Emmet Till notes

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Emmett Till
**Cole, Gwin (1918-2008) was an identification officer for the Mississippi Highway Patrol. He was one of the investigators appointed by governor Hugh White to Drew, Sunflower County, Mississippi to examine the shed on the Shmurden plantation where, according to witnesses, Emmett Till was alleged to have been beaten. When questioned about his role in this investigation in the late 1990s, Cole had no recollection of the case. **Daley, Richard J. (1902-1976) was the mayor of Chicago at the time of the Emmett Till murder, and spoke out publicly against the killing. He sent a telegram to President Dwight D. Eisenhower asking that “all the facilities of the federal government be immediately utilized so that the ends of justice may be served.” His tenure as mayor began in 1955 and ended with his death twenty-one years later. He attended DePaul University and graduated with a degree in law in 1934, but because of his immediate election to the Illinois state legislature, he never practiced. In 1968 he hosted the Democratic National Convention. **Fedric, Eugene C. (1917-2005) was a member of the 18-man Tallahatchie County grand jury that handed down indictments of murder and kidnapping against J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant on September 6, 1955. **Ford, Louis Henry (1914-1995) was the bishop who preached Emmett Till’s funeral sermon. He was also the presiding bishop of the Church of God in Christ and the namesake of the Bishop Ford Freeway in Chicago. He began his ministry in 1926, and became national director of public relations for the Church of God in Christ in 1945. He was elevated to the position of assistant presiding bishop in 1972 and in 1990, became presiding bishop. A graduate of Saints College in Lexington. Mississippi, he moved to Chicago in 1933. In 1963 he founded the St. Paul Church of God in Christ, and later the C. H. Mason and William Roberts Bible Institute for Bible Studies.
 * Family of Emmet Till speak out against Lil' Wayne lyrics (source: [] )
 * On the original version, Lil’ Wayne, whose real name is Dwayne Michael Carter Jr., compared rough sex to the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Louis Till, an African-American boy who was brutally beaten, shot and thrown into Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River with a cotton gin around his neck after allegedly whistling at a White woman.
 * Till's abduction and murder in Mississippi in August 1955, and the subsequent acquittal of his killers the following month, became not only a national story, but also put southern racism into the international spotlight. These events became a major force in the advancement of the Civil Rights Movement. ( http://www.emmetttillmurder.com/ )
 * Key roles http://www.emmetttillmurder.com
 * Abbey, Richard Huntington “R. H.” (1891-1986) was a member of the 18-man Tallahatchie County grand jury that handed down indictments of murder and kidnapping against J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant on September 6, 1955. He married Mary Ellen McGavock in 1925.
 * Adams, Olive Arnold (1912- ) was the author of an investigative work titled Time Bomb: Mississippi Exposed and the Full Story of Emmett Till, published within two weeks of the article in Look that featured the confessions of J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant. Details in Adams’s work differed drastically from the Look piece. She was the wife of Julius J. Adams, publisher of the New York Age Defender. In 2008, when she was ninety-five, two paraphrases from her operetta, Santa Claus and Unicorn were arranged by pianist Vladimar Shinov and performed at the Weill Recital Hall at Carnagie Hall.
 * Allison, Lee Russell (1915-1964) lived in Glendora, Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, and was one of the character witnesses for J. W. Milam in the Milam-Bryant murder trial. He married Verda Louise Coleman in 1940.
 * Allison, Lee Russell (1915-1964) lived in Glendora, Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, and was one of the character witnesses for J. W. Milam in the Milam-Bryant murder trial. He married Verda Louise Coleman in 1940.
 * Armstrong, Howard (1919-1993) served on the jury in the Milam-Bryant murder trial. At the time of the trial, he was a farmer living in Enid, Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. He married Jane Helms in 1942 in Charleston, Tallahatchie County.
 * Bell, Charles (1927-1984) was a member of the 18-man Tallahatchie County grand jury that handed down indictments of murder and kidnapping against J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant on September 6, 1955.
 * Billingsley, Walter (c. 1923-?) was slated as a witness for the prosecution in the Milam-Bryant murder trial, but was not called to testify. He was a milkman on a plantation near Drew, Sunflower County, Mississippi, and heard the sounds of the beating in the barn on the morning after Emmett Till was kidnapped in Money. This plantation was managed my Leslie Milam, brother of J. W. Milam and half brother to Roy Bryant. He was supposed to testify at the trial but at the last minute, told prosecutors that he did not see or hear anything.
