Sham Trial of Emmett Till Killers, Undocumented Lynchings and Relatives Who Go Bump in the Night

This grew out of something I'm attempting to write about my experiences in Tallahatchie County, MS, or the Free State of Tallahatchie, as they like to call it (and it's NOTHING like the Free State of Jones). The small book I'm working on is generally light-hearted with only a few gritty tales and this one grim one I've been struggling with for several years. I don't think the main topic here is the shocking thing it once was, since we've been shocked so many times recently. Any reasonable American is likely to read it and say "Duh" at this point, but I need to get this particular piece of knowledge out of my head and out of my late night wakefulness.

I lived in Tallahatchie County for less than 3 years among my kinfolk on land that had been in the family since the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, 1830-1831 (when the Choctaw were removed to Oklahoma in the Choctaw Trail of Tears). I'm writing all this background to provide context.

My ex-husband and I bought my Aunt's farm when she was in failing health, with the stipulation that she would live there until she died and that I would assist her as she needed. She was still sharp as a tack and living alone, but had experienced some serious heart problems.  My ex-husband was working on a river towboat and we could therefore live where we pleased as long as we pleased to live reasonably close to the Mississippi river, since his employer paid for travel to and from their towboats.

I had always loved that farm and had spent many happy hours as a child sitting in Aunt Rosa's mimosa tree (with the perfect low-growing limb) by the back steps while I read some of her huge stash of Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post, etc. I occasionally took some chopped corn up there to feed the chickens, and when I tired of those pleasures, I ran around the pastures near her house and climbed the gullies that were there when I was a child. 

I had been visiting Mississippi with my family since I could remember, and had spent a lot of time on that farm, but I had an idealized and romanticized idea of this place where I was going to live. This was the land of our ancestors, where my parents were born and raised, and this farm was the land of all those fond childhood memories.

My views were considerably different than those of my family and most of my childhood friends, even though, to the best of my recollection, while I may have seen an occasional Black person on the streets, I had never actually had any real interaction with Black people before I was living on my own in Memphis in the late 60's. My school was not integrated other than one child the Navy insisted they accept because she was not "negro", she was "Puerto Rican". Since the Navy payment per enrolled child made up most of the budget of our local school and they threatened to withdraw all their funds if she was not accepted, she was reluctantly enrolled. She was several years younger than I was, but I remember seeing her being pursued through the playground by a pack of mean little kids calling her names, chiefly, n****r, and making fun of her looks, and saying every other nasty thing that little kids are prone to use to harass other little kids, only, as you can imagine, worse. I was bothered and knew it was wrong, but I didn't have the courage to call down those younger children.

I attribute a lot of my differing opinions on racial matters to all those magazines I read at my Aunt Rosa's. That's where I first read about the children (some near my age) who were integrating the Little Rock, AR schools in 1957. News on local TV (when we got a TV) was pretty censored in the south, and my parents didn't want us watching too much news, either from the urge to protect us or to keep some of those damnyankee ideas out of our heads.   

Now, closer to the point of this piece. . .  when we moved to Tallahatchie County, one of the first people I became acquainted with was my nearest neighbor, an older man named Travis Thomas. I remembered him from yearly visits to Memorial Day/Homecoming (at the New Hope Church and Cemetery) as a child. This was a sort of combination yearly family reunion / potluck / grave cleaning occasion. Mr. Thomas was simply one of the grown-ups then, I don't recall even talking to him before I moved to Tallahatchie County as a young adult. He was both gregarious and garrulous to the extreme and would often stop by to talk when I was living just up the road from him. He was an unforgettable character, but not in a pleasant way. My function seemingly was simply to be his listener. During the first conversation we had, he informed me that he was a first cousin to both my mother and my father, from different sides of the family. I have to say here that there are innumerable familial interconnections in Tallahatchie County and I'm convinced that I am kin to nearly everyone in that county, either from one side or the other, or both. After living there and having nearly every older person I met try to trace kinship with me, I was often lost in a maze of cousins twice or thrice removed and never quite understood the math of the connections, even though I agreed with the proposition that we were kin.

Mr. Thomas, like many others, seemed to mostly want to talk about family ties, family stories and claims to fame, and his own superior knowledge and acquaintance with a wide range of people. We clashed quite early on when I objected to his frequent use of the "n" word, something over which I'd been fighting with my immediate family for years. Unfortunately, it seemed to only spur him on when I objected, and he informed me that he was too old to learn any different, and became an even more prolific user of that and other derogatory language. In reaction, I became adept at finding urgent matters that needed my attention, or disappearing into the pasture if I was lucky enough to see him coming. 

I was caught off guard on too many occasions and while I endeavored to be polite and cordial to my kinsman and nearest neighbor (other than my Aunt, who was immediately next door), it was seldom easy to listen to him. My aunt, on the other hand, did not indulge in the spiteful use of offensive language once I expressed my feelings on that subject. I'm sure she had her thoughts, but she did not harass me with them. His land abutted ours on one edge, just around the curve of the road, quite close for that rural area at the time.

