New Book Announcement: "The Emmett Till Book"

New Information, stories, new facts.

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ONE LATE AUGUST NIGHT IN 1955 around a Boy Scout campfire burned down to its last embers, Robert Keglar and his campers heard a story they would not forget. A “very shaken” man came into camp in the early morning hours and told of hearing the screams of a teenage boy being tortured and beaten to death only hours earlier in a machine shed outside of Drew, over in Sunflower County.

There were horrible screams, the visitor said, and when the men finished killing the young boy, they took his body from the barn and hauled it off. More than two men were in the lynching party, he told Keglar and others as the fire smoldered. Campers finally went to sleep and when they awoke for breakfast, the visitor was gone.

AT MIDNIGHT that same day, forty-six miles away from the scout camp, the parents of a seventeen-year-old Ruleville girl let early-morning visitors stay in their home for the night. J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, the latter her mother’s relative by marriage, were loud and nervous, she remembered.

“My parents didn’t tell me then what was going on at the time. J.W. had a full brother, Bud, and I am very sure he was with them, too. I was in bed but I could hear their voices.”

The woman, who asked to remain anonymous, said that years later her father told her that Milam and Bryant let him know what they had done to Emmett Till. “They knew the law was looking for them. They also said that Carolyn Bryant was with them when they killed Emmett Till. I don’t know when Bud joined them. I think they caught up with him later. He was a nicer person than his brother, and I don’t think he would have killed someone – I hope not.”

When she awoke at sunrise, all three men were gone. “I never knew what happened to them after they left our house. I think they knew the law was going to catch up with them. And I think they felt safe, since most of the officers were covering for them, anyway. I don’t know if they turned themselves in, let themselves be found or if they were picked up by the sheriff and charged.

“I still can’t believe how they put our family in such danger; there was so much turmoil after Emmett Till was killed. People in Drew – black and white – were threatening to kill each other’s entire families. Some were threatening to kill as many as ten members of another person’s family as payback.”

“I know that my parents would have never covered for them. They came to our house and sat there all night. Later my parents told me what was going on. But I would never want anyone to think that our family helped them out.”

“Most people in Drew and Ruleville felt the same way,” she said. “After the trial, the only support Milam and Bryant had been from the Klan because they were members. Most people didn’t want to have anything to do with them. They had killed a 14-year-old child, after all. Maybe they didn’t mean to do it, but they did kill him.”


ACCORDING TO SOME news reports, Till’s murderers were identified as being in the same car that drove Till from his great-uncle’s home in Money where he was visiting. In Greenville, Pulitzer prize-winning publisher Hodding Carter pulled a story off the newswire and placed it on the front page of his newspaper:

Two White Men Charged with Kidnapping Negro

Greenwood, Miss. (UP) – Two white men charged with kidnapping a 15-year-old [sic] Chicago Negro because they claimed he insulted the wife of one of the men, claimed today they released the missing boy unharmed. Sheriff George Smith said Roy Bryant, a storekeeper in nearby Money community and his half-brother, J.W. Nilan [Milam], were held on kidnap charges in the mysterious disappearance of Emmett Till of Chicago. They were arrested yesterday …

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HELLO.

The Emmett Till Book is a quick and unique read about the 14-year-old from Chicago and related Mississippi Delta murders. I live in the Delta, actually on the grounds of Parchman Farm, the infamous state penitentiary that has been the home to many Delta bluesmen. Our home is about ten miles from the plantation outside of Drew (in Sunflower County) where Emmett Till was murdered and about fifteen miles from Sumner, site of the trial of Milam and Bryant.

Some of the older people who remember those days are still around. I’ve talked to many of them, looked through archives and have picked up many new pieces of this story that are included in the book. Other murders are covered as well, including those of

•High school senior Jo Etha Collier (a young black girl killed in Drew on graduation night, 1973, by a white men accompanied by two white friends);

•Clinton Melton, a father of four who was killed by one of Milam’s drunk friends, and of course acquitted by an all-white male jury;

•Melton’s young wife who was run of the road into a bayou before she could testify in court;

•Cleve McDowell, a civil rights lawyer who was born in Drew the same summer as Till and shot to death in Drew in 1997. McDowell was investigating hundreds of civil rights murders, including Till’s. He kept in contact with Till’s mother, often exchanging information about the crime. Six months after he was killed, all of his papers were burned (or disappeared) when his office caught on fire. His murder is so mysterious that local court officials still refuse to remove a gag order from the records – strange, since he is certainly dead. But I found some fascinating new information, anyway.

This book also includes dozens of names of people lynched in Mississippi over civil rights activities, such as registering to vote; an Emmett Till timeline, and of course dozens of book and related references.

* * *


Fred and I moved to the Delta two years ago when he went to work at Parchman (he’s a psychologist). As a former news reporter it did not take long for me to start snooping around and discovering some of the hundreds of unsolved civil rights murders in “the Magnolia State,” particularly those that occurred in the far reaches of the Delta.

The Emmett Till Book is the first of two.

On June 16, Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited will be published and you’re invited to return to lulu.com and learn more about this two-year research and writing project. Meanwhile, I’m posting new items to my civil rights blogs daily and will be attending special services June 19 in Philadelphia, honoring the lives of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. I will post pictures on all of the blogs for you to see.

http://themiddleoftheinternet.com/bookorder.html


I look forward to hearing from you.
Susan Klopfer

mailto:sklopfer@earthlink.net