The Best American Crime Writing 2006 (34 page)

Ray Tribble wasn't stupid. He was a sharp, measured man who had worked hard and done well for himself and his community. How, I asked him, could he buy such an argument? Hadn't Emmett Till's own mother identified the body of her son? Hadn't that body been found wearing a ring bearing the initials LT, for Louis Till, the boy's dead father?

Tribble looked at me earnestly. That body, he told me, his voice assuming a didactic tone, "had hair on its chest." And everybody knows, he continued, that "blacks don't grow hair on their chest until they get to be about thirty."

In 1955 Joseph Wilson Kellum was a lawyer in Sumner, Mississippi. In 1995 he was still a lawyer in Sumner, and still practicing out of the same office, across the street from the courtroom where Bryant and Milam were tried and acquitted. J. W. Kellum was their defense attorney.

He was actually one of five; it is said that the defendants hired every lawyer in Sumner so that the state would not be able to appoint any of them a special prosecutor on the case. Kellum gave one of two closing statements for the defense, during which he told the jurors that they were "absolutely the custodians of American civilization" and implored them, "I want you to tell me where under God's shining sun is the land of the free and the home of the brave if you don't turn these boys loose-your forefathers will absolutely turn over in their graves!"

Kellum was a twenty-eight-year-old grocery clerk who had never attended college when, in 1939, he took the state bar exam, passed it, and immediately started a solo law practice. For more than fifty years his office was a plain, squat concrete structure bulging with messy piles of books and files and papers, unremarkable but for its proximity to the courthouse. We talked there for ninety minutes, and he never once grew defensive or refused to answer a question. At the start, he told me, he had regarded the defense of Bryant and Milam as "just another case over the desk." Had he ever asked them if they killed Emmett Till?

"Yeah," he said, "they denied that they had did it."

I asked if he had believed them. "Yeah, I believed them," he replied, "just like I would if I was interrogating a client now. I would have no reason to think he's lying to me."

I quoted his statement about the jurors' forefathers turning over in their graves if the defendants were convicted. What had he meant by that? "Their forefathers, possibly, would not have ever convicted any white man for killing a black man," he explained. I asked Kellum if he'd had any misgivings about appealing to the jury's racial attitudes that way."No, not at the time," he replied.

"Did you feel the same way at the time?" I asked.

"Not now," he said. He told me about a Vietnamese boy he sponsored in 1975, after the fall of Saigon. I restated the question. "Put it this way," he said. "I didn't feel that it was justifiable in killing an individual, regardless of what his color might be. I didn't think any white man had a right to kill an individual-black individual-like he was a dog."

How, then, could he have so passionately implored the jury, in his closing argument, to rule in a way that would nullify those very values? "I was trying to say something that would meet with- where they would agree with me, you see. Because I was employed to defend those fellas.And I was going to defend them as much as I could and stay within the law. Those statements were not-I received no admonition during the argument from the judge at all."

"So you just looked at it as part of your job?" "Part of the day's work," he said.

Did he now believe that Bryant and Milam had, in fact, murdered Till?

"I would have to see something," he said. "But they told me they did not. They told the other lawyers that they did not. I have not seen anything where it was supposed to have been an admission of guilt on their part."

If that statement were true, it would make him quite possibly the only man alive at the time who had not read or at least heard about Huie's Look article. But I didn't press him on it, didn't call him a liar. The strange thing is that, in my memory, I had always pressed J. W. Kellum hard, maybe even a bit too hard; for ten years,

I felt a bit guilty about how pointedly I had posed difficult questions to a rather genial octogenarian who had graciously invited me into his office and offered me as much of his time as I wanted. Today, though, when I read through the transcript of that conversation, I can't help feeling that I was too easy on the man. I guess we all make accommodations with the past.

The Aristocrat

It is not widely known, but shortly after they were acquitted, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam suffered a series of reversals. The family owned a string of small stores in the Delta; almost all of their customers were black, and most of them boycotted the stores, which soon closed. Local banks, with one exception, refused to lend money to Milam, who was also a farmer, to help him plant and harvest his crop. The one exception was the little Bank of Webb; Huie speculated that the bank came to Milam's rescue because John Wallace Whitten Jr., another member of the defense team, sat on its loan committee. According to Huie (who later paid the brothers for the film rights to their story), it was Whitten who brokered the Look interview, which took place in Whitten's small law office. Forty years later,Whitten sat down in that same office to discuss the trial with me.

Whitten was a most unlikely savior for two such men. A scion of one of the area's oldest and most prominent families, he went to college and law school at Ole Miss. After graduation, he shipped off to the war in Europe, where he rose to the rank of captain and was awarded a Bronze Star. When he returned home, J. J. Breland, the senior lawyer in town, asked Whitten to join his law firm. Such was the stature of the Whitten name that Breland, who was more than three decades older than Whitten, immediately renamed his firm Breland & Whitten.

Whitten was seventy-six and suffering from Parkinson's disease when we met in 1995, and though he was still practicing law, he often had difficulty speaking. Despite that-and the fact that, as he told me later, his wife had "fussed" at him for agreeing to speak with me-he was a gracious and open host, and like Kellum, never grew defensive or refused to answer a question.

One of his responsibilities before the trial, he told me, was to go down to Greenwood and meet with Dr. L. B. Otken, who examined the body after it was pulled from the Tallahatchie River. Otken, he recalled, had told him,"This is a dead body, but it doesn't belong to that young man that they're looking for." Did he really believe that? "I'm sure I did at one time," Whitten said. "I'm sure he convinced me of it." Had his thinking since changed? "Oh, yes," he said. "I believe that it was the body of Till."

