In another life, I was a pilot, one of those superhumans who has the ability to leave the ground and fly around the sky, then return to earth to fly again. One of the airplanes I flew in my flying career was the Cessna 560 Citation V. In fact, my employer at the time was one of the first to operate the zippy little jets. I flew them for two or three years then transferred to another location and flew another version of Cessna’s famous 500 series Citation, the CE 550 Citation II. Before I went into the V, I flew its predecessor, the CE 550/SII, the Citation SII. Later on in my flying career, I moved into the British-designed Hawker 700 and 800 and 800XP. For some eighteen months, I worked as a simulator/ground instructor on Hawkers at the Flight Safety Houston Center in Houston. After leaving Flight Safety, I flew contract, including Citation Vs. Consequently, I have more than a passing interest in yesterday’s mysterious crash of a Citation V in the Virginia mountains (not far from where I lived in Virginia when I was working for a charter operator in Lynchburg.)
Based on media accounts, the Citation, which was owned by a large Donald Trump and Republican donor who sits on the board of the National Rifle Association, took off from Elizabethton, Tennessee for a flight to MacArthur Airport on Long Island. The last communication with the pilot was a few minutes after takeoff when the airplane was passing through flight level 310, or 31,000 feet above measured sea level on a standard day. The airplane continued to climb and leveled off at an altitude of FL 340 and flew a route to MacArthur, then turned around and took up a course directly to Elizabethton, a town in the Smoky Mountains in northeast Tennessee near the North Carolina state line. Although I grew up in Tennessee, all I know about Elizabethton is that I had a female pen pal who lived there when I was a young teenager. According to the airplane owner, his daughter, one of the three passengers on board the ill-fated jet, had been visiting the family’s North Carolina vacation home.
According to the owner and media reports, there was only one pilot on the airplane. This is a departure from standard procedure. The Citation V was certified as a two-pilot airplane and the type certificate requires two pilots. However, it appears that the FAA has authorized an exemption to certain pilots to operate the Citation V single-pilot. Most, if not all, airplanes can be operated by a single pilot, depending on cockpit layout. This includes heavy airline-type airplanes. The addition of a second pilot to flight crews came about as a desire to increase safety by having a second pilot on board to take over the airplane in the event of pilot incapacitation. However, a second pilot increases pilot salaries. Eliminating the second pilot may save (some) money, but it also decreases safety. Just how much money it saves is questionable since insurance rates for single-pilot operations are higher.
Speculation by “aviation experts” (who probably never flew a Citation V) is that the accident was caused by hypoxia due to a loss of cabin pressure. Comparisons are being made to the crash of a Learjet carrying professional golfer Payne Stewart, but the problem in that case was that the oxygen system may have been turned off or depleted, not loss of cabin pressure per se. Some speculate that there was a rapid decompression, but the airplane was not high enough for a rapid decompression to cut the time of useful consciousness, the time a person is able to accomplish meaningful actions due to loss of oxygen. Even at 35,000 feet, a pilot would have around 30 seconds of useful consciousness, time to don their oxygen mask and start a descent. At higher altitudes, the TUC drops to mere seconds, but the Citation never got that high. According to Flight Aware, the pilot had filed for FL 390 but the airplane leveled at FL 340.
I doubt that cabin pressure was an issue because the Citation V is equipped with a red light on the annunciator panel that will illuminate to alert the pilot when cabin pressure reaches 10,000 feet. The light will trigger the master warning light, a flashing red light that will get the pilot’s attention. Cabin altitude in excess of 10,000 feet MSL will also automatically drop the cabin oxygen masks. The pilot checklist establishes strict emergency procedures for this eventuality – the pilots immediately don oxygen masks and execute an emergency descent to a lower altitude. I had a pressurization problem once on either a V or an S/II. I was PIC but was in the right seat. (The diaphragm in the outflow valve had ruptured.) I happened to look down and noticed that the cabin was climbing rapidly. I called ATC and declared emergency and advised that we were starting down. We were at flight level 270 (27,000 feet). The cabin never reached 10,000 feet and the other pilot and I never donned oxygen masks.
I suspect the problem was pilot incapacitation of another kind, of the physical variety. The pilot, one Jeff Hefner, was reported to have been a retired airline pilot who flew for Southwest Airlines for 25 years and had over 25,000 hours in the air. Although his age has not been reported, he was probably well into his sixties and possibly older. (He was actually 69. He was also an owner of a flight operation and was apparently providing pilot services to the airplane owner.) Federal regulations dictate that airline pilots must not be older than 65 years of age, a change from age 60 which stood for most of the history of the airline industry. Unfortunately, older men (and women) are in declining health and sudden death is not remote. I knew a pilot who flew a Citation single-pilot for a company here in Houston. He was single and lived alone. He failed to show up for a flight one day and when someone went to his house to check on him, they found him dead. Another pilot I knew went to sleep on his sofa and never woke up. Both of these pilots were in their fifties. Heart attacks are not the only problems facing us. One of my coworkers at Flight Safety suddenly fell out in the simulator and had a seizure, One of my friends, not a pilot, recently started having seizures. He turned out to have a brain tumor. I suspect that Hefner suffered a heart attack or some other physical ailment as the airplane was climbing and slumped forward in his shoulder harness. He had no copilot to help him, and the airplane was on its own.
Citation Vs might be “little jets” but they are surprisingly sophisticated. They are equipped with flight management systems that, when the autopilot is engaged, will fly the airplane without input from the pilot. FMSs utilize GPS and ground-based radio navigation systems to fly along a preprogrammed course from takeoff to destination. Pilot operations are only required for takeoff and landing. When I was flying Citation Vs, we routinely engaged the autopilot right after takeoff and didn’t disengage it until just prior to landing. All the pilot has to do is set the altitude in the altitude prompter on the instrument panel and the engaged autopilot will level the airplane and hold the altitude until the pilot resets the prompter. Apparently, the Citation V flew the planned route to MacArthur then, after the pilot made no input, the system picked up a direct course back to the takeoff point at Elizabethton. It probably flew to the point of fuel exhaustion then when the engines lost power, went into an out-of-control spin into the ground.
In regard to aircraft pressurization and oxygen, airplanes are pressurized by air taken from the engines. It passes through an air cycle machine and is pumped into the cabin as conditioned air. Cabin pressure is controlled by outflow valves mounted at the rear of the pressurized vessel. Diaphragms in the outflow valves are controlled by the pressure controller, which allows the valves to open enough to allow enough air to flow out to keep the cabin at the preset altitude. Oxygen is NOT pumped into the cabin. Oxygen in the cabin is relative to the cabin pressure altitude, which is set to an altitude up to 10,000 feet, the maximum altitude at which most people can function without becoming hypoxic. Normal procedure is to set the planned cruise altitude in the pressurization system then the system will maintain the maximum pressure differential for that altitude. (A recommended procedure is to set the system to 500 feet above the planned altitude to allow a cushion for bumps.) Citation Vs have an oxygen system with masks for the pilot and drop-down masks for the passengers, but it is only used to provide oxygen in the event of loss of cabin pressurization. (Some pilots breathe oxygen at night prior to landing as it sharpens the wits.) There is no on-off function of the oxygen controls, which can be set for crew only, for crew and passengers or dump masks in the event the masks don’t drop automatically. Citation Vs are equipped with quick-don oxygen masks for the pilots. All the pilot has to do to put it on is pick it up and sweep it over his/her face. Oxygen flow is then automatic.
Much has been made over the airplane “flying through restricted airspace.” It didn’t. The restricted airspace over Washington, DC only extends up to flight level 180 (18,000 feet MSL) and the Citation was well above it. The reason NORAD sent fighters aloft was because air traffic control had lost contact with the airplane, and it had taken up a course other than its flight plan route. This is a common practice. The fighters would have been sent up even if the airplane hadn’t been headed for D.C. They were launched because the airplane wasn’t flying its planned route. Authorities were alerted when it failed to land at MacArthur and turned back toward Elizabethton. It’s probable that FAA air traffic controllers thought the airplane was “no radio” after they lost contact with the pilot. Procedures for loss of communications are to continue the flight as cleared and land at the destination. It wouldn’t have been until the pilot failed to begin a descent to land at MacArthur that ATC would have realized there was a problem other than loss of communications.
My last flight was in 2010, thirteen years ago, and there are many things I’ve forgotten about the various airplane systems. I flew airplanes with Global, Sperry and Honeywell flight management systems. It seems to me that the three systems were programmed to return to point of origin in the event of an unexpected action, such as failing to land. In this instance, the airplane not only didn’t land, it never left FL 340. Considering that the track was on a beeline for Elizabethton, it’s pretty obvious that the FMS was locked on to it. The route to MacArthur was apparently along a Jetway and a published arrival east of the DC area but after it made the turn, it was headed direct to Elizabethton.
The main thing I get out of this is to question the wisdom of granting single-pilot exemptions for jets. The original exemptions were for light jets, meaning jets weighing less than 12,500 pounds. Except for jets, airplanes weighing less than 12,500 pounds do not require pilots to be type-rated and do not require a second pilot. The Citation V grosses out at 16,500 pounds. When the V was certified, the medium category was 12,500-300,000 pounds, it has since been changed to 16,500-300,000 pounds. Jet airplanes are fast and things happen quickly. Even though an airplane is classified as light, many are quite sophisticated, as much as any airline-type transport. In order to be type-rated for an airplane, all the pilot has to do is pass an evaluation which mainly involves flying instrument approaches and maintaining specified parameters while doing certain manuevers. One approach has to be flown with an engine out. Passing the flight check only means the pilot is competent, not that they are exceptional in any way. Obtaining a single-pilot exemption involves passing the same flight check without a copilot. I was a simulator evaluator, all that was required for the flight check was minimal competency. A barely competent pilot can be granted a single-pilot exemption.
I did not know Mr. Hefner and know nothing about him other than that he was a retired airline pilot. I doubt that his competency, or lack of it, had anything to do with the accident. On the other hand, his age and physical health might have. There is a reason the FAA mandates a retirement age for airline pilots of 65 (and 60 for decades before that.) It is because our bodies start slowing down and become susceptible to disease and mental acuity decreases – and we don’t realize it. During the year and a half when I worked for Flight Safety, I trained pilots of all ages. I saw some older pilots who really shouldn’t have been flying. I don’t know if they had lost competency due to aging or had been bad pilots all along. In one instance I had a foreign client and because he was there by himself, the center put one of the instructors in the right seat, the Hawker assistant course manager. John was around 70 and active in the local warbird community. Because the client was Swiss, I was training him in mountains. I had them takeoff from Denver and fly across the Rockies to Aspen. When we were right over the Rockies, I gave them a rear bay overheat light. Now, the first item on the emergency checklist for that problem is to turn off the air valves one at a time and see if the light goes out. If it doesn’t go out, then the pilot is to turn both valves off and initiate an emergency descent. I had them on this route for a reason, I wanted the Swiss pilot to think. As soon as the light came on, John called for an emergency descent – from FL 180 over mountains over 14,000 feet! The Swiss pilot didn’t think – he did what John told him to do. If they had been in an airplane over the mountains, they’d have been dead. I don’t know why John reacted the way he did, whether it was age or something else. He was a flight examiner and should have known the procedure. I remember one retired airline pilot who came through the initial course to get a Hawker type rating. The man shouldn’t have been flying! He could barely hold a heading or altitude. Another older pilot came through who had worked for my previous employer before I went to work for them. The guy was bad! I don’t know if he had always been bad or if he was slipping because of age. Not all older pilots are bad. I had one client from my former employer. Jerry was 65, he did everything perfectly. Speaking of my former employer, after I accepted an early retirement offer and retired at age 55, one of their pilots laid down on his sofa to take a nap and never woke up. He and I were about the same age.
Although pilots are subject to regular medical examinations – every two years for private pilots, once a year for commercial pilots and every six months for airline transport-rated pilots including an EKG – some medical conditions can be waivered. Some conditions such as low blood sugar not controllable by medication cannot be waivered but most can. (Part of the flight physical is a questionnaire regarding particular medical conditions. Pilots are not always honest.) I failed a flight physical due to high blood sugar, but my FAA medical examiner applied for a waiver and the FAA granted it on the basis that my diabetes was controlled by medication. I continued to fly for almost a decade with a waiver (exemption) as long as I could otherwise meet the requirements of the FAA physical.
Another factor with all of this is the quality of the instructors at Flight Safety and the other flight training companies responsible for training pilots. Many of them are simply lacking in experience. I was the only instructor out of about six or eight Hawker instructors who had ever flown the airplane operationally. Flight Safety would – and probably still does – hire a new instructor then send them through the initial type rating course for whatever airplane they would be working with then send them through a refresher course to see how the course was taught. Another instructor would observe them until they were ready to be assigned to instruct students. NONE of them knew how to operate the flight management system, even though Flight Safety and the FAA required instructors to have their clients use everything in the simulator just like they would in the airplane. The simulator had a Universal FMS while I was used to the Global (GNS) system. I could figure it out and had my clients use it. I worked for Flight Safety through a massive layoff due to fallout from 9/11. The day I was finally let go I was in the pilot’s computer room cleaning out my files when I heard two instructors in another program talking about how they knew nothing about the GPS approaches the FAA had developed and which they were supposed to be teaching their new clients. We had one senior instructor/examiner in the Houston center who had NEVER flown any jet airplane operationally. He had started out as a flight instructor in Flight Safety’s academy in Florida then had been type-rated in a jet – all in the simulator. In short, just because a pilot has completed a course at one of the flight simulator companies doesn’t mean they received quality instruction. Pilots are trained to minimums, and their performance may be sketchy.
A question that would undoubtedly be raised if the pilot had suffered a medical issue as I suspect is – what about the passengers? In the Citation V, the passengers are usually in the back of the airplane and there is a partition between them and the pilot. Although there is an opening to allow access to the cockpit, the pilots are not clearly visible to the passengers unless they go up front. They can possibly see the pilot’s shoulders and that is about it. Pilots usually wear headsets and passengers don’t hear the radios. My experience is that passengers will often fall asleep. The Citation passengers may have very well slept through the whole thing. Or, they may have been awake and knew things were bad. We’ll never know.
The NTSB will issue a preliminary report in a few days, usually around 10 days after the incident. The actual report will take a year to complete. Until then, all we can do is speculate but I won’t be surprised if the final report is pilot incapacitation due to a medical condition.
In recent years – during and since the Trump presidency – some Leftists have decided that the Left (meaning the Democratic Party) has changed, that they’ve become radical and no longer hold to former principles, particularly freedom of speech. Some are well-known journalists, such as Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi and Intercept founder, later abdicator, Glenn Greenwald. Others are lesser-known, such as Irish-American-Irish writer Jenny Holland and Hollywood critic Sasha Stone, along with former Playboy writer, now Spectator contributor and sometime comedian Bridget Phetasy. These have all resorted to Substack, which was started to give outcast journalists a place to write and market their wares – but which now seems to be in competition with Twitter – although Greenwald has gone in a different direction. All of them, along with former New York Times writer Bari Weiss, academic Jon Turley and British-American pseudo-conservative Andrew Sullivan lament the “sudden” hostility of leftists to the roughly half of Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. The reality is that the Left, which is a pseudonym for Marxists, has ALWAYS been hostile and restrictive of the rights of others, even to the point of executing their opponents. Violence and restriction of the speech of others has long been a hallmark of the Left. Modern leftists have just become more open about it than they were for a time now that they control academia and the media.
The so-called “Left” originated in Europe in the Eighteenth century when intellectuals began lamenting the plight of “the working man” in Europe’s monarchies. (The intellectuals were using the “working man” to advance their own goals, the elimination of monarchies and the aristocracy and replacing them with a government of – guess who.) The term originated in the French Revolution when revolutionaries began referring to “left” and “right” in reference to the seating in the Estates General; those opposed to royal veto privileges were seated on the left while royalists were on the right. The philosophies of the Left were already in place, having been developed by intellectuals advocating the overthrow of European monarchies and replacing them with governments attuned to the needs of the common man of which they, naturally, would be in charge. While leftists were all about the concept of “free speech”, it only applied to those on the left. Those who spoke out against the revolutionaries were subject to be permanently silenced. It didn’t take long before French leftists were running through the streets of Paris with pitchforks and scythes and putting royalists, including King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antionette, to death at the guillotines during the Reign of Terror. Literally, tens of thousands of Frenchmen and women were executed and an estimated ten thousand more died in French prisons. Left-wing politics was off to a violent start.
Violence erupted in Europe again a half-century later when revolutionaries attempted to overthrow European monarchies as the French had done. Led by intellectuals espousing socialist and communist ideas, the revolutions mostly failed and those involved were expelled or imprisoned. (The difference between a communist and a socialist is that communists proclaim that government should meet the needs of all while socialists believe government should meet the needs of those who contribute. The key element of both philosophies is government control.) Thousands, many of whom were Communists, immigrated to the United States.
The concept of communism goes back to at least the eighteenth century. Communistic groups, many led by Europeans, established communal societies throughout the new United States in the early nineteenth century, one of which was near Abraham Lincoln’s Indiana boyhood home. (Lincoln was born in Kentucky but his father moved the family to Indiana while he was a boy.) The Communist League was established in London in 1847 when two communist groups, The League of the Just, an organization formed by German migrants in Paris, and the Communist Correspondence Committees led by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, merged. Joseph Wedemeyer, one of the CCC members, immigrated to the United States and began organizing communists here. Although they were not solely so, the communist organizations were heavily German. He did not form the first communist organization in America, however. A League of Communists made up largely of German immigrants had been established in New York and Philadelphia in 1847. Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848 and charged Wedemeyer with its US distribution.
Karl Marx’s goal was to promote a worldwide communist revolution, and he saw the United States and Russia as the most likely places for it to begin. Marx believed revolution was possible in the United States by freeing the Southern slaves then joining them with industrial workers in the North to stage a revolution. When the Southern states seceded, Marx, whose New York Tribune articles were widely read in the US, advocated that Lincoln use his Union Army to free slaves rather than to restore constitutional union. (Lincoln initially justified the war as necessary to restore the Union. He made emancipation of slaves in the rebel states a policy in late 1862 in an attempt to gain more support for the war. He did not free slaves in states that remained in the Union or in Tennessee, which was under Union control.) Thousands of German and Irish immigrants joined the Union Army and dozens of Forty-Eighters served as high-ranking officers while others occupied positions in Lincoln’s administration. Wedemeyer and other Forty-Eighters had joined the Republican Party and, after initially supporting John C. Fremont in 1856, worked to get Lincoln elected. They were rewarded with military commissions and positions in Lincoln’s administration. Some Forty- Eighters supported John Brown, the insane abolitionist who sought to incite a slave revolt.
It can be said that the new Republican Party was Leftist. Many members were socialists, and some were communists. Founder Horace Greely was an avowed utopian socialist and acquaintance of Karl Marx, as was Charles A. Dana, Greely’s editor at the New York Tribune. Dana was also a socialist. He had been part of Brook Farm, a utopian commune in Massachusetts. They met Marx during trips to Europe and invited him to be the Tribune’s European correspondent. Marx wrote for the Tribune for more than a decade, or at least the articles were published under his name. The authorship of many was by Fredrich Engels, who also translated Marx’s articles to English. The Tribune was the paper of the Republican Party and Marx’s articles were widely read. The philosophies of “Radicals”, most of whom were Republican although a few were Democrats, who wanted to punish the South were identical to those of European leftists, even to planning to exterminate the Southern population and repopulate the South with Northerners and freed slaves. After the war, Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens told former Confederate general Richard Taylor, whose father, Zachary Taylor, had been president, that he intended to wipe out the entire white population of the South, but Lincoln’s policies as carried out by his successor, Andrew Johnson, prevented it. (Stevens spent his last breath fighting to have Johnson removed from office.) Radicals still attempted a harsh reconstruction policy using the Army to enforce it until moderate Republicans, some of whom were recanting Radicals, begin achieving power and decided enough was enough. Reconstruction ended after more than a decade with the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes. (The claim that Reconstruction ended as a result of a compromise with Southern states is bogus – Hayes was already planning to end Army occupation of the South.) Without the Army to back them up, Republicans in the South, who were mostly freedmen (many were Northern blacks who went to the South to organize free slaves in Loyal Leagues to support the Republican Party) and Northern migrants called carpetbaggers, lost power. It is no secret that Republicans were counting on the United States Army to keep them in power.
Marx’s dream of a communist revolution in the United States faded when the German Forty-Eighters lost their influence in the Republican Party, and it became more associated with industrialists and the railroads. Communist Joseph Wedemyer died of cholera soon after the war. Some Forty-Eighters returned to Europe. Carl Shurz, who had moderated his views, helped form a new party, the Liberal Republicans, to oppose Grant, whose administration was rife with corruption, and the Republicans. The Northern factory workers Marx had counted on tended to favor Democrats and weren’t enthusiastic about uniting with freed slaves, who they saw as competition for jobs. As Marx’s political hopes in the US died, he turned his attention toward Russia where he achieved success, although he didn’t live to see his ideas come to fruition. Marx’s goals of a Russian revolution were realized when Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917. The following year, the Bolsheviks began what became known as the Red Terror, a campaign of arrests and executions modeled on the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution. Hundreds of thousands were arrested and executed (Granted, White Russians did their share of executing but not to the extent of the Bolsheviks.) The Russian Civil War lasted from 1917 to 1922. Many White Russians fled the country. (The Soviets would continue to execute hundreds of thousands under Stalin, who succeeded Lenin. Nearly a million Soviets are believed to have been executed under Stalin.) The Bolsheviks immediately began attempting to carry out Marx’s goal of a worldwide Communist revolution. The USSR established Communists International to carry it out. One of their first targets was the United States.
