There are some stories that a journalist can never forget no matter how hard one tries.
Like fading pictures in a photo album, certain impressions remain in the mind long after time has erased the details of the events.
For one young black reporter, Cloyte Larsson, the 1955 Emmett Till murder trial was that kind of assignment.
When the trial of the young Chicagoan’s murderers ended in acquittal, Larsson - the only female reporter to cover this historical Mississippi Delta trial - worked abroad for the next thirty years, returning only in 1986 to write the thirty-year anniversary story for Ebony.
In 1955 Larsson had joined the team of writers and photographers from Johnson Publishing Company who volunteered to cover the trial, and when the all-white jury returned an acquittal, she saw “a side of the American way of life that even I, a Southerner, found shocking. Prejudice was a phenomenon that I was prepared for …but not open, raw, vulgar menacing hate.”
One day before the trial began, Ebony and Jet photographer David Jackson and Larsson visited Rev. Moses Wright at his weathered gray tenant farmhouse in Money.
Larsson later recalled, “While we sat talking on the porch, an open truck came rumbling down the road. It slowed as it approached the house, and in my mind’s eye I can still see the six white men standing in the back, armed with shotguns that glittered in the sun.
“How slowly the truck seemed to move…so slowly that I could see the eyes of the men regarding us with a cold and ageless hostility. The menace was obvious, the message clear. The spell was not broken until, abruptly, the truck picked up speed and raced on.”
Larsson met Sheriff Strider, “another unforgettable Mississippian,” the following day at the courthouse in Sumner.
“Standing in the entrance to the courtroom, like the anointed defender of the unreconstructed South, he rested his right hand meaningfully on his gun as he saw the members of the Black press approach.
“Malevolently aware that we could do nothing except accept his insult, swallow our rage and go on, [Strider] said with a poisonous smile, ‘Mawnin’, niggers!’”
Larsson got the message. “We were behind enemy lines now. We had no rights that a White man was bound to respect. Our press cards were no guarantee of safety. Not even a member of the U. S. Congress could expect a courteous welcome, not if he happened to be both Northern and Black.”
Congressman Charles Diggs of Michigan discovered that quickly enough when he joined reporters to witness the proceedings. “A nigger congressman!” scoffed a White deputy at the door. “It ain’t possible. It ain’t even legal!”
Knowing that any encounters with white journalists would arouse suspicion, Larsson and the other black reporters on their team were careful to pretend they did not know the white photographer who had come with them to photograph “aspects of the trial and of Mississippi life which it would have been impossible for Black reporters to cover.”
They would only meet secretly with Mike Shea to exchange information quickly at pre-arranged rendezvous points.
Since telephones in the homes of Black activists were tapped, Larsson dared not use them to make contact, fearing she would draw unnecessary attention to her hosts, “militant Blacks of Mississippi who were already in trouble enough.”
Dr. T. R. M. Howard, with whom some of the black journalists stayed in Mound Bayou, had received many death threats. “For his family’s protection and ours during the Till trial, he kept a small arsenal of shotguns behind the door.”
Most spectators at the Till trial were white Mississippians, some bringing their children and their box lunches. “They bought soft drinks from vendors who curtly refused to sell their wares to Blacks, and peered admiringly at Carolyn Bryant, the ‘victim’ of the alleged wolf whistle,” Larsson observed.
When Sheriff Strider told the court that the body which he had pulled out of the water had deteriorated to such an extent that “he couldn’t be sure whether it was that of a Black person or a White,” Larsson’s temper flared.
And then she did something totally out of character.
“During a pause in the trial, I pushed my way through the milling crowd of Whites and asked Judge Curtis Swango, whose impressively evenhanded conduct of the trial was like a breath of fresh air, why, if Sheriff Strider was unsure of the victims racial identity, he had asked a Black undertaker to take charge of the body!”
Heads turned. Eyes focused on Larsson, and…. “I felt like a marked woman.”
The White Citizen’s Councils were active in the area and Larsson had seen a letter on White Citizens’ Council stationery on Sheriff George Smith’s desk during an office visit.
“I knew that a White reporter from the North had been run out of town, and I knew that Sheriff Strider was perhaps the last man in Mississippi whose truthfulness I should publicly challenge.”
As the trial proceeded, tension in the courtroom was so high that when somebody dropped a glass bottle - it shattered - the sound was like a shot. “In a single, reflex reaction, everybody, Blacks and Whites alike, ducked.”
After the acquittal of Milam and Bryant, Larsson remembered her dismay. It had seemed clear from evidence presented that a strong case had been made against the accused.
“Till may or may not have wolf whistled. What did it matter? He had a right to life. I thought about his last moments, the terror…the blows…the bullet. How could anyone have done such a thing to a 14-year-old child?”
On their return trip to Sunflower and Tallahatchie counties, Larsson and the news team tried to interview Roy Bryant at his present place of business, a country-style general store in Ruleville.
Bryant granted them an interview, but was not in the mood to say much except that the case had hurt him, financially and that after the trial, his customers in Money found other places to shop.