 * Black, Herbert “H. T.” (1914-1988) was a member of the 18-man Tallahatchie County grand jury that handed down indictments of murder and kidnapping against J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant on September 6, 1955. He served as a corporal in the U. S. Army during World War II.
 * Booker, Simeon S. (1918- ) was a correspondent for Jet magazine from 1955 until his retirement in 2007. He covered the Milam-Bryant murder trial for that publication and soon after published his “Negro Reporter at the Till Trial” in the Nieman Reports. He had earlier won the Harvard Nieman Fellowship and then in 1952 became the first black reporter to work for the Washington Post, where he worked until 1955. He was also the first black to win the National Press Club’s Fourth Estate Award. He was educated at Virginia Union University, where he received a  Bachelor’s degree in 1942. He afterward attended Harvard University. He is also the recipient of the Washington Association of Black Journalists, Career Achievement Award (1993), the National Black Media Coalition, Master Communicators Award (1999), and the WABJ Lifetime Achievement Award (2000).
 * Boyack, James E. (1902-1966) was a white journalist who covered the Milam-Bryant murder trial for the black newspaper called the Pittsburgh Courier. He was born in Greenwich, England and later worked in public relations in New York. He was a freelance writer at the time of the Till murder.
 * Boyce, L. W. (?-?) lived in Glendora, Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, and was one of the character witnesses for J. W. Milam in the Milam-Bryant murder trial.
 * ..Bradley, Amanda (c.1905-?) lived on a plantation near Drew, Sunflower County, Mississippi at the time of the Emmett Till murder. This plantation was managed my Leslie Milam, brother of J. W. Milam and half brother to Roy Bryant. As one of the surprise witnesses gathered by the prosecution, she testified at the murder trial that she saw four white men entering and exiting a barn on the plantation the morning after Emmett was abducted. She also saw a truck outside of the barn. After the trial she, like most of the other black witnesses, moved from Mississippi to Chicago.
 * Bradley, Mamie Elizabeth Carthan Till (1921-2003) was the mother of Emmett Louis Till. She was born to Wiley Nash and Alma Smith Carthan in Webb, Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. When she was two years old, the family migrated north to Argo, Cook County, Illinois, a racially mixed community near Chicago. From 1936 to 1941 she was employed as a domestic worker; from 1941-1943 she worked for the Coffey School of Aeronautics, and from 1953 to 1956 she was employed by the Federal Government, in charge of confidential Air Force files. She married Louis Till in 1940 and gave birth to her only son, Emmett, in 1941. She and Louis later separated but were never divorced. Louis, later serving in the army in Italy, was executed in 1945. Mamie married a second husband sometime after Louis’s death, but they, too, divorced. After moving to Detroit, she married Pink Bradley on May 5, 1951, but that marriage also failed. On June 24, 1957, she married Gennie Mobley, and this time, she found a love that lasted. In 1956 she entered the Chicago Teacher’s College, where she graduated Cum Laude in 1960. She taught in Chicago schools until her retirement in 1983. During her years as a teacher, she earned a master’s degree in Administration and Supervision at Loyola University. In 1973, she trained the first group of children, who would become the Emmett Till Players, to recite speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She continued to speak and push for justice in her son’s slaying up until the time of her death, during which time she served as president of the Emmett Till Foundation. She also co-authored a play with David Barr, The State of Mississippi vs Emmett Till which was performed in such cities as Chicago, Los Angeles and San Diego from 1999 to 2001. She also co-authored her own memoirs with Christopher Benson, Death of Innocence: The Hate Crime That Changed America, published soon after her death in 2003.
 * Breland, Jesse Josiah “J. J.” (1888-1969) was one of five defense attorneys representing Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam in their murder trial. He was a graduate of Princeton University and began to practice law in Sumner, Tallahatchie County, Mississippi in 1915. He married Sue H. Savage in 1917 in Sumner. He later went on to become Tallahatchie County chairman of the Republican Party.
 * Broadway, William Henry, Jr., “June” (1907-1957) was the foreman of the grand jury that met in Greenwood, Mississippi in November, 1955, to consider kidnap charges against J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant. The grand jury returned a no true bill and therefore, all charges against Milam and Bryant were dropped. He was shot and killed on a plantation in Mississippi where he was a supervisor.
