By Ellen Barry
Times Staff Writer
July 30, 2005
Johnny B. Thomas has heard the rumors about his father's
possible involvement in the 1955 murder of Emmett Till in
Mississippi. Now, he's hoping for the truth.
(Hank Lamb / For The Times)
GLENDORA, Miss. — Johnny B. Thomas grew up with the story of Emmett Till. It
filtered down to children here like a dark fable, one that ended with a
black boy wrapped in barbed wire at the bottom of a river.
Thomas didn't see himself as part of that story. Then, when he was 11 or 12,
someone told him the old rumor about his father, Henry Lee Loggins.
The summer of 1955, when the 14-year-old Till was murdered for reportedly
whistling at a white woman, was also the summer Loggins disappeared. Loggins
worked for J.W. Milam, one of the white men who confessed to killing Till.
People here have long believed Loggins was present at the crime and spirited
out of town so he could not testify at Milam's murder trial.
For the last 50 years, Loggins has denied knowing anything about the crime.
He lived out his life as a junkman in Dayton, Ohio, and, at 82, is
recovering from a stroke. In an interview from a nursing home, he said he
had never hired a lawyer.
The baby son he left behind — now 51, the soft-voiced, white-haired mayor of
a dying Delta town — says he fears his father has held back the truth all
these years.
Thomas has asked state and federal authorities — who last year reopened the
investigation into Till's death — to grant his father immunity from
prosecution. Thomas plans to travel to his father's bedside, perhaps as soon
as next week, in a last attempt to settle the matter.
"I feel that toting around that kind of weight serves no purpose but to kill
you," he said. "Get rid of it and you can go ahead and live."
Told about Thomas' comments, Loggins repeated what he had said many times,
to reporters, to investigators, to his own family: That he knew nothing
about the murder.
"I wasn't there," he said. "I know people say so, but I wasn't there. I
ain't that kind of man."
As the 50th anniversary of the killing approaches, the role played by black
men remains a central mystery of the case. Days after the teenager was
killed, rumors began circulating that at least two black men had been
present — that they might have held Till down while he struggled to get free
or watched helplessly while he was killed.
Hallie Gail Bridges, assistant district attorney for Leflore County, said
the FBI had not yet completed its report, so prosecutors had not determined
who, if anyone, could be charged in the case. She would not comment on any
potential offers of immunity.
"I don't know where the investigation is going, and I don't want to step on
something that may or may not be in the works," she said.
Thomas said he had decided to press the matter because the murder affected
people beyond Till's family. Nothing was ever the same, he said, for the
black men whose names were drawn into it — or for the children of those men.
"It was really being sentenced to death to be made to participate, to take a
life, to not have your own life," he said. "I consider my father died twice.
He died once when he was made to take this child away. Then he died within
himself because he can never do anything about it."
Till turned heads when he visited his Mississippi cousins. The beloved only
son of a Chicago schoolteacher, he was a brassy, citified boy; people
noticed right away that he didn't say "yes, sir" and "no, sir."
Till had been in Mississippi three days when he made his mistake. He stopped
at Roy Bryant's general store in Money, 20 miles south of Glendora, where he
was alone for a moment with Bryant's young wife, Carolyn. Till's cousins
later testified that they heard him give a wolf whistle.
Three days later, Bryant and his half brother Milam burst into the house
where Till was staying. Carrying him to a barn in Drew, west of Glendora,
they beat him, shot him, weighed his body down by tying a 75-pound fan from
a cotton gin to his neck with barbed wire, and threw him into the
Tallahatchie River. When Till's body was fished out, his face was
monstrously distended, with one eye hanging from its socket.
The rumor mill was active in Glendora, where Milam ran a general store that
served the black community. Milam and Bryant were arrested the day after the
murder. By the start of their trial, two of Milam's black employees, Loggins
and Levi "Too Tight" Collins, had vanished. James Hicks of the Amsterdam
News, a black newspaper in New York, reported a week after the trial ended
that Collins and Loggins had been locked up in a jail in a neighboring town
during the proceedings.
Moses Wright, Till's uncle, said that when Bryant and Milam burst into his
house, a black man stood on the porch, hiding his face. At the trial, a
field hand named Willie Reed testified that he had seen the truck carrying
Till, and that two black men had been in the back of the truck with the
youth. Reed said Till was led into a barn; he later heard screams coming
from inside.
Black newspapers and civil-rights figures then urged federal investigators
to look more closely at Loggins and Collins. But that never happened. Bryant
and Milam were acquitted by an all-white jury. A year later, they confessed
to a Look magazine reporter, who paid them $4,000 for the interview.
Speaking from his hospital room, Loggins said he was not present the night
Till died. He said that if he had information about the case, "I would tell
it, because he was my color."
Loggins said he had never seen the boy, but he recalled the confidence that
made Till — raised far from the segregated South — stand out: "All women
looked the same to him, because he was from Chicago."
If he knew how white people in Mississippi were, Loggins said, "he wouldn't
have whistled. He made a mistake because he didn't know."
Loggins said that Milam had always treated him fairly and that initially, he
could not believe Milam was guilty of murder, "but it turned out he was." At
that time, he said, "it sure was hard to trust white people. I had friends,
so-called friends, but they would cut your throat." He said he moved to the
North not because of the Till case, or because his life had been threatened,
but "to make more money."
"I wasn't the only one who left," Loggins said. "A whole lot of people
left."
State and federal authorities reopened the investigation last summer, acting
in part on new information collected by documentary filmmakers. Most of the
central figures are now dead — Milam died in 1980, and Bryant in 1990.
Collins died in 1993. Two people frequently mentioned in connection with the
crime are still alive: Carolyn Bryant, 71, who remarried and is living in
Greenville, Miss., and Loggins, who had devoted most of his life to his
salvage business.
