Devery S. Anderson > Quotes

“Kellum reminded the jury that special prosecutor Robert Smith, “a gentleman I don’t know,” would have the final argument, and that this was a powerful advantage. He then closed with a dramatic message that the jury’s verdict would have eternal consequences. I want you to think of the future. When your summons comes to cross the Great Divide, and, as you enter your father’s house—a home not made by hands but eternal in the heavens, you can look back to where your father’s feet have trod and see your good record written in the sands of time and, when you go down to your lonely silent tomb to a sleep that knows no dreams, I want you to hold in the palm of your hand a record of service to God and your fellow man. And the only way you can do that is to turn these boys loose.123”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“the January 21, 1956, edition of the Baltimore Afro-American, he published another such letter, this time prompted by the Huie revelations. This one was directed”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“With Henry Lee Loggins holding the victim, the Milams led by J. W. began beating Emmett about the head with their pistols. He began to cry and beg for mercy. That only whetted their hatred. They smashed his head in, beat it to a pulp. Emmett fell to the floor, still crying and begging. Their frenzy increased. The blows fell faster. The frenzy mounted higher. The killers kicked and beat their victim. Finally the cries died down to a moan and then ceased. The Milams and Bryant thought their victim was dead. A new panic seized them. What to do with the body? J. W. rose to the occasion: throw the body in the Tallahatchie river.87 As”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“William Bradford Huie”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“Lasting romantic love has eluded Carolyn, however. After her divorce from Roy Bryant in 1975, she remarried at least twice and had another relationship with a man (last name Wren), with whom she lived for a time. On November 21, 1984, she wed Greenville resident Griffin Chandler, an employee at US Gypsum. The marriage ended three and a half years later with Chandler’s death.144 The widowed Carolyn soon married again, this time to former Leland police officer David Donham.”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“Nixon, however, proposed one way out of the dilemma by suggesting they push the issue on to Congress. If a bill came out of a congressional investigation, southern Democrats would certainly filibuster it, allowing the administration to save face while forcing the Democrats to deal with the fallout. Both Brownell and Dulles liked this idea.3”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“This was certainly an allusion to a March 1, 1954, incident involving four Puerto Rican nationalists who fired thirty rounds from the Ladies Gallery in the US Capitol, wounding”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“Reporter James Hicks also began a riveting four-part series in both the Cleveland Call and Post and Baltimore Afro-American. Hicks enthralled readers with his blow-by-blow account of the trial and his role in the dramatic search for witnesses”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“Hicks next told them what was most relevant in justifying a federal probe. Should the FBI send an agent to the jail at Charleston, he should talk to an inmate named Sarah, who “will tell you that during the Sumner murder trial when Sheriff H. C. Strider was saying that he could not locate Too Tight Collins, actually Collins was at that time locked up in the Charleston jail.” Sarah, according to Hicks, was granted various privileges at the jail for performing sexual favors for the inmates as well as for Strider.”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“Roy’s mother, Eula Bryant.”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“In July 1968, Strider admitted on the floor of the Mississippi Senate that he had paid for votes during his 1951 campaign for Tallahatchie County sheriff. Strider disclosed this as the Senate debated a bill that provided for absentee voting for teachers and students. “In those days you didn’t win elections, you bought them,” he told his colleagues. He said that he paid out a total of $30,000 for blank absentee ballots reserved for people who had indicated they would not be present on Election Day. Reporter Bill Minor, who knew the former sheriff, said years later that Strider had paid $25 to each of those willing to cast their ballot in his favor.”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“Chatham’s impassioned arguments brought tears to the eyes of the black journalists, sitting on the right side of the courtroom. Even some white spectators were crying”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“William Faulkner. A native of Oxford in Lafayette County, Faulkner argued in a September 9 UPI editorial written from Rome, Italy, that the Till murder was not just a local issue. The consequences were so wide that even the survival of America was at stake. Because the white race totaled only one-fourth of the world’s population, he argued, the rest of the world would not tolerate white America’s abuses of its minorities any longer. Would the United States survive another attack like Pearl Harbor if people throughout the world, who differ from its majority, either in skin color or ideology, were aligned against it? Talk about freedom means nothing if it does not include all of humanity, wrote Faulkner impassionedly. His conclusion was powerful and frank: Perhaps we will find out now whether we are to survive or not. Perhaps the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Negro child is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive. Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“When Roy, Carolyn, and the two youngest children left Louisiana in 1973 and returned to Mississippi, they relocated to Ruleville, in Sunflower County. Roy went back into the grocery business by taking over a small store that had been run by family members. Son Frank, a football player at North Sunflower Academy, earned his high school diploma in 1975. Carol Ann began attending the Mississippi School for the Deaf in Jackson, but spent every other weekend and holidays at home. She graduated in 1979.125 At some point, Roy and Carolyn Bryant’s marriage developed serious problems, and it became unbearable for Carolyn.”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“Medgar Evers certainly felt that way and told his wife, Myrlie, how furious he was that rather than help Mamie, the association “used her” to advance its cause.”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip,”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“The script still sits unproduced in Huie’s papers at Ohio State University.66”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“Dixon says that the white men in the front of the truck with J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant were Leslie Milam “and another brother who has never been completely identified.”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“Shortly after the release of “Shocking Story,” a series of articles appeared in the Los Angeles–based black weekly the California Eagle, beginning with its January 26 issue. The five-part series claimed to unfold the truth about the Till murder, but the dramatic details”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“When Gloster Current worried that Mamie might be absent, perhaps due to her recent bout with exhaustion, he instructed organizers to schedule her last on the program and to get donations before her speech. In case she did not show, he reasoned, “you do not have to make the announcement until after you have taken up the collection.”98 That”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“Simeon’s Story: An Eyewitness Account of the Kidnapping of Emmett Till, coauthored with journalist Herb Boyd.”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“PBS series The American Experience,”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“In February 1965, Strider won a special election to the state senate, where he represented Grenada, Yalobusha, and Tallahatchie Counties for the next five years. In addition to his role with the Game and Fish Commission, he was a member of the Public Property, Transportation, and Water and Irrigation Committees, and chairman of the Penitentiaries Committee.94”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“The story had been in the making for three months. The author was William Bradford Huie, a forty-five-year-old nationally known journalist, author, and television personality from Hartselle, Alabama.”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“A reporter from the Memphis Press-Scimitar read Coleman a United Press dispatch in which Look attributed the quotes to the governor-elect. Coleman still denied making such statements. “To begin with, Mississippi no longer electrocutes. We use the gas chamber. Secondly, I have been judge and attorney general for so many years I would never make such a statement without having sat in on the evidence. I did not hear the evidence in this case.” Look, however, insisted that the interview had been recorded and forwarded to New York, where it was released. Coleman admitted that he had talked with Smith by phone several days earlier, but he believed it to have been nothing more than a casual exchange. “I guess I should have declined to talk at all,” said Coleman, regretfully.”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“Bob Dylan’s “Death of Emmett Till”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“In June 2010, Carolyn joined the social networking site Facebook, under the username “Granny Pike” (after her mother’s maiden name), which kept her actual identity hidden. In mid-2014, however, she was forced to close her account because strangers figured out who she was and began to harass her online. Five months after first joining Facebook, however, she both posed and answered the question as to what constitutes the real qualities in a man. Her answer was that he must be ethical and stand up for a good cause.”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“The simple obituary of J. W. Milam that appeared in 1980 escaped media attention. Roy Bryant’s death, which came in 1994, would have gone unnoticed as well had it not been for the astute eye of journalist Bill Minor. Minor published a piece that noted Bryant’s role in the Till case soon after the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and Bryant’s local paper, the Bolivar Commercial, each ran short, standard obituaries.117”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

“Death of Innocence went”
― Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement