User:Moni3/EmmettTill

Early life
Emmett Till was the son of Mamie Carthan (1921–2003) and Louis Till (1922–1945). Louis was born in New Madrid, Missouri and Mamie in the small town of Webb, Mississippi. When she was two years old, her family moved to Argo, Illinois near Chicago, where her mother's home was often used as a way-station for people who had just moved from the South as they were trying to find jobs and homes. Louis and Mamie were among tens of thousands of black Americans who moved North between 1910 and 1970 as part of the Great Migration to escape lack of opportunity and unequal treatment under the law. Argo received so many Southern migrants it was nicknamed "Little Mississippi". Mississippi was the poorest state in the U.S. in the 1950s, and the Delta counties, located in the northwestern part of the state in the watershed of the Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers, were some of the poorest in Mississippi. In Tallahatchie County, where Mamie Carthan was born, the average annual income per household in 1949 was $690 ; for black families it was $462. Economic opportunities for black people were almost nonexistent. Most were sharecroppers who lived on land owned by whites. Mississippi's state constitution, adopted in 1890, disenfranchised black voters and removed most legal rights for black citizens. Jim Crow Laws enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries strictly enforced racial segregation.

Till was born in Chicago and nicknamed "Bobo" as an infant by a family friend. Mamie largely raised him with her mother; she and Louis Till separated in 1942 after she found out he had been unfaithful, and later choked her to unconsciousness, to which she responded by throwing scalding water at him. For violating court orders to stay away from Mamie, Emmett's father was forced by a judge to choose between jail or enlisting in the U.S. Army which he did in 1943, and was killed in Italy in 1945. At the age of six Emmett contracted polio, leaving him with a persistent stutter. Mamie and Emmett moved to Detroit where she met and married "Pink" Bradley in 1951. Emmett preferred living in Chicago, so he relocated to live with his grandmother; his mother rejoined him with his stepfather later that year. The marriage dissolved in 1952, however, and Pink Bradley returned to Detroit.

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Mamie and Emmett lived alone together in a busy neighborhood in Chicago's South Side with extended family nearby. She began working as a civilian clerk for the U.S. Air Force for a better salary, and recalled that Emmett was industrious enough to help with chores at home although he sometimes got distracted. She remembered that he did not know his own limitations at times. Following their separation, Pink Bradley paid her a visit and began threatening her. At eleven years old, Emmett, with a butcher knife in hand, told Pink he would kill him if he did not leave. Usually, however, Emmett was happy. He and his cousins and friends pulled pranks on each other (Emmett once took advantage of an extended car ride when his friend fell asleep and placed the friend's underwear on his head) and spent their free time in pickup baseball games. He was a smart dresser and often the center of attention around his peers.

In 1955, Mamie's uncle, 64-year-old Mose Wright, visited them in Chicago and told Emmett stories about outdoor living in the Mississippi Delta. Wright was a sharecropper and part-time minister who was often called "Preacher". He lived in Money, Mississippi, a small town in the Delta that consisted of three stores, a school, a post office, a cotton gin, and a couple hundred residents, 8 mi north of Greenwood. Mamie was ready for a vacation and planned to take Emmett with her, but Wright extended an invitation to Emmett, who had visited the Delta with Mamie three times before. Wright planned to accompany Emmett and a cousin to Money where another cousin would join them for two weeks. Emmett begged her to go and she relented. Before his departure, Mamie again cautioned him that Chicago and Mississippi were two different worlds and he should know how to behave in front of whites in the South. He assured her he understood.

Racial segregation, which was pervasive throughout the South, was established and enforced primarily to prevent interracial romantic and sexual relationships. Although this occurred, particularly among white men and black women, protecting white women from black men was made the highest priority, creating a severely divided caste system. Even the suggestion of sexual contact between black men and white women carried the most severe penalties for black men. Since 1882, when statistics on lynchings began to be collected, more than 500 black Americans had been killed by extrajudicial violence in Mississippi alone and more than 3,000 across the South. The majority of the incidents took place between 1876 and 1930; though far less common by the mid-1950s, these racially motivated murders still occurred. Zealous enforcement of segregation continued following World War II and racial tensions were furthermore on the rise after the United States Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education to allow integration in public schools. Many segregationists viewed the ruling as an avenue to allow interracial marriage. The reaction among whites in the South was to constrain blacks forcefully from any semblance of social equality. In May 1955, Reverend George W. Lee, co-founder of the Humphreys County NAACP who organized voter registration drives for black citizens, was shot in the face by an unknown assailant in Belzoni. A week before Till arrived, a black man named Lamar Smith was shot in front of the county courthouse in Brookhaven for political organizing. Three men were arrested but charges were dropped when witnesses refused to testify.

Encounter with Carolyn Bryant
Emmett and Wright arrived in Money on August 21, 1955. For a few days Emmett spent time fishing, swimming, and working with his cousins to bring in the cotton harvest on Wright's farm. On August 24, despite their grandmother forbidding Emmett from leaving without his great uncle, his cousins took him into Money.They spent 20 minutes at Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market. Accounts are unclear as to what transpired that evening that ultimately resulted in Emmett's murder. The shop was owned by a white couple, 24-year-old Roy Bryant and his 21-year-old wife Carolyn. It mostly catered to the local sharecropper population. Carolyn was alone that day; her sister-in-law was in the rear of the store watching children. Outside, Emmett's cousins began watching a checkers game. One or more of the boys dared Emmett to speak to Carolyn inside the store after he showed them a photo of a white girl, or a photo of children in his integrated class in his wallet. Emmett bragged to the boys that white children were his friends or referred to a picture of a white girl that had come with his new wallet, and stated that she was his girlfriend.

Emmett entered the store by himself and was alone with Carolyn Bryant for about a minute. According to several versions of events, he may have wolf-whistled at her. A newspaper account following his disappearance stated that Emmett sometimes whistled to alleviate his stuttering. His speech was sometimes unclear; Mamie claimed he had particular difficulty with pronouncing "b" sounds, and may have whistled to overcome problems asking for bubble gum. Other stories claim Emmett whistled at the checkers game outside. He may have grabbed Carolyn Bryant's hand and asked her for a date, or said "Bye, baby" as he left the store, or "You needn't be afraid of me, baby, I've been with white women before". Carolyn later asserted that Emmett had grabbed her at the waist and asked her for a date. She said he also used "unprintable" words. In any event, she ran outside to a car to retrieve a pistol from under the seat. Upon seeing her do this, the teenagers left immediately.

Carolyn told others of the events at the store, and the story spread quickly.

Roy Bryant was on an extended trip hauling shrimp to Texas and did not return home until August 27.

Murder
When Roy Bryant was told of what had transpired, he aggressively questioned several young black men who entered the store. That evening, Bryant, with a black man named J. W. Washington, approached a young black man walking along a road. Bryant ordered Washington to seize the young man, put him in the back of his pickup truck, and took him to be identified by an as-yet unnamed companion of Carolyn's who had witnessed the episode with Till. Friends or parents vouched for the young men in Bryant's store, and Carolyn's companion denied that the young man Bryant and Washington seized was the one who had accosted her. Somehow, however, Bryant learned that the young man who had done it was from Chicago and was staying with Mose Wright. Some recollections of this part of the story relate that news of the incident traveled in both black and white societies very quickly. Others state that Carolyn Bryant refused to tell her husband and Till's oldest cousin Maurice Wright, perhaps put off by Till's bragging and clothes, told Roy Bryant at his store about Till's interaction with Bryant's wife. Several witnesses overheard Bryant and his 36-year-old half-brother John William "J. W." Milam discussing taking Till from his house.}}

In the early morning hours on Sunday, August 28, 1955, Roy Bryant, Milam, and another man (who may have been black) drove to Mose Wright's house. Milam was armed with a pistol and a flashlight. He asked Wright if he had three boys in the house from Chicago. Till shared a bed with another cousin; there were eight people in the house. Milam asked Wright to take them to "the nigger who did the talking". When they asked Till if it was he, he replied, "Yeah", for which they threatened to shoot him and told him to get dressed. The men threatened to kill Wright if he reported what he had seen. Till's great-aunt offered the men money, but they did not respond. They put Till in the back of a vehicle and drove to a barn at the Clint Shurden Plantation in Drew. Till was pistol-whipped and placed in the bed of the pickup truck again and covered with a tarpaulin. Throughout the course of the night, Bryant, Milam, and witnesses recall them being in several locations with Till. According to some witnesses, they took Till to a shed behind Milam's home in the nearby town of Glendora where they beat him again and tried to decide what to do. Witnesses recall between two and four white men and two and four black men who were either in or surrounding the pickup truck where Till was seated. Others passed by Milam's shed to the sounds of someone being beaten. Accounts differ as to when Till was shot; either in Milam's shed or by the Tallahatchie River. He was driven to Bryant's store where several people noticed blood pooling in the truck bed. Bryant explained he killed a deer, and in one instance showed the body to a black man who questioned him, saying "that's what happens to smart niggers".