He was there in my yard one time expounding on what had become his favorite topic with me - the methods people in the area used to control the n*****rs or what he called the "Kneegrow" problem. He began a rambling tale of how my mother's other cousin, who was a deputy, would take the smart mouths out behind the jail and beat some manners into them. I'm deliberately using some of his language to give you the flavor of those diatribes. All through it, I was thinking of my suspicion that said cousin beat manners into his wonderful sweet-natured wife as well, when he was the one who needed the lessons, and I didn't doubt it was the same with any Black folks in his control. That time, I remembered something I had left baking in the oven and I had to cut the conversation short while I ran to check it. It took me so long to handle that problem in the oven that he finally gave up and went to talk to my aunt (who didn't seem all that keen on talking to him, either).

The next time he caught me out in the open where I couldn't disappear without being outright rude, he seemed determined to finish making the point he'd started making before. In the course of this one-sided conversation, he informed me that he "knew he was a man" when his father took him to a hanging when he was 12. I was caught so off guard by this statement that all I could do was gape at him. When I was able to get in a word edgewise, I asked what hanging he was talking about. He sort of flicked his head over his shoulder to the right, and said "where we hung that n****r". I took it to mean either the piece of our land behind him, or further on to his land, which lay in that direction, too. I just stood there in horror and asked "What did the man do?" The reply was to the effect that he had said the wrong thing to a white woman. I really don't know where the conversation went after that or how I got away, I was in a state of some shock. I'm just sorry that was not the last of what he apparently thought of as "schooling" me. I redoubled my efforts to stay away from him, because I didn't want to hear any more.

The next episode I remember was the one where he truly struck me dumb for a short time (and there were lots of other more aimless and less disturbing visits, but these are the ones that I remember vividly). He could be very sly, and on this occasion, I knew something bad was coming when he cut his eyes sideways at me while he rocked back and forth on his heels, thumbs in the sides of his overalls. It was body language that had become all too familiar over the last few months.

"I bet you didn't know that some of our relatives are famous, did you?"

 "No, I've never heard that before," I replied, warily.

Now he was rocking forward and back on his heels, in excitement and self-satisfaction, and he just beamed at me. 

"Yep, we're kin to one of them guys who took care of Emmet Till." As enlightened as I thought I was, the name was familiar to me, but I couldn't remember why. I'm sure I looked as puzzled as I felt, while I searched my memory. He expounded on the subject until I realized that this was the child who had been killed nearly 20 years before in Mississippi, west of us in Money, a very small town in Tallahatchie County, but in the edge of the delta. I don't remember what if anything I may have said to him, I just remember staring, with my heart pounding, and bile in my throat.

There was no internet then, so as soon as he left I got myself cleaned up and dressed to go into Charleston. I went straight to the library to dig out what little they had on Emmett Till (not much in that era) and read it while I fought the physical and mental distress my body was feeling. 

I can hardly believe I knew so little about what happened to Emmet Till at that time. I had to sit and figure out how I had gotten that far in life that clueless and ignorant. I tried to put it in some context by the year. He was killed in 1955, when I was nine years old, and recovering from a life threatening burning that kept me in hospital and at home for 12 weeks. I don't remember a great deal from that Christmas Eve I was caught on fire by a neighbor's child trying to give me a "hot seat" with a sparkler, or during the long recovery time. I go back to the remembrance of how little we (my sister and I) knew about current affairs. I'm sure not much on the news had penetrated my mind then, but I don't know how I escaped more than just a minor surface knowledge of this until my late 20's.

I never asked Mr. Thomas which one of them was related to us, but after an uncle published two painstakingly-researched genealogy books, I did see a Milam listed as a distant relative (although not that particular Milam). This was a last name I was familiar with in families nearby, who were probably not closely related to THAT Milam either. I also found some O'Bryants, but not any Bryants.

This thing Travis Thomas bragged about to me was a culmination of other horrors he was proud of, and he made this a time of earth-shattering revelation to me. I began researching, reading and thinking about race relations in more earnest than I had before. 

Meanwhile, my aunt died of a heart attack, and these terrible things I'd been told haunted me while I lived on the place I used to love so dearly. When passing by the large old oak tree in the pasture near the line between the two properties, I would get chills and worry that this might have been the site of the hanging I was told of, even though I'd never been able to bring myself to ask him for more details. I had noted it was down-hill and behind him when he did the head tilt over his shoulder. I don't have any proof that was the tree, or even if he was telling the truth or just telling a tale to shake me, but I couldn't get past the idea that it was true, and I was never comfortable living there afterwards. I had to leave.

I moved in 1977, but often went back in my mind to the story about Emmett Till and my purported but unproven distant kin. 

Fast forward to somewhere near the turn of the century, 2000. I became involved in some antiracial activities associated with the fledgling William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, the first time I'd become involved with a movement formally tackling racial healing. I say healing, because I don't really care for that word "reconciliation" which means "to restore to friendship or harmony." How can you restore what never was?

