Caracappa and Eppolito will spend the rest of their lives in jail. And also locked away with them is the big secret that went unmen-tioned at their triaclass="underline" Why the New York Police Department allowed the most notorious scandal in its history-two of its own acting as Mafia hit men-to remain ignored for a decade. Until, as fate would have it, this very, very cold case was accidentally resurrected.
Richard Rubin : The Ghosts of Emmett Till
from the New York Times Magazine
We've known his story forever, it seems. Maybe that's because it's a tale so stark and powerful that it has assumed an air of timelessness, something almost mythicaclass="underline" Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black kid born and raised in Chicago, went down in August 1955 to visit some relatives in the hamlet of Money, Mississippi. One day, he walked into a country store there, Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market, and, on a dare, said something fresh to the white woman behind the counter-twenty-one-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the owner's wife-or asked her for a date, or maybe wolf-whistled at her. A few nights later, her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother, J. W. Milam, yanked young Till out of bed and off into the dark Delta, where they beat, tortured, and, ultimately, shot him in the head and pushed him into the Tallahatchie River. His body, though tied to a heavy cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, surfaced a few days later, whereupon Bryant and Milam were arrested and charged with murder.
Reporters from all over the country-and even from abroad- converged upon the little courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, to witness the trial. The prosecution mounted an excellent case and went after the defendants with surprising vigor; the judge was eminently fair, refusing to allow race to become an issue in the proceedings, at least overtly. Nevertheless, the jury, twelve white men, acquitted the defendants after deliberating for just sixty-seven minutes-and only that long, one of them said afterward, because they stopped to have a soda pop in order to stretch things out and "make it look good." Shortly thereafter, the killers, immune from further prosecution, met with and proudly confessed everything to William Bradford Huie, a journalist who published their story in Look magazine.
Yes, we know this story very well-perhaps even too well. It has been like a burr in our national consciousness for fifty years now. From time to time it has flared up, inspiring commemorative outbursts of sorrow, anger, and outrage, all of which ran their course quickly and then died down. But the latest flare-up, sparked by a pair of recent documentaries, The Murder of Emmett Till and The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, has spread to the federal government: last year, the Department of Justice announced that it was opening a new investigation into the case. This spring, Till's body was exhumed and autopsied for the first time. It has been reported that officials may be ready to submit a summary of their findings- an "exhaustive report," as one described it-to the local district attorney in Mississippi by the end of this year. The only person in the Department of Justice who would comment on any aspect of the investigation was Jim Greenlee, U.S.Attorney for the Northern District of Mississippi, who would say only that its objective was "to get the facts about what exactly happened that day and who might be culpable."
I have spent a good bit of time trying to do the same thing, even though it's hard to see how I might have any kind of connection with the story of Emmett Till. I am a white man from the Northeast who is not a lawyer or an investigator or an activist; what's more, the whole thing happened a dozen years before I was born. But as is the case with so many other people, the story took fierce hold of me the first time I heard it, as a junior in college in 1987, and it has never let go. It drove me, after graduation, to take a job at the Greenwood Commonwealth, a daily newspaper in Greenwood, Mississippi, just nine miles from Money. There, I found myself surrounded by people who really were connected, in one way or another, with the case: jurors, defense lawyers, witnesses, the man who owned the gin fan. My boss, a decent man who was relatively progressive when it came to matters of race, nevertheless forbade me to interview any of them-even to ask any of them about it casually-during the year I worked for him.
In 1995, when I found myself back in the Delta to conduct interviews and cover a trial for what would eventually become a book about Mississippi, I took the opportunity to try to talk with the people I couldn't back when I lived there. Unfortunately, many of them had died in the interim, including Roy Bryant. (J. W. Milam died in 1980.) After a good bit of detective work, I managed to track down Carolyn Bryant, only to be told by a man who identified himself as her son that he would kill me if I ever tried to contact his mother. I laughed loudly into the phone, more out of surprise than amusement. "I'm not joking," he said, sounding a bit surprised himself."Really, I'm not!"
There were others, though, who were willing to talk, were even quite obliging about it, which surprised me, because these were men who had rarely, if ever, been interviewed on the subject.You see, I wasn't interested in talking to Till's cousins and other members of the local black community, the people who had been there with him at the store, who had witnessed or heard tell of his abduction and had worried that they might be next. Those people had been interviewed many times already; I knew what they had to say, empathized with them, understood them.The people I wanted to interview were those with whom I couldn't empathize, those I didn't understand. I wanted to sit down with the men who were complicit in what I considered to be a second crime committed against Emmett Till-the lawyers who defended his killers in court and the jurors who set them free. I wanted to ask: How could they do it? How did they feel about it now? And how had they lived with it for forty years?
I talked to four of them.They're all dead now.
Ray Tribble is easy to spot in the photographs and newsreel footage of the triaclass="underline" whereas eleven of the jurors appear to be staid middle-aged or elderly men, Tribble is wiry and young, in his twenties. Later he became an affluent man, a large landowner, president of the Leflore County Board of Supervisors. Whenever his name came up-which it did fairly often, at least when I lived in Greenwood -it was uttered with great respect. I was in town for six months before I learned that he had been on the Emmett Till jury.
Six years later, I called Tribble to see if he would talk to me about the trial. He didn't really want to, he said, but I was welcome to come over to his house and visit for a while. He might discuss it a bit, and he might not, but in any event, he didn't feel comfortable with my bringing a tape recorder, or even a note pad.
Tribble lived way out in the country, about five miles north of the crumbling building that had once been Bryant's Grocery. He met me on the front lawn and ushered me inside, where we talked a good while about everything, it seemed, but what I had gone there to discuss. Then, I recall, he suddenly offered, "You want to know about that thing, do you?" I did.
He had first suspected it might not be just another trial, he said, when reporters started showing up; then the camera trucks clogged the square, and the jury was sequestered, lodged in the upper floor of a local hotel. He recalled one member managed to bring a radio in so the men could listen to a prizefight. And then, without any emphasis at all, he added, "There was one of 'em there liked to have hung that jury." One juror, he explained-not him, but another man-had voted twice to convict, before giving up and joining the majority.