The Emmett Till case seems so straightforward, and has become so iconic, that people often mistakenly believe they know the whole story. One thing you won't hear in Eyes on the Prize, or just about anywhere else, is that it was extremely unusual that Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam were even tried for murder in the first place. In fact, no one I've asked in Mississippi can recall another such trial happening before then. There were a great many lynch-ings before then, of course, most of them now long-forgotten, but despite the fact that many of them were public events-and there are plenty of pictures to document them-no white man had ever been tried in Mississippi for lynching a black man before September l955.What's more, the trial of Milam and Bryant was widely regarded, at the time, to have been eminently fair (unlike the verdict).This was a universal conclusion-even the black press, outraged though they were over the verdict, devoted a lot of ink to how hard the prosecutors worked for a conviction, and how fair the judge was in presiding over the trial, the latter going so far as to exclude the testimony of Carolyn Bryant, which, he determined, served no purpose other than to inflame the jurors' racial prejudices. James L. Hicks, the legendary pioneer black journalist, was there in Sumner and wrote:
I had come here almost with a preconceived idea that I would jeer a mockery ofjustice from the first day of the trial. But, as the state spun its web around the two men in five days, I stayed up late and long each night, waiting and getting ready to cheer a state which I felt was coming over to the side of decency and fair play when the rest of the world was saying that it couldn't be done.
And up to the very moment that the jury of white sharecroppers came out of the jury room to announce their verdict, I was inwardly cheering and rooting for the people of Mississippi as loud and long as I root for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
For in the five days' conduct of the trial, Mississippi just didn't follow the script written for her by the rest of the world.
After my article was published, I was contacted by the son of one of those prosecutors; he later shared with me a large cache of letters his late father had received during and after the trial. There were two basic types: the first from a black or white correspondent thanking him for his courageous stand in the name of justice; the seond from a white correspondent condemning him, often obscenely, for betraying his race.
As I said, I never imagined, in 1987, that I would someday have the opportunity to confront some of the men involved in the Emmett Till case, if for no other reason than that the whole affair seemed so bizarre and archaic and otherworldly that I just assumed everyone involved in it was long dead.They were not, though most are now.J.W Kellum died at eighty-four, less than a year after I met him. Ray Tribble died of cancer in 1998, at the age of seventy-one; a senior center in Greenwood is now named for him. John W. Whitten, Jr., succumbed to Parkinson's in 2003, a week shy of his eighty-fourth birthday. Three years earlier, he and his wife gave a million dollars to their alma mater, Ole Miss, to build a new student golf center. Howard Armstrong died of heart failure on August 25, 2003; he was eighty-four years old. The road that leads to the cemetery where he is buried is named for him.
Roy Bryant died of cancer in 1994 at the age of sixty-three. So did his half brother, J.W. Milam, at the age of sixty in 1981. I am told that Milam's cancer was spinal, and particularly painful.The hotel in Sumner where the jurors were sequestered has long since closed, and now looks as if it is being devoured by trees; parts of it appear to have been swatted to the ground by some giant hand. Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market continues to deteriorate; when I last saw it, in the fall of 2004, the roof, windows, interior walls, and floors were entirely gone, and trees were growing inside it.The second-story porch had been reduced to some dangling weather-beaten timbers, and the front doors had vanished; someone had already put them up for sale on eBay, with an opening bid price of five hundred dollars.There were no takers.
For much more on the subject, including an account of my 1989 encounter with Roy Bryant, see Confederacy of Silence.
Chuck Hustmyre : Blue on Blue
Murder, Madness, and Betrayal in the NOPD
from New Orleans magazine
Antoinette Frank stood in the cramped kitchen of the Kim Anh restaurant, a 9mm pistol clutched in her hand. Kneeling on the dirty floor at Frank's feet were seventeen-year-old Cuong Vu and his twenty-four-year-old sister, Ha.
Cuong was an altar boy at St. Brigid Catholic Church. He played high school football and wanted to be a priest. Ha was considering becoming a nun. Both worked long hours at their parents' restaurant.
Frank fired nine bullets into them.
Ha Vu died instantly.When detectives found her, she was still on her knees, her forehead resting on the floor.
Cuong took longer to die. Frank shot him repeatedly in the chest and back, but his young athlete's heart continued to beat. Frank heard him trying to talk, so she shot him again, this time firing two bullets into Cuong's head.
Frank and her partner in crime, an eighteen-year-old named Rogers LaCaze, ransacked the Bullard Avenue restaurant until they found what they were looking for-money.
Frank and LaCaze bolted through the dining room. On their way to the front door they passed Ronnie Williams. Williams was a twenty-five-year-old New Orleans police officer assigned to the Seventh District. He had gotten off work at 11:00 p.m. and had gone straight to the restaurant to work a security detail. Williams needed the extra money the detail paid. Ten days earlier, his wife had given birth to the couple's second son, Patrick.
Still in his police uniform, Williams would be found face down behind the bar in a pool of blood. He had been shot twice in the head and once in the back.
LaCaze took Ronnie Williams's gun and wallet.
Outside, Frank and LaCaze piled into a battered 1977 Ford Torino. As the car screeched out of the parking lot, a sun-yellowed cardboard sign fluttered on the dashboard in front of the steering wheel. Printed on either end of the foot-wide rectangular placard was the star-and-crescent symbol of the New Orleans Police Department. In the center of the sign, between the symbols, were the words new Orleans police officer on duty.
The sign and the car belonged to officer Antoinette Frank, a New Orleans cop who worked out of the Seventh District. She, too, had just gotten off at 11 o'clock. Frank was on the same platoon and worked the same shift as Ronnie Williams.The two officers had worked together every day for more than a year.
Few would argue that by the time 1995 rolled around, the New Orleans Police Department was in sad shape. The department was losing about one hundred officers per year-many of them fired or arrested-and hiring only half that many. In 1994, two officers had been arrested for murder, one for killing a man the officer suspected of having broken into his apartment; the other for ordering the execution of a woman who had filed a brutality complaint against him.Then in December 1994, the FBI arrested ten New Orleans cops on federal drug-trafficking charges.