Leftists continued to have an influence in the United States through the labor movements, but they also influenced the American church. German theologians became critics of the scriptures and their theories spread to American theological seminaries, particularly after Charles Darwin’s theories of natural selection and evolution of the species became accepted among American academics. As seminaries turned away from the scriptures as authority, they turned toward the “social gospel,” a “gospel” based on social action rather than evangelism. The concept spread through American theological seminaries, including Harvard and Yale. Union Theological Seminary in New York became essentially a training ground for Leftist social activists. The transition to social work was natural. Northern churches had been drawn into the abolitionist movement in the 1840s. Some preachers, particularly Congregationalist Henry Ward Beecher, became rapid abolitionists and sent guns to Kansas to fight “border ruffians” from Missouri. (John Brown also had support among Forty-Eighters.) After the war, many Northern churches turned their attention to “the working man,” primarily European immigrants who brought European ideas of labor organization with them. The same workers who captured the attention of liberal preachers and union activists were also the objects of Communist International (Comintern), an organization sponsored by the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to spread Communism internationally. Communist parties were established throughout Europe. A Communist party was established in Japan. Comintern supported communists Mao Zedong of China and Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, whose real name was Nguyễn Sinh Cung, and they supported the Communist Party USA.
The Communist Party USA was founded in Chicago on September 1, 1919, by C.E. Ruthenberg, whose parents immigrated to Ohio from Prussia in 1882. He was born in Cleveland, where his father was a longshoreman and saloon keeper who catered to dock workers. Ruthenberg became a socialist while attending Columbia University and joined the Socialist Party in 1910, the year after his graduation from Columbia Law School. Along with fellow socialists Alfred Wagenknecht and Charles Baker, he was sentenced to a year in jail for violating the Espionage Act during World War I. The three were convicted of impeding the military draft by making speeches against it. After his release from prison, Ruthenberg became active in the extreme left-wing of the Socialist Party. He became executive secretary of the Communist Party America when it was formed. Ironically, Wagenknecht headed the rival Communist Labor Party of America, which formed the month before the CPA. The two parties were intense rivals until 1921 when a new Communist Party America was formed, along with a parallel organization called the Workers Party of America. Ruthenberg died during surgery for peritonitis in 1927. By that time, the organization had become the Communist Party USA.
Shortly after its formation, the Comintern directed American Communists to reach negros (the term African American was not in use at the time). The party formed the American Negro Labor Congress, a front organization designed to attract blacks to the party. The ANLC came out against segregation and spoke out against lynching. After their initial conviction, the CPUSA took control of the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, nine young blacks who had been convicted of raping two white women on a train traveling between Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee. The train passed through northern Alabama and complaints about the blacks were lodged in Scottsboro by whites who had been on it. They hired a New York lawyer named Samuel Leibowitz to represent the defendants. One of the women disappeared then came back to Alabama for the third trial and revealed that she had been in New York. No one knew where she was, or claimed they didn’t, until she made a dramatic entrance as Leibowitz was preparing to rest when he said he had one last witness and Bates entered. She recanted her previous testimony and claimed no rape had occurred and that she decided to come back to Alabama at the urging of Harry Emerson Fosdick, a noted New York leftist preacher. When the prosecutor asked the woman, Ruby Bates, who paid for her clothes, she responded “the Communist Party”. (Witness tampering, anyone?) The other woman, Victoria Price, did not recant. Bates appeared at Communist rallies after the trial, which resulted in a conviction, which Leibowitz appealed. He and the DA reached a compromise that allowed four of the blacks to go free. The intent of the defense of the Scottsboro Boys was to promote communism in the South.
The Communist Party USA also became involved with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, an organization formed to protest the lack of payments to tenant farmers by New Deal agencies created to alleviate financial problems caused by government-mandated decreased production. The payments were going to the landowners, and tenant farmers, who farmed on the landowner’s allotment, were left in the lurch. The Communists saw an opportunity to increase the size of the Popular Front in the United States by affiliating with the union. Communist Popular Fronts allowed participation by non-party members to help achieve party goals. Such people, who included social gospel advocates, some New Deal Democrats, socialists, labor activists, attorneys, publishers, novelists, journalists, liberal preachers, leftist politicians, Hollywood producers, directors, actors and screenwriters, civil rights activists and liberals, came to be known as “fellow travelers.” They were not party members but were in tune with Communist policies. American Communists failed to achieve a revolution as their fellows had in Russia, at least in part because US officials cracked down on them. The US government was well aware of what had taken place in Russia, which had become the Soviet Union, where hundreds of thousands died at the hands of the Bolsheviks. Laws were passed to prevent communists from organizing and Russian immigrants and others believed to espouse communist ideas were deported in what Communists refer to as the first “Red Scare.” Leftist lawyers filed suit on behalf of American communists and socialists and the Supreme Court ruled that they were protected under the First Amendment.
Leftists continued their activities in Europe. Like American leftists, they focused on labor organizing. Although Karl Marx died in 1883, his hopes for revolution in Russia came to fruition as Marxist groups took power after the abdication and execution of Czar Nicholas II. Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks mounted a second revolution and overthrew the provisional government established after the Czar stepped down. Typical of the Left, the Bolsheviks were cruel and murderous. Untold thousands died in Russia and its province of Ruthenia, now known as Ukraine. As soon as they took power, the Bolsheviks established Comintern to spread communism around the world, starting in Europe. Communism took root in Spain, where Spanish Communists calling themselves “Republicans” fought the Nationalists, a coalition of groups led by General Francisco Marco. Support for the communist Republicans was widespread in the United States, particularly among college students, many of whom had become leftist. Communist International, a Soviet-sponsored group, organized the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight for the Republicans. The mixed brigade included the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, made up mostly of Americans and Canadians. Volunteers were interviewed by Communist Party USA members. Most were communists. Some were immigrants or second-generation. Eighty-three members were black. The battalion was commanded for a short time by black Communist Oliver Law, a Texas native who had served in the Army for a time. Law went north and became active in the labor movement, then became a Communist. He was killed soon after taking command of the battalion. His wife’s son became prominent in the CPUSA. Another battalion was named George Washington. An artillery battery was named for abolitionist terrorist John Brown. Franco’s Nationalists prevailed and the surviving international volunteers were deported. Many of those from the US became active in the Communist Party after their return.
Communists were critical of Adolph Hitler’s Germany – until Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact and jointly invaded Poland after which the Communist Party USA opposed US intervention in the war and praised the Nazis. That changed when Hitler invaded the USSR. Communists started clamoring for the United States to enter the war and provide aid to the embattled Soviets. The Roosevelt Administration responded by including the Soviets in the Lend-Lease Program, a program for the United States to provide military supplies and equipment to Allied nations fighting the Axis, as Germany, Italy and Japan had been labeled. Previously, the Allied nations had purchased military equipment from manufacturers in the United States, which had declared itself neutral, but Lend-Lease was funded by US taxpayers and provided to the warring allied nations free of charge. Of some $50.1 billion in Lend-Lease supplies, over $11 billion went to the USSR. Communist Party defectors later testified that the Roosevelt Administration included numerous Communists, some of whom were spying for the USSR, including in the highly classified Manhattan atomic project. Communist infiltration extended to the military. Marine Corps General Smedley Butler, who had been awarded TWO Medals of Honor, is alleged to have been a Communist. He was definitely influenced by Karl Marx. When Hollywood producer/director Merian C. Cooper, who was an Army reservist, returned to the United States after service in China as Claire Chennault’s chief of staff, he met with Army chief of staff George Marshall. During the meeting, he told Marshall that the senior US officer in the China-Burma Theater, General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, who favored Mao and detested Chinese Nationalist head Chiang ki Shek, was a Communist. Marshall became incensed and told Cooper he’d never be promoted or receive another decoration as long as he was in government. True to his word, Marshall withheld Cooper’s promotions and decorations. Cooper did return to combat duty but not with Chennault. General George Kenney, commander of General Douglas MacArthur’s air forces in the Southwest Pacific, asked for Cooper and made him chief of staff of V Bomber Command in his rank of colonel. Kenney and MacArthur tried repeatedly to promote him to star rank, but Marshall refused. After Marshall was out of government, Dwight Eisenhower promoted Cooper and Charles Lindbergh, who had also been blacklisted, to brigadier general.
In 1932 26-year-old Myles Horton, who had grown up near Savannah, Tennessee, founded the Highlander Folk School in Grundy County, Tennessee near the community of Monteagle. He founded the school on land owned by Lillian Wyckoff Johnson, a prominent Tennessee educator from Memphis. Dr. Johnson had purchased the land to establish a center to provide education for the local inhabitants, who were isolated mountaineers. Although Monteagle is not in the Smoky Mountains, it is in an area on the western edge of the Appalachians that at the time was remote. Horton was a product of Union Theological Seminary. The school’s cofounders were socialist Don West, a Georgia activist and Congregationalist minister, and a Methodist minister and social reformer from New Orleans named James A. Dombrowski, another Union product. West was a communist although he denied ever being a card-carrying member of the party. Yet he was the District Director of the Communist Party in North Carolina. (Party membership denial was/is common among communists. Fidel Castro denied that he was a communist until after his successful revolution.) They were all Leftists. Several school staff members were Communist Party members. Those who weren’t were fellow travelers. Horton denied being a communist, but he certainly came close. His ideas were definitely Leftist. After turning the property over to Horton, West and Dombrowski, Dr. Johnson returned to Memphis. Although she supported Horton and the school publicly, privately she had reservations. Horton and West considered her “an elitist”. The goal of the school as stated by Horton and as stated today is “to establish a new social order”, a revolution.
For the first twenty years of its existence, the Highlander School focused on teaching labor leaders how to organize workers and strike. The school was heavily involved in labor organizing among miners in Tennessee, and cotton mill and garment workers in the South, particularly in the Carolinas. Although the labor movement was successful in North Carolina and the South, their efforts killed the US clothing manufacturing industry as it moved overseas. Successful union members found themselves out of a job. Horton’s original intent had been to organize sharecroppers in the South, but the school instead turned its attention to segregation and black civil rights. Noted activist Rosa Parks, who became famous for her role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, was trained at the Highlander School. The school played a major role in training civil rights activists until Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference assumed the role. King was also associated with the school. Whether he attended the school prior to the Montgomery Bus Boycott when his name became prominent is uncertain. He was definitely involved afterwards. The school was shut down by the state of Tennessee in 1961 after an investigation determined that it had violated several laws. However, it was reestablished in Knoxville and affiliated with the University of Tennessee. In 1971 the school relocated to New Market, a small town near Morristown, where it continues to train Leftist activists.
Rosa Parks is touted as being a hard-working black woman who refused to give up her seat near the front of a bus driven by James F. Blake because she was too tired to make her way to the back and was arrested. According to Parks, the white section filled up and Blake moved the sign marking the white section and told four black passengers, including her, to move back. She refused and Blake had her arrested. In reality, Parks was an activist who had been trained at the Highlander School to do just what she did, and she got on the bus with every intention of being arrested. While she did have a job working for Clifford and Virginia Durr, a leftist white couple – the Durrs sent her to the Highlander School – she was secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP and although she denied Communist Party membership, she and her husband were involved with the Montgomery chapter. She had been hand-picked to challenge the Montgomery bus system after other candidates failed to pass muster because of issues in their background. Parks had been working as an NAACP investigator for more than a decade. She was involved in the case of Recy Taylor, who claimed she was abducted and raped by seven white men in Abbeville, Alabama in 1943. Parks organized a nationwide protest when Taylor’s alleged assailants were not indicted. Parks denied that she knew Blake was driving the bus. She claimed he had driven off and left her in 1943 and she’d sworn she’d never ride on a bus driven by him again. But she did. She came in through the front door and took a seat just behind the white section, so she obviously knew he was the driver (she claimed she didn’t). Four rows of seats on Montgomery busses were designated for whites under Alabama law. Drivers had the option of designating additional seats for the white section if the designated seats filled up. Parks was arrested and the Montgomery NAACP used her arrest, as they had planned, to organize a protest against the bus company. Similar protests were organized in other segregated cities, not only against bus companies but also against department store chains with segregated lunch counters. Parks is often called “The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement”, which is true in the sense that she was a trained activist who prompted a protest that got national attention.
Although violence and suppression of rights are Communist trademarks, they were not present in the United States, except for labor strife, until the 1960s. This may be because the Soviets were engaged in internal strife then were occupied by their fight against the German invaders in World War II and lacked the resources and resolve to promote armed rebellion in the United States, with whom they were allied against Germany and, at the end of the war, Japan. Soviet Communists supported the Spanish Republicans and Mao’s Chinese Communists, and their resources were stretched thin. They were also hampered by US government action, first in the early 1920s then again in the Fifties during the period leftists refer to as “the Second Red Scare”. The McCarthy hearings followed by the actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee with the resultant exposure of many American Communists hampered their efforts. Leftists advocated that the hearings violated the First Amendment. Freedom of speech became a major talking point for the Left, but their idea of freedom of speech is limited to THEIR speech, not to those who disagree with them. When the American Civil Liberties Union defended the right of American Nazis to parade in Skokie, Illinois in 1977, leftists were incensed.
Civil rights demonstrators initially adopted a policy of non-violence, a tactic taught at the Highlander School. But leftists, including those involved in civil rights, became more militant during the Vietnam War. Some were open in their support for the communist government of North Vietnam – SDS officials met with North Vietnamese representatives in Cuba in 1968. By this time, American leftists were moving away from the idea of their own parties and turning to the Democratic Party. Socialists and communists turned to the Democrats after Franklin Roosevelt became president and instituted leftist policies. Harry Truman continued Roosevelt’s policies and added some of his own. Some Southern Democrats, who were upset over Truman’s civil rights policies, left the party and became Dixiecrats under the leadership of Senator Strom Thurmond. Although he wasn’t a leftist himself – his brother was – John F. Kennedy instituted policies leftists approved. After he was killed, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, continued his agenda and added some of his own. Still, Johnson was opposed by those on the Far Left because of the Vietnam War. An army of Leftist protestors descended on Chicago for the 1968 Democratic Party Convention. The protests turned into a riot. As a result of the protestor’s actions, conservative Democrats began leaving the party in droves and joining the Republicans. Richard Nixon, who had prosecuted Alger Hiss, was elected president that year. Four years later he would win the presidency with the largest electoral vote margin in history. (Leftists would get him out of office with the furor over the Watergate break-ins.) The Democratic Party has become more and more leftist since 1968. One former leftist writer claimed the party she supported was “middle of the road.” This woman is approaching fifty. The Democratic Party hasn’t been middle of the road since FDR!
The various anti-war, anti-racism, women’s liberation, gay liberation, Mexican liberation, American Indian Movement etc. groups may not have been Marxist per se, but their leaders definitely were. Betty Freidan, whose book The Feminine Mystique, is credited with setting off the feminist movement, was an avowed Marxist from her teen years and a labor activist. In addition to Freidan, several founders of the National Organization of Women were Marxist. Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who sued to end prayer in schools, was a socialist. She tried twice to defect to the Soviet Union – they wouldn’t have her! The various student groups, black, white and Mexican, were led by avowed Marxists and Maoists. By the sixties, younger leftists were turning away from Soviet-oriented Marxism. Their new heroes were Cuban leader Fidel Castro and his Argentine henchman, Che Guevara, North Vietnam president Ho Chi Minh and Chinese Communist Mao Zedong. Mao’s Little Red Book was popular on college campuses. Students posted Guevara’s picture on their dorm room walls and wore T-shirts with it emblazoned on it. Although they depended on high school and college students for their support, most of the leaders were older than the students of the day. Tom Hayden, for instance, was born in 1939 and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1961, BEFORE the United States became heavily involved in Vietnam, although President Kennedy would increase the number of military advisors there late in the year. Hayden co-founded the Students for a Democratic Society, a far left-wing organization, in 1960. SDS leader Bernadine Dohrn, who founded the Weatherman, was born in 1942 and graduated from college in 1963 then completed law school and was admitted to the bar in Illinois. Most of the leaders of the “student” groups had been radicalized while their members were still in grade school. They were influenced by leftists like Norm Chomsky who had come of age in the 1940s.
The SDS and other organizations that followed it were referred to as “the New Left” but they were still Leftist in orientation and in their support for the goals of Karl Marx. The SDS was actually not a new group, but a reorganization of the Student League for Industrial Democracy, which was descended from the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, a socialist group formed in 1905 by leftists Upton Sinclair, Clarence Darrow, Jack London, Walter Lippman and other prominent leftists of the day, one of whom, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was one the financiers of abolitionist John Brown’s failed attack on the Harpers Ferry arsenal and planned slave revolt in Virginia. The original group became the League for Industrial Democracy and remained socialist but it’s student affiliate merged with the Communist National Student League in 1935 and became the American Student Union, a Communist front organization. The ASU went dormant during World War II then reorganized in 1946 as the Student League for Industrial Democracy. (A new ASU was formed in 2022.) Hayden and Allan Haber, who came from a leftist family, changed it to the Students for a Democratic Society and began advocating militancy.
The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee organized in April 1960 at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina as an organization for students involved in lunch counter sit-ins in the segregated South. One of the founders was Diane Nash, a biracial woman who had organized the first successful lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee while a student at Fisk University. The SNCC started out as and was seen as a black students’ organization, but it began receiving support from white activists, particularly in the North, and the SDS. Tom Hayden’s first wife, Sandra “Casey” Cason, was heavily involved with the SNCC. She left Hayden to return to the South – she was from Texas – to work with the black group. Stokely Carmichael, a Trinidad native who grew up in Harlem and the Bronx, took over as SNCC president and began promoting Black Power. Initially, the term referred to the need for blacks to regain control of the organization, which had been taken over by whites, but it morphed into a larger idea of gaining power for blacks in all aspects of society, which came to include academia. Under Carmichael’s leadership, the SNCC left the broader civil rights movement and aligned with the SDS. Carmichael would eventually alienate many civil rights leaders and would move to Africa.
The new emphasis on Black Power was influenced, at least in part, by the violent riots in Watts, a section of Los Angeles, that broke out after police arrested a black motorist for drunk driving and his mother got involved. A crowd gathered and someone claimed police had kicked a pregnant woman. The resulting riots continued for almost a week. Rioting broke out the following year in Hunters Point, a San Francisco community, after a police officer shot and killed a black teenager he caught stealing a car. Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, two Marxist-Leninist activists who worked at the North Oakland Anti-Poverty Center, took note of the community reaction and founded what became the Black Panther Party, an organization that claimed it was protecting the black community from the police. Although the Panthers did some social work in the black communities, their primary objective was patrolling with weapons. They raised money to buy their first shotguns selling copies of Mao’s Little Red Book at inflated prices on the Berkley campus. (Mao’s book was practically required reading on college campuses.) A year later Newton shot and killed officer John Frey, who had pulled him over in a traffic stop. He was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, but the conviction was later overturned on the grounds of a judicial error. Two other trials resulted in hung juries. The Panthers and other Marxist groups used Newton’s imprisonment to recruit new members and raise money. In April 1968 Panthers, including Eldridge Cleaver, got into a gunbattle with police and one Panther, a teenager, was killed. Cleaver, who later admitted the Panthers ambushed the police, was charged with attempted murder. While out on bail, he left the country and fled to Cuba, a popular destination for American leftists when they were accused of crimes. He later went to Algeria, where he claimed he was supported with funds from North Vietnam.
Cleaver was not the only Panther to flee the country for Cuba. Huey Newton was charged with a number of violent crimes and fled. Panther Joanne Byron, who goes by the name Assata Shakur, received a life sentence for murdering a police officer in New Jersey. With assistance from the Black Liberation Army, a Panther offshoot who supported themselves by robbing banks and engaged in guerrilla activities, Byron escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women. She allegedly hid out in Pittsburgh for a year, then flew to the Bahamas. She made her way to Cuba and asked for asylum, which was granted. She has remained in Cuba but has become a hero to activists in the United States. The BLA was believed to be responsible for at least 70 violent acts, including the murders of thirteen police officers. Black Marxists were responsible for a spate of airline hijackings. In each case, the hijacker would demand to be taken to Cuba. One group of hijackers took the airplane on to Algeria, then made their way to Paris. One from that group, George Brown, is still at large. Between 1968 and 1972, there were no less than 90 attempted hijackings to Cuba, most of them successful. The hijackings led to the assignment of armed Federal air marshals to airline flights.
The student movements of the sixties and seventies were closely associated with the drug culture, or counterculture as it is often called. Prior to the sixties, few whites smoked marijuana or used other drugs. Marijuana was popular among young blacks in the North while Puerto Ricans in New York and others across the nation, particularly Hispanics, became known for sniffing model airplane glue, which had a narcotic effect. The late sixties is when pot became popular, along with narcotics and hallucinogens, particularly LSD, commonly known as acid. Noted LSD advocate Timothy Leary was broken out of jail by members of the radical Marxist-Leninist group The Weathermen and transported to Algeria where he sought assistance from Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers government-in-exile. Marijuana and other drugs were a regular feature at antiwar rallies, which often featured musical groups associated with the drug culture. (In many respects, the drug culture and the leftist antiwar movement were one and the same.)
Black Marxists were violent but white Marxists were equally so. The SDS was particularly violent. In less than a year in 1969-1970, there were some 8,200 violent acts on and around college campuses, including bombings, attempted bombings and threats of bombing. Radicals Sam Melville and his lover, Jane Alpert, set off bombs in New York, injuring 20 people. Not to be outdone, Marxist Puerto Ricans launched 40 terrorist attacks in New York, killing five and injuring at least 69. A radical Jewish group, the Jewish Defense League, was also responsible for attacks in New York, but it is considered “far right” rather than Marxist. Four young radicals set off a bomb at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The university had a contract to do mathematics research for the Army and the bomb was aimed at the research facility. The explosion killed one researcher and injured three others, one seriously. Two of the bombers, brothers Karl and Dwight Armstrong, had previously attacked the Badger Army Ammunition Plant with homemade bombs they dropped from a light airplane they had stolen from the airport at Middleton. The bombs failed to explode. After the Army research facility bombing, the bombers fled to Canada. David Fine was captured in California and served three years of a seven-year sentence. He got a law degree but was refused admission to the Oregon bar due to “lack of good moral character,” an exception to many of the sixties radicals who became lawyers and academics. Leo Burt, who went to Toronto with Fine, has yet to surface.