In an interview with William Bradford Huie in Look magazine in 1956, Bryant and Milam stated that their intention was to beat Till and throw him off an embankment into the river to frighten him. They told Huie that while they were beating Till, however, he called them bastards, declared he was as good as they, and had in the past had sexual encounters with white women. They then put Till in the back of their truck, drove to a cotton gin to take a 70 lbs fan—the only time they admitted to being worried, thinking that by this time in early daylight they would be spotted and accused of stealing—and drove for several miles along the river looking for a place to dispose of Till. They shot him by the river and weighted his body with the fan.

Mose Wright stayed on his front porch for 20 minutes waiting for Till to return. He did not go back to bed. He and another man went into Money, got gasoline, and drove around trying to find Till. Unsuccessful, they returned home by 8:00 am. After hearing from Wright he would not call the police because he feared for his life, Curtis Jones placed a call to the Leflore County sheriff and another to his mother in Chicago, who, hysterical, called Mamie Till Bradley. Wright and his wife also drove to Sumner, where Elizabeth Wright's brother contacted the sheriff.

Bryant and Milam were questioned by Leflore County sheriff George Smith. They admitted they had taken the boy from his great-uncle's yard, but claimed they had released him the same night in front of Bryant's store. Bryant and Milam were arrested for kidnapping. Word got out that Till was missing and soon Medgar Evers, Mississippi state field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Amzie Moore, head of the NAACP's Bolivar County chapter, became involved, disguising themselves as cotton pickers to speak safely with field workers who might know any information to find Till.

Three days after his abduction, Till's swollen and disfigured body was found by two boys fishing in the Tallahatchie River. His head was very badly damaged, he had been shot above the right ear, an eye was dislodged from the socket, there was evidence that he had been beaten on the back and the hips, and his body was weighted to the fan blade, fastened around his neck with barbed wire. He was nude, but wearing a silver ring with the initials "L. T." and "May 25, 1943" carved in it.

Confusion about Till's whereabouts and a positive identification of the body retrieved from the river compounded issues in the case that eventually influenced the trial. Before the body was found Hodding Carter in the Delta Democrat-Times, a local Mississippi newspaper, reported that Till may have been in hiding with relatives or perhaps he returned to Chicago for his safety. The body's face was unrecognizable due to trauma and the result of being submerged in water. Mose Wright was called to the river and identified Till. The silver ring Till wore was removed and returned to Wright, and further passed to the district attorney. Stories from witnesses, both black and white, conflict about whether the ring was on Till's body and who knew he had worn it previously.

Funeral and reaction
Till's death immediately eclipsed other racially motivated murders in Mississippi's history, provoking discussions about segregation, law enforcement, relations between the North and South, the social status quo in Mississippi, the NAACP, White Citizens' Councils, and the Cold War, all of which were played out in a drama staged in newspapers all over the U.S. and abroad. When Till went missing, a three-paragraph story was printed in the Greenwood Commonwealth and quickly picked up by other Mississippi newspapers. They reported on his death when the body was found, and the next day when a picture of him his mother had taken the previous Christmas showing them smiling together, appeared in the Jackson Daily News and Vicksburg Evening Post, editorials and letters to the editor were printed expressing shame at the people who had caused Till's death. One read "Now is the time for every citizen who loves the state of Mississippi to 'Stand up and be counted' before hoodlum white trash brings us to destruction." The letter went on to state that Negroes were not the downfall of Mississippi society, but whites like those in White Citizens' Councils that condoned violence.

Till's body was clothed, packed in lime, and placed in a pine coffin and prepared for burial. It may have been embalmed while in Mississippi. Mamie Till Bradley demanded the body be sent to Chicago; she later stated she worked to halt an immediate burial in Mississippi and called several local and state authorities in Illinois and Mississippi to make sure her son was returned to Chicago. A doctor did not examine Till post-mortem.

Mississippi's governor, Hugh L. White, deplored the murder, asserting that local authorities should pursue a "vigorous prosecution". He sent a telegram to the national offices of the NAACP promising a full investigation and assuring them "Mississippi does not condone such conduct". Delta residents, both black and white, also distanced themselves from Till's murder, finding the circumstances abhorrent. Local newspaper editorials denounced the murderers without question. Leflore County Deputy Sheriff John Cothran stated, "The white people around here feel pretty mad about the way that poor little boy was treated, and they won't stand for this."