 * Brownell, Herbert, Jr. (1904-1996) was United States attorney general at the time of the Emmett Till murder, and recipient of a telegram from NAACP attorney William Henry Huff urging the federal government to conduct a complete investigation into the killing. He received intense pressure from groups, individuals, and from those at rallies to bring justice to the case, especially after the acquittal of the defendants in the murder trial. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1927 and was admitted to the New York bar, and practiced law in New York City. He also served three terms in the New York assembly from 1933-1937. In 1944 and 1948 he served as campaign manager for Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey. As attorney general he filed the first desegregation suits that followed the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas and drafted the legislative proposal that became the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
 * Bryant, Carolyn (1934- ) was born in Indianola, Sunflower County, Mississippi. She won two beauty contests in two different high schools, and at age 17, left school to marry Roy Bryant on April 25, 1951. She was the target of the “wolf whistle” by Emmett Till while she was running the counter at the Bryant Grocery and Meat Market on August 24, 1955 in Money, Leflore County, Mississippi. She testified during the murder trial that on the occasion of the whistle, “a Negro man” entered the store, grabbed her, asked her for a date, and used various obscenities. Judge Curtis Swango decided that her court testimony of the incident inside the store was not admissible before the jury and so they never heard it. She had borne two sons with Roy Bryant by the time of the trial, and later had a third son and a daughter. The store in Money closed soon after the murder trial, and the family later moved to Texas and Vinton, Louisiana. They returned to Mississippi in 1973. She and Roy Bryant divorced a few years later. She lived for several years in Greenville, Mississippi. She was a major focus of the 2004-06 investigation by the FBI as a possible accomplice in the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till, but there was not evidence to support that and in February 2007 a grand jury failed to indict her. After the death of her son, Frank, in 2010, she left Mississippi.
 * Bryant, Roy (1931-1994) was one of the accused killers of Emmett Till. He was born a twin in Charleston, Tallahatchie County, Mississippi to Henry and Eula Lee Morgan Milam Bryant. He attended the Baptist church in Charleston as a child, and for a time lived in Tutwiler, Tallahatchie County. He later spent three years in the military as a paratrooper (1950-53). He married Carolyn Holloway on April 25, 1951, and the couple had three sons and a daughter. After the murder trial, due to black boycotting of his store, he was forced to close the business. Around this time he and J. W. Milam sold their story confessing to the murder of Emmett Till, to reporter William Bradford Huie for $3,500, and it was published in Look magazine in January 1956. In 1956 he went to the Bell Machine Shop in Inverness, Mississippi, and learned welding with the help of the G. I. Bill. He worked as a welder and boilermaker for 16 years in East Texas and Louisiana. He and his family then moved to Ruleville, Sunflower County, Mississippi, in 1973, and Bryant lived there until his death. Legally blind as a result of his years as a welder, he came to own another general store in Ruleville, which he ran until it burned down in 1989. As his store in Money three decades earlier, the Ruleville establishment catered mainly to a black clientele. He and Carolyn divorced in 1979 and he married Vera Joe Orman in 1980. In 1983, while running his grocery store, he was indicted for buying food stamps for less than their value and then selling them at full price to the government. He plead guilty to two counts of food stamp fraud, but due to the pleas of his attorney, he was sentenced to only three years probation and a $750.00 fine. Four years later, however, he was again charged with food stamp fraud and was sentenced to two years in prison. However, he was released after only eight months. The Till case was not discussed in the court in either conviction, and both times, he received the minimum sentence because his attorney argued for leniency. Bryant had been “a good citizen,” the attorney argued  Toward the end of his life he spent most of his time at home, but sold watermelon and other fruit at a stand along the road in Ruleville in the summertime. Plagued with health problems, he nearly lost his feet due to diabetes and eventually died of cancer at the Baptist Hospital in Jackson, Mississippi.
 * Caldwell, James Hamilton, Jr. (1898-1962) was one of three members of the prosecuting team representing the state of Mississippi at the Milam-Bryant murder trial. He was married to Sarah Petterson, and at the time of the trial he was recovering from a heart attack and was unable to bear much of the responsibility of the prosecution team. He had initially opposed the grand jury indictment, stating his belief that “the case was lost from the start.” Unfortunately, he drowned seven years after the trial.
