When Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam went to trial in September 1955 for murdering Emmett Till, a young writer traveled from New York to Sumner, Mississippi, to cover the trial for The Nation magazine and learned lessons about what America was and what it has become.
Dan Wakefield, now 86 years old and a permanent resident of Broad Ripple, is sharing how that trial, as well as his friendship with the late African-American writer James Baldwin, impacted him in a public talk March 12 at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church.
Wakefield was just six months out of college when he went to Mississippi for the trial. It was his first story for a national magazine. He recalled recently at a Broad Ripple coffeehouse — one of his main hangouts these days — how the Greyhound bus he took didn’t even quite get him to Sumner. It dropped him off a couple miles short and he had to walk the rest of the way. Wakefield and other writers from the North were called “outside advocators” by most whites in Sumner, a rural town about 130 miles north of Jackson.
Bryant and Milam were on trial for murdering Till, a 14-year-old African-American whose incriminating offense was allegedly flirting with a white woman while on vacation. Till was born and raised in Chicago. Remembered as one of the most brutal hate crimes of the 20th century, Bryant and Milam kidnapped, tortured and lynched Till before dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River. A jury of exclusively white men acquitted Bryant and Milam after just over an hour of deliberation.
The non-guilty verdict wasn’t a surprise to many, including Wakefield, but it still drew emotion from those who had to see the process play out.
“It’s one thing to read about lynchings and think that’s history,” Wakefield said, “but then to see men set free who had murdered a boy, to see it with your eyes, it’s something you never forget.”
Bryant and Milam sold their confession to Look magazine in 1956. The story detailed how the two men beat Till with a gun, shot him and threw him in the river with a cotton-gin fan attached with barbed wire to his neck to make him sink. Bryant and Milam, both now dead, couldn’t be tried for the same crime twice, but the Justice Department re-opened the investigation into Till’s murder last year.
One of the details from the trial that has stuck with Wakefield through the years is Till’s great-uncle, Moses Wright, giving his testimony and pointing to Bryant and Milam to identify the murderers. Wakefield called it the “most dramatic moment in the trial” because most white people assumed fears of repercussions would keep Black people from testifying so defiantly.
Wakefield took the weekend after the trial to write his story from a hotel room, and his first sentence is what he said he considers to be his best ever: “The crowds are gone and this Delta town is back to its silent, solid life that is based on cotton and the proposition that a whole race of men was created to pick it.”
After the trial, when Wakefield was back home in New York, he would sometimes meet with his friend Baldwin, who would ask about the trial. One of the things Baldwin was most curious about was how the people in Sumner reacted to the non-guilty verdict.
“Well that’s the amazing thing,” Wakefield told his friend. “The people in the town thought it was just fine.”
Baldwin corrected Wakefield: “You mean the white people in the town.”
Wakefield realized he had spent most of his life seeing things only from the perspective of white people, even as he covered various civil rights events in the South, including the Montgomery bus boycott later in 1955. It’s something Wakefield continued reckoning with later in his life.
“I think white people really don’t know American history,” he said. “We’re not taught the real American history. You know, I went to School 80 here in Broad Ripple, and I went to Shortridge, and I went to college at Columbia and lived in New York, and yet I’ve come to realize in the last couple years that I really haven’t been taught American history like it really was.”
Contact staff writer Tyler Fenwick at 317-762-7853. Follow him on Twitter @Ty_Fenwick.
DAN WAKEFIELD TALK
Wakefield will talk about his experience covering the Emmett Till trial in 1955 and his friendship with James Baldwin. Fellow Indiana author Phil Gulley will join Wakefield.
When: 7 p.m. March 12
Where: St. Luke’s United Methodist Church, 100 W. 86th St.
Cost: Requesting $25 donations (free for students)
A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the event is free, but the host, Christian Theological Seminary, is requesting $25 donations that will go to Indiana Writing Center’s “Building a Rainbow” program. It is free for students.
Emmett Till
