I was stunned. I had always heard, and believed, that the jury's brief deliberation had been a mere formality. This news forced upon me a belated yet elementary epiphany: the Emmett Till jury was not a machine, an instrument of racism and segregation, a force of history. It was just like any other jury-a body composed of twelve individuals. One of whom, apparently, was somewhat reluctant to commit an act that history has since ruled inevitable.
Tribble told me he couldn't recall which juror, but said it in a way that made me wonder if he truly couldn't remember or if he could but didn't care to say. I ran some names by him, but he would neither confirm nor deny any of them, and fearing that the conversation might soon be coming to an end, I changed the subject and posed the question I had wanted to ask him for six years:Why did he vote to acquit?
He explained, quite simply, that he had concurred with the defense team's core argument: that the body fished out of the Tallahatchie River was not that of Emmett Till-who was, they claimed, still very much alive and hiding out in Chicago or Detroit or somewhere else up North-but someone else's, a corpse planted there by the NAACP for the express purpose of stirring up a racial tornado that would tear through Sumner, and through all of Mississippi, and through the rest of the South, for that matter.
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.