Until he left Mississippi in late 1955, Dr. Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard felt sure that his name topped the Citizens’ Council “death list” on which the names of his late friends George Lee and Lamar Smith had once appeared. So he kept a .357 Magnum revolver on one bedside table and a .45 semiautomatic on the other and a Thompson submachine gun at the foot of his bed. A rifle or shotgun stood in all four corners of the bedroom and in every other room in the house. His large and well-appointed home and outbuildings would be more properly called a compound; the driveway featured a guardhouse in which armed men sat twenty-four hours a day. He was not a violent man, but he intended to sleep in peace on his own property. That is why, when an African American farm worker named Frank Young showed up at the gate at midnight on the eve of the Till murder trial, the guards were reluctant to wake Howard up. But Young insisted that he had an important story to tell about Till’s murder and refused to talk with anyone but Dr. Howard.
In the front room of Howard’s house Young told a harrowing story that he had walked and hitched rides for eighty miles to tell: he had witnessed and knew others who had witnessed events in the murder of Emmett Till. Their accounts changed the narrative of the murder significantly, including moving the crime from Tallahatchie to Sunflower County and tying Bryant and Milam directly to the killing.
Early on that Sunday morning of August 28, said Young, three or four black workers had seen a green and white Chevrolet pickup pull onto the plantation in Sunflower County managed by Leslie Milam. Four white men were in the cab of the truck, and in the back Emmett Till sat between two African Americans, Levi “Two Tight” Collins and Henry Lee Loggins, who both worked for J. W. Milam. The pickup stopped in front of a small barn or equipment shed and the group went in. Soon thereafter Young and the others heard the unmistakable sounds of a vicious beating. When Young and another witness snuck up closer to the shed they saw J.W. walk out and get a drink of water from the well. Someone then drove the truck into the shed, and the witnesses watched as it came back out with a tarpaulin thrown over the bed. Emmett Till was no longer visible. All of these witnesses were available to tell their stories, Young told Howard.
Howard had already given over his home as a safe house and headquarters for witnesses, journalists, and crucial visitors like Mamie Bradley and Representative Charles Diggs. He would bring Mamie from Chicago at his own expense and escort her and other witnesses to and from the Sumner courthouse in a well-armed caravan. Diggs had been a guest at Howard’s farm on several occasions for the huge annual gatherings of the RCNL, where he was a favorite speaker. But Howard’s efforts extended beyond providing a safe haven: he had been leading the “Mississippi underground” that undertook the most effective investigation of the Till murder, helping to find, interview, and eventually protect and relocate several key witnesses.1
On a tip, one member of the underground, the reporter James Hicks, had gone to a joint called King’s in Glendora, the little crossroads where J. W. Milam lived. “The place was filthy and the cotton pickers who were enjoying their Sunday off crowded it to the doors,” he wrote. Hicks drank beer, danced, and eventually unearthed rumors that Sheriff Strider had locked away two men, Levi “Too Tight” Collins and Henry Lee Loggins, in the Charleston jail to keep them from testifying. Collins and Loggins might well be the two black men Young had seen with Till in the back of the pickup.2 The rumors would eventually be proven true; defense attorney Breland later confirmed that Strider kept the two men in the jail under false identities both before and for the duration of the trial.3
Also in the Mississippi underground were Ruby Hurley, Medgar Evers, and Amzie Moore, who had been investigating the Till case for some time. Myrlie Evers wrote later, “Medgar and Amzie Moore, an NAACP leader from Cleveland, Mississippi, set off from our house one morning with Ruby Hurley, down from Birmingham to investigate. . . . All of them were dressed in overalls and beat-up shoes, with Mrs. Hurley wearing a red bandana over her head. Moore had borrowed a jalopy with license plates from a Delta county. Dressed as day laborers, they made their way among sharecroppers’ cabins and cotton fields, looking for people who might know something about the murder.”4
After his midnight conversation with Young, Howard called some of his colleagues to share the new evidence. Many of the black reporters were already at the house, including Hicks, Simeon Booker, and Robert M. Ratcliffe of the Pittsburgh Courier. Howard almost certainly called Hurley, Evers, and Moore as well. All day and all night that Monday, while the court selected a jury, Howard and his crew looked for the witnesses who could confirm Young’s story and Hicks’s suspicions. The four they found agreed to come to Howard’s house the next evening to relate what they had seen. These evidential gold mines promised not only to provide eyewitness testimony linking the defendants to the murder but also to change the legal jurisdiction from Tallahatchie to Sunflower County. Such a move probably provided the best opportunity civil rights advocates had for disrupting the script of acquittals already unfolding in Sumner.
At eight o’clock Monday evening some members of the Mississippi underground conducted a strategy meeting in Mound Bayou to choose a course of action. Aside from Howard, Hurley was present, as were several African American reporters, including Hicks, Booker, and L. Alex Wilson of the Chicago Defender. They agreed that white reporters might fare better in dealing with local law enforcement officials and decided to ask John Popham of the New York Times and Clark Porteous of the Memphis Press-Scimitar to act in concert with them. All the reporters would have to agree to hold off filing any stories until after the Tuesday night meeting with the witnesses.5