small room quickly became crowded and thick with the odors of whiskey and sweat; faces, guns, and furnishings were caught in the shaky and sparse illumination of Milam’s flashlight. “The house was as dark as a thousand midnights,” Wheeler Parker recalled. “You couldn’t see. It was like a nightmare. I mean—I mean someone come stand over you with a pistol in one hand and a flashlight, and you’re sixteen years old, it’s a terrifying experience.”18
Milam and Bryant told Wright to turn on some lights, but Wright only mumbled something about the lights being broken.19 The wash of the flashlight swept from Maurice to Wheeler and back to Wright. The white men moved on. “They asked where the boy from Chicago was,” recalled Maurice.20
“We marched around through two rooms,” Wright recounted. Milam and Bryant, clearly impatient, may have suspected Wright was stalling. Elizabeth had moved quickly to wake Emmett, but he moved far too slowly. “They were already in the front door before I could shake him awake,” she said.21
Now the two white men stood over the blue metal bedstead where the fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago lay with his cousin. “Are you the one who did the smart talking up at Money?” Milam demanded.