One of his responsibilities before the trial, he told me, was to go down to Greenwood and meet with Dr. L. B. Otken, who examined the body after it was pulled from the Tallahatchie River. Otken, he recalled, had told him,"This is a dead body, but it doesn't belong to that young man that they're looking for." Did he really believe that? "I'm sure I did at one time," Whitten said. "I'm sure he convinced me of it." Had his thinking since changed? "Oh, yes," he said. "I believe that it was the body of Till."
I appreciated his candor, even as I suspected it was a bit incomplete. Or perhaps Whitten was merely choosing his words very carefully; when he said, "I'm sure I did at one time," the natural interpretation is, "I must have, or I never would have done what I did." But I doubt very much that a man like John Whitten could have actually believed such a dubious thing at any time; I imagine that he and the rest of the defense weren't really trying to sell that argument to the jurors so much as they were offering it to them as an instrument of plausible deniability should anyone question their judgment in the future. And now, like J. W. Kellum, he seemed to be engaging in a bit of historical revisionism.
And he clung to it, even when I read to him from an account of his closing argument that had been published in the Greenwood Commonwealth on September 23, 1955:
There are people in the United States who want to destroy the way of life of Southern people… There are people…who will go as far as necessary to commit any crime known to man to widen the gap between the white and colored people of the
United States. They would not be above putting a rotting, stinking body in the river in the hope it would be identified as Emmett Till.
I asked him if he had really believed those things as he was saying them. He said yes, then surprised me by adding:"And I suppose I would probably say I still believe it. I believe there were certain people who would profit by it."
Whitten then revealed something else about himself: clients may have hired him for his old Delta name, but what they got in the bargain was a savvy lawyer who wanted to win and knew how to do it. "That's one of the benefits of arguing where the prosecutor just has a circumstantial case," he said. "If it's just circumstantial, you can go argue your own circumstances over his, and if they believe you, you win."
I asked him if he thought the jury had reached the correct verdict. "Under the circumstances, I don't know if correct would be the right word," he told me."But I think it was sustainable." Had he since come to believe the defendants guilty? "I expect, yes," he said. "If you had to put me down as-if I had to say one way or the other what my belief was, it would be that the body was that of Till and he had been put in the river. These people either did it or knew of it."
I raised the subject of his having helped get a loan for Milam- who, like Whitten, was a veteran of World War II, and a highly decorated one at that-after the trial. Huie had quoted Whitten as saying: "Yes, I helped him. He was a good soldier. In a minefield at night, when other men were running and leaving you to do the killing, J. W. Milam stood with you.When a man like that comes to you and his kids are hungry, you don't turn him down."
"Did you really feel that he was a good man?" I asked.
"Yes, I did. Now, I don't say I felt like he was a man I wanted to know and be with every day. But I felt like he was honest. I felt like he was-could be counted on to do things and look after his family. I never changed my mind about that."
"Well, how is it possible that he did this, then?"
He was silent for a moment."I don't know," he said.
I asked him if he didn't see a conflict there: how could he believe both that Milam was a good man and that he was a murderer? "Well, if that's what you're to judge by," he said. "I don't know whether doing this means he's bad or not. I can't-I'm sure I would have done differently, but I don't dismiss him in every respect because he made one mistake-bad mistake, but his children are still-he's still entitled to work and feed his children."
He was clearly feeling uneasy now, and I could see that it was not merely with this line of questioning; his discomfort, I suspected, mirrored the way he had felt forty years earlier when he had been called upon to defend men of a type he did not associate with, men who had committed a crime he no doubt considered distasteful, to say the least. People of John Whitten's background, his station, did not do such things, or embrace those who did. And yet, in killing Emmett Till, Milam and Bryant had drawn fire from the outside world, not just upon themselves and their crime, but upon their state and their region and nothing less than the entire Southern way of life.And John Whitten, as one of the chief beneficiaries of that way of life, had been called upon to defend it by defending them.
Adding to that burden must have been the knowledge that, in the process, he had become something of a spokesman for white resistance: his final entreaty to the jury was the most notorious utterance of the whole affair. "I'm sure,"Whitten told the jurors, that "every last Anglo-Saxon one of you men in this jury has the courage to set these men free."
"Why 'Anglo-Saxon'?" I asked him.
At first he offered something about Anglo-Saxons having "a reputation for being a little harder against people who get out of line than do others," but he quickly set that aside and explained: "You said 'Anglo-Saxon,' the jury would understand what you were talking about.You're talking about a white man." He added, making a pointed reference to another trial that at that very moment was also polarizing the country, "I guess you could say I was playing the race card."
And it occurred to me, right then, just how much the defense of O.J. Simpson owed to the defense of Roy Bryant and J. W Milam, and how little, in some ways, the country had changed in the past forty years. The issue of race was still so potent that it could overwhelm evidence and hijack a jury, even when the case at hand was a brutal, savage murder. I found it interesting that Whitten made the connection; I wondered if anyone in that courtroom in Los Angeles had.
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."