Perhaps the most violent of the sixties radicals were The Weathermen, also known as the Weather Underground and Weatherman, who took their name from a line in a Bob Dylan protest song. An extremely radical group founded in Ann Arbor, Michigan as a faction of the SDS, the group’s stated goal was the overthrow of the United States government by creating a revolutionary party that would rise up against “the imperialists.” They were close associates of Castro’s Cuba and North Vietnam. Founders passed out a position paper at an SDS convention in Chicago in 1969 in which they called for “a White fighting force” to join with the “Black Liberation Movement” and other radicals to destroy US imperialism and found a classless communist world. The Weathermen grew out of Northern efforts to organize an interracial movement among urban poor. They supported the Black Power movement and were violently opposed to the US role in the Vietnam War. They advocated that all struggle was anti-imperialist and anti-racist. Weathermen went so far as claiming all white babies were “tainted with the original skin of white privilege.” (Sound familiar?) They called white babies white pigs. Weathermen were obsessed with radical murderer Charles Manson. Bernadine Dohrn made statements praising Manson for the murders of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and others. Soon after they organized, The Weathermen began planning a large protest in Chicago in hopes of inciting a riot. As it turned out, participation was not as great as hoped but protestors, who came in from other cities, caused some damage and injuries during conflicts with the police. One Chicago politician was severely beaten. The Weathermen then began a campaign of bombing government buildings and banks. They placed bombs at the US capitol then announced it was in protest of the invasion of Laos. In 1975 – two years after the US withdrew from Vietnam – they bombed the State Department building and claimed it was because “the US was escalating the war.”
The Weathermen founders were Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, and others, all of whom were radical leftists. Dohrn was a lawyer with a law firm in Chicago; she had done work for Martin Luther King. Ayers, whose father was CEO of Commonwealth Edison, had been radicalized at the University of Michigan. Rudd was a New Jersey Jew who worshipped Che Guevara. Rudd and Dohrn, along with other SDS leaders, were invited to Cuba in 1968 to meet with Cuban, Soviet and North Vietnamese communists. Soon after their founding, the Weathermen issued a declaration of war against the United States, an act of treason as defined in the Constitution, yet none of the Weathermen were charged with treason. After initially proclaiming their enmity with the United States, the Weathermen decided to go underground and establish cells around the country to carry out violent terrorist acts. Although the Weathermen were credited with numerous bombings, the only recognized casualties were among themselves – but not for lack of trying. Members of the New York cell were building nail bombs in the basement of a Greenwich Village townhouse that they planned to set off at “a military noncommissioned officers men’s dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey” (probably the NCO club) when one of the bombs exploded then set off two others. The townhouse was completely destroyed, and adjoining structures were damaged, including one occupied by actor Dustin Hoffman. Three of the Weathermen, one of whom was a founder and another was Bill Ayers’ girlfriend, died and two others were pulled out of the wreckage. The survivors then fled to bomber Kathy Boudin’s parents where they remained overnight, then went underground. The townhouse belonged to the father of Cathy Wilkerson, the other survivor. Both women were eventually apprehended and served terms in prison for armed robbery. After prison, Boudin became a college professor at Columbia and Wilkerson taught high school.
The Weathermen escaped Federal indictment and possible conviction for treason on a technicality. Some of the evidence against them had been obtained by electronic surveillance without a warrant, which the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional. Rather than attempting to prosecute and risking exposure of foreign intelligence assets, the Department of Justice elected to drop charges against Weathermen members. Thus, perhaps the most radical Marxists of the period escaped prosecution. Bernadine Dohrn was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list when Federal charges against her were dropped. She served less than a year in jail for refusing to testify against another former Weatherman in an armed robbery case.
Veterans of the antiwar movement and the media greatly overstate the movement’s impact on the Vietnam War and the ultimate communist victory, but there is no doubt that the leaders, at least, were attempting to promote a communist victory in the beleaguered country. Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese president, was called a nationalist but was actually a dedicated Communist whose hero was Vladimir Lenin. After spending several decades in the Soviet Union and China, Ho returned to Vietnam during World War II with the intention of establishing a Communist government. North Vietnam was a Communist state. Naturally, American communists wanted to see it triumph over the South Vietnamese government. Opposition to US military involvement in Vietnam goes back to 1954 when Quakers demonstrated outside the Pentagon after the French defeat in Indochina. Although US combat troops were not involved in Indochina, the US provided combat airplanes to the French and Air Force transports flew French wounded to France and moved anticommunist Vietnamese from the North to South Vietnam when the country was partitioned. The Eisenhower administration sent military advisors to South Vietnam (as it did to numerous countries around the world) but their numbers were limited. There were about fifty in Vietnam when John F. Kennedy took office.
After training Laotian communists and participating in the Laotian civil war, North Vietnam started infiltrating troops into South Vietnam to support indigenous communist forces in the late 1950s. Ho had left Viet Minh units in the south after the partitioning of the country by the Geneva Accords ending the war with the French. (Neither the United States nor representatives of the State of Vietnam, which became South Vietnam, signed the accords.) He intended to use them to overthrow the new South Vietnamese government but was talked out of if by the Chinese, who advocated that he could accomplish his objectives through elections. When the elections weren’t held, Ho ordered his followers in the South to take action against the Diem government. He moved cadre north for training then moved them back again, along with supplies. To avoid detection, the communists moved through North Vietnam-controlled eastern Laos along trails that came to be known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The indigenous communists, the Viet Cong, built up and began mounting attacks on South Vietnamese installations while waging a terror war through bombings, particularly of popular restaurants and hotels frequented by Westerners.
Newly inaugurated President John F. Kennedy sent the first non-advisory US Army personnel, a radio intercept unit, to Vietnam in May 1961. Later that year Kennedy, who was embarrassed over the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, escalated the US role in Vietnam when he sent some four hundred US Army special forces advisors to the country along with a Marine helicopter squadron. Additional units followed, including Air Force air commandos and troop carrier transports. For the next three years, the US role in the war was advisory and logistical. In August 1964, Kennedy’s successor, former Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, authorized air strikes against targets in North Vietnam after an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin. Although the Gulf of Tonkin incident is represented as having been contrived, in reality there was a real incident. On the night of August 2, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the US Navy destroyer Maddox off the North Vietnamese coast. Two nights later, Maddox and Turner Joy, another destroyer which joined Maddox, picked up radar and electronic signals indicating the presence of hostiles. The two ships fired at the radar targets. Whether or not there was an actual attack is open to conjecture – North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap denied that an attack took place, and the Navy was suspicious that the radar signals were actually static. Regardless, LBJ obtained what is known as The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution from Congress which authorized him to carry out whatever actions were needed, including military action, to assist any member of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, commonly known as SEATO, without a declaration of war. The resolution passed with only two senators, Wayne Morris of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska voting against it.
After the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed Congress, the Johnson Administration began seeking a means of forcing North Vietnam to give up its plans to conquer South Vietnam. Ho’s Communists had no intention of giving in. On February 7, Viet Cong attacked Camp Holloway, an Army airfield a few miles from Pleiku. Seven Americans were killed and 107 wounded. In retaliation, LBJ ordered the commencement of ROLLING THUNDER, a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam. Originally intended to only last a few weeks, the campaign continued until November 1, 1968, when Johnson ordered a bombing pause just before the presidential elections. North Vietnam was not bombed again until 1972. A Marine antiaircraft missile battalion deployed to Da Nang from Okinawa. They were the first ground combat troops sent to Vietnam. They were followed by the 3rd Marine Division, which began deploying to Da Nang in March 1965 to protect Da Nang Air Base. A few weeks later the Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade flew from Okinawa to Bien Hoa. At the time, Marines were all-volunteer as were paratroops. No draftees were involved. That would change later in the year when additional Army units were deployed to Vietnam.
The introduction of ground combat troops meant casualties would increase. From 1959 through 1964 there had been less than 500 deaths in Vietnam, many of them to accident and other causes. There were 1,863 deaths in 1965 alone. That number would triple in 1966. There had been a military draft since the Korean War, with draftees serving two years in uniform then going home. Young men saw it as an inconvenience but there was little resistance. College students were generally exempt. Now that the country was again involved in a war, it occurred to young men that there was a chance they might die, although the chances were small in comparison to the numbers of men actually serving in the armed forces. (Some 1.7 million men were drafted during the Vietnam War. Not all went to Vietnam. Of the some 58,000 who died in the war, 30%, or less than 18,000, were draftees, slightly over 1% of all men drafted.) College students, who had student exemptions, began protesting the draft. Leftists encouraged young men to flee the country to avoid being drafted. As casualties increased, there was a slightly higher percentage of negro deaths compared to the black population of the country, and civil rights activists seized on this and began accusing the United States of black genocide. Actually, the reason for the higher percentages was that blacks volunteered for elite units such as paratroopers and reenlistment rates among blacks were higher. Consequently, there were more blacks in the initial units deployed to South Vietnam. However, the rate would drop as more troops went to Vietnam. Overall, some 12.4% (7,264) of the 58,193 men (less eight women) who died in Vietnam were black. This is roughly 1% higher than the national black population. Mexican-American leftists would later claim that Mexican-Americans died at a higher rate than their percentage of the population but they were listed as white and no records of Mexican-American deaths exist.
Anti-war activists attempted to turn military personnel against the war. Coffee houses were established near military bases where activists held teach-ins to influence impressionable young men to turn against the war. Their efforts were not as successful as represented in the media. While underground newspapers circulated around some military bases, they weren’t widely read. I spent 12 years in the Air Force and the only copies of underground newspapers I ever saw were copies my first wife, a young Woman in the Air Force, saved from when she was stationed at Travis AFB, California because she was mentioned in them – she was doing undercover narcotics work for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. There was a race riot on the Navy carrier ESSEX and there was racial unrest on military bases, mostly during the final years of US involvement in the war as the US role was declining. Those involved were mostly first termers. I was stationed at Clark Air Base, Philippines in 1969-70. Night duty NCOs were required to wear a sidearm and keep the doors chain locked because of threats by black activists to take over one of the C-130 flying squadrons and steal the revolvers that were kept to issue to flight crews departing on missions to Southeast Asia. There were also threats of blacks taking over the airmen’s club. No actual incidents occurred.
Some underground newspapers encouraged soldiers to go to Vietnam then kill their commanding officer. As the war continued, fragging incidents, where someone used explosives, often hand grenades, to kill or maim others, usually officers and NCOs, became more frequent. All told, there were roughly 1,000 fragging incidents in Vietnam involving explosives resulting in the deaths of roughly 100 men. However, these numbers do not include men killed by firearms. There is no way to know if any of these deaths were prompted by antiwar efforts in the States. Statistics on Vietnam casualties show that 234 were intentional homicides with almost 1,000 nonintentional homicides. It was not uncommon to find booby-traps set up in Air Force transports after hauling troops, particularly Vietnamese. There was an instance with which I am familiar where a hand grenade in a coffee cup was found under the cockpit of a C-130 by a flight engineer during preflight. The grenade had been placed in such a way that it would roll out, probably during takeoff when G-forces are higher, and come out of the cup and explode. This incident occurred at Cam Ranh, where Vietnamese were not allowed on the flight line, meaning the grenade had to have been placed by someone with access to the parking ramp, an American. My wing lost a C-130 and crew to a midair explosion around the same time. Although some believed the crew flew into an area of naval artillery firing, sabotage was not ruled out.
I was in Vietnam during the massive protests against the US “incursion” into Cambodia. There were no protests against the operation in Vietnam. Most of us applauded the move. Unlike students in the States, we knew that North Vietnam had turned eastern Cambodia into their own playground. North Vietnamese used “neutral” Cambodia as a sanctuary and supply base. I was a C-130 crewmember and we had been operating into remote airfields along the Cambodian border for more than a year and were subject to frequent rocket attack from across the border. One of our airplanes was shot down by a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun that moved back and forth across the border. North Vietnamese troops would attack US and South Vietnamese units in South Vietnam then flee across the border where they could not be pursued. After the incursion, those airfields were as quiet as any rural airport in the United States. We saw the protests as an indication that college students in the States were clueless as to what was actually taking place in Southeast Asia. I heard about one incident where a C-130 pilot in another unit went to his squadron commander and asked to be taken off flying status in protest of the operation. He was psychologically evaluated and put in a mental ward. He became a pacifist after the war and worked with communists in Central America as a medical doctor and wrote a book about his experiences. There are reports that at least one B-52 pilot refused to fly a mission over Cambodia just before bombing came to a halt in 1973. Another asked to be removed from flight status in December 1972 after Nixon ordered B-52 attacks on Hanoi and a large number of airplanes were lost to missiles.
There was a decline in discipline in the military and widespread drug use in the lower ranks, but this is more due to the US culture as a whole than the antiwar effort. Lower ranking military personnel are typically recent high school graduates, and drug use among high school students skyrocketed in the late sixties as teenagers emulated their idols in the music industry. Drug use by American teenagers went from nil in the early sixties to widespread by 1970. Hair length became a status symbol and the military regulations requiring short haircuts were at odds with the styles of the time. Blacks started wearing Afros, which didn’t conform to military regulations, and the style was copied by young whites with frizzy hair (or permanents.) Discipline in units in Vietnam was aggravated by the knowledge that the United States was deescalating its role in the war. Nobody wants to be the last man killed in a war and troops were reluctant to go out on operations they saw as pointless.
There was also the problem of lowered mental standards, which occurred during the Johnson Administration when the military was directed to accept 100,000 men who would have previously been disqualified for military duty by their performance on the mental aptitude tests administered to prospective recruits. As many as 350,000 substandard men were recruited from 1966-1971, when the program was discontinued. Johnson touted the program as a means of helping young men get out of poverty. The program particularly affected blacks, who were often disqualified for military duty because of poor performance on the entrance tests or medically. I enlisted in the Air Force at the induction center in Memphis in 1963. There were five of us who were enlisting in the Air Force and about 50, all black and mostly from Mississippi, who had been sent up by their draft boards for induction into the Army. One of the medics told us that they’d have to send most of the blacks home because they either couldn’t meet the mental qualifications or had medical problems such as syphilis. Those are the kind of men Project 100,000 affected. The majority of Project 100,000 men went to the Army, where they were assigned to non-technical units, reportedly about half in the infantry. The other half became cooks, truck-drivers, freight handlers or performed other menial tasks. The Air Force received the lowest percentage at 9% while the Navy and Marine Corps each received 10%.
An irony of the antiwar movement is that it increased in intensity AFTER the US started pulling troops out of South Vietnam. In June 1969, after taking office in January, President Richard Nixon ordered General Creighton Abrams, who had assumed command of US forces in South Vietnam, to take steps to reduce American casualties. The first troops were withdrawn the following month. Troop withdrawals continued with troop levels dropping from a high of 536,100 in 1968 to 475,200 the following year and continuing downward each year until 1972 when they were down to 24,200, mostly aviation personnel.
Yet even though the US was withdrawing from the war as Nixon’s strategy of Vietnamization took hold, the Weathermen continued their efforts to defeat the US government. Bombings continued. On May 19, 1972, an important date for revolutionaries, a female Weatherman set off a bomb in a women’s restroom in the Air Force section of the Pentagon. The act was probably in retaliation for the resumption of bombing of North Vietnam after the North Vietnamese launched a full-scale invasion of the South in a failed attempt to capture Saigon. No one was killed but the resulting plumbing leaks damaged files in nearby offices. In 1974 Weatherman published a book called Prairie Fire, the Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, in an attempt to influence leftists who had not been radicalized. They formed the Prairie Fire Discussion Committee which became the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee in 1975. The PFOC continues the work of the Weathermen and SDS. Weathermen formed the May 19th Communist Organization, using the birthdays of Ho Chi Minh and Malcom X, a member of the American established Nation of Islam, who once wrote a letter to President Truman in which he declared himself to be a communist. The leadership was largely female. M19CO was a combination of the Weathermen and the Black Liberation Army and was a far-left armed terrorist group. While the Prairie Fire organization sought to use legal means to achieve revolution, M19CO operated underground and was planned to develop an armed leftist militia. M19CO members broke Joanne Byron out of prison and held up a Brinks armored car to get money to be used to create “New Afrika” in the South. M19CO continued bombings in the 1980s, with their last bombing in 1985. By that time, most of the members, many of whom were women, had been arrested on various charges and the organization disintegrated.
With the Vietnam War now history, support for Leftist organizations dwindled. The United States entered a relatively quiet period with limited military action. The draft ended in 1973 and the Army became all-volunteer; the Air Force and Navy already were and had been for decades while the Marine Corps used a few draftees during Vietnam. There was no draft to protest and Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada and George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Panama were short-lived operations that didn’t last long enough for any opposition to organize. The Weatherman fell apart and the SDS became a shadow of its former self. The radicals of the sixties and seventies got into politics and became journalists, movie producers, college professors and high school teachers. Only a handful, David Horowitz and Eldridge Cleaver in particular, recanted.
One civil rights icon who didn’t exactly recant is James Meredith, the first black student to attend the University of Mississippi. Unlike other black activists, Meredith didn’t see the need for more political action, he knew he already had rights and wanted to exercise them. He enlisted in the Air Force after his high school graduation in 1951 and served until 1960 when he got out to further his education. He’d taken college courses while in the service. After his discharge, he enrolled in an all-black school in Jackson. Legal decisions had outlawed segregation of schools and he applied to the University of Mississippi. When his application was rejected solely because of his race, he got Medgar Evers, the head of the NAACP in Mississippi, to help him file suit. After several appeals, the Supreme Court upheld a ruling by the Fifth Court of Appeals that Meredith had the right to be admitted to Ole Miss. He was finally admitted on October 1, 1962 and graduated the following year with a degree in political science. Three years later, Meredith decided to march, solo, from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi to demonstrate to blacks in the rich Mississippi Delta that they should not fear reprisals for registering to vote. Meredith specifically directed the bigtime civil rights leaders to stay away, this was his march and his alone. Unfortunately, he was sprinkled with birdshot a few miles south of Memphis. Although his wounds were not serious, he was hospitalized. Meredith intended to complete the march, but civil rights leaders saw an opportunity for publicity and Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and others took it over. King publicized the march and brought in people, black and white, including movie stars, union bosses and the media. Meredith did not continue the march but did join it for it’s final day when the marchers reached Jackson. The following year, Meredith was living in New York and working on his law degree at Columbia when he ran for Congress against Adam Clayton Powell AS A REPUBLICAN! In 1972 he ran for the Senate against Senator James Eastland. In 1967 he supported former Governor Ross Barnett, the man who had blocked his way into Ole Miss, in another run for governor. He took a job on the staff of conservative Republican North Carolina Senator Jess Helms in 1989. In 1991 he supported former KKK head David Duke in his quest to become governor of Louisiana. Meredith said Duke’s views were in line with his own. As he saw what was happening in the civil rights movement, Meredith accused civil rights leaders of being power-hungry conmen. In 2002 at the fortieth anniversary of his admission to Old Miss, Meredith said, “Nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights. It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind.” Meredith has stated that the problem for blacks is not white supremacists, it’s white liberals.
Although the sixties and seventies are long in the past, Leftist radicals have had a profound influence on society, particularly through academia. For one thing, college students found that staying in school was a better way to avoid the draft than hopping the border to Canada. (Thousands of Canadians – some 30,000 – 40,000, some of whom were women – went the other way and came to the United States to enlist in the military, 134 Canadians died or were reported MIA. One Canadian soldier was awarded the Medal of Honor.) As long as a man remained in school, he could get a student deferment. Consequently, many pursued masters and doctorates then became academics. Civil rights groups influenced colleges and universities to add courses such as black studies and women’s studies to their curriculum. Black studies was added to the curriculum at Berkely because of pressure from black activists, who had begun studying “black history” in group sessions. The idea caught on as colleges and universities saw offering degrees in such fields as black history and women’s studies as money-making efforts. Congress had authorized educational payments for Vietnam Era veterans and Pell Grants as well as government-backed student loans. A high percentage of former students defaulting on student loans are black. They went to college and were awarded degrees in spurious fields then found their degrees were only good in academia or with civil rights organizations. Women with degrees in women’s studies become women’s studies teachers
Leftists once clamored for free speech, at a time when Communists and socialists were being censored. They weren’t really about free speech for everyone; they were about free speech for themselves and their associates. It’s no surprise that modern academics and students censor and “cancel” conservatives who hold ideas not in conformity with those of leftists. Academics and college students came up with the concept of “hate speech,” a form of speech that can only be defined by those with an ax to grind. So far, there are no laws restricting speech in the United States. However, popular opinion has accomplished restriction of speech by ostracizing those who use words they claim is “hate speech.”
Leftist lawyers – one member of the movement described them as “a bunch of Marxists” – came up with the concept of “critical race theory”, a belief that the legal system is influenced by race. The founders of the movement were black, Mexican and Amerindian lawyers with connections to the Black Power and Chicano Movements of the Sixties. The Chicano Movement was/is a Mexican youth movement started by leftist Hispanics after they saw the success of blacks with the civil rights movement. A key focus of the movement is the belief that Northern Mexico was the ancestral land of the pre-Columbian Aztecs called Aztlan and that it was stolen from Mexico by the Treaty of Hidalgo. The concept of “white privilege” originated among radical leftists in the Black Power movement, Weathermen and Black Liberation Army as did the emphasis on white supremacy.
The American Indian Movement (AIM) was started by convicts, mostly from urban areas who had left the reservation in the 1950s with Federal assistance. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, they were Ojibwe. Their goals are the same as those of the Black Power movement, except for Indians rather than blacks. In order to attract members, AIM started focusing on issues dating back to the nineteenth century when tribes were put on reservations and white settlers moved into their former lands. The leaders of AIM were not necessarily Marxists-Leninists, but they were influenced by those in the Black Power movement and based their movement on civil rights tactics – protests against events such as the celebration of the landing of the Mayflower in Boston. They have engaged in protests that turned violent, particularly those at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Although AIM has protested government actions on Indian land, their main object seems to be the prevention of assimilation of native peoples.
One of the most recent Marxist-Leninist movements is Black Lives Matter, started by three black women, two of whom claimed to be “trained” Marxists and the third a labor organizer, who claimed frustration over the acquittal of George Zimmerman of the murder of Trayvon Martin, a black Florida teenager. The three women seem to have been ignorant of George Zimmerman’s own racial makeup. His mother was Peruvian, and she has African ancestry. Zimmerman’s Germanic name and white father caused many to fail to realize he is of mixed race and technically black. It was more suiting to leftist aims to paint Zimmerman as a white man who murdered a black teenager. The three women were flabbergasted that the jury found that Zimmerman shot Martin in self-defense, or at least they claimed to be. They started using the Twitter hashtag #BlackLivesMatter and turned it into a crusade against police killing of blacks. Never mind that Zimmerman wasn’t a police officer, he was acting as a neighborhood watch. Leftists painted Martin as a hero and Zimmerman as a white supremacist who killed the teenager without cause.
