An Unforgettable Miscarriage of Justice

NAUSEATING. ABSOLUTELY NAUSEATING. That is the only way to describe the miscarriage of justice in the Emmett Till murder case. If you want a tale of everything wrong with the American criminal justice system, at least at the time of the Till case, then read Tragedy on Trial: The Story of the Infamous Emmett Till Murder Trial (2024) by Professor Ronald Collins. It is nothing less than a superb account of the racist, violent, farcical trial that acquitted two white defendants of murdering Emmett Till, a young Black teen who allegedly made inappropriate remarks toward a white woman in Mississippi in 1955. Yet this book is so much more: it is an indictment of the failures of the criminal justice system that led to this miscarriage of justice. And, as the author says, although the courtroom trial may have ended, “America is still on trial.”

Collins uses a unique approach to tell the story of the Emmett Till case. His focus is on the facts, and where better to start the search for those facts than in the trial transcripts themselves? Though the book has prefaces and explanations for each part of the proceedings, the transcripts are really the source that transports the reader back to the trial itself.

Before delving into what those transcripts show, a brief summary of the Emmett Till case is in order. The 1955 trial happened as the United States was redefining itself after World War II. Black veterans had returned home and Brown v. Board of Education was one year old. But the day-to-day life for Black Americans in the South had not changed. They were subjugated, abused, and discarded by an American culture that refused to embrace them. Into this environment stepped a young Black boy from Chicago. Emmett Till, who was visiting his family in Money, Mississippi, was taken from his uncle’s home by the two defendants—Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam—and tortured and murdered. It was only because of the courage of his mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, that the world was made to see and confront what had happened. They saw it because she insisted on an open casket at Till’s funeral.

A grand jury in Tallahatchie County also saw what happened and indicted Bryant and Milam on charges of kidnapping and murder. But the 12 white men sitting on the jury refused to see what the world could see: Emmett Till had been forcibly taken from his uncle’s home and beaten, tortured, shot, and thrown in the river, and his body, not found until a few days later, was weighted down by a cotton gin fan fastened with barbed wire. The jury acquitted the defendants. This book explains in terrifying detail how the defense prevailed; however, it goes beyond that. It also explores how journalist William Bradford Huie created a phony narrative to sell his own sensational version of the case.

The Trial

Emmett Till was 14 years old when his mother sent him to stay with his relatives for two weeks in Money, a small northern Mississippi town. On the evening of August 24, 1955, Till was hanging out with friends and relatives in front of defendant Bryant’s store and allegedly made an inappropriate remark to Bryant’s wife, Carolyn. According to Carolyn Bryant, when Till put some candy on the counter, he grabbed her right hand and asked her for a date. Then, according to her, he grabbed her waist and made a lecherous comment that she needn’t be afraid of him because he had slept with white women before. Carolyn Bryant then left the store and headed to a car to retrieve a weapon. At that point, Till whistled at her, breaking a long-standing social taboo between Blacks and whites in the South. Two days later, Carolyn’s husband Roy Bryant returned to town. Hearing about the incident, he made plans with his half brother, John W. Milam, to teach Till a lesson. They proceeded to troll the streets for a Black boy but initially grabbed the wrong one. They then reached the home of Moses “Preacher” Wright, Till’s uncle. There, they demanded that Till come with them, threatening to kill Wright and his family if they told anyone about what they were doing. After Carolyn Bryant confirmed Till’s identity, the defendants drove him to a barn where they whipped and tortured him. They then shot him and dumped his body in the river. The key witnesses to these facts were Wright and Black workers who saw the truck with Till and heard hollering and whipping from the barn.

Three days later, Robert Hodges, a boy who was fishing several miles downstream from the scene of the crime, found a body and pulled it from the river. It was badly bloated, but he noticed that one of the body’s fingers was wearing a silver ring. Wright was called to the riverbank and identified his nephew’s body, which was then released to a Black undertaker. The ring was given to Wright, who identified it as a family ring. He turned it over to LeFlore County Deputy Sheriff John Ed Cothran.

Within a day of the abduction, Bryant and Milam were arrested for kidnapping. Only later were they charged with murder. The first trial was actually the murder trial, which was held in a different county from the one where the kidnapping occurred. Seven witnesses were called for the prosecution, including Wright, Hodges, Till-Bradley, and others who had seen Till’s body recovered from the river and heard the beating in the barn.

So, in light of this damning evidence, how were the defendants acquitted? I’m tempted to say, “Read the book.” And that is exactly what one should do since it contains both context and the transcripts of the trial. But the defense was as amazing as it was effective. The defendants claimed that the 14-year-old boy found in the river with barbed wire around his neck, a bullet hole in his head, and the Bradley family ring on his finger was not Emmett Till. Given all the other evidence, how could this possibly have been plausible? Well, to an all-white jury looking for a way to avoid convicting two white neighbors, it was more than enough—even though there was a partial confession by Bryant that he had taken Till from Wright’s home. The defense lawyers simply promulgated a story that, although the defendants took Till, they later released him; so, it must have been a different boy who was found dead in the river. The defense then peppered their presentation with a parade of “good old boy” character witnesses attesting to the defendants’ benevolent personalities, as well as witnesses who would vow that there had been a beating but could not rebut the defense claim of whose body was found in the river. This was a “corpus delicti” defense—the prosecution would lose because the defense would introduce doubt as to the identity of the body found in the river.

The Impact

The result of the trial was predestined by the racism and injustice of the South throughout that era. One’s heart sinks as this injustice comes into stark focus throughout the trial. Law enforcement officers, especially the sheriff, were complicit in how they handled the investigation from the beginning. Doctors lied on the stand. The trial smacked of the type of Southern justice that took the place of straight-out lynching—lynching of the victim by a fundamentally tainted trial instead. Collins’s book shows, line by line, how that occurred. It demonstrates how justice was replaced by a show trial to preserve the traditions of the South or, as the defense put it, to use a jury to be the “custodians of American civilization.” The jury deliberated for less than 70 minutes. Its verdict became a ticking time bomb for our justice system.

The defendants were never tried for the kidnapping; the Wright family retreated to the North. An unscrupulous freelance writer, William Bradford Huie, contrived a way to write his own sensational version of the crime for Look magazine. But the real version is in the trial transcripts, and this book helps us remember the truth by providing those transcripts and footnotes amplifying and explaining what occurred.

The Till trial was an injustice. Mercifully, it is one that continues to spur efforts to address the racism that tainted that trial from beginning to end. In 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. It addresses more than just lynchings: it also addresses hate crimes committed in other ways, as well as conspiracies to commit hate crimes based upon race. It moves the tragedy of a trial to a promise of a more just future. Even a failed trial has the power to do that.