Journalist withheld key information about Emmett Till’s murder, documents show

Detailed Washington Post report sheds new light on episode that helped launch civil rights movement

In a tragic story that is still breaking news after almost 70 years, the Washington Post reported on Aug. 28, 2024, that a journalist whose 1956 article was billed as the “true account” of Emmett Till’s killing withheld credible information about people involved in the crime, according to newly discovered documents.

Journalist William Bradford Huie’s newly released research notes show that he suspected more than two men tortured and killed 14-year-old Emmett Till, but, according to the newspaper, “suggest that he left that out when it threatened his story.” Mississippi Today previously reported similar findings.

Huie’s article in Look magazine “helped shape the country’s understanding of 14-year-old Till’s abduction, torture and slaying in Jim Crow-era Mississippi,” the Post noted.

The Look article detailed the later confessions of two white men who had been acquitted by an all-white jury in the killing. The men reportedly told Huie they had no accomplices.

Yet Huie’s 33 pages of research notes, which the Post reported were recently released by the descendants of a lawyer in the case, indicate his reporting showed that others were involved and suggest that he chose to leave that out because it jeopardized the sale of his story. He also was seeking a movie deal about the killing and had agreed to pay the two acquitted men, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, part of the proceeds.

If Huie had fully reported what he learned, it could have led to charges against additional participants in the murder, according to historians interviewed by the Post reporter.

Milam and Bryant told Huie after their acquittal that they had killed Till after Carolyn Bryant, Roy’s wife, claimed the boy accosted her in August 1955. They spoke freely because after having been acquitted, they were protected by the U.S. Constitution’s double-jeopardy clause.

Dave Tell, a University of Kansas professor whose 2019 book, Remembering Emmett Till, was harshly critical of Huie’s reporting, told the post that Huie had intentionally protected guilty people.

The FBI has reopened the Till case several times, most recently in 2017.

The newly released documents include letters that Huie exchanged with John Whitten, one of the men’s defense attorneys. Whitten’s granddaughter, Ellen Whitten, found the documents in April 2024 and with her mother donated them to the Emmett Till Archives at Florida State University. “I think shedding light on historical wrongs is never a bad thing,” Ellen Whitten said in an interview.

Deborah Watts, Till’s cousin and cofounder of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, told the Post, “We knew that they were lying on Emmett. We knew there were many that sought a profit and a payoff from the pain that our family experienced.”

Davis W. Houck, the founder of the Till archives and co-author of a book about media coverage of Till’s murder, shared the documents with the Washington Post and with Mississippi Today ahead of their public availability.

The Post noted that when Huie’s article in Look magazine hit national newsstands, the impact was immediate. Many white Mississippians who had previously supported Milam and Bryant turned against them. U.S. Rep. Charles Diggs (D-Mich.), one of the few Black members of Congress at the time, read the story into the congressional record. Black journalists had been pressuring Mississippi officials and the FBI to investigate and charge additional suspects in the case, but Huie’s “true account,” with its assurance that only two men were involved and its depiction of Till as a defiant brute, effectively ended that effort.

The Post reported that experts now agree on this basic timeline: 

• On Aug. 24, 1955, Till whistled at Carolyn Bryant outside the grocery store in Money, Mississippi where she worked. If anything had previously happened inside the store, it is unknown.

• In the early hours of Aug. 28, Milam and Bryant, along with at least two and perhaps five accomplices, went to the home of Till’s great-uncle and great-aunt  and abducted Till at gunpoint. They put him in the back of Milam’s truck, and one or more Black men who worked for Milam held Till down. They drove to the farm of Leslie Milam, another brother.

• A group of white men beat and tortured Till inside the barn. Black neighbors heard Till crying and begging for his mother. Milam shot Till in the head, and Till was either dead or dying when he was loaded back into the truck around sunrise. His body was tied to a 74-pound gin fan with barbed wire and dumped into the Tallahatchie River. It was recovered on Aug. 31, 1955.

(The full Washington Post story includes more detail.)

Huie met with Milam and Bryant several times, and in his research notes he repeatedly expressed doubts about the story they told him, according to the Post article. He expressed more doubts in letters to Whitten after he had traveled to Chicago to interview Black witnesses.

In a Dec. 10, 1955, letter, Huie told Whitten that he had interviewed Elizabeth Wright, whom he had found “intelligent,” and who, he wrote, “talked mighty convincingly about the ‘third man’ who came in her room and spoke with her” during the kidnapping. “She said it was Milam’s brother-in-law from Minter City,” Huie said in the letter.

Milam had a brother-in-law in Minter City named Melvin Campbell, and in a heavily redacted 2006 report by the FBI, investigators said Campbell told an unnamed person he was with Milam and Bryant the night Till was murdered. Campbell died in 1972.

Huie never mentioned Wright’s claim of a third kidnapper in the Look article. If he had, Look would have required that Campbell sign a release form, the Post reported.

In his research notes, Huie also wrote “there appears no doubt” that Carolyn Bryant’s claim that Till accosted her was “fabricated — probably at the suggestion of one of the lawyers.” But in the Look article, he published her claim as fact. Bryant died last year.

Huie also avoided mentioning other purported witnesses because he would have been required to get signed waivers, the Post reported.

In a Dec. 20 letter to Whitten, Huie hinted that he pitched the story to Look because of its lax editing practices, writing: “I dealt with a magazine with which I could exercise this control.”

Other comments in Huie’s letter were “at odds with Huie’s reputation as being sympathetic to the civil rights movement,” the newspaper reported. “The Black writer Zora Neale Hurston considered him a friend, and Martin Luther King Jr. wrote the foreword to Huie’s book about the 1964 murders of three civil rights activists.”

At some point, John Whitten removed the folder containing the notes and letters from his office. On the folder he wrote: “M + B, destroy.” But shortly before his death in 2003, he told his daughter-in-law — Ellen Whitten’s mother — where in his house he had hidden the documents, in case anything happened to him, the Post reported. Ellen Whitten told the Post she had never asked him about the case because she had never heard of Emmett Till. “It’s not something they teach in schools in Mississippi,” she said. “Well, they do now. They did not at the time.”

After Ellen Whitten and her mother donated the documents to the Till archives, Houck called to tell her of their significance. He warned that her grandfather “does not come off well in these letters.”

“I would hope that if anyone else had documents related to the case they’re feeling sort of uncertain about, I think bringing it all to light helps,” she told the Post.

In its report on the release of the papers, Mississippi Today noted that 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 [sic] truth about Huie.”

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Image: Emmett Till grave marker (Robert A. Davis/Chicago Sun-Times/AP, via Washington Post)