Since it’s founding, Black Lives Matter has protested the killing of blacks by police, starting with the shooting of black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Protestors claimed police officer Darren Wilson shot Brown while he had his hands up saying, “don’t shoot”. This claim was not corroborated by witnesses and Wilson was cleared of any violations in the incident. The shooting and the failure to indict provoked racial unrest in Ferguson and around the nation, much of it provoked by Black Lives Matter. There can be little doubt that BLM’s presence influenced the outcome of the trial of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, who died in police custody after being arrested when he was found to be under the influence of drugs, which turned out to be Fentanyl. Although the autopsy found that Floyd died of heart failure, the state of Minnesota claimed his death was due to asphyxiation caused by the pressure of Chauvin’s knee on his neck. A teenager copied footage of Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck and posted it on social media. BLM organized demonstrations in cities all over the country, at a time when public assemblies were forbidden due to COVID, some of which disintegrated into riots. There was widespread rioting in Minneapolis and calls to “defund the police.” BLM has attracted millions of dollars in funding from corporate interests.
Then there is antifa, an organization dating back to the early Twentieth Century when the original Antifa was organized in Germany by the Communist Party of Germany in the early 1930s. The German Communists advocated Joseph Stalin’s theory of social fascism, which basically claimed that any form of political belief standing against Communism was fascist. The modern antifa is a worldwide movement with roots in the West German student movements of the sixties. The first groups were founded by Maoist communists. There is a connection with the punk rock music scene of the 1980s, when leftist punkers organized in Minneapolis in opposition to other punkers they saw as racists. Punkers go back to the ”skinheads” of the sixties and seventies, who originated in the UK among working-class youth who wore their hair short rather than adopting the modish long hair of the Beatles and later rock and rollers. Antifa, which is made up of communists, anarchists and socialists, see themselves as antiracist social justice warriors who are combating the “far-right,” a term that is used to describe imaginary individuals and groups in the United States. (The term “far-right” was coined to describe dictatorial governments, namely the fascists of Europe and Asia of the 1930s.) Antifa protests speaking engagements of people they see as far-right, racist, white supremacist or anything not in line with their thinking and often engage in violence. Water bottles filled with concrete are a favorite weapon. They also engage with police who they see as instruments of fascism (which is anything in opposition to communism.) Antifa includes Leftist academics, who are engaging in a war of censorship and “cancellation” of conservatives in academia and on college campuses.
Prominent leftist organizations include the Jewish Antidefamation League, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. The ADL was founded in 1913 by wealthy Northern Jews as a reaction to the arrest of Leo Frank, the Jewish manager of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, for the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, one of his employees. Originally organized by the B’Nai B’Rith, from which it split after Frank was convicted, the ADL’s efforts were aimed at influencing the public through newspapers and other media against the “defaming” of Jews. The ADL fought for decades to have Frank, who was hung after being broken out of prison, pardoned. They were finally successful in 1986. The ADL was basically spinning its wheels until the revelation of Nazi atrocities gave them a massive boost. ADL chapters began infiltrating “extremist” groups and partnering with the FBI. Since then, the ADL has represented itself as monitoring antisemitism (which is basically criticism of any Jew) and the monitoring of “hate groups.” The ADL has become essentially private secret police who spend their time looking for people they believe to be antisemitic.
Monitoring of “hate groups” is also the business of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization based in Montgomery, Alabama. Founded by attorney Morris Dees, who had made a fortune in direct marketing, in 1971, the SPLC traffics in exposing “hate groups “. It’s essentially a non-Jewish version of the ADL, although much of its staff is made up of Jewish lawyers. Previously, Dees had sued the Montgomery YMCA for discrimination when it refused admission to two black boys to a summer camp. Dees, who had represented a Klan member in 1962, was hired by Mary Louise Smith Ware, a black activist who had been arrested prior to Rosa Parks for refusing to change seats on a city bus. Smith Ware had previously been a party to a suit against the mayor of Montgomery challenging the city and Alabama’s segregation laws. The case went to the Supreme Court. The case against the YMCA was challenged because it is a private organization and not bound by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Dees’ staff found evidence of a secret agreement between the city of Montgomery and the YMCA. The court ruled that the YMCA had a private charter from the city and was thus subject to the Fourteenth Amendment. The court ordered the YMCA to integrate its facilities. It also ordered the organization to integrate its board, but that ruling was overturned on appeal. Dees and his organization developed a strategy of suing to obtain judgments against “hate groups” in an attempt to bankrupt them. The SPLC began labeling various groups, particularly those associated with conservatives, as “hate groups” and posting information about them on its web site. The SPLC list and the ADL’s lists are frequently used as sources by journalists writing about particular individuals and groups. Dees was accused of inflating the numbers and roles of “hate groups” as a tool to attract more contributions from his supporters, who are mostly Northern leftists. He was also accused of discrimination in the organization. Dees would eventually be fired from the organization he founded.
Morris Dees is definitely leftist. A lifelong Democrat, after campaigning for George Wallace in 1958, he claimed he “had an epiphany” in 1967 while sitting in the Cincinnati airport waiting out a snowstorm and decided to switch sides and devote his life to civil rights. He served as the national finance director for the campaigns of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter then was national finance chairman for Ted Kennedy’s primary campaign against Carter in 1980. The head of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, also has a history in left-wing politics. He served in the Obama administration and was appointed as a member of the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group of critics of Facebook’s monitoring policies. Margaret Huang, who replaced Dees as head of the SPLC, also has a background with leftist organizations. The staffs of both the ADL and SPLC are heavily leftist.
In closing, I’ll say that there shouldn’t be any surprise at the efforts of leftists to censor speech and even thought. SPLC head Margaret Huang has said that one of her goals is to reduce the numbers of those espousing “white nationalist” ideas. That, my friends, falls under the category of controlling thought. In fact, controlling thought seems to be the goal of the Left in general. Their goal is to stifle independent thought and force everyone to follow their lines of thinking, which goes back to the ideas of Karl Marx, Fredrick Engels and other communist leaders from Lenin to Ho Chi Minh, who seemed to think that if people didn’t think like them, they should be imprisoned or executed. I fear what may be coming, not for my sake but for my children and grandchildren.
They buried Queen Elizabeth II of England yesterday. My wife has been grieving ever since we got word of her passing almost two weeks ago. We’ve been watching all the drama created by Meghan Markle, the two-bit actress who somehow managed to snag Prince Harry. We’ve been impressed by how the former Prince Charles, now King Charles III, has been handling himself. Poor Charles has been standing on the sidelines waiting for his mother to pass on and assume his role as king for years. Now, at age 73, he is king and Prince William, the new Prince of Wales, is in waiting to take his place with the little Prince George in line behind him. Oh, the drama of it all!
Queen Elizabeth is somewhat personal to my family, and not because my first wife was descended from King Henry VIII (which explains a lot.) One of the stories my dad used to tell when we were in the cotton patch in an attempt to get me to keep up was about how he met the young princesses in the spring of 1944 when he was serving at Hardwick with the 93rd Bombardment Group of the Eighth Air Force. Sometime in April King George and his two daughters, who were teenagers at the time, visited Hardwick to see one of my dad’s squadron’s B-24s off as it prepared to depart England for the United States on a savings bond tour after it became the first Eighth Air Force bomber to complete fifty missions. The bomber, Bomerang, although Daddy and apparently everyone else pronounced it Boomerang, flew on the first mission flown by Eighth Air Force B-24s and came back so badly damaged that the group was going to scrap it. However, the airplane’s crew chief, later Master Sergeant Chambers, insisted that he could restore it to a combat worthy condition. Chambers, who was later crew chief on one of the B-24s my dad’s crew flew, was successful and Bomerang went on to complete more than fifty missions, including the famous low-level raid on the Ploesti oil fields on August 1, 1943. If I remember the story correctly, the King and the two girls met the men of the 328th Bombardment Squadron, including my dad. Daddy always talked about how he signed his name right above the future queen’s and her sister’s. I believe he said the names were in front of the left waist window. Sadly, that piece of history was lost to the world when Bomerang was scrapped.
B-24D Bomerang
I remember watching Elizabeth’s coronation on my grandmother’s TV. We didn’t have TV at our house yet. TV was just becoming available in West Tennessee as stations in Memphis were coming online. My main recollection is of the carriage as it pulled away from Westminster Abbey after the coronation. Elizabeth had already been queen for almost a year by the time she was crowned. It never registered on me until fairly recently that Elizabeth was never intended to be queen. He father, King George, was second in line for the throne after his brother Edward, but Edward abdicated the throne in order to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson in 1936 and ten-year-old Elizabeth suddenly found herself as first-in-line for the British monarchy. It has been said that when she and her six-year-old sister Margaret learned that their father had become king, Margaret allegedly commented, “then you will someday be queen.” Elizabeth said she guessed so and Margaret replied, “poor you.” Sixteen years later Elizabeth found herself to be queen when she got word while on a trip to Africa that her ailing father had passed away.
I don’t think I ever saw Queen Elizabeth, although I might have seen her from a distance – more about that later – but I did have some association with her. In the summer of 1972 I was at Norton AFB, California attending the Military Airlift Command NCO Academy. A Royal Air Force VC-10 came in. I’m not certain if I knew it was her airplane or not until that night. After we finished our day’s training, I went to the NCO club in my uniform. There were about half a dozen RAF enlisted people in the club, two women and at least three men. I don’t remember how we got together but we did. They may have noticed my wings. I don’t recall but at any rate I ended up sitting with them. It turned out that the two women and two of the men were loadmasters, the same as I was, so we had an instant camaraderie. One of the men was actually a warrant officer and he was the senior loadmaster in the entire Royal Air Force. The two women and the other male loadmaster were lower ranking, corporals or sergeants. They were interested in me because I had flown C-130s in Vietnam and was on C-5s. Some or all of them had flown on C-130s and they were interested in the C-5 because it was new and massive. The two women were a really cute brunette and a sort of dumpy blonde. The lower ranking male loadmaster told me the blonde was a lesbian. I danced with both of them. I told the cute brunette I’d never danced with another loadmaster before.
Queen’s VC-10 at Lexington Bluegrass Airport
It was through talking to the RAF crew, particularly the warrant officer, that I learned that the Queen often visited the United States without the fanfare of a state visit. The royal family is wealthy and their wealth includes properties in countries other than the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth. I don’t remember why she had flown into Norton, but it is just outside Los Angeles. I seem to remember them telling me why they were there but if they did, I’ve forgotten what they said. I do remember that they told me that their airplane was set up to carry both passengers and cargo. I think I was more impressed that the RAF had female loadmasters while women were barred from aircrew duty in the United States and would be until after I got out in 1975.
I next became aware of the Queen’s non-state visits to the United States when I was employed by a company in Kentucky. One of our frequent destinations was the airport at Lexington. I saw an RAF VC-10 sitting on the parking ramp numerous times. (This brings me to one of my pet peeves – airport parking ramps are made of concrete or asphalt, NOT Tarmac, which is an outdated method of construction that has NEVER been used on airports in the United States and probably not anywhere since Tarmac came along early in the Twentieth Century when a company named Tar Macadam registered Tarmac as a trademark. Listen folks, Tarmac is NOT in use today! It’s NEVER been used in airport construction. It’s the parking ramp, stupid!!) It is a known fact that the Queen owned a stable of Thoroughbreds, but it’s not known that some of them are on a horse farm in Kentucky. Kentucky media claims the Queen visited Kentucky five times but it was probably more often than that. I saw her VC-10 at Lexington’s Bluegrass Airport more than once. I took the photograph of it in 1991 or 92. I was told that she came in quite often to check on her horses and the media was not informed. I seem to recall being told that she owned a horse farm in the Lexington area. None of the articles I have read acknowledge this; rather they refer to her visits to check on her horses at other’s farms and to look at stallions to breed her mares. I seem to recall seeing the VC-10 at Bluegrass at least twice and possibly three times. I doubt that I was there every time she was.
Although the media often criticized the Queen and the royal family, particularly in reference to the late Princess Diana, but I never had any ill-feelings toward her or any of them. My ancestry is largely from what is now the UK but the last of my ancestors were in the United States by 1840 and I have no allegiance to any of the British Isles or Ireland. (I have Irish ancestry but I’m not sure if it’s Irish or Scots-Irish.) I do have some German ancestry but the British Royal Family has ties to Germany as well. My dad spent some seven or eight months in England during World War II and I have been to several English airfields during my Air Force service. I even flew a load of British gold from Fort Knox to a RAF base back in 1968 in a secret operation most Americans know nothing about. There were rumors that LBJ was giving the British US gold to prop up the pound but it was actually British gold that had been brought to the United States for protection at the beginning of World War II. I will say one thing – the golden hue of 70,000 pounds of gold bars in the lights inside a C-141 was something to behold.
My wife has had a hard time accepting the Queen’s passing, at least she did at first. Apparently, she was in good company. Her passing shouldn’t have come as a shock to anyone. She was 96 years old for crying out loud! She was also suffering from various ailments even though she was getting around pretty good for a woman her age – which isn’t saying a lot. There has been a lot of speculation that her death means the end of the British monarchy. I doubt it. Britain has only had a monarchy since at least the 10th century when William the Conqueror won the Battle of Hastings and established Norman rule. It’ll take a revolution to overturn the British monarchy, a revolution that’s not going to happen.
The above link is to a story from back in July about documents President Trump declassified and ordered the FBI and DOJ to release to the public, but they refused to release them. The documents pertain to the conduct of US intelligence agencies, particularly the FBI, toward candidate, then President Donald Trump during his campaign and later presidency and the investigation of alleged connections to Russia. President Trump ordered the DOJ to release the documents during the final days of his presidency and the agency flat-out refused. It is my educated guess that these are the documents the FBI were after when they raided the president’s Florida home. The Washington Post ran an article in which the author claimed the documents are related to nuclear weapons but I suspect this is a smokescreen to divert attention from the real documents.
Now, it so happens I know a little bit about classified information and a tad about nuclear weapons. As a non-commissioned officer in the US Air Force, I held a Secret then a Top Secret security clearance. My security clearance was downgraded to Secret after I transferred to a unit where there was no need for me to have access to Top Secret information any longer. Most people are probably not aware of it, but most Air Force jobs require at least a Secret security clearance even though most probably never have access to any classified information at all. I can only think of a few occasions when I had access to Secret documents, or even Confidential for that matter. When I enlisted in the Air Force, I had to fill out a document authorizing the Air Force to conduct a background investigation on me. While in basic training, I was selected for training as a jet aircraft mechanic, a skill that required a Secret clearance, not because airplanes themselves are classified but because some missions are. I was trained on B-47s, nuclear bombers that were being phased out and replaced by B-52s. I could be assigned to any airplane with more than two engines. Some flew classified missions.
The US government has been hiding information from the public since George Washington was president. Not all secret information pertains to the military either. Some of it – much of it perhaps – is political. Some is to keep foreign governments from learning information that might be beneficial to them in negotiations but much of it is to keep government actions secret from the American public. Some information is hidden from Congress, which American presidents starting with George Washington came to see as opponents who keep them from carrying out their plans. Just when the United States government specified the three levels of classification is unclear, but it was probably during World War II when the government was secretly working on the atomic bomb (a secret the Soviets were well aware of because someone in the program was feeding them information.) Although documents are classified as Confidential, Secret and Top Secret, some documents were also designated as “Restricted” and some as “NoForn,” meaning no foreigners were allowed to see them, even though they hadn’t been given a security classification. Some were also designated as “For Official Use Only,” meaning they weren’t to be made available to the media or anyone other than those who needed access to them. It’s been a long time, but my recollection is that aircraft operating manuals and other manuals I was issued contained a “For Official Use Only” statement on the cover page.
I was awarded a Secret security clearance either while I was in basic or after I started aircraft mechanic training at Amarillo, Texas. A military member’s security clearance level was posted on transfer and some other orders. A security clearance was required for aircraft maintenance, as well as most other Air Force career fields. Only a few did not require a clearance, one of which was cooks and bakers. I know this because I once encountered a young airman who had been cleared at the highest level but lost his clearance. He was formerly a security technician, meaning he was assigned to the Air Force Security Service, an agency responsible for collecting information by eavesdropping on foreign communications. (They also eavesdrop on US military and government communications.) A call went out Air Force-wide for airmen to cross-train into the aircraft loadmaster career field. It was a popular field because it involved flying and relatively few Air Force enlisted personnel are on aircrew duty. The loadmaster field required a Secret clearance. He was already cleared at the highest level but for some reason a new background check was run on him. It turned out he had gotten married and his new wife had family in the Soviet Union, which made him a security risk. He lost his security clearance and could no longer be a loadmaster nor could he go back to his previous field, so he went to the chow hall as an apprentice cook.
The young cook had previously held what was known in the Air Force as a “Crypto” clearance. Although the government only identifies three levels of security clearance – Confidential, Secret and Top Secret – there are higher levels of classification within the Top Secret level. The Crypto clearance the cook had held was awarded to men and women involved in coding and decoding of classified messages. There was also another aspect of the field, the decoding of intercepted communications of foreign nations. At the time, the Air Force Security Service was an Air Force major command but it had a relationship with the National Security Agency, a super-secret government agency that wags referred to as “No Such Agency.” The Army and Navy had their own commands that reported information its personnel gathered to NSA. AFSS operated classified collection sites at various locations around the world. The command also maintained squadrons operating airplanes equipped with special electronic intercept equipment, including two squadrons with C-130s, one in Japan and the other in Germany. The modified C-130s featured a capsule in the cargo compartment with stations for intercept operators and translators. Their mission was intercepting Soviet, Chinese, North Korean and North Vietnamese radio communications, particularly to determine their air defense methods. The Navy has an identical mission to determine antisubmarine methods using modified P-3s. A number of US airplanes have been shot down in or near hostile territory while on such “sneaky Pete” missions. The AFSS, the Army Security Service and NSA also had a mission of monitoring telephones and other communications of US military and government personnel to prevent the revelation of classified information. In one of my assignments, there were signs above the telephones warning users to be careful what we said, that the phones were monitored. I once worked with an Army veteran who was in the Army’s equivalent to the AFSS. He told me he was once assigned to monitor communications of an Army general in Europe and picked up conversations of the officer with his mistress.
I spent twelve years in the Air Force in the sixties and seventies. I was on flying status as an aircrew member on transport airplanes for almost eleven of those years. Three of my assignments were in squadrons with a mission transporting nuclear weapons in addition to other, more routine, missions. Two were overseas where our nuke mission was for nuclear war. Although the mission itself was Secret, it was Top Secret because of where we would go if the unthinkable happened and we were launched. It was because of that mission that I was awarded a Top Secret clearance. We spent a week on alert in a restricted area on an established airbase. By restricted, I mean the area was fenced in and guarded. Our C-130 was parked alongside two tactical fighters loaded with nuclear weapons. We were loaded with nuclear weapons that we would fly to a Top Secret base where the two fighters would return to be loaded for a second mission after dropping their bombs on a hostile target. Although all of us held Top Secret clearances, I was told that the only thing actually classified Top Secret was a sealed envelope in the mission folder our navigator had been given. The navigator was designated as the classifieds officer on the crew. We spent a week on ten-minute alert, meaning we had ten minutes from the time the alert sounded to get to the restricted area, get to our airplane, start the engines and be ready to taxi. It was a stressful week because we were tied to the alert sirens and flashing red lights around the base and because we knew that if we were actually ordered to taxi out and take off, the world would never be the same again. I was on the same mission three years later at the same location when I was assigned to another C-130 wing at another base. Our wing sent crews to the location to support the same mission I had been involved in previously.
Between my two overseas assignments with the Top Secret mission, I was assigned to a C-141 squadron in the United States. Our squadron was unique because we were designated as a special missions squadron, meaning we were responsible for moving nuclear weapons and nuclear components around the world. However, we didn’t have a wartime mission as the squadrons I was in overseas had – our mission was logistical. Although I held a Top Secret clearance, I don’t think I was ever assigned to a mission that was classified Top Secret. Rather, they were classified Secret. One mission involved moving small nuclear warheads from an overseas location to a base in the United States with a restricted area where nuclear warheads were stored. We loaded the 75-pound “birdcages” using a classified manual, probably Secret, that was part of our mission kit. When we finished, we put the manual back in the mission kit then locked the airplane and it was put under guard until we departed the following day.
After my second overseas assignment, I was assigned to a squadron with a brand new transport type and we didn’t have a nuclear mission. A year or so after I joined the squadron, the Air Force decided there were too many people with Top Secret clearances. Consequently, many clearances were downgraded to Secret, including mine. I can count on my hands the number of times I attended a classified briefing during my 12 years of military service and most of those were the daily intelligence briefings during my time on alert. I attended a classified briefing in my first squadron in the States when we briefed on a brand new mission the squadron had been selected to train for. The second was when I attended an orientation briefing in my new unit at my first overseas assignment. Orientation briefings acquaint new personnel with their new unit. This one was classified. Whenever I attended a classified briefing, I was required to present my military ID card and sign a roster.
I say all this to provide some background. I’m prompted to write this because the Washington Post recently claimed that the raid on President Donald Trump’s Mar-Lago resort and home was due to him having nuclear-related documents. I seriously doubt that this is true. The only possible documents he might possibly have had access to would have been those designating the targets for US nuclear weapons in the event of war. If any such documents were in the White House, they would have been in the briefcase carried by the officer assigned to the president to carry the “Football.”
Since the 1960s when the nuclear mission started including missile-firing submarines, the US nuclear mission has been a “triad” of air, land and sea launching platforms – bombers, fighter-bombers, missile silos, submarines and some ships. Each component has its own targets. While a president probably approves the targets, I doubt that they would be involved in selecting them and I doubt that a list of targets would have been kept in the White House. If they were, they would not have been where they could have been packed up when Donald Trump was moving out of the White House, they would have been kept in a secure location accessible only by those “with a need to know.” Contrary to popular belief, nuclear weapons are not Top Secret, they’re Secret. Nuclear weapons have been part of the US military arsenal since 1945. It’s their locations (some of them) and targets that are Top Secret. In spite of what the Washington Post claimed, I seriously doubt that there were any nuclear-related documents at Mar-a-Lago. For that matter, I doubt that there were any classified documents there at all. On the other hand, there could have been declassified documents related to Donald Trump’s presidency.
