William Bradford Huie believed Carolyn Bryant lied when she testified that Emmett Till attacked her, but the author still published her fabrication, a long-secret memo reveals.
Huie’s reporting in his 1956 Look magazine article has been denounced for twisting and omitting critical facts, but this memo, for the first time, proves the writer purposely published falsehoods that became the official narrative for Till’s 1955 slaying for decades.
Wright Thompson, author of a new book about the Till case, “The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi,” called the memo “a smoking gun” that reveals “a long suspected but never quite proveable truth about Huie.”
While national debate rages over critical race theory, this memo shows “how hard it is to teach Black history, because part of white supremacy is lying about the past,” said Dave Tell, author of “Remembering Emmett Till.”
Wiiter William Bradford Huie.
Thirty-three pages of “confidential” notes, labeled for destruction, show how Huie convinced Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his brother, J.W. Milam, to talk after an all-white Mississippi jury acquitted them. In return for telling how they murdered Till, the writer slipped them thousands in cash, refused to testify against them, repeated their lies and erased the Black witnesses who identified others in the lynch mob.
Keith Beauchamp, a producer for the 2022 “Till” film, whose 2005 documentary “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till,” helped reopen the Till case — said Huie was far more passionate about making a movie than he was about telling the truth.
“I am ‘hot’ in Hollywood right now,” Huie bragged to an editor. “This Mississippi story, with proper releases, is a good bet for $100,000,” the modern-day equivalent of more than $1.1 million.
Sharing a “secret 15%” with the killers is “a damn good way for Milam and Bryant to make crime pay,” he wrote.
“I am ‘hot’ in Hollywood right now,” Huie bragged to an editor. “This Mississippi story, with proper releases, is a good bet for $100,000,” the modern-day equivalent of more than $1.1 million.
Sharing a “secret 15%” with the killers is “a damn good way for Milam and Bryant to make crime pay,” he wrote.
The lies that Huie published enabled the killers to justify their torture and killing of a 14-year-old boy, said Davis Houck, Fannie Lou Hamer Professor of Rhetorical Studies at Florida State University, where the memo, along with letters, are part of a new donation to The Emmett Till Archives at Florida State University Libraries. “Huie did generational damage to Mississippi and the nation by making Emmett Till an avatar for hate.”
On July 25, 1955, Emmett Till turned 14. When he had spare time, he liked playing baseball, but most of all, he loved humor.
“He would pay people to tell him jokes,” said his cousin, Wheeler Parker. “He was strictly fun.”
In this photograph taken in Summit-Argo, Illinois, Emmett Till, left, sits on a bicycle beside his cousin, Wheeler Parker, with his passenger, Joe Williams.
Weeks later, Till’s great-uncle, Moses Wright, visited Chicago and invited Till and Parker to come vacation with him in Mississippi for a couple of weeks before school started.
Till’s mother, Mamie, gave him permission, and he fished, swam and picked cotton with his cousins in the Mississippi Delta.
On a Wednesday evening, Aug. 24, 1955, he and his cousins visited Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market in Money. Parker bought an ice cream cone and went outside to finish it. Till stayed inside.
Roy Bryant told Huie that Till entered the store and said “yeah” instead of “yes.”
“The atmosphere in the store tensed,” Huie wrote in his memo. “Carolyn Bryant noted the ‘insult’ and became excited.”
When two other Black youths urged him to leave, Roy quoted Till as saying that he knew white women.
“Frightened, Carolyn Bryant hurried to get the pistol,” Huie wrote. “The Chicago youth ‘leered at her’ and whistled.”
Bryant’s getting the gun frightened the cousins, Parker said, and they sped away in Wright’s 1946 Ford. None of them, he said, had seen Till do anything inappropriate in the store.
After her husband’s arrest, Carolyn Bryant told defense lawyer Sidney Carlton that Till had bought bubble gum, grabbed her hand and asked for a date, according to Carlton’s notes, contained in Huie’s papers at Ohio State University Libraries.
When she pulled her hand away, she said Till asked, “What’s the matter, baby, can’t you take it?”
She said he also said goodbye and whistled at her, according to the lawyer’s notes.
Days before jury selection began in the September 1955 trial, Carlton announced to the press a much different story: Till had “mauled” her. The story ran in Mississippi newspapers and spread to those who wound up serving as jurors, according to interviews with them.
Carolyn Bryant Donham, who accused Black teenager Emmett Till of making improper advances before he was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, has died in hospice care in Louisiana. She was 88.
Carolyn Bryant claimed Till had “mauled” her, and she echoed that claim in her testimony. She depicted Till as a predator, grabbing her by the waist and refusing to let go. She claimed he told her that she didn’t need to be afraid because he had “f—ed” white women.