 * Campbell, Maybelle (?-?) was Emmett Till’s school teacher at McCosh Elementary School in Chicago, and spoke at his funeral on September 3, 1955. She called him “a fine upstanding pupil.”
 * Campbell, Melvin L. (1925-1972) was a brother-in-law to J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, and according to the recent FBI investigation, was with Milam and Bryant when Emmett Till was kidnapped and murdered. He married Mary Louise Bryant on August 26, 1948 in Tallahatchie County Mississippi, and at the time of the Emmett Till murder, he and his wife owned a small store in Minter City, Leflore County, Mississippi. According to the FBI report of their interview with Mary Louise, Campbell told his wife of his involvement in the crime.
 * Carey, Archibald (1908-1981) was a speaker at the Emmett Till funeral. He had been elected twice as a Chicago alderman from 1947-55, and in 1951 was appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower as the first black to serve as chair of the President’s Committee on Government Employment Policy. From 1953-56 he served as a delegate to the United Nations. He was also the pastor of Quinn Chapel AME church in Chicago, and a graduate of the John Marshall Law School in Chicago. He served as a circuit judge from 1966-1979. His speech at the 1952 Republican National Convention served in part (the words “Let Freedom Ring”) as inspiration for phrases in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech delivered during the August 28, 1963 March on Washington.
 * Carlton, Caleb Sidney (1915-1968) was one of five defense attorneys representing Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam at their murder trial. He was admitted to the bar in 1939 and began practicing law in Sumner, Mississippi in 1945. He later became president of the Mississippi Bar Association.
 * Carter, Hodding (1907-1972) was a journalist who covered the Milam-Bryant murder trial for the Delta-Democrat Times, which he founded by merger in 1938. He remained with the paper as editor and publisher until the mid 1960s. He received a B.A. from Bowdoin College in 1927 and did graduate work in journalism at Columbia University. He was awarded a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard in 1940 and later that year helped found the daily PM. During WWI, he served in the Mississippi National Guard. He was a progressive journalist and known as the “Spokesman for the New South.” In 1946 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials against segregation and racist injustice, and was censured in 1955 by the Mississippi legislature for his criticisms of the White Citizens Councils. He was the author of numerous books
 * Carthan, Wiley Nash “John” (1902-1969) was the father of Mamie Till-Mobley and grandfather of Emmett Till. He was born in Mississippi and lived there until moving to Argo, Cook County, Illinois with his wife and daughter in 1924. He worked for Corn Products in Argo until his divorce from Alma Smith Carthan in the early 1930s. He later moved to Detroit, Michigan and remarried. His relationship with Mamie was an estranged one until she and Emmett moved briefly to Detroit and in with the Carthans around 1950. He accompanied Mamie to the murder trial in Mississippi in August 1955, providing emotional support during that difficult week. He died at the home of his brother Emmett Carthan while visiting his relatives in Argo and Chicago. He went by the name of John Carthan by the time of the trial.
 * Chancellor, John (1927-1996) was a journalist who covered the Milam-Bryant murder trial as a national reporter for NBC. Two years later, he also reported on the desegregation of Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. He came to NBC in 1950 after two years with the Chicago Sun-Times and worked as a correspondent on the Huntley-Brinkley Report. He became host of the Today Show in 1961 and later served as director of Voice of America from 1965-1967. He was head anchor on the NBC Nightly News from 1970 until his retirement in 1982. He was the sole anchor for most of his tenure.
 * Chatham, Gerald (1906-1956) was the district attorney who prosecuted J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant in their murder trial. He had practiced law in the district since 1931. He had also served as a state representative, county superintendent of education, and county prosecuting attorney before he was elected district attorney in 1942. He held that office until 1956. Unfortunately, he died of a heart attack at home one year after the trial in Sumner. His family blames his health issues on stress related to the Till case.
 * Clark, Hubert (1920-1972) was alleged to have been involved in the murder and kidnapping of Emmett Till. According to the 2004-2006 FBI investigation, this claim originated in reports issued in 1955 as well as being confirmed by J. W. Milam several years later in a conversation with a friend. Clark was a World War II veteran. He married Francis Norene Mitchell in 1939.