When I decided to write a book about the C-130 tactical airlift mission, I contacted the Air Force to gain access to the historical records. Air Force historical records are routinely classified for thirty years, or they were at that time. I was informed that such records are classified for that period in order to (1) protect military secrets, (2) protect classified military equipment that might still be in use, (3) protect relationships with foreign countries and (4) to protect reputations. Some records, such as records related to the use of the atomic bomb, were classified for fifty years as were other records that might possibly be embarrassing to officials from that time, namely President Harry Truman. The report of interviews of the Japanese generals who would have commanded the Japanese forces opposing an Allied invasion of Kyushu were classified for fifty years. Here is the report if anyone is interested – JapaneseGenerals.pdf (sammcgowan.com).
I strongly suspect that the Mar-a-Logo raid was conducted because of the information referred to in the link preceding this article – to protect the reputation of the FBI and certain political figures, including Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. During the final year of his presidency, right down to the final day, President Trump declassified numerous documents related to FBI and NSA actions taken against him, particularly those related to Operation CROSSFIRE HURRICANE, an FBI operation attempting to somehow link him to Russia. The FBI planted an informant inside the Trump campaign and attempted to persuade others to inform for them. The DOJ inspector general later determined that the DOJ, particularly the FBI, had acted improperly in obtaining warrants to conduct surveillance of Carter Page, a former Naval officer who had spent time in Russia (and provided intelligence to the CIA) and had become a petroleum consultant. The FBI also took questionable actions involving George Papadopoulos. Although he insists he did nothing wrong, the FBI coerced him into pleading guilty to “lying to the FBI,” a catch-all regulation the FBI put forth as a means of obtaining a conviction of some kind when they lack evidence of anything else. They routinely use it after bankrupting individuals they have under investigation. Another example is Lt. General Mike Flynn, who got crosswise with the Obama administration, who then sought to discredit him after Donald Trump named him to his cabinet. After Donald Trump was elected president, Admiral Mike Rogers, the head of the NSA, paid a visit to the president-elect and allegedly informed him that the Obama Whitehouse was spying on him. Trump moved his headquarters out of Trump Tower to New Jersey the next day. President Trump later claimed Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower. The media poo-pooed the claim but it was later revealed that it was true. The FBI or NSA were monitoring a computer system in the building for sure. Admiral Rogers had not gone along with actions taken by other senior intelligence officials and took a less aggressive stand in a report Obama released just before Trump’s inauguration. The admiral DID NOT advise Obama of his visit beforehand. In retaliation, Obama’s Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter, claimed he had recommended that the admiral be fired.
The Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are both extra-constitutional organizations. There was no Department of Justice in the Federal government prior to 1870 when the Grant Administration established it, ostensibly to “prosecute Klan members.” However, there is a problem with this claim – the Klan, which was confined mostly to Tennessee, had already disbanded. The original Klan was formed in Pulaski, Tennessee as a fraternal organization of former Confederates modeled on college fraternities and other men’s organizations of the time. The founders came up with some silly rituals and costumes – not the peaked white hat and robe of the Twentieth Century Klan. They started meeting in a large mansion outside of town that had been damaged by a tornado. They established “guards” at the entrance to the drive who told passers-by that they were the ghosts of soldiers that had been killed in the war. This had a frightening effect on local Negroes, who were superstitious. There had been a lot of problems from the recently freed slaves but the news of the “ghosts” caused them to moderate their behavior. The Tennessee governor, William G. “Parson” Brownlow was a Radical Republican and he had disenfranchised former Confederates and was causing other problems. Tennessee Confederate veterans realized the Klan could be used as a weapon. Their activities escalated to violence. However, the Klan disbanded when Brownlow left the governorship in 1869 and went to Washington as a US senator. His successor, Dewitt Clinton Senter, who had been a Radical, changed his mind about treatment of former Confederates and abolished most of Brownlow’s policies. With Brownlow out of the way, the Klan leadership decided there was no longer a need for the organization and disbanded. Senter disbanded the “militia” Brownlow had formed and re-enfranchised former Confederates. (To his detriment, they voted him out of office the next election.) Historians claim the new DOJ prosecuted hundreds of “Klan” members prior to the end of Reconstruction seven years after it was formed.
The Federal Bureau of Investigations came into being almost forty years after the DOJ was formed, and without Congressional approval. The Constitution left most matters to the States and no organization had been created to investigate Federal crimes. The only Federal law enforcement/investigative organization was the Secret Service, which was part of the Treasury Department and was primarily responsible for the investigation of financial crimes. Washington established the US Marshals whose primary role was serving Federal warrants. They later enforced laws on Federal lands, including US territories in the West. President Theodore Roosevelt established an investigative unit within the DOJ by executive order. The DOJ had been lobbying Congress for its own investigative unit but had been opposed on the basis that such a unit wasn’t necessary. When Congress returned from recess, they let the new organization stand. The new Bureau of Investigations set out to garner more power for itself. During World War I, it took for itself the responsibility of finding enemy agents. When J. Edgar Hoover became head, he continued the effort to expand the bureau and garner more power for it and himself. The FBI achieved fame as it battled various gangs of criminals involved in Federal crimes, primarily robbing banks.
Until recent years, the FBI was led by men with strong conservative bent. That has changed as more and more college graduates joined the Agency whose political views are leftwing. The same thing has happened in the Central Intelligence Agency, starting during the Carter Administration. Although the FBI is supposed to be apolitical, the agency seems to have become politicized with certain presidents using it as their personal police force. The investigation of Donald Trump as a candidate, then as President of the United States is without precedent. Although the DOJ IG investigation of DOJ actions regarding the investigation of President Trump did not find that the actions of particular agents were politically motivated, neither did it rule it out. The timing of the raid on Donald Trump’s home – three months before a Congressional election and as candidates are starting to declare for the 2024 presidential election, and with a current president whose standing in the polls is at rock bottom – is very suspicious.
As I was working on the previous article, some things came to mind. I read numerous articles, including William Bradford Huie’s Look article of his interviews of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam and his more in-depth article Wolf Whistle, in which he referred to his interview of Emmett Till’s mother and other family members, including the cousins who were present at the store. I also purchased and read Mamie Till-Mobley’s memoir as well as numerous internet articles, all of which were written by people who seemed to be convinced that Carolyn Bryant was somehow responsible for Emmett’s death. I also read the 2006 FBI report of their investigation, an investigation that led nowhere. Several things stood out.
Let me start off by saying that Mrs. Mobley said some things in her book – which was written over a half century after he son was murdered – that she represented as fact when they were actually rumor. For instance, she stated that a young college student from Tallahatchie County wrote in his thesis about the Till murder that an attorney told him that the two Negroes Willy Reed claimed to have seen were jailed by the sheriff in another town to prevent them from testifying. (The student practically quoted W.B Huie’s Wolf Whistle article.) This was rumor, not a fact as the FBI report of the investigation in 2005-2006 reveals. In fact, the two men in question said that they were in Clarksdale, Mississippi on a job at the time of the trial. They both denied that they were involved in the abduction and murder in any way. She says that when she saw Emmett’s body, he only had two teeth. When his remains were disinterred and autopsied, he was found to have all of his teeth but one. She also claimed he’d been hit in the head with a hatchet.
Gin fan used to weight Till’s Body
Nothing I have read takes into consideration that Till’s body was being dragged along in the current of the river for three miles and more than three days while being tied to a heavy gin fan to which he had been secured by a length of barbed wire wrapped around his neck. The photo above shows the fan with a link of barbed wire at the top. They most likely tied him to the fan with the back of his head against the fan and the wire under his chin which meant his head was touching the fan. His head would have been banging against that metal fan the entire time. The fan and his body would have bounced off of rocks, logs and other debris as it journeyed the three miles from which it was thrown in the river to the snag where it was found. Much of the battering of his head may have been caused by banging against the fan. The constant pounding could have fractured his skull, which was found with part of it broken away. Milam admitted that he pistol-whipped Till, but he also said he had no intention of killing him. In fact, the pistol was probably loaded – unless he loaded it after he beat him – and it would have been dangerous to have used the pistol with the barrel pointed toward himself.
One thing that struck me is Simeon Wright’s claim that Emmett did nothing wrong yet at the same time he said that one of his older brothers or cousins sent him in the store to get Emmett. If Emmett was doing nothing wrong and hadn’t gone into the store on a dare, why the necessity to get him out of the store and away from Carolyn Bryant? He stated that they wanted to get him out of the store BEFORE he said something. She was used to waiting on Negroes. Why the urgency? Wright claimed Emmett was in the store for less than a minute. How did he know? Surely he wasn’t timing him! One of the women who was outside claimed that she could see in the store and that Emmett didn’t do anything but put his money in Carolyn Bryant’s hand rather than putting it on the counter. She – and others – have claimed that Negroes didn’t put money in the hands of white women but laid it on the counter to avoid touching them. (They could have simply dropped the coins into the clerk’s outstretched hand. Actually, I believe putting money on a counter in front of a clerk rather than in their hand is normal for most people. Thinking back, I realized that’s how I do it.) Did she actually see Emmett grab Carolyn Bryant’s hand as she testified? I don’t know. What I do know is that country stores in the 1950s didn’t have the best lighting. My uncle operated a country store when I was a boy in the fifties and there were several stores around where I grew up. The lighting in the stores was usually a few bare bulbs suspended from the ceiling; they didn’t have fluorescent lighting. The incident occurred sometime after dark, around 7:30-8:00. I’ve never been to Money, Mississippi and never looked in the Bryant store but I doubt that anyone outside would have been able to see much of what was going on inside. They would have to have been just outside the window. If there was a group clustered outside, the question would be why? There must have been a reason they were watching Emmett.
Moses Wright testified that he heard “a lighter voice” outside. His son claimed he later said it was a woman’s voice. Now, there are men with high-pitched voices not unlike a woman. He didn’t claim to have heard a woman’s voice when he testified. Carolyn Bryant Donham has denied being present for the abduction. She told FBI agents that her husband and his brother brought the boy to the store and she told them it wasn’t him. Milam told Huie that Wright himself said he’d “go get him” after they announced they were looking for the boy “who did the talking in Money.” They claimed Emmett Till admitted to being the one. There is an explanation for the contradiction in Mrs. Donham’s account – she was interviewed over a half century after the event. Stories change over the years for a number of reasons. I heard a Federal prosecutor claim in a TV documentary I watched just last night – unrelated to the Till case – that “traumatic” events are etched in our brains. This is not true. I’ve been involved in a number of traumatic events over the years, including some in which I feared for my life. I don’t remember every detail. My recollections are like snapshots, not a video. I have to fill in the blanks to remember what happened.)
Then there is the issue of Curtis Jones, Till’s cousin, who traveled to Mississippi from Chicago at some point after Emmett went down with Preacher Wright. He later became a Chicago police officer. Jones was not a blood relative of Till. His mother was Moses Wright’s oldest daughter from a previous marriage. Curtis was interviewed for a PBS documentary. He stated that he was at the store, that Emmett had been showing a photograph of a white girl and that some of the blacks in front of the store dared him to go inside and ask Carolyn Bryant out. After the documentary came out, some of the Wrights claimed that Jones wasn’t there, that he hadn’t come down from Chicago yet. They convinced him to change his story and he recanted and apologized to Mamie Mobley for making the claim. Was Jones there? Who knows? He said he was then he said he wasn’t – after his relatives told him he wasn’t. Like most of those involved in the incident, he’s dead – he passed away in 2000, three years before Mamie Mobley.
In her book, Mrs. Mobley insinuates that Emmett had patronized the store numerous times before the incident. She claims she talked to him on the phone and he asked her for money, claiming he’d spent the money he took with him, at least $25.00, on candy and treats for his cousins and their friends. She claims he spent the money in Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Store. Carolyn Bryant testified that she’d never seen him before. Now, since he was from Chicago and the blacks in town knew he was from Chicago, it’s doubtful she wouldn’t have recognized him if she had seen him before. (Contrary to the oft-repeated claim that to whites all blacks look alike, whites can identify individual blacks by their facial and physical features just as we identify anyone else.) There were also two other stores in town as well as others in the other small towns around the area. Preacher Wright, who young Emmett was visiting, lived 2.8 miles east of Money. While Money was the closest community to Wright’s home, there were other communities around and the city of Greenwood was less than 10 miles away. The Wrights had a car. I suspect her claim that he spent his money in Bryant’s store is disinformation. Witnesses related to FBI investigators that Emmett had never been in the store before that night.
I also question her claim that she received letters from Emmett before he was abducted. She claims it took three days for a letter to reach her in Chicago from Mississippi. I’m not so sure about that. I grew up about 100 miles northeast of Memphis. I had a lot of pen pals all over Tennessee (mostly girls) including some in Memphis. My recollection is that it took five days for a letter to reach me from Memphis. Unless it is local, mail travels between numerous post offices during its journey from where it was mailed to its destination. Mail from Money would have probably gone to Greenwood where it would have been sorted then sent somewhere else then somewhere else before it was loaded on a train to Chicago where the process would have been repeated. Emmett arrived in Mississippi late on Saturday, August 20. The train trip was fifteen hours and he’d left that morning, meaning he didn’t get to his uncle’s house until early Sunday. The incident in the store occurred on Wednesday, the 24th then he was taken from Wright’s home early on Sunday the 28th. If Mrs. Mobley received mail from him and talked to him as she said she did, it would have to have been AFTER the incident at Bryant’s store, yet she makes no mention of him saying anything about it. There is no doubt that the cousins were concerned about his actions. They later claimed it was the whistle but Bryant and Milam made no mention of a whistle when they went to Wright’s house, they said they wanted the “fat boy from Chicago” who “did the talking down at Money.” Allegedly, Emmett’s cousins wanted him to leave for Chicago immediately and he wanted to go himself but his (great)aunt talked him out of it. She thought it would blow over. One would think he would have told his mother about the incident. Instead, she claimed he was having a ball and wanted to stay in Mississippi. Something does not compute.
It is commonly asserted by civil rights activists that whites hate blacks, especially in the South. I don’t think this is true. The blacks – and whites – that were lynched weren’t lynched because of their skin color, they were lynched because they were believed to have done something, usually murder or rape. Civil rights activists refer to any killing of a black by a white or whites as a “lynching” when, in fact, a lynching is an extra-judicial punishment, meaning it is carried out outside the law. While there is no doubt that some whites, not only in the South but throughout the country – and even the world – considered blacks to be a lower form of humanity, they didn’t hate them. The teaching of evolution started in the 1920s and many came to believe that blacks were further down the evolutionary ladder than whites. But hating blacks? I don’t think so. Not as a general rule. On the other hand, whites in the North resented Southern blacks moving up and competing with them in the job market. Civil rights activists maintain that Emmett Till was killed because of hatred of blacks. No, he was killed because he violated a taboo then, according to W.B. Huie, made the mistake of causing a man who had killed many and had no compunction against killing another to become enraged. Although it was alleged that J.W. Milam had killed Negroes before, the allegation wasn’t true – he’d killed Germans during the war. Huie said in Wolf Whistle that he received thousands of letters from black activists after the Look article. One in particular was from a black woman he knew and respected who chastised him because his article negated their claim that Till was killed because he was black and had whistled at a white woman. Milam told Huie he held no hatred for blacks, that he actually liked them. He maintained that Till had pushed him over a line.
J.W. Milam told Huie that Moses Wright remarked that “he ain’t got good sense” when he and Roy Bryant went to his house to get Emmett Till. Mamie Till-Mobley said in her book that Emmett was a breech birth and that his umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck. It was also wrapped around his body – she mentions his knee. The doctor had to use forceps to get him out. She commented that his head was misshapen. She also said the doctors told her the boy would have to be institutionalized for the rest of his life, but she doesn’t expound on it. Was the doctor concerned that he had brain damage? Nowhere in her book does she indicate that Emmett had any kind of mental problems but, then again, the book is basically an ode to Emmett Till. If the umbilical cord is wrapped too tightly, it may cut off blood flow and cause damage to the brain. In Emmett’s case, not only was the umbilical cord around him, he had changed positions in the womb and was coming out butt-first, a breech birth. Did Emmett Till suffer some mild brain damage that affected his rationality? Does that explain why J.M. Milam didn’t think the boy was afraid of him, and that he didn’t seem to realize he was going to be killed?
Then there is Willy Reed. Emmett Till’s body was found in the Tallahatchie River in Tallahatchie County. It was assumed that he had been killed in Tallahatchie County, which gave the county jurisdiction over the case. However, it appears that certain black leaders in the area, particularly Dr. T.R.M. Howard, a black surgeon who lived in Mound Bayou, an all-black city some distance north of the area, wanted the case moved to Sunflower County. Howard believed that a Sunflower jury would be more likely to convict Bryant and Milam for Till’s murder. Another of the Milam/Bryant brothers, Leslie Milam, managed the Sturdivant plantation in Sunflower County. Desperate to find witnesses for the prosecution, Howard located 18-year-old Willy Reed who claimed he had seen J.W. Bryant’s green and white 1955 Chevrolet pickup with four whites in the front and three blacks in the back. He claimed one of the blacks was Emmett Till based on a photograph of Till that he saw in the newspaper. He also claimed that he had passed by Leslie Milam’s barn and had heard sounds that he took to be of someone being beaten. He claimed he saw J.W. Milam come out of the barn and get a drink of water from a well. Howard found a couple of other witnesses, all connected to Reed, who claimed to have seen the truck. Law enforcement from Sunflower County, possibly accompanied by Dr. T.R.M. Howard, searched the barn for evidence that Till had been beaten and murdered there but found none.
There is no way to determine if Reed’s testimony was true. There is no doubt that Howard promised to get him out of Mississippi and move him to Chicago if he testified. Howard apparently believed Reed’s testimony would cause the judge to declare a mistrial, which would have opened the door for Sunflower County to prosecute the two men. For some reason the judge did not declare a mistrial even though Reed’s testimony indicated that the murder had taken place in Sunflower, not Tallahatchie. Perhaps the judge did not believe Reed, who knows? Reed did leave Mississippi and moved to Chicago where he suffered a nervous breakdown soon after he arrived. Dr. Howard also left Mississippi and moved to Chicago where he got involved in politics as a Republican. He founded a hospital. After he recovered from his nervous breakdown, Willy Reed became a medical orderly. Incidentally, Mamie Till-Mobley doubted Willy’s testimony.
The autopsy also revealed something interesting. Pieces of metal were found in the head that investigators determined was 7 ½ or 8 shot – birdshot. The small shot – 00 buckshot is the largest – was loaded into light-loaded shotgun shells for hunting quail and doves. FBI investigators found that Remington Arms had produced .45-calibers for an Air Force contract. The Air Force wanted to put the cartridges in survival kits for crash survivors to shoot birds. Whether the cartridges were sold on the civilian market is not discussed in the FBI report. They would have been useful for killing rats in barns and warehouses. (I shot a lot of .22 cartridges loaded with birdshot at pests, mostly English sparrows. The sparrows nested under the eaves of our house and brought in mites.) That Milam had loaded his pistols with birdshot is an indication he did not intend to kill Till. The tiny shot are too small to do serious harm to anything but birds and small animals at normal ranges. A shot at close range, however, has the power to penetrate the skull while the load is still together and under the maximum power of the charge, as evidently happened with Emmett Till. Had Milam intended to kill the boy who “done the talking down at Money,” he’d have loaded his gun with cartridges containing bullets rather than shot. He evidently didn’t tell Milam and his attorney that his gun was loaded with birdshot.
The autopsy also revealed that rumors that had been spread were not true. One “witness” claimed there were as many as a dozen white spectators who sat on benches in Leslie Milam’s barn. He claimed they had drilled holes in Till’s skull with a brace and bit; he claimed other injuries. The autopsy revealed no such wounds. There seems to have been a lot of rumors spread around the Money area and possibly in Chicago as well, rumors such as the claim that the two blacks who worked for Milam and were alleged to have taken part in the crime were held by the sheriff in the Charleston, Mississippi jail. It was just that, a rumor, but Mamie Mobley repeated it in her book as fact.
I don’t recall when I first heard about Emmett Till. I was almost ten when he was killed. My family took the Memphis Commercial Appeal and I read it cover-to-cover. We also took Look as well as Life, as did my grandparents (or my aunt or uncle who lived in their house.) I don’t recall any discussion of the case by my parents or my uncles. My parents were sympathetic to the plight of blacks at the time (they changed their views, or my father did, after the civil rights movement became more prevalent.) One of my closest friends growing up was ostracized by some of our classmates for making some comments about how blacks were mistreated. They called her a nigger-lover. I was mortified when some of my classmates insulted some blacks I knew from the window of our school bus. They were about nine at the time. They had older brothers and sisters. I’m sure they got it from them. I don’t remember any discussion of Emmett Till at school, none at all. It was a long time ago.
A few weeks ago a “woke” academic named Timothy Tyson unscrupulously “released” the unpublished memoir of now 88-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the then 21-year-old 5’2”, 103-pound white storekeeper at the center of the incident that led to the beating and shooting of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy in Money, Mississippi in 1955 and the acquittal of his killers at trial a little over a month later. The death of the teenager has been a major focal point of civil rights leaders and black activists ever since. Most blame Mrs. Bryant for what happened, mainly because she’s the only one still alive. Numerous attempts have been made to have her indicted, well, for something! None have succeeded. Although the memoir has not been released to the public – members of the media have read it and “’splain’ed” it to the rest of us without letting us read it and decide for ourselves – excerpts reveal that Mrs. Bryant, now Mrs. Donham, never recanted her account of what happened as Tyson claimed in a 2017 book he wrote about Till. He obtained the memoir from Mrs. Donham in 2008 when he interviewed her for his book about Till and submitted it to the University of North Carolina archives after promising that it would not be released to the public until 2036.[1] Tyson reneged on his word after “researchers,” actually members of Till’s family, recently came across a 67-year-old warrant against Mrs. Bryant in a box in a Mississippi courthouse basement.
