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."
I asked him how he had felt about serving."Really and truly," he told me,"I can't remember how I felt about that. I reckon I felt the way I did about serving on any other jury. I wasn't crazy about serving on none of them…I needed to be on my job and on the farm."When I pressed him to tell me what else he remembered, he responded:"I don't want to pull it up. I want to leave it out there- it's just best to leave things alone."
"He just never did talk about that much," his wife, who was sitting next to him, explained.
I asked about the verdict. "I didn't think that they presented the case to prove it," he said of the prosecutors."I understand that them folks was pretty much outlaws, but I didn't know that. I heard it years later." He was quiet for a moment."I still don't know."
That truly surprised me. But he stood by it, insisting that the prosecution had not proven its case-otherwise, he said, "I'd never have voted the way I did."When I asked him what the jury deliberations had been like, he said, "I'm sure there was a good bit of discussion. I do remember that there were at least three votes on that thing." He must have anticipated my next question, because he quickly added,"And I voted to acquit all three times."
I was disappointed; somehow, I had hoped he might have been that lone dissenter. I asked if he still believed they had reached the right verdict.
"I still think they were innocent," he said. "I have no reason and no proof, and I don't judge people. I went and done my duty, left my duty where it was at and went on to other things."And no misgivings at all? "I served to the best of my ability, under my prayer to God for guidance and wisdom. And I stand by my decision…I still stand by it. I think I was right."
"I guess you know that an awful lot of people disagreed."
"I was surprised at all the fuss," he said. "I thought we deliberated that thing, came back with a decision and that should be it." I asked him if racial tensions were sharpened there afterward. "There wasn't as much tensions as there are now," he said.
"We've always had some good black friends," his wife added. "Very good."
"Go to Charleston," he told me, "talk to any of the blacks that was raised with me, and they'll tell you I was anything but a racist."
And I found that statement more disturbing than anything that Ray Tribble, or J. W. Kellum, or John Whitten had said to me. Because I believed him. I believed that Howard Armstrong was not a racist. I felt I had gotten to the point where I could spot a racist of almost any type in almost any circumstance, and he was not one. And yet he had voted-at least three times, by his own account-to acquit two men who were clearly guilty of a horrific, racist crime.
I have spent a lot of time contemplating that conundrum over the past ten years, and I have come to the conclusion that at least part of the problem is ours.We tend to think of racism, and racists, the way we think of most things-in binary terms. Someone is either a racist or he isn't. If he is a racist, he does racist things; if he isn't, he doesn't. But of course it's much more complicated than that, and in the Mississippi of 1955 it was more complicated still. Today, we can look back and say that Howard Armstrong should have voted to convict Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam of murdering Emmett Till; but for him to buck the established order like that would have actually required him to make at least four courageous decisions. First, he would have had to decide that the established order, the system in which he had lived his entire life, was wrong. Second, he would have had to decide that it should change. Third, he would have had to decide that it could change. And finally, he would have had to decide that he himself should do something to change it.
Howard Armstrong never made it to that final step. Another juror apparently did, and managed to stay there through two votes before backing down. It is frustrating to me that I will probably never know who that other juror was, where he found the courage that got him that far, and why, ultimately, he changed his mind. But it is even more frustrating to me to imagine that Howard Armstrong made it past Step l but got tripped up on 2 or 3.
I only wonder if it was frustrating for him too. In 1995, sitting with him in his living room, I took his answers, his unwavering declarations that he had no regrets, at face value; today, I'm not so sure. Rereading my notes after ten years, I can perceive a certain defensiveness in his words, an urge to keep the conversation short and narrow, perhaps cut off the next question before it could be asked. His insistence, like J.W. Kellum's, that this was just another trial feels flat now. And then there's his vacillation on the matter of whether or not the defendants were "outlaws." Did he really believe, in both 1955 and 1995, that Bryant and Milam were innocent, and that he himself had done the right thing in voting to set them free? Or was this merely something he repeatedly told him-self-and others-to get by? I do believe he was not a racist in 1995. But had he been one in 1955 and then grew, in subsequent decades, so ashamed of that fact that he did everything he could to defeat it in his own mind?
I don't know if Howard Armstrong could have answered those questions then, but I imagine he didn't want to try. It was easier on him, I'm sure, to believe that he had just forgotten all about it."I'm glad I can't remember those old days," he told me near the end of our visit. "You hear so much about 'the good old days.'The good old days weren't so good."
Richard Rubin has been a regular contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, and has written for the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, New York magazine, and The Oxford American, among others. His most recent book, Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South (Atria, 2002), is in part a memoir of his experiences reporting for a daily newspaper in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1988-1989. He lives in New York, and is at work on a book about World War I.
I first heard the story of Emmett Till in 1987, as a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, while watching the documentary Eyes on the Prize as part of a seminar on the subject of Race in America. I was shocked, of course, by Till's story-most of Eyes on the Prize is shocking, really-and when the narrator recounted how an attorney for the killers said, at their trial, "I'm sure every last Anglo-Saxon one of you men in this jury has the courage to set these men free," I remember, clearly, thinking:Why would anyone say such a thing? What could he have been thinking? In a general sense, my desire to find the answers to questions like those is what led me to take a job as a newspaper reporter in the small Delta town of Greenwood, Mississippi, after graduation, and to spend nearly five years living in the Deep South. I never imagined, though, that I would someday have the chance to pose those questions to the man who had inspired them in the first place.