 * Cole, Gwin (1918-2008) was an identification officer for the Mississippi Highway Patrol. He was one of the investigators appointed by governor Hugh White to Drew, Sunflower County, Mississippi to examine the shed on the Shurden plantation where, according to witnesses, Emmett Till was alleged to have been beaten. When questioned about his role in this investigation in the late 1990s, Cole had no recollection of the case.
 * Cole, Gwin (1918-2008) was an identification officer for the Mississippi Highway Patrol. He was one of the investigators appointed by governor Hugh White to Drew, Sunflower County, Mississippi to examine the shed on the Shurden plantation where, according to witnesses, Emmett Till was alleged to have been beaten. When questioned about his role in this investigation in the late 1990s, Cole had no recollection of the case.
 * Coleman, James Plemon “J. P.” (1914-1991) was Mississippi Governor Elect at the time of the Milam-Bryant murder trial and assigned his own special agent, Robert Smith, to aid the prosecution. Prior to his election as governor, he had been an aid to a U. S. congressman, and served as district attorney, circuit judge, state attorney general, and justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court. As governor, he was successful in maintaining racial segregation in Mississippi. After his term as governor ended, he was elected to the state House of Representatives. He ran for governor again in 1963 but lost. In 1965 he was appointed to the United State’s Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and held the rank of chief judge from 1979 to 1981. He retired from the fifth circuit in 1984.
 * Collins, Levy “Too Tight” (1935-1992) has been tied to the murder of Emmett Till by various witnesses. At the time of the murder, he was employed by J. W. Milam, and was allegedly in the truck the morning Emmett was taken to the Shurden plantation near Drew, Sunflower County, Mississippi. Investigators learned that to prevent him from witnessing in court, Sheriff H. C. Strider placed him in jail elsewhere in Tallahatchie County under a false name. In an interview published in the Chicago Defender shortly after the trial, he denied any involvement with the murder. Later in life, he was working in a cotton compress. warehouse in Drew.
 * .Cothran, John Ed (1914-2008) was deputy sheriff to Leflore County sheriff George Smith. He arrested J. W. Milam on charges of kidnapping Emmett Till and was a witness for the prosecution at the Milam-Bryant murder trial. He later served as sheriff of Leflore County from 1960-1964. He later lived in Moorhead, Mississippi, where he was questioned by the FBI during the course of its 2004-2006 investigation. He could not provide them with details, having forgotten much about the case, but did remember the events leading to Milam’s arrest.
 * Cothran, John Ed (1914-2008) was deputy sheriff to Leflore County sheriff George Smith. He arrested J. W. Milam on charges of kidnapping Emmett Till and was a witness for the prosecution at the Milam-Bryant murder trial. He later served as sheriff of Leflore County from 1960-1964. He later lived in Moorhead, Mississippi, where he was questioned by the FBI during the course of its 2004-2006 investigation. He could not provide them with details, having forgotten much about the case, but did remember the events leading to Milam’s arrest.
 * sCrawford, John (1933- ) was one of several youths who was with Emmett Till in the evening before his kidnapping. He is the brother of Roosevelt Crawford and uncle of Ruth Crawford, two of the local teenagers who witnessed the incident at the Bryant Grocery and Meat Market. He currently lives in Detroit, Michigan.
 * Crawford, Roosevelt (1939- ) was one of several youths with Emmett Till who went to Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market on August 25, 1955, when the incident between Emmett and Carolyn Bryant occurred. He maintains that Till did not whistle at Bryant but that Till was responding to a bad move made by a checker player on the porch. He is the brother of John Crawford, who was with Till on the day he was kidnapped, and uncle of Ruth Crawford, who was also present at the store when Till whistled. He currently lives in Detroit, Michigan.
 * Crawford, Roosevelt (1939- ) was one of several youths with Emmett Till who went to Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market on August 25, 1955, when the incident between Emmett and Carolyn Bryant occurred. He maintains that Till did not whistle at Bryant but that Till was responding to a bad move made by a checker player on the porch. He is the brother of John Crawford, who was with Till on the day he was kidnapped, and uncle of Ruth Crawford, who was also present at the store when Till whistled. He currently lives in Detroit, Michigan.
 * Desmond, James (1908-1968) was a journalist who covered the Milam-Bryant murder trial for the New York Daily News. He began his career working for the Associated Press and other news organizations. He was well-known at the Daily News for his “Albany Line” column, which served to analyze New York politics. He was the author of the 1964 book, Nelson Rockefeller: A Political Biography.
