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KOLUMN Magazine
JOURNALIST WITHHELD INFORMATION ABOUT EMMETT TILL’S MURDER, DOCUMENTS SHOW
William Bradford Huie’s newly released research notes show he suspected more than two men tortured and killed 14-year-old Emmett Till, but suggest that he left that out when it threatened his story.
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Photo, Emmett Till’s photo is seen on his grave marker in 2002. (Robert A. Davis/Chicago Sun-Times/AP)
A journalist whose 1956 article was billed as the “true account” of Emmett Till’s murder withheld credible information about people involved in the crime, according to newly discovered documents.
William Bradford 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 article detailed the confessions of two White men who previously had been acquitted by an all-White jury in the murder. The men told Huie they had no accomplices.
Photo, J.W. Milam, left. and his wife, join Roy Bryant, far right; and his wife, Carolyn Bryant, in the courtroom. (AP)
In the Dec. 10, 1955, letter to Whitten, Huie asked about one of those Black men, Levi “Too Tight” Collins, long believed to have been forced by Milam to participate in the kidnapping. Huie also mentioned Willie Reed, an 18-year-old Black passerby who had testified he caught a glimpse of Till in the back of the truck and heard him being tortured in Leslie Milam’s barn. Both Collins and Reed fled to Chicago after the trial, where their stories circulated.
“I listened to so much of this stuff in Chicago that I began doubting myself,” Huie told Whitten, “and one night I was on the point of coming back to Mississippi and ‘pistol-whipping’ Milam for telling me a fabric of lies.” He then asked Whitten what he knew of Collins’s claims about Milam, admitting it was “too late for me to ask you to reassure me on this point.”