Through that first ill-fated fight to change the Mississippi flag, I became acquainted with a woman who was, at that time, on the staff of Jackson State University, and was working on a database for people to find out what happened to their relatives who just "disappeared" and/or supposedly ran off, never to be heard from again. A lot of these were said (by whites trying to cover up their misdeeds) to be just "trying to cause trouble" like the rumors white authorities spread that Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman were just pranking people by disappearing. I related the above story to her, and she asked me to speak out about it and see if I could help someone find out what happened to their loved one. I was so ashamed that my family might be involved in something so repulsive that I could not do it, and I did not want to drag my elderly parents through the kind of mud that might entail. I am ashamed I did not have the courage and I apologize to both her and to anyone who might have gotten some small measure of closure had my information helped them find out what happened to their relative and/or ancestor.

It nagged at me for years and years and finally, a while back, I did some internet research on this. I was looking for lynchings in Tallahatchie in the period in which Travis Thomas would have been 12 years old. In order to do that, I needed his birth date. Trying to google his obit, I typed his name and Tallahatchie County and the first thing that popped up was not an obituary, it was a website about Emmett Till and the trial of the two men, Bryant and Milam. It came up because Travis Thomas was on the jury, and his name shows up in many links, and photos. Finding these hit me like a ton of bricks. I'm not sure why finding out he was on that jury made me so angry, angry beyond reason, but I'm sure some of that anger was at myself. Seeing that face again brought it all back as clearly and wretchedly discomforting as if I were back in the early 70's and just finding a very nasty skeleton in my family closet.

He's in the back row of the jury, at the left when they are facing the camera. I have no idea why he didn't brag about being on this jury after what he had bragged about. The jurors were asked if they knew either man or if they had any bias and all apparently claimed they didn't know them and didn't have any bias. All I can surmise is that Travis Thomas wanted to tell me his own claim to fame and he came so very close. I believe he wanted to both brag about it, and to rattle my cage and I'm just surprised in retrospect that he didn't tell that final part, too. Maybe it's because I moved before he finished with me, or maybe he was reluctant to admit doing something likely provable as illegal; I can only guess at that.

Quoted from the Famous Trials Website:

Jury selection began on September 19 and finding twelve unbiased jurors would not be an easy task. One prospective juror, Robert Smith, neatly described the problem when asked whether he had a "fixed opinion" in the case. Smith answered, "Anybody in his right mind would have a fixed opinion." In 1955, none of the black residents of Tallahatchie County were registered voters and thus, under the jury selection rules then in place, no black was eligible to serve as a juror. During the six hours of jury selection, the county's sheriff-elect assisted the defense team, advising the lawyers as to which jurors were "doubtful" and which were "safe." All of the twelve white men seated for the jury seemed safe. One of the defense attorneys said later, "After the jury was chosen, any first-year law student could have won the case."

It does, at least to me, lend some credence to the veracity of what he told me about a black man being hanged in the Murfreesboro community when he was 12. I have tried to find a reference in online sources to a lynching in Tallahatchie County in the years in which he might be 12 or close to it, without success. He would have had his 12th birthday on July 11, 1919 and if he was 12 when this happened, it could have been the last half of 1919 or the first half of 1920. 

So, was he just telling a tale, was the age he quoted a loose estimate or was this just one of many lynchings that is not delineated on the online lists I was able to access? I can't tell, but I do know that this kinsman of mine and the others with him did not belong on that jury. 

My apologies to anyone who may be seeking information on a possibly lynched ancestor, you deserve more from me and my ilk. I will even apologize to a minuscule degree, to descendants or any living relatives because I know this will humiliate and embarrass them unless they are absolutely beyond the pale. I'm mostly sorry that it took me so long to speak about matters that have troubled me for more than half my life. I wish there were a searchable database of lynchings and possible lynchings with names (when available) and locations available for people looking for their family members and ancestors. I went through a couple of different web pages with names, dates and places of lynchings, but they are not in a database form (and in one case the place names in MS are frequently misspelled and possibly just incorrect), and they were listed in no real order, neither chronologically or alphabetically, and only somewhat geographically in order. The research was done by volunteers who had limited time and resources and someone with computer knowledge today would be hugely helpful if the information was combined and ordered in a database. Perhaps someone is working on it already (I do hope so).

I hope I have written this with enough coherence and organization that it may be useful to someone other than just to me and my own mental well-being, but it has been a cleansing of sorts for me. I realize pretty well everyone has known for years how absurd that trial was and how impossibly packed with bias that jury was.

I have a few words from the grave for those of you who have complained to me about what they perceived as my obsession with matters of race (that they believe should be left alone). Perhaps you'll understand my "obsession" better now, or perhaps you'll just shrug your shoulders and repeat that old canard that racial problems will just go away if we stop talking about them. I quote you a line that Mr. Thomas himself frequently used when he disagreed with me. He would shrug and say, "All right, then, that's with you."