 * Desmond, James (1908-1968) was a journalist who covered the Milam-Bryant murder trial for the New York Daily News. He began his career working for the Associated Press and other news organizations. He was well-known at the Daily News for his “Albany Line” column, which served to analyze New York politics. He was the author of the 1964 book, Nelson Rockefeller: A Political Biography.
 * Dogan, Harry H. (1895-1959) was Tallahatchie County sheriff-elect at the time of the Milam-Bryant murder trial. He served from 1956-1960. He allegedly helped pick jurors for the trial that would likely favor an acquittal of the accused. According to one of the defense attorneys, Dogan sent word to the jurors while they were deliberating to stall the verdict in order to make it “look good.” He died in office during this, his fifth term as sheriff.
 * Evers, Medgar (1925-1963) was field secretary for the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP at the time of the Emmett Till murder. He, with other NAACP officials, helped to seek out witnesses for the trial. He was inducted into the army in 1943 and served in Normandy. He attended Alcorn College (now Alcorn University), where he met his wife to be, Myrlie Beasley. The two were married on December 24, 1951. The following semester, he graduated with a degree in business administration. They moved to Mound Bayou, where he worked as an insurance agent until 1954, and was active in the NAACP and in civil rights activities. He applied for, and was denied entrance into the University of Mississippi Law School. He moved his family to Jackson, where he and Myrlie set up the office of the NAACP and began investigations into violent crimes perpetrated against blacks. His work to bring down segregation made him many enemies, and late in the evening on June 12, 1963, he was gunned down in his driveway as he returned home. His killer, Byron De La Beckwith, was tried twice in 1964 and set free due to two hung juries. Beckwith was finally convicted in 1994 and died in prison.
 * Falls, Jerry (1905-1979) was the foreman of the 18-man Tallahatchie county grand jury that handed down indictments of murder and kidnapping against J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant on September 6, 1955. He married Elizabeth Garner in 1934 and was one of the wealthiest men in Tallahatchie County, described as “a Delta aristocrat steeped in the tradition of noblesse oblige.”
 * Featherston, James Shoaf (1923-2000) covered the Milam-Bryant murder trial for the Jackson Daily News. He later worked for the Dallas Times Herald from 1962-1970, and went on to teach journalism at Louisiana State University from 1970-1994. His began his career in journalism with the Vicksburg Herald in 1951, and his coveragce of a 1953 tornado in there won the staff of the  paper a Pulitzer Prize.
 * Frasier, John, Jr. (?-?) was a Leflore County prosecutor who worked on the kidnapping case against J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant. The kidnapping occurred in Leflore County.
 * Frasier, John, Jr. (?-?) was a Leflore County prosecutor who worked on the kidnapping case against J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant. The kidnapping occurred in Leflore County.
 * Halberstam, David (1934-2007) was a journalist who covered the Milam-Bryant murder trial for the West Point Daily Times Leader while a reporter living in Mississippi. A 1955 graduate of Harvard, he later worked for the Nashville Tennessean from 1956 to 1960, and as a New York Times staff writer from 1960 to 1967. In 1964 he shared the Pulitzer Prize and George Polk award for foreign reporting. In 1967 he became a contributing reporter for Harpers. He authored several books, including The Fifties (1993), which details the Emmett Till case. He was killed in a car accident in California while researching a new book. A book he completed before his death, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War was released in September 2007.
 * Havens, Willie D. (1904-1998) served as the alternate juror in the Milam-Bryant murder trial. He married Mamie Glover in Charleston, Tallahatchie County in 1929. As an alternate, he was dismissed from the jury by Judge Curtis Swango before it retired to the jury room to deliberate. He was a carpenter living in Charleston.
 * Haynes, Goldie (1913-1989) was an evangelist who sang a solo, “I Don’t Know Why I Have to Cry Sometimes,” at the Emmett Till funeral.
 * Henderson, Robert Harvey (1921-2007) was one of five defense attorneys representing J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant in their murder trial. At 34, he was the youngest of the legal team. He had been a life-long resident of Tallahatchie County and had been in practice since 1947. As the last surviving member of the defense team, his death came just five days after Tallahatchie County apologized to the Till family for the injustices of the trial on October 2, 2007.