“Forced to give up the business, he left Mississippi, and his wife Carolyn eventually left him. His half-brother, J. W. Milam, also moved out of state and, like Roy, split up with his wife,” Larsson would learn.
Larsson found that Milam had died from cancer. Sheriff Strider was dead and so was Moses Wright, whose house in Money had been leveled. “I remember [Wright] as a brave man whose finger never shook when, in that hostile courtroom, he pointed out Milam and Bryant.”
What in the past would have been a quiet lynching had made news around the world and Larsson on her trip back to the Mississippi Delta found that many whites were still embarrassed.
She interviewed Aaron Henry in Clarksdale who by then was serving a second term in the state legislature. Henry had been one of the NAACP officials who had helped produce the “missing witness” that the FBI may never have found.
Henry told Larsson that white men had been killing black boys in the Delta for years without ramifications. But this time, perhaps “the hand of God” was involved, causing the Emmett Till case to become a cog in the wheel of change.
“Perhaps we have television to thank for that,” Henry told Larsson.
Searching for Roy Bryant, Larsson and her team met up with Cleve McDowell in a courtroom in Clarksdale of Coahoma County. McDowell took them to see Bryant during a quick trip around the counties.
The black attorney who was the regional director of the NAACP in his state looked vaguely familiar to Larsson.
“We had seen his picture in the newspapers. In 1963, he was the first Black student, after James Meredith, to be admitted to the University of Mississippi and the first ever to study law there.
After the murder of NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers, McDowell learned that he and James Meredith were next in line for assassination [a fact confirmed by a retired Parchman guard who said he was asked to perform this act by a Delta planter.]McDowell bought a gun.
“Most everybody else had one, he told Larsson, “but when mine was discovered, I was expelled.” He completed his education, however, at the Thurgood Marshall School of law in Texas - a “better and safer” place to be, he told oral history interviewer Owen Brooks a number of years later. “They were teaching civil rights law and the University of Mississippi was far behind.”
Larsson was surprised that Bryant’s store was in a black Ruleville neighborhood where he was not hassled. But McDowell explained that Bryant wasn’t worried “because blacks forget” and that “even when they know what certain whites have done, they don’t do anything about it.”
But this was no reason to think the Klan had gone away, McDowell added. “They’re not wearing sheets any longer. They’re wearing gray flannel suits! But some of them have just gone under cover. And some of them are doing it to us in a different way-the Northern way.
“If Northern whites had been in power down here, we’d still be in slavery!…. Now, we have situations like Black lawyers being harassed by the bar association, and we have economic freeze-outs whenever big money is involved.”
In McDowell’s opinion, conditions in parts of Mississippi were worse in 1986 than in 1955: “You can see open sewers, a level of poverty as bad as in some deprived, developing countries, with insects crawling over everything. Down here, we’ve still got a massive job to do.”
McDowell introduced Larsson to Greenwood Councilman David Jordan and his wife, Christine, both science teachers in Greenwood’s integrated city schools. The Jordan couple had fought long and hard for civil rights and as president of the Greenwood Voters’ League for 20 years,David Jordan was instrumental in initiating lawsuits aimed at democratizing the political and educational systems.
The couple were at the movie theater when Emmett Till’s body was pulled out of the Tallahatchie River. Jordan remembered feeling shocked that someone in their midst could kill a 14-year-old child.
“After that happened, we were ready to do whatever was necessary to change the social conditions which had made this possible,” he told Larsson.
During the remainder of the Decade, the Emmett Till case remained the overriding force in black people’s minds. It was “evident that white people didn’t care,” the Greenwood teacher told Larsson on her return trip to the Delta.
“I am intelligent enough to realize that the same kinds of things that happened once could happen again…We are still in the struggle, and even though we have made some gains, we are still skeptical,” Larsson wrote.
Were this journalist’s words prophetic?
Eleven years later, in 1997, McDowell was murdered in his Drew home, about five miles from the plantation shed where Till was lynched. Questions remain about this civil rights attorney’s murder; to this day, all police and court records surrounding this crime remain under a “gag order.”
The struggle continues as thousands of southern African Americans look around the chaos contributed by storms Katrina and Rita; many asking if the emergency services provided to them would have been the same, had their color been white.
Will the Land of Emmett Till every change? The question remains - even fifty years after a young woman changed history by reporting on one of this country’s most famous trials.
Susan Orr-Klopfer, journalist and author, writes on civil rights in Mississippi. Her newest books, “Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited” and “The Emmett Till Book” are now in print and are carried in most online bookstores including Amazon and Barnes & Noble. “Where Rebels Roost” focuses on the Delta, Emmett Till, Fannie Lou Hamer, Aaron Henry, Amzie Moore and many other civil rights foot soldiers. Both books emphasize unsolved murders of Delta blacks from mid 1950s on. Orr-Klopfer is an award-winning journalist and former acquisitions and development editor for Prentice-Hall. Her computer book, “Abort, Retry, Fail!” was an alternate selection by the Book of-the-Month Club.