Activists claim the document is justification for arresting the elderly woman on the basis that Mississippi has no statute of limitations for kidnapping. Tyson claims the memoir is “evidence” and decided to hand copies to the media. However, it’s not new – he gave a copy to the FBI more than a decade ago. At some point, Tyson went to the FBI and claimed that Mrs. Donham had recanted. They opened a new investigation. However, the FBI determined that there was no way to prove his claim. FBI agents interviewed Mrs. Donham and she denied that she had ever recanted and added no new information. Furthermore, the FBI found holes in Tyson’s explanation of his claims. The investigation was closed. The FBI also determined that even if Mrs. Donham lied in the testimony she had given more than a half century before – the judge refused to allow her to testify before the jury – they didn’t have jurisdiction to prosecute and neither did the state of Mississippi since the statute of limitations on perjury had expired in 1960.[2] They had no basis to open a hate crime investigation because the murder had occurred long before such legislation became law.
The recent investigation was the second attempt to have Mrs. Donham indicted. The first was in 2004 after the death of Emmett Till’s mother and publication of her memoir when family members convinced the FBI to open an investigation on the basis that others had been involved in the abduction and murder of Till besides the two men who were tried and acquitted – then later admitted the killing in interviews with Alabama investigative reporter William Bradford Huie. The FBI report is available on the FBI web site. I have read the report. There’s little evidence in it, if any. Most of it is nothing but hearsay. Some is interviews of people (2) who were present outside the store. One was Simeon Wright, who evidently was one of those who went to Mississippi to press to have the case reopened, the other was a female cousin who was present at the store. Wright, who was 12 at the time, claimed he was the one who went in the store and got Till. He claims Till was only in the store alone with Mrs. Bryant for “less than a minute” but offers no proof of how he made this determination. However, the accounts they gave differ substantially from what investigative reporter William Bradford Huie was told in Chicago a few months after the incident.
In the late summer of 1955, the black community was shocked at the news that a young Chicagoan named Emmett Till had been brutally murdered in Mississippi. News of the boy’s death was picked up by black newspapers and magazines and photographs were published of his battered body. Blacks in Chicago were incensed. They became even more incensed when the two men arrested for his kidnapping and murder, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, Bryant’s half-brother, were acquitted by an all-white jury at their trial in Sumner, Mississippi the following month. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) made the murdered teenager a poster boy for their civil rights campaign and newspapers ran countless editorials decrying the verdict. Over the past sixty-seven years, black activists, journalists, film makers, Till’s relatives and “historians” have done their best, with great success, to revise the story to suit their own purposes.
The NAACP was hated by many whites, especially in the Mid-South. The organization was founded in 1909 by a consortium of progressive whites, many of them professed socialists, and blacks. Included among the founders were W.E.B. Dubois, a black socialist who eventually left the United States and joined the Communist Party, and Ida B. Wells. Ida Wells was born in 1862 in Holly Springs, a town in north Mississippi just south of Memphis, Tennessee. After the Civil War, her father became a member of the Loyal League, a black vigilante group founded by free blacks who came South after the Civil War, who harassed their white neighbors, particularly former Confederates. Although a child, Wells was active in the League, which was largely responsible for the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. She lost her parents to yellow fever as a teenager and moved to Memphis where she continued her radical antiracial activities. She became a newspaper publisher, publishing articles designed to inflame racial hatred. She frequently wrote about lynching after three black men that she knew were hung. They were lynched after a mob broke them out of the Memphis jail. However, the piece that led to Wells being run out of Memphis was one she wrote in which she essentially said that white women craved sex with black men.[3] She had conveniently left town and gone to New York “on vacation” before the piece ran. A few days after it came out, the newspaper office was burned to the ground. Wells never went back. She remained in the North and continued her campaign against lynching. The NAACP gained little support in the South until a black woodcutter named Elle Persons (or Parsons) was burned to death in 1917 by an angry mob after he was arrested for the brutal murder of a young white teenager named Antionette Rappel. The pretty fifteen-year-old high school student left home for school one morning and never came home. Her body was later found in a woods a half mile from Persons’ home. Her head had been cut off with an ax and there was evidence she had been raped. Persons confessed to the murder but many, blacks in particular, believed the confession was coerced. After Persons was taken off a train and burned to death in front of a large crowd, the NAACP was finally successful in forming a chapter in Memphis. NAACP chapters soon sprang up throughout the South, including Mississippi.
Emmett Louis “Bobo” Till was a fourteen-year-old Negro from Chicago whose relatives had gone “straight north” from Mississippi. In the summer of 1955 he was invited by his great-uncle (by marriage), Moses, or Mose, “Preacher” Wright to spend time in Mississippi, where his mother had been born, to see what it was like.[4] Although articles about Till focus on his youth, most leave out that he was big for his age. Wright testified that the stocky five foot, five inch teenager “looked like a man.” In her memoir, Carolyn Bryant Donham says she thought he was in his late teens or early twenties when he came in her store. Although apologists, including his mother, claim he wasn’t a smart-aleck, he was described as one by some. She even hinted at it in her description of what she told him before he left on the trip. At the time of his death, he was living in the South Side of Chicago in a predominantly or all-black neighborhood. He and his mother lived on the second floor of a two-family home owned by his grandmother. In South Side, he was part of a culture characterized by fast-talking and violence. He had not lived in South Side all his life, though. His mother was from Argo, a predominately white community just west of Chicago, and Emmett lived there off and on for much of his childhood. He had polio as a child and had a stutter as a result. Preacher Wright testified that he was difficult to understand. However, Carolyn Bryant testified that he spoke clearly. Wright also allegedly told his abductors that the boy “don’t have good sense. He didn’t know what he was doing.”
Young Emmett did not spend all of his time in South Side, however. He had family and friends in Argo, where his mother grew up, a community that had become part of the village of Summit. Named for the Argo mill, it is a multi-racial community – the 2000 census showed the population to be 61% white and only 12.5% black, with a number of the people of Polish, German and Irish ancestry. His grandparents had settled there when they came up from Mississippi in the 1920s. Other family members had settled there as well. Moses Wright would settle there when he left Mississippi after the trial of Emmett Till’s accused murders. His mother related in her memoir that from age ten, Emmett road the streetcar to Argo to visit his relatives and friends.
His mother, Mamie Carthan Till-Mobley, claimed later that she warned the boy about his mouth before he left on the trip, advising him that he should be respectful to whites to avoid violence. She told him that Mississippi was not Chicago. She told him to say, “yes sir” and “no sir” and not to smart off.[5] He said he would. He took a train to Mississippi with his great-uncle. Another cousin came down later. When he got to Mississippi, he didn’t take his mother’s advice. Instead of addressing whites with “yes sir” and “no sir” he said “yeah” and “nah.” He regaled his Mississippi cousins and their neighbors with stories about Chicago, allegedly including how he had sex with white girls, a taboo subject in Mississippi. On August 24, he was involved in the incident that led to his murder. Exactly what happened that Wednesday evening is disputed. The accounts given at the time have been challenged by an army of black “historian”/activists and white leftists along with Till’s family, all eager to absolve Till of any blame for what happened. According to contemporary accounts, Carolyn Bryant’s testimony and her memoir, Till made sexual advances toward the 21-year-old white owner of a store in Money.[6]
Carolyn Holloway Bryant was a young married women with two children. She had grown up in Indianola, Mississippi, a town just west of Greenwood. An attractive young woman (she had participated in local beauty contests) of five foot two inches height and weighing 103 pounds, she dropped out of high school at age 17 to marry 20-year-old soldier Roy Bryant whom she had known and been dating since age 14. Roy served in the Army with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina during the first years of their marriage. He came home in 1953 and took over the store in Money and operated it with his wife. He also drove a truck for one of his brothers.[7] They lived in two rooms in the back of the store with their two small children. Carolyn did not stay overnight at the store when Roy was away, she stayed with relatives. They considered it unsafe for her to be there alone at night. The area teemed with blacks. Some were from sharecropping families, some were employees of local farmers or businessmen like Roy Bryant’s family. The five older children were Milams and the six younger were Bryants. Eight of the siblings were boys and three, Bryants, were girls. Male family members made a living running stores, operating trucks and renting agricultural equipment, particularly cotton pickers, to local farmers. They provided the cotton pickers with black drivers.
Money is a small crossroads community, like so many in rural America, on the eastern side of the rich Mississippi Delta land on the Tallahatchie a few miles north of Greenwood. In 1955 Money consisted of a post office, a filling station, three stores – one of which belonged to the Bryants – a cotton gin and a school. To the east the state becomes hilly and is populated more by small farmers while the Delta is home to the large cotton plantations for which Mississippi is famous. The region once belonged to the Choctaw. They sold their land to the United States in 1831 after the Treaty of Dancing Creek and settlers moved in and established cotton plantations using slave labor. After the Civil War and the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, the slaves who had worked on the plantations remained as farm hands. Some became sharecroppers.[8]
In the 1950s the Mississippi Delta looked like a Third World nation. I grew up in rural West Tennessee about 100 miles northeast of Memphis, which sits in the corner of the state just north of Mississippi. Money is about the same distance south of Memphis. My homeland was rolling hills, river bottoms and woods. We raised cotton as did other farmers – we picked it ourselves – but we only had a few acres.[9] We also raised corn and livestock. The big cotton plantations were west of us in the flat lands east of the Mississippi. Although the West Tennessee bottomlands are technically not part of the Mississippi Delta as it is defined, the land and culture are the same. We had blacks around – they were called “colored people” – but not in large numbers. Most blacks lived in town. I don’t recall there being many black sharecroppers – most sharecroppers in the area were white. Rather, local blacks either worked for the farmers in the region, as domestics working for some of the wealthier families – mostly in town – or had jobs. About once a year my family would drive some 100 miles to Memphis for an outing which usually included a visit to the Memphis Zoo. What struck me was that once we entered the flat Mississippi bottom region between where we lived and Memphis, we started seeing large numbers of what most would call shacks, all occupied by black families.[10] Sometime in the 50s, probably around 1958, my family took a trip to Leesville, Louisiana to visit my aunt and uncle who was in the Army stationed at Fort Polk. Once we got south of Memphis, we were in a different world. We passed mile after mile of ramshackle shotgun houses with black families sitting on the porch or standing around in the yard. It was in the spring and there was no cotton to hoe or pick. Huge cotton fields surrounded the houses. It was like that all the way to Greenville, Mississippi where we crossed the Mississippi River into southeast Arkansas and continued like that as we went south into Louisiana and across the state to Leesville.
I graduated from high school in 1963 and enlisted in the Air Force some two months later. The Army and Air Force induction center was at the VA hospital in Memphis. There were five of us, all white, who had been sent there by our recruiters and a large group of colored boys who had enlisted in the Army or been sent there by their draft boards. Most, if not all, were from Mississippi.[11] We all went through the mandatory enlistment physical and took a battery of tests. One of the Army medics who took us through the process told us that they’d have to send nearly all the blacks home. Either they couldn’t pass the Armed Forces Qualification Test or they had diseases such as syphilis and TB that barred them from military service. He said it was the same every week. (Two years later the Johnson Administration ordered the military to start accepting men with substandard scores. They called it Project 100,000 – it was a disaster.) Such were the kinds of young blacks often found in the Mississippi Delta. It was not the kind of place where a white woman should be alone, especially after dark.
Mississippians and other Southerners were well aware that there were different classes of blacks, an awareness dating back to slavery when slaves performed various functions. Some were “house Negroes” who worked in the plantation houses as servants, some were craftsman who worked as carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, seamstresses and the like and some were “field Negroes” who were only capable of menial tasks, namely plowing, hoeing cotton in the spring and picking it in the fall. During slavery, slaves in the upper categories looked down on the field hands. They also looked down on the “white trash” who lived nearby and were barely getting by.[12] After slavery ended, blacks in the craftsman classes moved into towns where they continued their craft. A few became educated. The field hands mostly remained on the plantations. There were also classes of whites: the well-educated professionals such as doctors, lawyers, bankers and teachers; the farmers and businessmen who were successful but not well-educated; then the “white trash” – landless whites with no prospects. The so-called “white trash,” also sometimes called rednecks or peckerwoods, were often descendants of children and young adults who were brought to the English colonies as indentured servants then at the end of their indenture were released with the equivalent of fifty dollars and no prospects. They became hired hands and sharecroppers and were in competition with blacks.
A word about sharecropping. Although black activists try to claim it was unique to the American South, it had actually been around for centuries and was common in the Midwest and West as well as Europe. Not all sharecroppers were black. Many were white. Sharecropping was basically farming in which a wealthier individual or family provides the land, equipment, seed and fertilizer and the sharecropper provides the labor. The landowner provided the sharecropper’s family a house in which to live as well as land on which they could grow a garden and raise livestock. They even provided mules or horses and plows, then later a tractor and equipment to till the land they were sharecropping. On large plantations, the landowners often provided supplies through a store they owned. They sold groceries, farm supplies and other commodities to the sharecroppers on credit. They even provided medical care. Their debt was taken out of the sharecropper’s share of the crop. The Bryants’ store was not a “company store,” they were merchants who sold to their mostly black customers on credit, as was common throughout the South and Midwest. They operated on credit themselves. They mainly sold groceries and meats but also had a candy counter. The main counter with the cash register was at the back. Although various articles and books about the store don’t say so, they probably made sandwiches, usually bologna, for their customers – the stores I am familiar with did. Roy Bryant had set up checker boards in front of the store where blacks congregated. He sometimes played checkers himself and let the young Negroes buy cold drinks on credit.
Emmett Till’s mother Mamie was evidently intelligent and capable. Although she was born in Mississippi, her family moved to Illinois when she was two as part of the “Great Migration” when millions of blacks moved out of the South. (Although blacks claim so many left the South due to the threat of lynching and lack of economic opportunity, it was more the latter than the former. Not only did blacks leave the South, so did millions of whites, far more than blacks.) She was an honors student at a predominantly white school in Argo, Illinois and only the fourth black student to actually graduate from it.[13]Emmett’s father, Louis Till, however, was either not intelligent or he had something about him that made him violent. There is no information about Louis Till’s background other than that he was allegedly an orphan in New Madrid, Missouri, a Mississippi River town south of St. Louis. How and when he made his way to the Chicago area isn’t recorded. Mamie met Louis when he was seventeen and employed at a corn mill in Argo, Illinois where her father had worked prior to her parents’ divorce and his move to Detroit. She said he had just come up from Missouri but offers no details. She claimed that her parents didn’t approve of Till and she broke off the relationship, but he persisted.[14] They were married in 1940; both were age eighteen. Emmett was born within a year. The marriage didn’t last long. Louis became violent. One night he pounced on her she continued to eat some greens her mother had sent over after he told her not to – Louis did not like his mother-in-law. He got her on the floor and choked her to the point she almost passed out. She retaliated by dousing him with hot water when he came in later that night. She got a restraining order which he repeatedly violated. In 1943 he went into the Army, allegedly because a judge told him to either enlist or go to jail. Mamie was notified after the war that Louis had been executed for “willful misconduct.”
Little Emmett grew up essentially without a father but he did have male influences in his life in the form of great-uncles and cousins then later his mother’s boyfriend, Gene Mobley. He never really knew his father because he left while he was a small child and never came back. Whether he knew he had been executed is unknown. His mother indicated that he didn’t. He only had one grandfather who was only peripherally involved in his life. His mother remarried a man named Mallory in 1946 but the marriage didn’t last long. Mamie’s first job was at an aeronautics school but she got a civil service job as a clerk at an Air Force procurement office in downtown Chicago. She moved to Detroit and lived with her father, who had moved there after he and her mother divorced. She worked as a clerk at a military induction center while in Detroit. Her mother was a strict Church of God in Christ holiness but her father liked to play the piano and sing In clubs. One day he walked out and didn’t come back. She was eleven. She was almost thirty when she reunited with him in Detroit. She married a man named Pink Bradley in Detroit in 1951 but the marriage only lasted two years. Emmett wasn’t around him much. The little boy didn’t like living in Detroit so he went back to Argo to live with his great-uncle and aunt.[15] He lived with them in Argo until his mother returned from Detroit with Pink Bradley. His grandmother had sold her house in Argo. She and Mamie bought a two-flat house in South Side Chicago. Mamie quit her job in Detroit and they moved to Chicago and into the second floor of her mother’s building. Pink went with them. Mamie’s mother got him a job at Corn Products in Argo. She got another civil service job with the Social Security Administration. However, Pink would take Mamie’s car and drive back to Detroit every weekend, to see his mother, he said. She learned he was seeing a woman named Margaret and threw him out of the house. After she divorced Bradley, he would sometimes come to visit. Although they had got along while Mamie was married to him, Emmett no longer liked the man. When Pink stopped by for a visit in Chicago and started in on Mamie, Bo, who was sick in bed with the flu, got out of bed and grabbed a kitchen knife. He said to Pink, “if you put your hands on my mother, I will CUT you!” He was eleven at the time. Mamie’s job with Social Security wasn’t panning out. She was working a lot of overtime but couldn’t get promoted. She either returned to her old Air Force job or took a new one. She was moved into a new position working with classified files.[16]
After they moved to South Side, Emmett was enrolled at McCosh Elementary, an all-black school. (Class photos show no white students.) He was described as an average student. He had completed eighth grade when he left for Mississippi and would have been a ninth-grader when he got back. Yet even though they were living in South Side Chicago and he was attending school there. Emmett spent much of his time, most of his weekends, in Argo. His mother relates in her memoir that he started taking a streetcar to Argo when he was only ten years old! She relates accounts of things he did in Argo, such as playing baseball, but she had no idea what else he and his cousins, some of whom were two years or more older than him, were doing. She was working fulltime for the Federal government in downtown Chicago. Emmett was tending to the house and cooking for her during the week but there’s no telling what he was doing on the weekends when he was an hour away in Argo.
The various accounts on the internet focus solely on the Tills and provide no background at all on the whites who were involved. There’s reason for this – Emmett Till has become an industry for some historians, writers, journalists and some of his relatives. They want the focus on him and his mother and don’t want anyone to know anything about J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, because J.W. Milam was a sure enough bona fide war hero and a man not to be trifled with. He had enlisted in the Army in 1941 and served in North Africa and Europe with the 2nd Armored Division, then transferred to the 75th Division. Even though he only had a ninth grade education, he was awarded a battlefield commission which explains the transfer – men who were commissioned from the ranks were normally required to transfer to a different unit. He was wounded by shrapnel – seventeen pieces struck him in the chest. An FBI report of the 2004-2006 investigation only acknowledges that he had a Purple Heart but he was actually highly decorated with a Silver Star, the third-highest US military combat decoration. He probably also had a Bronze Star since he had been awarded the combat infantryman’s badge and the Bronze Star was automatic for anyone with the CIB. This would make him a highly decorated soldier. He held a commission as a first lieutenant in the Army reserve. Known as “Big Milam”, he was a big man with a bald plate and had a reputation as a killer because of his wartime experiences. It was claimed that he had killed Negroes but it wasn’t true. He was also a successful businessman. He owned interests in several stores and some trucks and provided cotton pickers with black drivers to local plantations. He was known as a man who knew how to deal with Negroes. He lived among them. He employed several blacks. Roy Bryant was J.W.’s half-brother. He, too, was a veteran. He had volunteered for the Army in June 1950 at the outbreak of the Korean War and trained as a paratrooper. He served with the 82nd Airborne Division but probably didn’t go overseas – the 82nd remained Stateside at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Roy knew how to fight but he wasn’t a killer like his brother.
Bobo or Bo, as he was called by his family, arrived in Mississippi on August 20, 1955, after a long train ride from Chicago. His uncle lived on a farm just under three miles from Money and sharecropped. It was late August and the cotton fields were coming ripe. Bobo picked a little cotton – 25 pounds – for the first time in his life, but he turned out to be a bust as a cotton picker and his uncle let him go back to the house. He’d only been to Mississippi twice before, the first time as a baby and the second when he was nine.[17] He spent his time with his Mississippi cousins and neighboring teenagers when they weren’t in the fields. Mrs. Mobley related in her book that the family picked cotton in the morning, weighed in at lunch, then picked again until four PM when they weighed in again then went to the house and were free until morning.[18] He was described as a stocky youth who looked older than his fourteen years. He was five foot four or five and weighed 150-160 pounds. Some called him fat. Moses Wright testified that “he looked like a man.” Carolyn Bryant said she took him to be in his late teens or early twenties when he came in her store. In her testimony she referred to him as “a man.”
There are conflicting accounts about a girl, a white girl. Contemporary accounts claim he had a picture of a white girl in his wallet and was showing it around and claiming she was his girlfriend. (His mother later claimed the picture came with the wallet and was of actress Hedy Lamar.) He also claimed he was having sex with her. Later, one of his cousins claimed he had a picture of his integrated class, which is odd since he supposedly went to an all-black school. The explanation is that he went to a summer school and there were some white kids in the class.[19] In 2018 a Chicago woman named Joan Brody told a friend she had known Emmett Till in elementary school and they decided she was the girl in the picture. She was twelve at the time (which would have made her a seventh grader) and Emmett was thirteen. Although she wasn’t Till’s classmate at school, they attended a brief summer class and sat side by side. She was allegedly the only white girl in the class. She denied having sex with him, however. She also said she couldn’t believe he would have told his cousins he had. However, the girl in the photo probably was someone else.