Bridges, the assistant district attorney, said "all the old research puts [Loggins]
in it." She added that prosecutors would take coercion into account when
deciding who — if anyone — to prosecute.
University of Alabama historian David T. Beito, who has researched the case
extensively, said that evidence suggesting Loggins was present was weak,
contradictory and largely based on hearsay. Christopher Metress, an English
professor at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., said he had mixed
feelings about bringing charges against a man who would have been killed for
refusing.
"I see him as a guy caught up in forces really beyond his control, and now
I'm afraid we're going to misjudge him because we don't fully appreciate the
power of those forces," said Metress, author of "The Lynching of Emmett
Till: A Documentary Narrative."
There is no such hesitation from Simeon Wright, 62, a cousin of Till's who
was sleeping in the room with the youth the night Bryant and Milam took him
away.
Loggins "had almost 50 years to come forward," Wright said. "He didn't do
it. He could have cleared the air, gotten those who were involved while they
were alive. As the saying goes, it's on him now. "I would like to see him
talk. And if he doesn't talk, throw the book at him."
On a sweltering July afternoon, almost nothing is moving in the town of
Glendora. The population has dropped below 300; according to Thomas, the
last white resident left in 1994. On the small main street, which was once
lined with cafes and clothing shops, vines are creeping in the windows of
gutted storefronts. Locusts drone hypnotically. A yellow dog trots across
the railroad tracks.
Thomas grew up here without a father. With no stable source of income,
Thomas and his siblings had to pick cotton for $1.25 a day, attending school
erratically. Thomas, a daydreamer, could never keep up. One of his most
vivid childhood memories is his mother, Adeline, beating him on the legs
with cotton stalks, prodding him to work faster.
He didn't blame her. His mother sold corn liquor, did restaurant work and
relied on Milam for help.
"Mama had no way to fend for herself," he said. "My mama was an
entrepreneur, and I guarantee that [with a man in the house] we would have
risen out of poverty. She was left out there to really just disintegrate."
Loggins didn't return to Mississippi until Thomas was 9 years old; he
arrived with a gift — a red bicycle. Every year after that he would make a
visit, Thomas said.
Mary Marshall, Thomas' younger sister, said she also heard the rumors that
Loggins was present at Till's killing. Marshall, 50, who lives in Rochester,
N.Y., never saw them as anything but rumors. She had almost forgotten the
matter until last year, when she heard that the CBS program "60 Minutes" had
interviewed her father.
She hated to see it come back up. The allegations, she said, are something
she doesn't even want to think about.
"He says he didn't have nothing to do with it," she said. "I believe my
father."
It was different for Thomas. When prosecutors announced they were reopening
the case, Thomas was the first to tell Loggins about it. He offered to act
as a go-between when filmmakers asked to interview Loggins. He began
pressing old folks in town about what they remembered. Behind it, he said,
is the desire to get at the truth, no matter how unsettling.
A full account of what happened will underline "what this country made this
innocent, illiterate person do," Thomas said.
"There was no way he could deny [Milam] anything he was ordered to do —
shoot, cut, break — whatever," Thomas said. "There was no way to say no."
The old folks said they understood. As a black person in Glendora, you got
used to seeing things you couldn't do anything about.
Hester Stevenson, 82, remembers walking into Milam's corner store one day
and seeing Milam beat a black man with a stick. The man's hands were tied,
and there was blood running down his face; terrified, Stevenson backed out
of the store and didn't say anything about it.
A.D. Young, 71, remembers seeing a white man shoot a black gas station
attendant on the spot for pumping more gas than he asked for. "Back then,"
Young said, "it was easy to come up missing if you said the wrong thing."
The Till murder fell into this category. Stevenson said she believed Loggins
and Collins were present — against their will — at the murder, then left
town "because they was scared." Bryant and Milam, she said, "figured them
boys was going to tell."
Young, a former mayor, said that during the trial, everyone in Glendora
assumed the two black men were dead. "Wasn't nobody going to speak of it,"
Young said. "We were scared to do anything. And they're afraid to talk about
it up until this day."
Young said he couldn't fault Loggins or Collins — or any black man at that
time — for following Milam's orders.
"I believe any man in that situation [would have obeyed] if whites told them
to, or you're probably going to end up dead," he said. "I don't know of any
freedom that we had back then. The law was the white man's law."
He added this, though: He said he was glad Milam and Bryant didn't come to
fetch him for a helping hand that night. If they had, he said, they would
have had to kill him.
Thomas sometimes feels like he is the last person in the world who wants to
live in Glendora.
He's spent most of his life watching the town die. Roads that were once
paved have been allowed to go to gravel. The bridge south of town is closed,
sealing Glendora off from nearby communities. A plan to invigorate the
economy by seeding sweet potato farms recently collapsed for lack of a
market.
Still, for the last year, Thomas has been nursing a vision for Glendora.
His idea has to do with redemption. He'd like to open a civil-rights museum
in the town's old cotton gin, one that stood near Milam's shop. It may be
the place where Milam and Bryant found the heavy fan they used to weigh down
Till's body, he said.
He likes the idea of tourists driving into Glendora to read about its most
famous native, the blues musician Sonny Boy Williamson. Then they could
learn about the infamous killing — about Milam, about "Too Tight" Collins,
and about the mayor's father. For this, Thomas needs a more complete
account.
So, he's traveling to Dayton, where father and son can talk face to face.
"I really, really hope he'll tell the world what happened," Thomas said. "I
think the world will probably forgive him."
He doesn't know whether his father will want to tell the story after all
these years. Or even, in all honesty, if his father has a story to tell. But
he's crossing his fingers.