 * Henry, Aaron E. (1922-1997) was a NAACP official at the time of the Emmett Till murder, and helped find witnesses willing to talk by disguising himself as a sharecropper and going into the fields. He served as president of the Mississippi Conference of Branches of the NAACP from 1960 to 1993, was president of the Council of Federated Organizations, Mississippi, from 1962-1965, and a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1980 to 1995. He was also a pharmacist and ran his own pharmacy in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
 * cHerbers, John (1923- ) is a journalist who covered the Milam-Bryant murder trial for United Press International. He graduated from Emory University in 1949, and began his career at the Greenwood, Mississippi Morning Star, and the Jackson, Mississippi Daily News. He was a reporter for UPI from 1953-1963. He joined the New York Times in 1963, was appointed assistant national editor in 1975, deputy Washington bureau chief in 1977, and Washington national correspondent in 1979. He retired in 1987. He has authored several books, including The Lost Priority: What Happened to the Civil Right’s Movement in America? (1970).
 * Hicks, James L. (1915-1986) was a reporter who covered the Milam-Bryant murder trial. His investigation into the murder was published in several installments in the Baltimore Afro-American, the Cleveland Call and Post, and the Atlanta Daily World, soon after the trial. He began his career in journalism in 1935 with the Call and Post. He joined the army and was awarded three battle stars for his service in the New Guinea campaign, and was promoted to captain. After World War II, he joined the Afro American in Baltimore and became the Washington Bureau Chief for the National Negro Press Association. He served as editor for the Amsterdam News from 1955 to 1966, and again from 1972 to 1977. He was the first African American member of the State Department Correspondents Association and the first African American accredited to cover the United Nations. In 1977 he became editor of the New York Voice.
 * Holland, George (1913-1982) served as a juror in the Milam-Bryant murder trial. He was a farmer living in Glendora, Tallahatchie County, Mississippi.
 * Howard, Theodore Roosevelt Mason “T. R. M.” (1908-1976) was a doctor, entrepreneur, and fraternal leader in the all-black town of Mound Bayou in the Mississippi Delta. He was chief surgeon of the Friendship Clinic and owned an insurance company, home construction firm, a large plantation, and had many other investments. In 1951, Howard founded the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, a civil rights and pro-self-help organization that sponsored an annual rally/festival/speech in Mound Bayou. Speakers at this event included Thurgood Marshall and Rep. Charles Diggs. Medgar Evers, who moved to Mound Bayou to sell insurance for Dr. Howard, was an early leader of the RCNL. During the Milam-Bryant murder trial, Dr. Howard searched for witnesses and other evidence to secure a conviction as well as to prove a broader conspiracy. Mamie Bradley stayed in Dr. Howard's house during the trial, as did many black reporters.
 * Hubbard, Joe Willie (c. 1928-?) was alleged by T.R.M. Howard to have been with J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant in the murder of Emmett Till. This claim was also put forth by two other writers who published investigative pieces on the murder in 1956: Olive Arnold Adams in Time Bomb: Mississippi Exposed and the Full Story of Emmett Till, and Amos Dixon (pseudonym) in a series of articles in the California Eagle (although Adams uses the pseudonym “Herbert” for Hubbard). Although Willie Reed and Henry Loggins recently recalled having once known Hubbard, no one knows what happened to him.
 * Hubbard, Joe Willie (c. 1928-?) was alleged by T.R.M. Howard to have been with J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant in the murder of Emmett Till. This claim was also put forth by two other writers who published investigative pieces on the murder in 1956: Olive Arnold Adams in Time Bomb: Mississippi Exposed and the Full Story of Emmett Till, and Amos Dixon (pseudonym) in a series of articles in the California Eagle (although Adams uses the pseudonym “Herbert” for Hubbard). Although Willie Reed and Henry Loggins recently recalled having once known Hubbard, no one knows what happened to him.
 * Huff, William Henry (1888-1963) was a NAACP attorney who represented Mamie Bradley after Emmett Till was murdered. He later terminated his services with her when the NAACP ended its sponsorship of Mrs. Bradley’s speaking tour. He attended Georgia Normal and Industrial Institute and Knox Institute in Athens, Georgia. He also attended the Chicago Law School, obtaining his L.L.B., and the John Marshall Law School for his J.D. He was admitted to the Indiana Bar in 1936 and the Illinois Bar in 1946. He was also admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. In addition to law, he was trained at the National Medical University in Chicago, and practiced pharmacy.

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