Investigative journalist William Bradford Huie wrote both an article for Look magazine about Bobo’s murder and an expanded account of how he came to investigate the case and some of his actions while researching.[20] After meeting with Milam, Bryant and Mrs. Bryant, he flew to Chicago and talked to Till’s family and friends, including his cousins from Mississippi – and his mother. Preacher Wright and some of his family left Mississippi right after the trial and settled in Argo. They talked candidly. Milam had told Huie Till actually had not one but three pictures of girls in his wallet, one of which he claimed to be his girlfriend. His wallet fell out of his pants and he looked to see what he had and saw the pictures. He also claimed he was having sex with her – he taunted Milam, telling him she “liked it.” Milam told Huie and his attorney, John Whitten, that he became enraged at Till’s taunts and decided to kill him. He’d bragged about the girl to the Mississippi Negroes but the cousins thought he was just bragging, although they told Huie he was “getting close.” They knew where his girlfriend, or the girl he claimed as his girlfriend, lived and took Huie by the house. Huie saw the girl in the yard. So there evidently really was a white girl. Whether it was Joan Brody or someone else remains unclear but it was probably not her. The girl was probably someone he knew in Argo since his cousins knew where she lived. His grandmother lived there and he had lived there off and on. Even after he and his mother moved to South Side Chicago, he often took a streetcar to Argo, a predominantly white community, to see people he knew.[21]
Emmett Till may have been telling the truth. Sex between white girls and black boys in Chicago was not uncommon. It’s not at all impossible for Bobo to have been having sex with a white girl in Chicago regardless of the scoffing by his mother and others who always passed it off with “he was only fourteen!”[22] (Young teenage boys DO have sex! There is an article in today’s New York Post about a case in Tomball, Texas of a teenager who started having sex with his teacher shortly after he turned thirteen and continued having sex with her for the next three years.) They said Till had had sex and that he had sex during his Mississippi visit. He wasn’t a virgin. Although his cousins didn’t believe he had sex with the white girl, it’s possible he had. Black boys having sex with white girls was not uncommon in Chicago and other Northern cities in the 1950s. After all, unless she made it up as later claimed by his relatives, Bobo told Carolyn Bryant that he’d “f—-d a lot of white women.”
Although some of them later recanted, contemporary accounts relate that Bobo’s cousins didn’t believe his stories about having sex with white girls. Neither did other blacks around Money that Till bragged to. One Wednesday evening, August 24, they drove into Money to hang out for a while after having picked cotton. They were on their way to a “joot” – a juke joint – but it hadn’t opened yet so they went to Money to hang out until it did. There were checkerboards in front of the stores – including Bryant’s Grocery which was one of three stores in the community. A group of young blacks, perhaps as many as a dozen, were hanging out in front of the stores when they arrived. Some were a little tired of Bobo’s boasting. Bobo was making one of his claims about having sex with white girls when one of the crowd called him on it. “There’s a pretty white girl in that store over there. Go over and ask her for a date.”
Regardless of whether he was dared or not, Bobo went in Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market. He either went in the store by himself or went in with someone else who left him alone in the store. His cousins acknowledge that he was inside alone with Mrs. Bryant for at least a minute. They stayed outside to watch. A lot can happen in a minute. Evidently, something did.
This is Carolyn Bryant’s testimony in her husband’s murder trial. The judge ordered the jury out of the room then refused to allow it to be admitted as evidence:
NOTE –The so-called “n-word” appears in the transcript. Following is her testimony. I removed the challenges from the prosecution for the sake of brevity. The prosecution did not want the jury to hear an account of what had happened four days before Emmett Till’s abduction.
MRS. ROY BRYANT,
A witness introduced for and on behalf of the defendants,
being first duly sworn, upon her oath testified as follows:
DIRECT EXAMINATION BY MR. CARLTON (attorney for Bryant and Milam):
Q What is your name, please, ma’am?
A Mrs. Roy Bryant.
Q You are the wife of one of the defendants in this case, the defendant Roy Bryant, is that right?
SMITH: We object, Your Honor. That is incompetent, immaterial and irrelevant.
THE COURT: The objection is overruled.
Q When did he enlist in the Armed Forces?
A In June of 1950.
Q That was about ten months, I believe, before you married?[24]
A Yes.
Q How long did he stay in the service?
A Three years.
Q Did he get out in about June of 1953 then?
A Yes.
Q Now Mrs. Bryant, I direct your attention to Wednesday night, on the 24th day of August, on that evening, who was in the store with you?
The prosecution objected. There (was) a discourse between the attorneys and the judge, who instructed the jury to leave the courtroom. The judge then allowed her testimony to continue.
Q Mrs. Bryant, on Wednesday evening or Wednesday night, the 24th day of August, 1955, did anyone — who was in the store with you that night?
A No one.
Q You were alone in the store at the time?
A Yes.
Q Was there anyone in the living quarters at the rear of the store?
A Yes.
Q Who was back there?
A Mrs. Milam and her two children and also our two children.
Q Did any incident occur in that store on that evening which made an impression on you?
A Yes.
Q And what time of the evening was that?
A About eight o’clock.
Q Was that before or after dark?
A After dark.
Q Just tell the Court what happened there at that time, please, ma’am.
A This nigger man came in the store and he stopped there at the candy case.[25]
Q And in the store, where is the candy case located?
A At the front of the store.
Q And on which side is it?
A It is on the left side as you go in.
Q And that is the first counter there, is that right?
A Yes, Sir.
Q Now, is the store, with reference to that candy counter, is there anything back of the candy counter towards the wall of the store?
A No.
Q Is there any place to walk there or anything of that sort?
A Yes, an aisle.
Q When this negro man came in the store, where were you in the store?
A I was farther back in the store, behind the counter.
Q Where were you in the store when this man came in?
A I was farther back behind the counter.
Q Were you on the same side or on the other side?
A The same side.
Q And when he came in, I believe you said he stopped in front of the candy counter, is that right?
A Yes.
Q And what did you do then?
A I walked up to the candy counter.
Q And what transpired up there at the candy counter?
A I asked him what he wanted.
Q And did he tell you?
A Yes.
Q Do you know what it was he asked for?
A No.
Q And did you then get the merchandise for him?
A Yes. I got it and put it on top of the candy case.
Q And what did you do then?
A I held my hand out for his money.
Q Which hand did you hold out?
A My right hand.
Q Will you show the Court how you held your hand out?
A I held out my hand like this (demonstrating by holding out her hand).
Q Which hand was that?
A My right hand.
Q And will you show the Court how you did that?
A Like this (demonstrating by holding out her hand).
Q And did he give you the money?
A No.
Q What did he do?
A He caught my hand.
Q Will you show the Court just how he grasped your hand?
A Like this (demonstrating with her hand).
Q By what you have shown us, he held your hand by grasping all the fingers in the palm of his hand, is that it?
A Yes.
Q And was that a strong grip or a light grip that he had when he held your hand?
A A strong grip.
Q And will you show the Court what you did? How did you get loose?
A Well, I just jerked it loose, like this (demonstrating).
Q It was about that difficult to get loose, was it?
A Yes.
Q And it was with that much difficulty that you got your hand loose?
A Yes.
Q Just what did he say when he grabbed your hand?
A He said, “How about a date, baby?”
Q When you freed yourself, what happened then?
A I turned around and started back to the back of the store.
Q You did what?
A I turned to get to the back of the store.
Q Did you do anything further then?
A Yes. He came on down that way and he caught me at the cash register.
Q You say he caught you?
A Yes.
Q How did he catch you?
A Well, he put his left hand on my waist, and he put his other hand over on the other side.
Q How were you going down along the counter there? Did he approach you from the front, or from the rear or how?
A From the side.
Q Now, Mrs. Bryant, will you stand up and put my hands just where he grasped you? Will you show the Court and jury?
A It was like this (demonstrating by putting Mr. Carlton’s hands on her body).
Q He grabbed you like that, did he?
A Yes.
Q In other words, with his left arm around your back?
A Yes.
Q And his left hand on your left hip?
A Yes.
Q And he had his right hand on your right hip?
A Yes.
Q Did he say anything to you then at the time he grabbed you there by the cash register?
A Yes.
Q What did he say?
A He said, “What’s the matter, baby? Can’t you take it?
Q He said, “What’s the matter, baby? Can’t you take it?”
A Yes.
Q Did you then try to free yourself?
A Yes.
Q Was it difficult? Did you succeed in freeing yourself?
A Yes.
Q Did he say anything further to you at that time?
A Yes.
Q What did he say?
A He said, “You needn’t be afraid of me.”
Q And did he then use language that you don’t use?
A Yes.
Q Can you tell the Court just what that word begins with, what letter it begins with?
A The witness did not answer verbally, but shook her head negatively.)
Q In other words, it is an unprintable word?
A Yes.
Q Did he say anything after that one unprintable word?
A Yes.
Q And what was that?
A Well, he said — well — “With white women before.”
Q When you were able to free yourself from him, what did you do then?
A Then this other nigger came in the store and got him by the arm.
Q And what happened then?
A And then he told him to come on and let’s go.
Q Did he leave the store willingly or unwillingly?
A Unwillingly.
Q How did the other negro get out of the store then? How did they leave?
A He had him by the arm and led him out.
Q Were there any white men in the store at the time this occurred?
A No.
Q Were there any other negro men in the store at the time?
A No.
Q Were there any other persons outside the store?
A Yes.
Q Were they white men or colored men?
A Colored.
Q Were there a number of them out there? How many of them were out there?
A Oh, about eight or nine.
Q When he went out the door, did he say anything further after he had made these obscene remarks?
A Yes. He turned around and said, “Good-by.”
Q And when he got out the door, what did you do?
A I called to Mrs. Milam to watch me and then I ran out the door to go to the car.
Q Which car did you go to?
A Mrs. Milam’s.
Q What did you go to the car for?
A For my pistol.
Q Where was your pistol in the car?
A Under the seat.
Q It was under which seat?
A The driver’s seat.
Q As you went out the door and went to the car, did you see this man again?
A Yes.
Q Where was he then? Where was he standing?
A He was standing by one of the posts on the front porch.
Q Your store has a front porch to it?
A Yes.
Q And these posts are on the front porch?
A Yes.
Q Did he say or do anything at that time?
A He whistled and then came out in the road.
Q Can you give a sound something like the whistle that he made there? Was it something like this? (Mr.
Carlton demonstrated by giving two low whistles.)
A Yes.
Q When you got your pistol, Mrs. Bryant, where was this boy then? Or I should say where was this man?
A When I turned around, he was getting in a car down the road.
Q Did you rush back in the store then?
A Yes.
Q Had you ever seen that man before?
A No.
Q Have you ever seen him since?
A No.
Q Tell us what size man he was. Describe about how tall he was.
A He was about five feet, six inches tall.
Q And that is about four inches taller than you are, is that right?
A Yes.
Q And how much would you say that he weighed?
A Around one hundred and fifty pounds.
Q Did he walk with any defect?
A No.
Q Did he have any speech defect?
A No.
Q Did you have any trouble understanding him?
A No.
Q What sort of impression did this occurance make on you?
A I was just scared to death.
Q Mrs. Bryant, do you generally know the negroes in that community around Money?
A Yes.
Q What kind of store is it that you run there?
A It is just a general store.
Q Are most of your customers negroes or white people?
A Most of them are negroes.
Q And of course, you come in contact with most of the negroes around there in that way?
A Yes.
Q And you know most of them around there, do you?
A Yes.
Q And was this man one of those?
A No.
Q Did he talk with a southern or northern brogue?
A The northern brogue.
Q Did you have any difficulty understanding him?
A No.
Q Did you have any white men anywhere around there to protect you that night?
A No.
Q Was your husband out of town?
A Yes.
Q Do you know where he was?
A He was in Brownsville.
Q What was his purpose in being away from home then?
A He had carried a load of shrimp there.
Q Where had he started out with that load of shrimp?
A From New Orleans.
Q When did you expect him home?
A I didn’t know.
Q What was the reason for Mrs. Milam and the children being there with you?
A So that I wouldn’t be alone.
1. CARLTON: Now, we submit, Your Honor, that the testimony here is competent on the basis of the testimony which was introduced by the State to show that there was some talk in Money, and to remove from the minds of the jury the impression that nothing but talk had occurred there.
THE COURT: The Court has already ruled, and it is the opinion of the Court that this evidence is not admissible.
(The jury returned to the courtroom, and the proceedings
continued with the jury present.)
Till apologists claim that Mrs. Bryant “lied” in her testimony because she had talked to one of her husband’s attorneys previously and hadn’t mentioned that he had laid his hands on her or his words about his sexual experiences with white women. This is simple to explain. First, they base this claim on a “statement” she allegedly gave that was later found in Huie’s notes. This was probably not a sworn statement; it was not a statement to law enforcement but to an attorney and was not a deposition. Second, what people tell an attorney and what they later testify to in court are often different. There is also another explanation – Carolyn Bryant had been severely traumatized by the experience and she simply didn’t want to talk about it. She hadn’t wanted her husband to know what had happened because she feared he would do something to Till. Now he was in jail awaiting trial for his murder. Those who claim she “lied” are merely voicing their own opinion and point to the difference in the two statements as “proof.” They cannot explain why she felt threatened and ran outside to get the pistol.
The following is an excerpt from Carolyn Bryant Donham’s memoir. Although the complete manuscript hasn’t been published on the internet, excerpts have. This is her description of what occurred in Brytan’s Store:
The FBI report on the 2004-2006 investigation is heavily redacted and does not give the names of people who were then living, but there is one account that seems to relate that Juanita Milam later claimed she didn’t believe Carolyn’s story and thought she might have made it up in order to convince her husband not to go off and leave her alone in the store.[26] However, this doesn’t make sense because Roy was on trial for murder when she testified. She claimed she thought she was in Greenwood and wasn’t baby-sitting Carolyn’s kids. She WAS in Greenwood that weekend when the abduction occurred. She did not make a statement at the trial. More than likely, Mrs. Milam’s memory was confused since the event had occurred a half-century earlier. The investigation was in 2004-2006. By that time Carolyn and Roy Bryant had been divorced for a quarter century.[27] Whether or not she and Juanita remained in contact is unknown. Juanita passed away in 2014. Her husband, J.W. Milam, died in 1980.
Carolyn followed the two boys out the door. She ran to her brother-in-law’s car and reached in and got the pistol out from under the front seat. At some point Bobo let out a “wolf whistle.” His cousins definitely believed it was aimed at the white woman.[28] One of them saw that she had the pistol and shouted, “Come on, we got to get out of here!” They eventually ended up at Preacher Wright’s place, at least some of them did. Wright was told or somehow learned what happened although not in detail. He wanted Bobo to catch the next train headed north. Bobo himself reportedly was frightened and wanted to go home but Wright’s wife, his grandmother’s sister, convinced him to stay. She said it would all blow over. Just what they knew is not known. They may have only known about the whistle since there were no witnesses in the store to hear what was said. One of the older cousins told Huie he ran inside when he saw Bobo put his hands on Mrs. Bryant and pulled him out of the store.[29] This may have been Maurice Wright, who was sixteen at the time.
Carolyn told her sister-in-law Juanita what had happened but they agreed not to tell her husband when he came by to escort them home later. Roy Bryant, Carolyn’s husband, was off on a trip in a truck hauling shrimp to Texas and wouldn’t be back until Saturday. Even though the two women remained silent, word started getting around. There were other people on the streets who saw and heard the wolf whistle and saw Carolyn come running out of the store to get the gun. It seems to have been circulating only among the black population because J.W. Milam, Juanita’s husband, wasn’t aware of it. Had any whites known about the incident, he surely would have been informed.
From all indications, Roy found out about the incident before he went home, probably from one of the colored men who worked for his brother. Blacks claimed there was a “Judas nigger” who told Bryant. Some believed it was Maurice Wright but his family denied that it was him. Maurice became estranged from his family and died an alcoholic. He talked to Carolyn about it. Just how much she told him is unknown as is how much he had already been told. When he learned what happened, he knew he had to do something or he’d be a laughingstock for not taking some kind of action against the person who had insulted his wife. He decided his only option was to whip the Chicago Negro to avoid losing the respect of his black customers. Later that night he called J.W. and told him he needed him to do something for him but J.W. said he was busy. He explained what had happened and J.W. said he’d be over as soon as he closed the store where he was working sometime after midnight. Sometime around 2 AM they showed up at Preacher Wright’s house. Wright knew why they were there. Bryant identified himself and said they were there to talk to the boy from Chicago who had “done the talking” down at Money. There was no mention of a whistle. Reporters and blacks later claimed Till died “because he whistled at a white woman.”
Wright said he’d get him.[30] He took them to where Bobo was sleeping with his cousins. He was in bed with Simeon Wright, Preacher’s 12-year-old son. Wright begged Milam not to take the boy, he said “he ain’t got good sense” and didn’t know what he was doing. Wright’s wife offered to pay for any damages. Milam told her to go back to bed. Wright would later testify that a third man waited on the porch and that he thought he was colored. After they took the boy outside, Wright claimed they heard them ask someone “Is this him?” and a voice responded that it was. He claimed the voice was “lighter than a man’s” which has led to much speculation that Carolyn Bryant was with them and somehow culpable in the kidnapping.[31] After they left, Wright waited around for some time trying to decide what to do. He finally drove somewhere and filled his car up with gas. He eventually went to his brother-in-law and told him; the brother-in-law took him to the sheriff.[32] One of the boys visiting from Chicago went to a white neighbor and called his mother, who notified Mamie, who went by Mamie Bradley. They called the Chicago police, who started calling Mississippi sheriffs.
Was Emmett Till not right in the head? Wright did not mention making the comment in the trial but J.W. Milam claimed he said it. There is a distinct possibility that he was not. He was born in a breech birth, with his butt coming out first, and his umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck. It’s possible he was brain-damaged. The doctors apparently thought he was. They told Mrs. Till (Mamie) her baby had problems and would probably have to be institutionalized for life.
Somebody, probably Moses Wright, swore out a warrant for Roy Bryant and possibly J.W. Milam for kidnapping. Evidently a warrant was also sworn out for Carolyn Bryant but never served.[33] In her memoir, Mrs. Till-Mosely, as she later identified herself, said the sheriff told her they had Bryant and Milam and were looking for Carolyn Bryant.[34] Roy Bryant was arrested at the store on Sunday afternoon based on what Preacher Wright told the sheriff and carried to jail. Milam was not arrested at the time but he came to the jail later and turned himself in. The two men were charged with kidnapping but were never indicted. Bryant admitted that they took the boy from Wright’s but he said they had taken him to the store and showed him to Carolyn. She said it wasn’t him and they set him free. But Bobo hadn’t been seen since so they kept them in jail until a grand jury could meet. Everything changed when a fisherman spotted some feet sticking out of the water in the Tallahatchie River the following Wednesday. The body was badly swollen from having been in the river for three days but Moses Wright thought it was Emmett Till mainly because of a ring that was found on the body.[35] The ring has the initials “L.T.” inscribed inside. Emmett’s mother later said the ring was the only thing the Army sent her from her estranged husband’s effects. The kidnapping was now a murder.
Because the body was found in Tallahatchie County, jurisdiction switched to there from LeFlore County where Money is located and where Preacher Wright lived. An 18-man grand jury indicted Bryant and Milam for murder. They were tried a month later in Sumner, the county seat of Tallahatchie County – and were acquitted. Although the outcome was never in doubt, the prosecution had no witnesses to the murder and all evidence was circumstantial. The sheriff who saw the body said it was unidentifiable. A local embalmer said the body had been in the water at least ten days. The black press went ballistic, and the furor was joined by other media. Bobo’s mother had called the black media in to see the boy’s battered face before the funeral. They accused the authorities in Mississippi, perhaps with some justification, of looking the other way.[36] They claimed a white man would never be convicted of murdering a black in Mississippi. Some ranted that Bobo’s father had died fighting for freedom in Europe and his son could not find justice in racist Mississippi. Headlines claimed that Bobo had been murdered for “wolf whistling at a white woman” and the killers had been found not guilty.
Alabama native William Bradford Huie was a highly respected journalist. Born in 1910, he graduated with honors from the University of Alabama in 1930 and began a career in journalism. He sold his first story to True magazine while still in college. After working at several newspapers, he went to work for H.L. Mencken at Mercury Magazine. He served as a Naval officer in World War II, then returned to Mercury where he became editor. He authored numerous books and novels, several of which were made into movies. One of his books was about the execution of Private Eddie Slovik, the only US soldier escorted for desertion in World War II. During a visit to an office in the Pentagon he “obtained” a key to the numbers on the graves in the cemetery in France where Slovik was buried. Later on, when people started claiming that Bobo’s father died “for freedom”, he remembered the key and found that Louis Till was buried three graves from Slovik. He and another black soldier were executed after being found guilty of raping two Italian women and murdering another during an air raid. Although this was immaterial as far as Emmett Till was concerned, the prosecution had introduced Louis Till’s death when they put Mamie Bradly on the stand. They asked her about Emmett’s father and she answered that he had died in the service in the European Theater on July 2, 1945. The defense had no idea that he’d been executed for rape and murder and the failed to pick up on the date, which was two months after the war in Europe had come to an end. Mamie may have known that he’d been executed for rape although she later claimed she only knew it was for “willful misconduct.”
Huie, who wasn’t present for the trial, decided to offer Bryant and Milam a payment for the screen rights to their story in anticipation of making a movie about the death of Till and the subsequent trial. Since they had been acquitted, they could not be tried again for Till’s murder because of the double jeopardy clause in the US Constitution. He went to Mississippi and met with John Whitten, who was part of Bryant and Milam’s defense team – it seems that every lawyer in the Greenwood area wanted to defend them. Money poured in for their defense. Some of it came from New York and New Jersey. He asked Whitten if Milam had ever said if he had killed Till; Whitten said he had never asked. Whitten volunteered that Milam was “a killer,” that it was the reason for his battlefield commission. He commented that he was the kind of person you need around for a war. Huie came up with a plan to offer the two men a sum of money for rights to their story. Whitten said he’d ask them. Although he was there on his own, he got LOOK magazine to offer the money in exchange for an exclusive story in the magazine. Huie was criticized by members of the media for what they call “checkpoint journalism” but Huie said it never bothered him – “it gets results.”
Huie told the two men he’d meet with them over five nights and in the daytime he’d go around and verify that they were telling the truth. He promised to pay them some $4,000 but only if they told the truth. He wanted verifiable facts. Although Bryant talked some, Milam did most of the talking. Milam, who was an Army officer, was the more articulate. Milam admitted that although they hadn’t intended to kill Till, he became enraged by Till’s taunting about how black men were better lovers than whites and bragging about all the white women he had had.[37] His wallet fell out of his pocket and they found three pictures of white girls in it. Till claimed one was his girlfriend, that he had sex with her and “she loves it.” He said that although they had pistol-whipped him, Till never seemed to be frightened of them. After he became enraged, Milam shot Till in the side of the head then they dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. They had attached a heavy fan from a gin to his neck to submerge him.[38] After he had finished his story, he had Milam and both Bryants read it and initial it. It was the first that Carolyn had heard of what they had done to the boy.