Soon, however, discourse about Till's murder became more complex. Robert B. Patterson, executive secretary of the segregationist White Citizens' Council used Till's death to claim that black people were safer under racial segregation policies and the NAACP was neutralizing their efforts. In response, NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins characterized the incident as a lynching and stated that Mississippi was attempting to maintain white supremacy through murder, and "there is in the entire state no restraining the influence of decency, not in the state capital, among the daily newspapers, the clergy, nor any segment of the so-called better citizens". Mamie Till Bradley told a reporter that she would seek legal aid to help law enforcement find her son's killers and that the State of Mississippi should share the financial responsibility. She was misquoted; it came out as "Mississippi is going to pay for this".

The A. A. Rayner Funeral Home in Chicago received Till's body, and upon arrival, Bradley insisted on viewing it to make a positive identification, later stating that the stench from it was noticeable two blocks away. She decided on an open casket funeral, saying "There was just no way I could describe what was in that box. No way. And I just wanted the world to see." Tens of thousands of people lined the street outside the mortuary to view Till's body, and days later thousands more attended his funeral at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ. Photographs of his mutilated corpse circulated around the country, notably appearing in Jet magazine and The Chicago Defender, both black publications, and drew intense public reaction. According to The Nation and Newsweek, Chicago's black community was "aroused as it has not been over any similar act in recent history". Till was buried September 6 in Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois.

News about Emmett Till spread to both coasts. Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and Illinois Governor William Stratton also became involved, urging Governor White to see that justice be done. The tone in Mississippi newspapers changed dramatically. They falsely reported riots in the funeral home in Chicago. Bryant and Milam appeared in photos taken a decade before of them smiling in their military uniforms and Carolyn Bryant's beauty and virtue were extolled. Rumors of an invasion of outraged blacks and northern whites were printed throughout the state so that the Leflore County sheriff took them seriously. Local businessman, surgeon, and civil rights proponent T. R. M. Howard, one of the wealthiest blacks in the state, warned of a "second civil war" if "slaughtering of Negroes" was allowed. Following Wilkins' comments, white opinion began to shift. According to historian Stephen Whitfield, a specific brand of xenophobia in the South was particularly strong in Mississippi, urging whites to reject the influence of Northern opinion and agitation. This independent attitude was profound enough in Tallahatchie County that it earned the nickname "The Freestate of Tallahatchie", according to a former sheriff, "because people here do what they damn well please", making the county often difficult to govern.

Consequently, Tallahatchie County Sheriff Clarence Strider, who initially positively identified Till's body and stated that the case against Milam and Bryant was "pretty good", on September 3 announced his doubts that the body pulled from the Tallahatchie River was Till's, who he speculated, was probably still alive. The body, according to Strider, was planted by the NAACP: a cadaver stolen by T. R. M. Howard, who colluded to place Till's ring on it. Strider was motivated to change after the comments made in the press about the people of Mississippi, later saying, "The last thing I wanted to do was to defend those peckerwoods. But I just had no choice about it."

Bryant and Milam were indicted for murder, despite the reservations of the grand jury's prosecuting attorney, Hamilton Caldwell, who was not confident a conviction would ever be returned in a case of white violence against a black male accused of insulting a white woman. A local black paper was surprised at the indictment and praised the decision, as did the New York Times. The high profile comments made in Northern newspapers and by the NAACP concerned the prosecuting attorney, Gerald Chatham, who worried that they would not be able to secure a guilty verdict, even with the evidence they had. Initially, with limited funds, Bryant and Milam had difficulty finding attorneys to represent them, but five attorneys at a Sumner law firm offered their services pro bono. Collection jars were placed in stores and other public places in the Delta, eventually gathering $10,000 for the defense.

Trial
The trial was held in the county courthouse in Sumner, the western seat of Tallahatchie County, because Till's body was found. Sumner had only one boarding house and the small town was besieged by reporters from all over the country. David Halberstam called it "the first great media event of the civil rights movement". A reporter who had covered the trials for Bruno Hauptmann and Machine Gun Kelly remarked that this was the most publicity for any trial he had ever seen. No hotels were available for black visitors. Mamie Till Bradley arrived to testify and the trial also attracted black congressman Charles Diggs from Michigan. Bradley, Diggs, and several black reporters stayed at Howard's home in Mound Bayou, which, on a large lot surrounded by Howard's armed guards, resembled a compound. The day before the start of the trial, a young black man named Frank Young arrived to tell Howard he knew of two witnesses to the crime. Levi "Too Tight" Collins and Henry Lee Loggins were black employees of Leslie Milam, J. W.'s brother, in whose shed Till was beaten. Collins and Loggins were spotted with J. W. Milam, Bryant, and Till. The prosecution team was unaware of Collins and Loggins. Sheriff Strider, however, booked them into the Charleston, Mississippi jail to keep them from testifying.

Attendees remember the trial, taking place for five days in September 1955, as being very hot. The courtroom was filled to its 280-spectator capacity, and racially segregated as set by law. Press from major national newspapers attended, including black publications; black reporters were made to sit segregated from the white press, farther from the jury. Sheriff Strider welcomed black spectators coming back from lunch with a cheerful, "Hello, Niggers!" Some visitors from the North found the court to be run with surprising informality. Jury members were allowed to drink beer on duty and many white men in the audience wore handguns holstered to their belts.

The defense's strategy was to cast doubt on the identity of the body pulled from the river and questioned whether Till was dead at all. They asserted that Bryant and Milam had taken Till but had let him go. They furthermore attempted to prove that Mose Wright—who was addressed as "Uncle Mose" by the prosecution and "Mose" by the defense—could not identify Bryant and Milam as the men who took Till from his cabin. Only Milam's flashlight was in use, and no other lights in the house were turned on. Milam and Bryant identified themselves to Wright the evening they took Till—the third man did not speak—but Wright only saw Milam clearly. Wright's testimony was considered remarkably courageous and a first in the state for a black man implicating the guilt of a white man in court. Journalist James Hicks, who worked for the black news wire service National News Association, was present in the courtroom and was especially impressed that Wright stood to identify Milam, pointing to him and saying "Thar he" (There he is), calling it a historic moment and one filled with "electricity". A writer for the New York Post noted that following his identification Wright sat "with a lurch which told better than anything else the cost in strength to him of the thing he had done". A reporter who covered the trial for the New Orleans Times-Picayune stated it was "the most dramatic thing I saw in my career".

Mamie Till Bradley testified that she instructed her son to watch his manners in Mississippi and that should a situation ever come to his being asked to get on his knees to ask forgiveness of a white person, he should do it without a thought. The defense questioned her identification of her son in the casket in Chicago and a $400 life insurance policy she had taken out on him.

While the trial progressed, Leflore County Sheriff George Smith, Howard, and several reporters, both black and white, attempted to locate Collins and Loggins. They could not, but found three witnesses who had seen Collins and Loggins with Milam and Bryant on Leslie Milam's property. Two of them testified that they heard someone being beaten, blows, and cries. One testified so quietly the judge ordered him several times to speak louder, he heard the victim call out, "Mama, Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy." Sheriff Strider testified for the defense his theory that Till was alive, the body retrieved from the river was white. A doctor from Greenwood stated on the stand that the body was too decomposed to identify, and therefore had been in the water too long for it to be Till.

Judge Curtis Swango allowed Carolyn Bryant to testify, but not in front of the jury, after the prosecution objected that her testimony was irrelevant to Till's abduction and murder. It may have been leaked in any case to the jury.

Carolyn Bryant was allowed to testify in court, but because Judge Curtis Swango ruled in favor of the prosecution's objection that her testimony was irrelevant to Till's abduction and murder, the jury was not present. In the event that the defendants were convicted, the defense wanted her testimony on record to aid in a possible appeal.

In the concluding statements, one prosecuting attorney said that what Till did was wrong, but that his action warranted a spanking, not murder. Gerald Chatham passionately called for justice and mocked the sheriff and doctor's statements that alluded to a conspiracy. Mamie Till Bradley indicated she was very impressed with his summation. The defense stated that the prosecution's theory of the events the night Till was murdered was improbable, and said the jury's "forefathers would turn over in their graves" if they convicted Bryant and Milam. Only three outcomes were possible in Mississippi for capital murder: life imprisonment, the death penalty, or acquittal. On September 23 the all-white, all-male jury acquitted both defendants after a 67-minute deliberation; one juror said, "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have taken that long."