I appreciated his candor, even as I suspected it was a bit incomplete. Or perhaps Whitten was merely choosing his words very carefully; when he said, "I'm sure I did at one time," the natural interpretation is, "I must have, or I never would have done what I did." But I doubt very much that a man like John Whitten could have actually believed such a dubious thing at any time; I imagine that he and the rest of the defense weren't really trying to sell that argument to the jurors so much as they were offering it to them as an instrument of plausible deniability should anyone question their judgment in the future. And now, like J. W. Kellum, he seemed to be engaging in a bit of historical revisionism.

And he clung to it, even when I read to him from an account of his closing argument that had been published in the Greenwood Commonwealth on September 23, 1955:

There are people in the United States who want to destroy the way of life of Southern people… There are people…who will go as far as necessary to commit any crime known to man to widen the gap between the white and colored people of the

United States. They would not be above putting a rotting, stinking body in the river in the hope it would be identified as Emmett Till.

I asked him if he had really believed those things as he was saying them. He said yes, then surprised me by adding:"And I suppose I would probably say I still believe it. I believe there were certain people who would profit by it."

Whitten then revealed something else about himself: clients may have hired him for his old Delta name, but what they got in the bargain was a savvy lawyer who wanted to win and knew how to do it. "That's one of the benefits of arguing where the prosecutor just has a circumstantial case," he said. "If it's just circumstantial, you can go argue your own circumstances over his, and if they believe you, you win."

I asked him if he thought the jury had reached the correct verdict. "Under the circumstances, I don't know if correct would be the right word," he told me."But I think it was sustainable." Had he since come to believe the defendants guilty? "I expect, yes," he said. "If you had to put me down as-if I had to say one way or the other what my belief was, it would be that the body was that of Till and he had been put in the river. These people either did it or knew of it."

I raised the subject of his having helped get a loan for Milam- who, like Whitten, was a veteran of World War II, and a highly decorated one at that-after the trial. Huie had quoted Whitten as saying: "Yes, I helped him. He was a good soldier. In a minefield at night, when other men were running and leaving you to do the killing, J. W. Milam stood with you.When a man like that comes to you and his kids are hungry, you don't turn him down."

"Did you really feel that he was a good man?" I asked.

"Yes, I did. Now, I don't say I felt like he was a man I wanted to know and be with every day. But I felt like he was honest. I felt like he was-could be counted on to do things and look after his family. I never changed my mind about that."

"Well, how is it possible that he did this, then?"

He was silent for a moment."I don't know," he said.

I asked him if he didn't see a conflict there: how could he believe both that Milam was a good man and that he was a murderer? "Well, if that's what you're to judge by," he said. "I don't know whether doing this means he's bad or not. I can't-I'm sure I would have done differently, but I don't dismiss him in every respect because he made one mistake-bad mistake, but his children are still-he's still entitled to work and feed his children."

He was clearly feeling uneasy now, and I could see that it was not merely with this line of questioning; his discomfort, I suspected, mirrored the way he had felt forty years earlier when he had been called upon to defend men of a type he did not associate with, men who had committed a crime he no doubt considered distasteful, to say the least. People of John Whitten's background, his station, did not do such things, or embrace those who did. And yet, in killing Emmett Till, Milam and Bryant had drawn fire from the outside world, not just upon themselves and their crime, but upon their state and their region and nothing less than the entire Southern way of life.And John Whitten, as one of the chief beneficiaries of that way of life, had been called upon to defend it by defending them.

Adding to that burden must have been the knowledge that, in the process, he had become something of a spokesman for white resistance: his final entreaty to the jury was the most notorious utterance of the whole affair. "I'm sure,"Whitten told the jurors, that "every last Anglo-Saxon one of you men in this jury has the courage to set these men free."

"Why 'Anglo-Saxon'?" I asked him.

At first he offered something about Anglo-Saxons having "a reputation for being a little harder against people who get out of line than do others," but he quickly set that aside and explained: "You said 'Anglo-Saxon,' the jury would understand what you were talking about.You're talking about a white man." He added, making a pointed reference to another trial that at that very moment was also polarizing the country, "I guess you could say I was playing the race card."

And it occurred to me, right then, just how much the defense of O.J. Simpson owed to the defense of Roy Bryant and J. W Milam, and how little, in some ways, the country had changed in the past forty years. The issue of race was still so potent that it could overwhelm evidence and hijack a jury, even when the case at hand was a brutal, savage murder. I found it interesting that Whitten made the connection; I wondered if anyone in that courtroom in Los Angeles had.

Sometimes, when you set out to find answers to what you believe are simple questions, what you actually end up with are more questions, the kind that are anything but simple. That's what happened to me during those four conversations. Especially the last one.

Howard Armstrong. In 1995, he was, aside from Ray Tribble, the only living juror. In 1955, he was a thirty-six-year-old veteran of World War II, just like John Whitten, and was living in Enid, up in the northern stem of Tallahatchie County. Most of the other jurors, he said, were from other parts of the county, and he didn't know them.They might have known him by reputation: he was a lay minister, leader of the deacons at the Mount Pisgah Baptist Church. A few years later he would be ordained, and would serve as pastor to a number of congregations for the next thirty-five years, finally retiring at the age of seventy-five, just a year before we met.

As with the others, I spoke to Armstrong on the phone first, and he invited me to come by and visit-although, like Ray Tribble, he wasn't sure he wanted to talk about the trial. No one, he told me, had ever tried to interview him on the subject."Ain't a lot of people even know I served on that jury," he said.

He was living with his wife of fifty-three years, Janie, in a small, neat house that sat up on a rise off a dirt road. In 1955, he was a farmer who made ends meet by working nights at a heating and air-conditioning factory in Grenada, Mississippi, about thirty miles away. The first he had heard of the murder of Emmett Till, he told me, was when he received his jury summons. "I didn't have time for much news," he explained, "working night shift and farming during the day."