For the rest of October and in November protests continued from New York to Los Angeles. Moses Wright spoke from time to time, walking back and forth, pounding his fist into his palm, and animating his performances in the manner of a veteran Church of God in Christ preacher. “Rally of 20,000 here cheers call for action against Mississippi goods,” the New York Times reported on October 12. Jammed into the Garment District on 36th Street between Seventh and Eighth, the twenty thousand protestors roared their approval when Adam Clayton Powell Jr. proposed a national boycott on Mississippi products and a March on Washington in January to demand that Congress finally pass an antilynching bill. Activists quickly organized March on Washington Committees in New York, Detroit, Chicago, and elsewhere.22
Throughout the fall and into the winter, mass meetings flourished in New York, Chicago, and Detroit, as well as Newark, Boston, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Milwaukee.23 In Los Angeles some five thousand persons crowded into the Second Baptist Church, with several thousand more standing outside, to protest the Till case. Almost certainly a majority of them were first-or second-generation Southern transplants of the Great Migration. As described by the Chicago Defender, “The meeting was punctuated by screams and occasional outcries as Dr. T. R. M. Howard of Mississippi related facts and details about what he termed the ‘cruel, desperate and deadly’ treatment of Negroes in his home state.” Silence ruled when the eloquent physician turned his eye to Los Angeles itself. “How many of you within my sight and the sound of my voice are enjoying the luxury of Cadillacs, safe, comfortable homes, and the privilege to vote, while thousands of your brothers in blood live in fear of their lives?” he demanded. The rally raised roughly $10,000.24
In mid-November the NAACP disclosed that more than a quarter million people had heard Mamie Bradley or Moses Wright speak at their rallies, and Howard claimed that he had addressed thirty thousand people.25 When Medgar Evers reported on his out-of-state speeches on the Till case, he listed Detroit twice, St. Louis, East St. Louis, Washington, D.C., Tampa, and Nashville.26 Both Howard and Adam Clayton Powell spoke in Montgomery in November. There would be many more speeches in a movement organized by indignation over the Till case.
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Any thought that the case would fade as 1955 turned into 1956 would soon vanish, thanks to the ongoing protests but also to the work of William Bradford Huie, a seventh-generation Alabama novelist and journalist with an inflamed ambition and iridescent imagination. In January 1956 Look magazine, with one of the largest circulations in the country, published Huie’s “Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi.”27 In addition to copies for their nearly four million subscribers, Look printed an extra two million for the newsstands.28 Three months later the story was reprinted for eleven million subscribers to the Reader’s Digest.29 Huie’s story would shape America’s imagination of the Till case for fifty years.
Huie began working on the Till case a month or so after the acquittals.30 In Sumner he met with J. J. Breland, pointing out that the truth of what happened had never been established. “And this lawyer said, ‘Well, I’d like to know what happened. I never asked them whether they killed the boy or not.’?”31 A pioneer in what would later be derided as “checkbook journalism,” Huie told Breland that Look would pay Milam and Bryant $4,000 to give their account. Breland called in the killers and relayed Huie’s offer. Because they had been acquitted, they could not be tried again for the same crime; therefore, without shame or law to impede them, and with cash on the table, there was no reason not to go public with their version of events. They accepted. There would be $1,000 for the law firm and $3,000 to be divided between Milam and Bryant in exchange for the story of Till’s kidnapping, beating, and murder. Huie would state the facts, including quotes, without saying how he had gotten them; that would allow the half-brothers to maintain some pretense of innocence. And they would sign a waiver not to sue Huie for libel. Breland then set up a week of secret meetings at the law firm at night. After Look’s senior counsel showed up with a satchel full of cash, J. W. Milam and Roy and Carolyn Bryant told Huie their story through a haze of cigarette smoke, with Milam doing most if not all of the talking.32
If any of them mentioned a physical assault of any kind on Carolyn, Huie did not report it, which seems unlikely given his penchant for the sensational. In this version Emmett Till of Chicago, visiting his country kinfolks in Mississippi, boasted to his young cousins about having had sex with a white girl. Outside Bryant’s Grocery the youths dared Till to ask Carolyn Bryant for a date. He did so. Hearing the tale, Milam and Bryant kidnapped the boy from his great-uncle’s farmhouse, intending merely to beat him, but Till taunted them with stories of having sex with white girls and proclaimed his own equality. In short, the boy virtually committed suicide.
“We were never able to scare him,” Milam told Huie. “They had just filled him so full of that poison he was hopeless.” The men took turns smashing Till across the head with their .45s. The boy never yelled, but continued to say things like “You bastards. I’m not afraid of you. I’m as good as you are. I’ve ‘had’ white women. My grandmother was a white woman.” Milam made their case:
Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless. I’m no bully; I never hurt a nigger. I like niggers—in their place—I know how to work ’em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain’t gonna vote where I live. If they did, they’d control the government. They ain’t gonna go to school with my kids. And when a nigger even gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he’s tired o’ livin’. I’m likely to kill him. Me and my folks fought for this country and we have some rights. . . . Goddam you, I’m going to make an example of you—just so everybody can know where me and my folks stand.33
And so, Milam said, they drove to the cotton gin, forced Till to carry the heavy fan to the truck, took him to the riverbank, shot him in the head, and rolled him into the river.34 In this version, it was a “coincidence” that Till’s ignorant bravado met Milam’s ignorant brutality at just the wrong place and time, “too soon after the Supreme Court had decreed a change in the Delta ‘way of life.’?”35 This was not a tell-all; for one thing, Huie knew that more than two people were involved in the murder of Emmett Till, but he decided to forget that inconvenient fact because it would cost too much to get releases to print their names.36 In Milam and Bryant’s version the one person who receded further from view was the real-life fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, with his slight stutter, his imitations of Red Skelton and Jack Benny, and his ability to see second base in a loaf of bread.