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Till lynching discussed at Sojourn to the Past event

YOUNGSTOWN – When he was 10 years old, Keith A. Beauchamp had no way of knowing that rifling through magazines in his parents’ study would change the course of his life.

“I could not wrap my head around what exactly I was looking at,” Beauchamp, an award-winning filmmaker, said.

One of the publications that crossed the young child’s radar screen was the famous issue of Jet magazine that told the tragic story of 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was lynched Aug. 28, 1955, in Money, Mississippi, a few days after having wolf-whistled at a white woman. After his find – which also included a photograph of Till’s mutilated remains – Beauchamp’s parents told him the story of how Till had been abducted then brutally murdered, something that continually resurfaced throughout his life and led to his making two films about the case.

The Jet magazine article and gruesome photograph also had a local connection because a reporter named Simeon Booker, who attended Youngstown College (now Youngstown State University) and became the Washington Post’s first black reporter, had covered it.

Beauchamp shared his recollections with about 100 people who attended a special program Tuesday at the Tyler History Center, 325 W. Federal St., downtown, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Till’s lynching in the tiny Mississippi Delta town.

Hosting the two-hour gathering was Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past, in conjunction with the Mahoning Valley Historical Society.

Also sharing his recollections was Dale Killinger, a retired special FBI agent who helped reopen the decades-old case in 2004, after it had been reopened in 1991 but quickly closed afterward.

Till, affectionately nicknamed “Bobo,” was a jokester and storyteller who, contrary to many people’s assumptions, had visited the Magnolia State when he was 9, five years before boarding a train from his Chicago home to the Delta in August 1955, so he was aware of certain southern customs and mores, Beauchamp noted.

A few days after his arrival, Till, along with Simeon Wright and a few other cousins, went to Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market to buy candy and other items. As they left, Till wolf-whistled at Carolyn Bryant, something the likes of which was taboo in the Jim Crow South, before they fled in fear and hid.

Around 2 a.m. three days later, Bryant’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, who carried a gun and a flashlight, knocked on Mose Wright’s door, then searched the house before finding Till asleep and first kidnapping then lynching him. Simeon Wright, who was 12, shared the bed with Till that fateful morning.

A few days later, a 14-year-old named Robert Hodges found Till’s mutilated remains while fishing in the Tallahatchie River, which led to the arrest of Bryant and Milam on murder and kidnapping charges. Till had been shot and weighed down with a 75-pound cotton gin tied to his neck.

In September 1955, an all-white, all-male jury in Judge Curtis Swango’s courtroom acquitted the two men on the charges after 67 minutes of deliberations — much of it spent on a soda break. To this day, no one has been held legally accountable for the crime that many say galvanized the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

During his talk Tuesday, Beauchamp pointed out that wolf whistling at someone became popular in Chicago culture and elsewhere because of a 1940s cartoon “kids gravitated to. Unfortunately, he did it to the wrong person,” the filmmaker said.

Beuchamp, who attended Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and moved to New York City, said that co-producing the 2022 film “Till” with Whoopi Goldberg also was a type of activism he used to fight racism, of which he was a victim when an undercover Baton Rouge police officer beat him up in 1989 for dancing with a white female friend.

Before making the 2005 film “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till,” Beauchamp had befriended Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, who he affectionately refers to as “Mother Mobley.” At first, however, he was afraid to approach her about the project because “I didn’t want to open old wounds,” the filmmaker remembered.

The first daunting step Beauchamp took prior to bringing his latest film to the screen was making people in the Delta feel comfortable enough to talk to him about the case, which many wanted to forget. It took three years for him to get Simeon Wright to open up about it, Beauchamp said, adding that some people blamed Wright’s father, Mose Wright, for not being more proactive in preventing Milam and Bryant from abducting then killing Till.

Making “Till” fulfilled a second promise to Mobley that he would truthfully and accurately depict and represent her son, Beauchamp said. He also was convinced it would have another benefit.

“I wanted to make a film because I felt a feature film would reach more people than a documentary,” he added.

At one point while conducting extensive research in the Delta, Beauchamp discovered an outstanding arrest warrant that had been issued for Carolyn Bryant on murder and manslaughter charges but never served. That finding led the FBI on another attempt to prosecute her, but in 2007, a Leflore County grand jury declined to indict Bryant.

“Keith was able to present the things you saw in the film today as building blocks for why there ought to be an investigation. And that led to the district attorney saying, ‘If the FBI investigates it, I’ll prosecute it.’ So, essentially the FBI investigation in 2004 was really just us doing it for the state prosecutor,” Killinger told the Mississippi Free Press in June 2022.

