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Closing of Till case brings regrets, resignation

As a civil rights tragedy goes unpunished, views splinter about the state of racial justice.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published March 4, 2007

Even as the U.S. Department of Justice was announcing a fresh look at unsolved civil rights era killings around the South, a Mississippi Delta prosecutor was closing the books on perhaps the most notorious of those cold cases - the brutal 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till.

To some, the Leflore County grand jury's decision not to return an indictment in the case following an exhaustive three-year federal investigation was a sign that not much has changed in Mississippi in the last 52 years.

Others, including the prosecutor herself, felt it showed the opposite - a maturing of racial justice in this part of the South.

"It would have been very easy for that grand jury to have returned a true bill based solely on emotion and the rage they felt. And I commend them for not doing that," says Joyce Chiles, the black district attorney who directed the case in which the grand jury declined to charge 73-year-old Carolyn Bryant Donham - the object of Till's infamous wolf whistle.

If the grand jurors had acted on the basis of hate, not evidence, Chiles says, that would have been more like the Jim Crow justice of 1955.

"I didn't feel good toward her; I still don't feel good toward her," says Chiles, who grew up on a plantation not far from the spot where Till's bloated, ravaged body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River. But as the prosecutor who laid out the file for the grand jury, she had to acknowledge that the evidence was not there.

"We are justice seekers and not head hunters," Chiles says. "And if I were to follow the law and the evidence as it was presented, I would have had to have returned a no bill."

Since 1989, officials in Mississippi and six other states had won convictions in nearly two dozen civil rights era cases that most had considered stone cold. The decision in the Till case was revealed Tuesday, the same day U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced the reopening of about a dozen cold cases; he did not reveal which cases they are.

To many, Till was the "sacrificial lamb" of the civil rights movement. When federal officials reopened the case in 2004, his family and others had high hopes that someone would at last be made to pay for killing the boy whose defiled, river-ravaged face helped galvanize mass opposition to Southern segregation.

In August 1955, Till left Chicago to spend the summer with his great uncle, Mose "Preacher" Wright, in the cotton crossroads town of Money.

Late that month, "Bobo" and some other kids went to the Bryant Grocery & Meat Market, across the Money Road from the "colored" school, to buy candy and pink-iced "stage plank" cookies. Simeon Wright and his cousin had just stepped outside when Emmett let out his whistle.

Wright was sharing a bed with Emmett two nights later when a car pulled up. Half-brothers Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam appeared with pistols and announced they had come to see "the boy who had done all the talking."

The men ordered Emmett to dress, then led him outside. Mose Wright would later testify that he heard a light voice from inside the vehicle, like that of a woman, say that they had the right one.

Three days after Emmett's disappearance, his body was found in the Tallahatchie, a gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire.

As many as 100,000 people filed past Till's open casket during a four-day public viewing in Chicago. A graphic photo of his mangled face in Jet magazine helped stoke the nation's outrage and fuel the civil rights movement.

In 1955, an all-white Tallahatchie County jury took just 67 minutes to acquit Bryant and Milam of killing the 14-year-old for having the audacity to whistle at a white woman.

Even after Bryant and Milam confessed to the killing in 1956 in Look magazine, the federal government failed to move. The two died without being charged, and many thought that was the end.

But the case was reopened in 2004, due in large part to the efforts of New York filmmaker Keith Beauchamp.

Beauchamp had seen the Jet magazine photo when he was 10, and the image had haunted him. He compiled a list of at least 14 people - black and white - he thought had some role in the kidnapping, beating and slaying. He went to the authorities with the names of five people who were still alive, including the former Mrs. Bryant.

The FBI amassed an 8,000-page file during its investigation but determined that the statutes of limitations had run out on all possible federal crimes. The agency turned the file over to Chiles, with a recommendation that she take a close look at Donham.

Roy Bryant denied at the time that his wife came along on the abduction, and no one has come forward saying that they saw her at the Wright home.

Simeon Wright was devastated by the panel's decision, but not really surprised.

"They came up with this 50 years ago," Wright, 64, said from his home in Chicago. "Some of the people haven't changed from 50 years ago. Same attitude. The evidence speaks for itself."

Juan Williams, author of Eyes on the Prize and other works on the civil rights movement, is not persuaded. "You have a mostly black (grand) jury, a black prosecutor. I mean, I don't know what he wants," Williams says. "It's not as if this has been a whitewash by any means. ...

"The two guilty parties are dead. You can't go back and revise history to your liking because you now live in a more enlightened era."

[Last modified March 4, 2007, 00:37:57]