In post-trial analyses, blame for the outcome varied. Mamie Till Bradley was criticized for not crying enough on the stand. The jury was noted to have been picked almost exclusively from the hill country section of Tallahatchie County, which, due to its poorer economic make-up found whites and blacks competing for land and other agrarian opportunities. Unlike the population living closer to the river (and thus closer to Bryant and Milam in Leflore County) who possessed a noblesse oblige toward blacks according to historian Stephen Whitaker, those in the eastern part of the county were remarkably virulent in their racism. The prosecution was criticized for dismissing any potential juror who knew Milam or Bryant, for the fear that such a juror would vote to acquit. Afterward, Whitaker noted that this was a mistake as anyone who had personally known the defendants usually disliked them. One juror voted twice to convict, but on the third discussion, acquiesced and voted with the rest of the jury to acquit. In later interviews, the jurors acknowledged that they knew Bryant and Milam were guilty, but simply did not believe that life imprisonment or the death penalty fit punishment for whites who had killed a black man. This is disputed by later interviews with two jurors who stated as late as 2005 that they believed the defense's case, that the prosecution had not proven that Till had died and that it was his body that was removed from the river.

In November 1955 a grand jury declined to indict Bryant and Milam for kidnapping, despite their admissions that they had taken Till. Mose Wright and a young man named Willie Reed, who testified to seeing Milam enter the shed where screams and blows came from, both testified in front of the grand jury. T. R. M. Howard paid to relocate Wright, Reed, and another black witness who testified against Milam and Bryant, to Chicago.

Reed, who later changed his name to Willie Louis to avoid being found, continued to live in the Chicago area until his death on July 18, 2013. He avoided publicity and even kept his history secret from his wife until she was told by a relative. Reed began to speak publicly about the case in the PBS documentary The Murder of Emmett Till, aired in 2003.

Media discourse
Reactions from newspapers in major international cities and Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and socialist publications were furious about the verdict and very critical of American society. Southern newspapers, particularly in Mississippi, wrote that the court system had done its job. Till's story continued to make news for weeks following the trial, especially sparking debate between Southern, Northern, and black newspapers, the NAACP and various high-profile segregationists about justice for black people and the propriety of Jim Crow society.

In October 1955, the Jackson Daily News reported facts about Till's father that had been suppressed by the U.S. military. While serving in Italy, Louis Till raped two women and killed a third. He was court-martialed and hanged by the Army near Pisa in July 1945. Mamie Till Bradley and her family knew none of this, only told that Louis had been killed for "willful misconduct". Mississippi senators James Eastland and John C. Stennis probed Army records to uncover Louis Till's crimes. Although Emmett Till's murder trial was over, news about his father remained on the front pages of Mississippi newspapers for weeks in October and November 1955, further engaging debate about Emmett's actions and Carolyn Bryant's integrity. Stephen Whitfield writes that the lack of attention paid to identifying or finding Till is "strange" compared to the amount of published discourse about his father. According to historians Davis Houck and Matthew Grindy, "Louis Till became a most important rhetorical pawn in the high-stakes game of north versus south, black versus white, NAACP versus White Citizens' Councils".

In 2016, reviewing the facts of the rapes and murder for which Louis Till had been executed, John Edgar Wideman writes that given the timing of the publicity about Emmett's father, although the defendants had already confessed to taking Emmett from his uncle's house, the post-murder trial grand jury refused to even indict them for kidnapping. Wideman also suggested that the conviction and punishment of Louis Till may have been racially motivated, referring to his trial as a "kangaroo court-martial".

Protected against double jeopardy, Bryant and Milam struck a deal with Look magazine in 1956 to tell their story to William Bradford Huie for between $3,600 and $4,000. The interview took place in the law firm of the attorneys who had defended Bryant and Milam. Huie did not ask the questions; Bryant and Milam's own attorneys did. They had never heard the story before either. According to Huie, the older Milam was more articulate and sure of himself than Bryant. Milam admitted to shooting Till and neither of them thought of themselves as guilty or that they had done anything wrong. Following their interview, however, their support base eroded in Mississippi. Blacks refused to shop at their stores, they went bankrupt, and were unable to secure loans from banks to plant crops.

Reaction to Huie's interview with Bryant and Milam was explosive. Their brazen admission that they had unashamedly killed Till caused prominent civil rights leaders to push the federal government harder to investigate the case. Till's murder was one of several reasons the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was passed, which allowed the U.S. Department of Justice to intervene in local law enforcement issues when civil rights were being compromised. Huie's interview, in which he said that Milam and Bryant had acted alone, overshadowed inconsistencies in earlier versions of the stories. Details about Collins and Loggins and anyone else who had possibly been involved in Till's abduction, murder, or the clean-up of it was, according to historians David and Linda Beito, forgotten.}}

< ref name="Buckley"> Wideman also suggested that the conviction and punishment of Louis Till may have been racially motivated, referring to his trial as a "kangaroo court-martial".