KILLINGER’S ROLE

Initially, Killinger, who entered the FBI in 1996, knew little about the Till case, even though his boss was a Mississippi native. After conducting his own research, Killinger partnered with a retired agent from Sumner, Mississippi, and the Mississippi Highway Patrol to begin investigating the circumstances surrounding the crime. Sumner also is the site of the Tallahatchie County Courthouse where Bryant and Milam’s 1955 trial took place.

Today, the historic, restored courtroom is home to the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, which is committed to telling Till’s story and promoting racial healing, according to its website.

Over time, Killinger also became aware of previously unknown witnesses.

They included Peter Harris, a black man who was in the Bryant-owned store shortly before Till’s lynching and found himself in a confrontation with Roy Bryant because he failed to address the latter as “sir.” Carolyn Bryant whispered something in her husband’s ear and he backed away, Killinger said.

Another witness was Willie Hemphill, who was walking home from the grocery store – which also had a large black clientele – when Milam’s green 1955 Chevrolet truck pulled up and a black man named Johnny B. Washington, who ran errands at the store, grabbed Hemphill and tossed him in the truck’s bed as they drove around searching for Till. Presumably, Carolyn Bryant told Milam and her husband that Hemphill was not the one who had whistled at her. After that, Hemphill was thrown out of the vehicle, causing him to land on his face and break a few teeth, Killinger explained.

Another key eyewitness was Willie Reed, who testified that as he walked to a store in Drew, Mississippi, he saw Milam’s truck turn onto a piece of property formerly known as the Clint Shurden Plantation on which was a barn where Till was tortured and killed. In the vehicle were four white people, three blacks and a black teen – presumably Till – hunkered in the backseat, he said in his testimony at the 1955 trial.

“I heard somebody hollering and some licks, like somebody was whipping somebody,” he said.

After the trial, Reed was escorted out of Mississippi to Chicago, where he changed his name to Willie Louis and worked as a hospital orderly before his death July 18, 2013. Reed was 76.

Killinger also mentioned Henry Lee Loggins, a black man who was suspected of aiding Bryant and Milam in Till’s abduction, though perhaps unwittingly because he feared the two men. For years, Loggins, who worked for Milam, denied he had any part in the crime. Nevertheless, Loggins’ son, Johnny B. Thomas, who was mayor of Glendora, Mississippi, felt for years that his father held back on admitting his role.

Four months after their acquittal in September 1955, Bryant and Milam spoke with William Bradford Huie, who wrote a piece titled “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi” for the Jan. 24, 1956, edition of Look Magazine. Huie was considering making a film about the case, so he paid the two men $4,000 each for the rights to their stories, in which they admitted having lynched Till, Killinger noted.

“Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless. I’m no bully. I like (the “n” word) in their place. I know how to work ’em,” Milam told Huie in the article. “But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. … ‘”Chicago boy,'” I said, ‘I’m tired of ’em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble.'”

For decades, the biased story served as a comfortable narrative by which many white people viewed the tragedy, Killinger said, adding that the piece is now part of Florida State University’s Emmett Till archives.

After the case was reopened in 2004, Till’s body was exhumed in May 2005 from Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois, and found to be in pristine condition under a glass enclosure. Many fingerprints from mourners in 1955 were still on the casket, said Killinger, who called it “a surreal day.”

The next day, a physical autopsy was conducted, the X-ray results of which showed lead fragments from 7.5-gauge birdshot pellets. Dental records and mitochondrial DNA that matched Simeon Wright’s DNA confirmed the remains were those of Till – dispelling rumors that the body may have been someone else’s.

“In the end, what have we got? It’s Emmett’s for sure,” Killinger said, adding that Till also suffered a broken femur and two broken wrists.

In spring 2006, Killinger presented his findings – which also included Carolyn Bryant’s partial confession to him – to the district attorney, but in 2007, the grand jury declined to indict her, he recalled.

About a decade later, the U.S. Justice Department reopened the case based on a 2017 book by Timothy Tyson in which Carolyn Bryant recanted her account of the events that led to Till’s killing. Nevertheless, on Dec. 6, 2021, the department’s Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Mississippi announced the closure of the investigation.

Also, on April 25, 2023, Carolyn Bryant Donham died in hospice care in Westlake, Louisiana, at age 88.

Seven decades later, the Till case continues to resonate with many people largely because of his young age and the brutality with which he was killed, Killinger and Beauchamp said Tuesday.

“Emmett Till is the Anne Frank of America,” who continues to serve as a reminder that injustice, though coupled with hope and a quest for justice, still exists, Beauchamp said.

He added that the tragedy also influenced Rosa Parks, who was friends with Till’s mother, to refuse to surrender her bus seat — the famous spark for the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. In addition, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. viewed Till’s killing as an extreme example of intimidation to keep blacks from the voting booth, Beauchamp continued.

Also, Emmett Till’s story continues to galvanize and inspire many people who are protesting against the second President Donald Trump administration, he said.

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