Huie wrote in his memo, “There appears no doubt that much of Mrs. Bryant’s testimony regarding physical contact with the Negro youth or alleged ‘obscene remarks’ was fabricated — probably at the suggestion of one of the lawyers.”
Huie wrote in his memo, “There appears no doubt that much of Mrs. Bryant’s testimony regarding physical contact with the Negro youth or alleged ‘obscene remarks’ was fabricated — probably at the suggestion of one of the lawyers.”
A day later, the killers changed their story, claiming Till attacked her and used obscene language. Huie published it without question.
Parker said he has spent a lifetime defending his cousin from Huie’s slander and many others who read his article and believed that Till had done something wrong.
“They had us ashamed to talk about it, he was denigrated so badly,” Parker said. “Like his mother said, people swallowed it [Huie’s article] hook, line and sinker.”
He continues to combat those lies, he said. “When I tell the story, they say it’s alleged. Not much credence is given to those involved.”
The Look article’s lies about her son wounded Mamie Till-Mobley, said Christopher Benson, co-author of her memoir, “Death of Innocence.”
Huie’s article turned Till into a “Black brute” and Milam into a decorated war hero, duty bound to punish this “uppity intruder,” he said.
The article so upset Till-Mobley that she sued Huie and the magazine.
The lawsuit failed in the end, Benson said, because the person who had been defamed, Emmett Till, was dead.
On Saturday evening, Aug. 27, 1955, Till joined his cousins on a trip to town, and on the way back, Parker said the driver accidentally ran over a dog.
“Emmett started crying,” he said. “That was the kind of person he was.”
They arrived home close to midnight, and after 2 a.m., the two half-brothers appeared at Moses “Preacher” Wright’s home, where Till was staying.
Roy Bryant pounded on the door and called out, “Preacher, it’s Mr. Bryant. Let me in.”
When Wright opened the door, the white men dashed in.
Parker, who was 16, woke to angry voices. A man with a pistol and flashlight came down the hall, and Parker readied for his life to end. He closed his eyes and prayed, “God, just let me live.”
The men walked by, and he heard them say they wanted “the fat boy from Chicago who did the talking,” he recalled.
Houck said the killers’ choice of words makes it obvious that Till never “mauled” Carolyn Bryant, or they would have said that.
Milam told Huie that he yanked the covers off Till and “ordered him to get the hell up and get his clothes on.”
When Wright’s wife, Elizabeth, objected, Milam said he replied, “Get your ass back there in bed and shut up — and I mean get in the goddamn bed!”
Huie wrote that she told him there was a third white man there that night. She identified him as Milam’s brother-in-law from Minter City. That was Melvin Campbell, whom the FBI concluded was part of the lynch mob, said Dale Killinger, the FBI agent who investigated the Till case in 2006.
But when Huie wrote the piece, he erased Campbell.
Mose Wright, right, and his son Simeon, sit in their home at the community of Money, Miss. , near Greenwood, and discuss the loss of their 15-year-old relative, Emmett Till, September 1, 1955. Till was a nephew of Mose Wright. Till's body was found in the Tallahatchie River August 31. He had a bullet hole in his head. Two white men are being held in jail at Greenwood in connection with the death. (AP Photo)
Before the killers left his home, Moses Wright testified that Milam told him, “If this is not the right boy, then we are going to bring him back.”
“Did Mr. Bryant or Mr. Milam ever bring him back?” the prosecutor asked.
“No, sir,” Wright replied.
Milam asked him how old he was.
“Sixty-four,” Wright replied.
Milam warned him that if he identified them, “you will never live to get to be 65.”
Wright said he heard one of the men ask someone inside the truck “if this was the boy” and that he heard that someone reply, “Yes.”
Huie erased the preacher’s testimony, too.
At the murder trial, Leflore County Sheriff George Smith testified that Roy Bryant said he and Milam abducted Till, but turned the youth loose after they brought him to Bryant’s Grocery and found out “he wasn’t the right one.”
But when the killers talked to Huie, they changed their story.
“Are you the Chicago sonofabitch that whistled at that white woman?” Milam said he asked Till.
“Yeah,” Till was quoted as replying, “what’re you gonna do about it? I’m as good as you are.”
The brothers told Huie that if Till had denied it, they would have taken Till back to Carolyn Bryant. “Hell, he didn’t deny it,” Milam told Huie. “We had the right n—-. He admitted it, so we didn’t need to go by the store.”
The memo shows Huie never questioned them about this change, which concealed the role that Carolyn Bryant played.
Dale Killinger, the FBI agent who investigated the Till case in 2006, said he has long believed that she did identify Till, who was then tortured and killed.
In her original statement to defense lawyers, “Carolyn Bryant stated that Emmett was brought to her,” he said. “This is the same information that, in 2005, she admitted to, saying that Roy Bryant, J.W. Milam and Elmer Kimbell brought Emmett to her at the store in Money in the middle of the night.”
Huie erased Carolyn Bryant from the story.
Even Huie recognized the ridiculousness in the next part of the killers’ story.
“Here is the most incredible portion of the story,” Huie wrote in his memo. “Milam and [Roy] Bryant insist — and apparently they are truthful — that no one else was with them; that the two of them sat in the cab; that they did not tie the youth; that they did nothing more than menace him with their pistols; yet he remained ‘impudent’ and ‘full of fight’ all during the subsequent five-hour ordeal of driving around and whipping — and he never once tried to run!”
The killers told Huie they drove around in the dark, looking for a cliff 80 miles away where they hoped to “scare” Till. They listed the multitude of Delta towns they traveled through before abandoning their search.
Huie never questioned them, and he never retraced their trip. If he had, he would have concluded, like the FBI did, that covering such a distance was impossible. (Later, Roy Bryant admitted to a relative that this was all a lie.)
File photos of John W. Milam, 35, left, his half-brother Roy Bryant, 24 , centre, who go on trial in Sumner, Miss., Sept. 18, 1955, are charged with the murder of 14-year-old African American Emmett L.Till from Chicago, who is alleged to have "whistled" and made advances at Bryant's wife Carolyn, seen right. (AP Photo)
The killers insisted that Till stayed the entire time in the back of the pickup, despite no one holding him there. “He wasn’t afraid of them!” Huie wrote in Look. “He was tough as they were. He didn't think they had the guts to kill him.”
Tell said Huie had to concoct an “unafraid Till” to get the magazine to publish his article. “Had Till been scared, Huie’s narrative would have required extra men to guard him in the back of the truck,” he said. “But with the extra men, Look would not publish the story.”
Huie’s claim “absolved Huie of the need to secure signatures he could not obtain and cleared the way for Look to publish the story,” Tell said.
Huie had evidence that Till had fears. Huie wrote that Moses Wright’s wife, Elizabeth, told him that Till “was scared when they drove away from the store [on Aug. 24]. He wanted to go home.”
Tell said the “stoic, unafraid Till” is nothing but a myth created by the white establishment to write the guilty men out of the story and foster the false impression that Mississippi tried everyone responsible.
The truth is that a mob of killers brutalized this kidnapped youth inside a dark barn before shooting him, Tell said. “He was terrified.”
Huie downplayed the terror that the 14-year-old endured, he said. “Till’s unafraid demeanor is nothing more than a myth, a political creation designed to sanitize our memory of the night Till was killed.”
Not long after the sun rose the next morning, Willie Reed was walking across a plantation near Drew. He testified at trial that he saw four white men in the cab of a 1955 Chevy pickup with three Black men holding “a black boy” in the back of the truck.
FILE - In this Sept. 29, 1955 file photo, Willie Reed, right, a witness in the Emmett Till murder case in Mississippi, stands outside the door of his apartment in Chicago under guard by Detective Sherman Smith. Reed, who changed his name to Willie Louis and told no one of his connection to the case, not even his future wife, was brought to Chicago by friends after his testimony in the trial. His wife, Juliet Louis said Wednesday, July 24, 2013, that her husband died July 18, 2013 at a hospital in Oak Lawn, Ill. He was 76. (AP Photo/Charles Knoblock, File)
Reed also testified that he heard “a whole lot of licks” in the barn and someone hollering, “Oh.” He also saw Milam emerge from the barn and get a drink of water.
Mary Bradley saw a truck with four white men, and Reed’s grandfather, Add, identified Milam’s brother, Leslie, with the men.
None of that testimony appeared in the Look article, and Huie moved the beating of Till from a Drew plantation that Milam’s brother ran to Milam’s shed in Glendora, more than a half hour away.
“Huie can’t write the story he wants to write,” Houck said, “unless he eliminates Willie Reed and the other Black witnesses from the story.”
Huie first heard about the Till trial while he was sitting on the set of a Hollywood film adapting another one of his books.
Less than two weeks after the killers’ acquittal, Huie sat in the law office of Breland & Whitten in Sumner, talking to the defense lawyers about a magazine article, a book and a possible film based on the Till case, the memo shows.
“From the moment he strode in with his proposal,” said Devery Anderson, author of “Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement", “personal gain was all he really cared about.”
Huie promised to protect the killers by refusing to testify against them if a grand jury indicted them for kidnapping, and he vowed to keep secret “any others who might have been involved in the abduction-and-slaying.”
In return for their story, Huie offered the killers a percentage of the net profits he would realize. They would get 15% (later raised to 20%), and the attorneys would get 10%. (Huie would later pay the killers $3,150 and the lawyers $1,260.)
In an interview with the “Eyes on the Prize” documentary, Huie quoted himself as explaining that killers “must tell me the truth, they must give me ways so that in the daytime I can go out and verify that they're telling me the truth. And if I find them telling me a lie, I won't pay them a damn thing.”
Huie paid them, and he published their falsehoods, Houck said. “Without their carefully concocted lies, which we now know were embellished by Huie, he had no ‘shocking’ story — and the white South did not have a villain in Emmett Till. Without those two things, no money-making journalism and books would be published, and no blockbuster films would be made.”
While many sang hymns at nearby churches in Sumner on Sunday morning, Oct. 23, 1955, Huie listened to the two brothers describe how they kidnapped and killed Till, used barbed wire to tie a heavy fan around his neck and dumped his body into a river. Milam even pulled out his Colt .45 and demonstrated how he pistol-whipped Till before shooting him.
Days before the meeting, Huie told his editor at Look, “There are four men in the abduction-torture-and-murder party. I know all four of them.”
But the two brothers — whose relatives also participated in the killing, according to the FBI — told Huie they did it all by themselves.
When the writer mentioned the Black witnesses identifying additional members of the lynch mob, Milam replied, “Them crazy n-----s didn’t know what they were talking about.”
Roy Bryant objected to his wife signing a release, according to the memo.
Huie responded that she was a part of the story and that the “‘insult’ to her was the motive for the killing.”
“You gonna picture her as some slut?” Roy asked.
Huie vowed to tell the truth.
And that was just the start of the lies the killers told Huie, said Dale Killinger, the FBI agent who reinvestigated the Till case in 2006.
They lied about where they drove Till after abducting him, where they tortured him, where they shot him, where they got the gin fan and where they dumped his body, he said.
These falsehoods, knowingly promoted by Huie, kept the focus on Bryant and Milam as the killers, concealed the others involved and concealed the fact they brought Till to Carolyn Bryant, Killinger said. As a result, he said, many Americans question what happened to Till, “even questioning the fact he was murdered, despite the killers’ admissions.”
Milam claimed Till told him, “He was [as] good as I was, that he had f----- white women, and that his grandmother was a white woman.”
Parker, who grew up with Till, said the killers’ claim that his cousin had sex was ridiculous. “He was barely 14,” he said.
Anderson said Till’s grandmother wasn’t white.
Instead of calling out the killers for justifying their murder of a 14-year-old, the writer paid them and published their lies as truth, Anderson said. “This all goes to show that Huie’s primary motive was to make money off of this story.”
Shortly before his Look article appeared in January 1956, Huie began to wonder if he had been bamboozled by the killers.
After traveling to Chicago and hearing Willie Reed’s story about hearing Till’s beating in the barn, Huie began to doubt himself.
“I began doubting myself and one night I was {at} the point of coming back to Mississippi and ‘pistol-whipping’ Milam for telling me a fabric of lies,” he wrote defense lawyer John Whitten Jr. “Lord help me if Milam lied to me!”
“I began doubting myself and one night I was {at} the point of coming back to Mississippi and ‘pistol-whipping’ Milam for telling me a fabric of lies,” he wrote defense lawyer John Whitten Jr. “Lord help me if Milam lied to me!”
Huie’s secret memo and his letters to Whitten were contained in an envelope that Whitten marked first with “M&B” for Milam and Bryant and then “Destroy.”
They never were, and now Whitten’s family has donated them to Florida State’s Emmett Till Archives.
“It seems it was more important to him to preserve it than destroy it,” said Whitten’s granddaughter, Ellen. “That is why we preserved it, and that is why we donated it.”
Despite criticism from Till’s mother and others, the Look article went largely unchallenged in the mainstream press until Killinger investigated for the FBI in 2006 and determined that most of Huie’s “facts” were actually fabrications.
But Huie’s article “has proved almost impossible to kill,” said Thompson, whose new book centers on the barn where Till was brutally beaten and shot. “Even today, when Washington D.C., politicians and staffers come to learn about Till, they are often still told details from the Look magazine article — details that Huie simply invented or was too gullible to see for what they were.”
Mamie Till is held by Gene Mobley, who would later marry her, while she stares at the brutalized body of her son, Emmett Till. She opened the casket, and more than 50,000 saw his body. This photo taken by David Jackson, now in public domain, appeared in both the Chicago Defender and Jet magazine.
He pointed to organizations such as the Emmett Till Interpretive Center and the Emmett Till and Mamie Till Mobley Institute as among those seeking to tell the truth about what happened.
Katie McCormick, Florida State’s associate dean of libraries for Special Collections & Archives, said Mamie Till-Mobley’s story was “rejected by publisher after publisher” at the same time that Huie’s story became “the defining framework for decades.”
In the end, “Huie and the killers stole the story of Emmett Till from his mother and family,” she said.
This latest donation documents “the fabrication of lies,” she said. “We hope the archival collections can contribute to the preservation of truth and support educational efforts in the spirit of Mamie Till-Mobley.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