When Huie’s story came out, many blacks became even more incensed then they already were and some blacks have been incensed ever since, at least in part because Mamie Till-Mosley and others, including Preacher Wright, went around the country talking about Bobo and his murder, and talking about how bad Mississippi was. One northern black woman who Huie knew told him that his Look article would affect their efforts to promote his death as a case for civil rights. Black activists and white activist/historians claim that Huie lied because he didn’t mention others who might have been involved but Huie’s intent was to tell Bryant and Milam’s story, not speculate about who did what and who didn’t. He went to Mississippi to get their story, not to investigate the crime. Witnesses had testified in Bryant and Milam’s trial that others were involved. Many were up in arms because they didn’t believe Carolyn Bryant’s account – and black activists today are STILL up in arms. Like the Jews who refuse to accept that Leo Frank might have been involved in the death of 13-year-old Mary Phagan[39], many blacks and white civil rights activists refuse to accept that Emmett Till may have actually propositioned Carolyn Bryant. And that is exactly what Emmett “Bobo” Till’s actions were, if Carolyn Bryant was truthful. Tim Tyson claims she recanted when he was interviewing here in 2008 but after his book about Till was published, Mrs. Donham and her daughter-in-law, who was present and who had typed up her manuscript, said she didn’t.[40] FBI investigators determined that Tyson had no proof of her recantation. He taped the interview but her recantation is not on it. He claims she said it while he was setting up his tape. He points to a single-sentence note he claims he wrote down at the time as proof. She definitely didn’t recant in her manuscript. Based on what Mrs. Donham said in her testimony and what she said in her manuscript, Emmett Till not only made an unwanted sexual advance, he put his hands on her, which constitutes assault.
Bobo Till was definitely capable of violence, as his mother’s account of his attack on his former stepfather demonstrates. Although she and others praised him as a well-mannered boy, that incident puts the lie to their assertions. Her claims are based on her perceptions of him and the reality is that parents have no clue what their kids are like when they’re away from them after somewhere around age nine. Probably every murderer’s mother since Caine has claimed “my boy is a good boy.” She and other’s also claimed he wouldn’t have bragged about sexual conquests because “he was only fourteen.” Well, some fourteen-year-olds have sex. Do they tell their mothers? Actually, when Huie asked Mamie if Bobo was having sex, she replied that she didn’t know, that he was at the age when boys become interested in sex and that if he was, he wouldn’t tell her.[41]
Some of the blacks present that night later claimed that Till didn’t do anything but take her hand, if that. One of the girls said all he did was put the money in her hand instead of on the counter.[42] Simeon Wright claimed a half century later that there was no photograph, no one dared Till to accost Bryant and that he was the one who went in the store and he didn’t drag Till out by the arm. However, these claims were made more than fifty years after the fact after tons of publicity about the case by civil rights activists and possibly pressure from family members. Just how the family and civil rights activists have presented the story is evidenced by the sign they placed at the place where Milam and Bryant threw Till’s body in the river. The sign says it was thrown in the river “as a warning” to other blacks when they actually threw it in the river in an attempt to conceal it.[43]
There were assertions that the Klan and the White Citizens’ Council were involved. However, FBI investigators determined that none of those accused in the kidnapping and murder were Klan members or had any association with it.
The reality is that blacks and white civil rights activists have been looking for someone to prosecute for Emmett Till’s death ever since Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were acquitted. They first focused on other members of the Milam/Bryant family. Now that they’re dead, they’re focused on Carolyn Bryant Donham. They’re pressing the state of Mississippi to bring charges against her. They don’t have long to force such an action and even if they are successful, it’s doubtful she’ll live long enough to stand trial because she is an 88-year-old woman and is currently under hospice care while dying of cancer.[44] Relatives of Till formed a legacy foundation in 2005 with the goal of finding somebody to prosecute for his death.[45] The foundation is a continuation of an organization Mamie Till-Mosby formed after the NAACP withdrew their support of her speaking engagements. They managed to get the FBI to conduct an investigation which led nowhere, a grand jury that included black members refused to issue any indictments. Incidentally, although the FBI agent in charge of the investigation has commented that Donham’s manuscript and the warrant is “evidence,” the FBI has actually had the manuscript for years.[46] Every single document the foundation and other “researchers” have been able to scrounge up had been turned over to the FBI.
The Till foundation members are going after Bryant-Donham on the basis of a single comment made by Moses Wright in his testimony. He testified that he heard a voice that was “lighter” than a man’s. Trying to prosecute on the basis of this statement would be beyond impossible. Moses Wright has been dead for decades, as has everyone else known to be there that night. The Wright children were in the house and didn’t hear what was said. They have no witnesses and Wright did not identify the voice as that of a woman, much less Carolyn Bryant. Although Simeon Wright later claimed that his father said the voice was a woman, he is dead as well as his father and there is no way to corroborate what would be hearsay evidence. Mrs. Donham did not admit to being at the house when Till was taken – she said they brought him to her at the store.[47] In her testimony, she said she did not see Till again after the incident in the store so there is a conflict, but the statute of limitations on perjury is long-since past. She can also claim she did not look at him. In short, there is no case against the woman.
Incidentally, an autopsy of Till’s remains released in 2015 revealed that he was killed by 7 ½ birdshot. This is a good indication that Milam DID NOT intend to kill him. Cartridges containing birdshot are normally used to kill rats and other small rodents from a few feet away. Cartridges designed to kill humans use solid or hollow-point bullets, not birdshot. Why Milam had his pistol loaded with birdshot will never be known. Perhaps he intended to shoot Till to scare him. He told Huie that he decided to kill him because he kept going on and on about sex with white women.[48] The shot killed him because it was fired from very close range, close enough the shot entered his brain.
Then there is the matter of Emmett Till’s father. This is what Huie later told an interviewer about how the story came out:
William Bradford Huie: I was in—I wasn’t in Alabama when the trial was held. I came back—I was in California working on a film, I came back to my home here in Hartsill, oh, three or four months after the trial. And uh, I picked up Look magazine one night, and I looked at the letters written in, and somebody had taken this fact: it had been discovered by then. And that—-young Till’s father had been killed during the Second World War and was a soldier. And so some uh, white boy out of Harvard-—a black man would never have done this—-some white boy out of Harvard had written a poem about the irony of young Emmett Till being killed in Mississippi while his father gave his life for the proposition “All men are created equal,” etc. etc. Well, I looked at it, and I said, nonsense. It doesn’t happen that way. I was in the Second World War, and most black men were stevedores. They were not where they would give their lives for the proposition that all men are created equal. So I had one of the strangest experiences in my life, one of the great coincidences in my life. When I had done the story of He Slew the Dreamer, three …
William Bradford Huie: When I did-—when I wrote the, when I was doing the research for The Execution of Private Slovik, I was in the Pentagon. Ninety-six Americans were executed during the Second World War, 95 of them for murder and uh, rape, and Slovik who was executed for desertion.[49] And all 96 of those men are buried in a secret plot, uh, near, um, or adjoining an American cemetery in Northern France. And I had to-—the Army when they finally cooperated with me on the Slovik story I wanted to photograph Slovik’s grave. And so I had to get, uh, permission. I had to get from them to tell me the row number and the number of Slovik’s grave in this plot of 96. And the Colonel had had it for me, and they took it out of the vault, because they never expect—-it was top secret everything. On his desk he had a key, as to the numbers of the graves. There are no names on any of these graves, just numbers. But there’s, on this key, there’s a, there’s a name and an address, who that man was. And the Colonel had to go away somewhere, and I should have been court-martialed for this, because the moment I saw it, I knew that there was a story on, in each of those numbers. So I whirled it around here, and I’m copying it down just as fast as I can. He goes away twice and I get most of the names down and I have that now. I really shouldn’t say this on the air, because the Army may court-martial me for this now. But at any rate, I’m the only man outside of somewhere in the depths of the Pentagon that’s got that key. And after I read this piece in Looke, I whirled around, picked up that key, and I looked just three graves from Eddie Slovik, and I saw, Private Louis Till. And this only means that the man has been executed for rape and/or murder. And I said, “Oh no, this can’t be the same man.” The next morning I got up and I called the Judge Advocate General of the United States Army, whom I knew. Now this man came from Georgia, he had typical Georgian racial attitudes.
William Bradford Huie: And uh, so, I called him and I said now this is the story in Mississippi, um, the boy who was killed over there, I said, “I have just found this and I want you to check it for me and tell me who it is.” Uh, he was interested. About two hours later he called me and he was just overjoyed. And he says, “Goddamn Huie, that’s the same damn nigger.” I said, “That’s that boy nigger’s father.” He said, “I’ve got the case in front of me,” he says, “The most fool case of killing two Italian women during a, air raid we ever had. We hanged him in Langert.” And uh, so uh, he said, I said, “Well, send me the case.” And then I said, “Now listen General, let’s just wait a minute.” I said, “Now this boy in Mississippi never knew his father.” I said, “This hasn’t got anything to do with this case over there, and it doesn’t excuse anybody from murder or anything of this sort.” Uh, so I don’t think any of this should be, I said, “I don’t know whether I’m going to write the story or not,” because I said, “I don’t think this ought to be revealed.” So [cough] we sit down down on it. Well, at any rate, later the story crept out, because he gives it out. It’s too good. He has to tell Senator Eastland and so forth and they call a press conference and so forth.
Huie related that some black friends of his, including at least one NAACP official, were incensed when the news came out. They had been using Bobo’s death and his killers acquittal in their campaign for civil rights in Mississippi. That his father had been executed for rape and murder of white women might be construed as an indication that Emmett was a potential rapist. NAACP executive Roy Wilkins told Huie he “almost feel into the Louis Till trap.” He planned to refer to the contrast between Louis’ and Emmett’s death in a speech but at the last minute decided not to use it.
Some black activists have attempted to whitewash Louis Till’s conviction for rape and murder. Black author and civil rights activist John Edgar Wideman took up the cause of Louis Till and all but claimed he was “lynched” by white officers just like his son Emmett was “lynched” by whites in Mississippi.[50] Louis Till and Fred A McMurray, were convicted of rape of two Italian women and murder of another on the basis of testimony of another black soldier who was with them and a British soldier when they broke in on the women during an air raid on an Italian port near Rome. The records of the court martial were classified, as are all court martials, until Till’s were declassified in the wake of Bobo’s death.[51] Wideman obtained a copy of Till’s court-martial then wrote an article for Esquire and a book in which he speculated that Till might have been innocent but was convicted by racist white officers. He claimed the black soldier who testified against him did so to save his own ass. He took Till’s silence as a sign that he was reconciled that he had no hope. In short, Wideman seems to have sought to exonerate Till because he was Emmett’s father. Although some claim there is a genetic connection that may lead some to become criminals, the claim is disputed by psychologists who claim that culture, not hereditary is a determining factor in a person’s actions. Psychologists refuse to accept any finding that might indicate that there is any difference between the races, particularly anything that might suggest an inferiority of members of the Negro race.[52]
Milam claimed to Milam that Till said his grandmother was white. If so, he would have to have been referring to Louis Till’s mother because he only knew one grandmother and she was Moses Wright’s wife’s sister. If true, that might indicate why Louis Till was orphaned. However, photographs of Louis Till do not show the face of a mulatto. If he did have white ancestry – and many blacks do – it was probably further back in his ancestral line. Existing photos of Emmett Till, all black and white, indicate that his complexion was lighter than most blacks, more brown than black, which is an indication of white ancestry. In fact, when Emmett was born, he had light skin, blonde hair and blue eyes. His mother’s friends and neighbors thought she had been sleeping around – the milkman was a favorite bet, so was the iceman. They were both white. She claims she was a virgin when she got married and that Louis was the only man she’d slept with. Photos of Mamie show her as having a lighter complexion. Huie described her complexion as café a lait. Perhaps the white ancestor was on her father’s side of the family. His ancestry is irrelevant to what happened except that Milam may have told the truth about Till’s actions and claims.
Soon after the trial, Preacher Wright moved to Chicago. His wife Elizabeth had already gone; she left immediately after Emmett was taken. She is reported to have not spent another night in their house. Some, if not all, of his cousins also moved to Chicago. Mamie Bradley, her name at the time, went on a speaking tour talking about Emmett’s death. The NAACP saw her as a cash cow but she said if anyone was going to make money off of Emmett’s death, it should be her. An angry Roy Wilkins said she was capitalizing her son’s death. The organization stopped funding her and started funding Preacher Wright instead. She formed her own organization to attract donations and continued speaking. Emmett became a poster child for the civil rights movement, which was eager to point to his murder as an example of injustice in Mississippi in particular, and elsewhere in the United States, particularly the South. Before the NAACP broke ties with her, his mother is reported to have gone on the most successful fund-raising tour in the organization’s history. Alabama civil rights activist Rosa Parks was arrested the following December for refusing to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery. She claimed Emmett Till’s death had inspired her.[53]
The death of Emmett Till was made for the civil rights movement. According to their claim, he was an innocent young boy who was murdered for “whistling at a white woman.” His family – actually Mamie’s family since his father had no family – were demoralized by Bill Huie’s story and Carolyn Bryant’s testimony. Mamie and others who knew Emmitt later claimed he couldn’t have done the things she had accused him of. They justified their beliefs with the “he was just fourteen” statement. None of them had been in the store and they had no idea what had happened, but they begin to think they did. One of the two girls who was in the group with Bobo claimed she watched him through the window and all he did was put the money in her hand instead of on the counter. (There was evidently a practice in local stores that whenever a black man bought something from a white woman, they put the money on the counter rather than putting it in her hand and touching her.) One of the men claimed Bobo was only in the store for less than a minute. Obviously, no one timed the incident so they really had no idea how long he was in the store. Moreover, no one heard the conversation. They only knew that she had come running out of the store and Bobo had wolf whistled at her, and that she went to the car and got a pistol.
Around the time of the fiftieth anniversary of Emmett Till’s death, a number of people started “researching” the event – working on books, film projects and the like. By this time most of those who played a role in the incident had died. Those who were still alive were approaching old age, or were already elderly. Moses Wright passed away in 1977. His wife Elizabeth had died seven years previously. Mamie Till-Mobley had written a book about her son’s death – she died of heart failure the same year it was published in 2003. Researchers started claiming there were inconsistencies in what Carolyn Bryant told her husband’s lawyer and what she said in court. They started looking for someone to prosecute. A black doctor named Howard had gone around drumming up witnesses to testify against Bryant and Milam. He found one witness named Willy Reed who claimed he had heard the sound of beatings coming from Leslie Milam’s barn, and that he had seen J.W. Milam come out of the barn and get a drink out of a well. Leslie Milam managed a farm in an adjoining county. If Reed’s accusations were true, the trial would have had to have been held in Sunflower County rather than Tallahatchie County and the judge would have had to declare a mistrial.[54] He also claimed to have seen three white men in Milam’s truck with three blacks in the back, one of which he claimed was Emmett Till. Two black men who worked for J.W. Milan were claimed to have been with him and Bryant when they abducted Till and subsequently killed him. A story circulated that they were being held under assumed names in a jail in another town so they couldn’t testify. Both men denied that they played any part in the murder. Reed left Mississippi for Chicago after the trial and had a nervous breakdown shortly after he got there. Bryant and Milam had both been dead for some time, as had Leslie Milam. Carolyn Bryant Donham, however, was still alive. They began focusing on her as someone guilty of – something!
Simeon Wright, Preacher Wright’s youngest son who had been 12 at the time, wrote a book in which he contested Carolyn Bryant’s version of events. He claimed he was the one who went in and got Bobo and that he didn’t drag him out as she claimed. He claimed Bobo was in the store “less than a minute.” He also said that there was no picture, that Bobo never made any claim about having had sex with white women, that there was no dare. Whether his version is true or not will never be known since he is now deceased. It is possible that Simeon carried a lot of guilt. He also claimed that his father had told him that the voice he heard outside after they took Bobo out was a woman. Members of the family gave interviews on camera about the event – fifty years after it happened. Curtis Jones, the cousin who came down from Chicago after Bobo claimed he was present at the store but later recanted on his version of events when he realized -or was coerced into believing – he didn’t get there until Saturday after the event on Wednesday evening. Fifty years is a long, long time and although we like to think we have perfect memories of events, the reality is that we can’t even remember what happened five minutes ago! This is especially true as we get older. Our perception of events are colored by what we’ve heard from others, read, dreamed or imagined. People involved in the same event may remember it differently – and probably will. In Vietnam I was on an airplane that blew two main gear tires when the pilots were backing out of our parking spot. The copilot remembered that the tires had blown right after we pulled off of the runway after landing. I had another memory of something happening to me. I believed for years it happened but then it came to me that it had happened to a buddy and what I was remembering was the mental picture I had as he described it to me. Memory cannot be trusted.
Sometime around 2004 members of Mamie Till-Mosely’s family journeyed to Mississippi to meet with FBI agents in an attempt to have them open a case against Carolyn Bryant. Mississippi is a conservative state but its justice system, like the justice systems in nearly every state and the Federal Department of Justice, had been taken over by political progressives devoted to the concept of social justice. Prosecutors who weren’t even born in the 1950s and 60s were reopening old cases related to the civil rights movement, particularly the murder of Medgar Evers, a NAACP official who was shot at his home in Jackson in 1963. Evers was allegedly “investigating” the death of Emmett Till. Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and Marine Corps veteran who had fought on Guadalcanal and was wounded on Tarawa, was charged with the crime. Beckwith was tried twice; both trials ended with a hung jury. Evers’ widow pursued the case. Reporters from the Jackson Clarion-Ledger investigated Beckwith’s previous trial and found that jurors had been investigated illegally by a state agency. The state used that as grounds for a new trial. Beckwith protested that it was double jeopardy but a court ruled that it wasn’t. Prosecutors were able to coerce a former Klan member to testify that Beckwith had boasted of killing Evers at Klan meetings and he was convicted. Others who had been involved in notorious murders in the 50s and 60s were also convicted. The success in those cases convinced the Till family and various civil rights activists that they would be able to convict Carolyn Bryant. The trouble was, they had no evidence, just opinion.
Emmett Till’s relatives were convinced that “evidence” uncovered by a film maker and certain authors was enough to get Carolyn Bryant, who had divorced Roy Bryant in 1975 and remarried, indicted for murder, kidnapping or something. They asserted that she had lied in her court testimony because she added things that weren’t mentioned in her “statement” to Roy’s attorney. They managed to convince the FBI to investigate and the “evidence” was presented to a grand jury. However, their “evidence” was likely to lead to a no bill and that is exactly what happened. Then in 2017 Timothy Tyson’s book The Blood of Emmett Till came out. Tyson claimed in the book that Carolyn Bryant Donham had “recanted” her testimony. The Till relatives thought again that they had her. Tyson obtained Mrs. Donham’s unpublished memoir and turned a copy over to the FBI after submitting the original to the UNC archives. However, the FBI determined that Tyson lacked proof of a recantation and Mrs. Donham and her daughter-in-law, who was present when Tyson interviewed her, denied that she had recanted. Once again, Till’s relatives were disappointed.
The latest “new development” was the discovery of an unserved warrant for Carolyn Bryant’s arrest for kidnapping followed by Tyson’s “release” of Mrs. Donham’s manuscript to the media. Black activists went into a North Carolina nursing home where they thought Mrs. Donham was to harass her, but she wasn’t there. The family, represented by the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, a 501c (3) charitable organization run by family members, is pressing Mississippi to reopen the case in hopes of having Mrs. Donham indicted for kidnapping. All I can say is “good luck”! There are no longer any witnesses to testify against her and even though the memoir is revealing in that she says she lied to her husband that Till was not the one who had accosted her in the store, her description of the incident is the same that she gave to the court with the exception that she said she screamed for help in the memoir. She did not mention that she screamed in her testimony.
Did Emmett Till assault Carolyn Bryant and did he say the things she testified that he did? While there’s no way to be certain, it’s extremely likely that he did. The later claims by members of the Wright family that he didn’t are suspect. The passing off of his alleged remarks with the comment “he was only fourteen” is not only meaningless, but smacks of disinformation.
Was Carolyn Bryant present at Preacher Wright’s house when Emmett Till was taken? I don’t know, but I doubt it. If she was, she didn’t admit to it in the memoir. Wright does not claim that she was. He told the court that he heard someone in the yard with “a lighter voice” but he also told the court he couldn’t tell whether Bryant and Milam were in a car or a truck. (They were in Milam’s green and white 1955 ½ ton Chevrolet pickup.) Simeon Wright claimed his father told him the voice was a woman but he and his father are both dead. The witness who testified that he saw Emmett Till in the back of J.W. Milam’s pickup did not mention a woman – he said he saw three white men in the cab and two black men in the back with Till. William Bradford Huie said that Mrs. Bryant didn’t know what they had done to Till until she heard it in the law office where he met with Bryant and Milam.
Chances are, Carolyn Holloway Bryant Donham will be dead soon. Hopefully, her death will not make the news and the Till Legacy Foundation won’t find out about it. If they do, they or their supporters will do something. They’re too filled with hatred not to.
Note – The Leflour County grand jury just announced that they are not going to indict Carolyn Bryant Donham based on the ancient warrant. Wheeler Parker, who is not a blood relative of Emmett Till, made a statement to the press in which he lamented that the state of Mississippi failed to convict Till’s killer. Parker went to Mississippi with Till on the train and was present at Bryant’s store when the incident happened.
[1] Mrs. Donham and her daughter-in-law claim Tyson was going to help them get the memoir published but Tyson denies it.
[2] The FBI press release mentions the consideration of charging Mrs. Donham with the dubious charge – the FBI uses it when there’s no indication of a crime – of “Lying to the FBI.” However, there is no mention of charging Tyson with the same crime even though he was unable to substantiate his claim that she had “recanted.”
[3] Ironically, the incident that prompted Well’s editorial hadn’t happened in the South, but in northern Ohio in a suburb of Cleveland. A black man was convicted of rape although he claimed the sex he had with a white woman was consensual. Allegedly, he had been having sex with a married white woman and when they were caught, she hollered “rape.”
[4] His mother was born in Mississippi but never lived there after age two. Her family left Mississippi in the 1920s and moved to Illinois and settled in the Chicago area. Some of her relatives remained in Mississippi.
[5] “Smarting off” was and is common among blacks, particularly in northern ghettos like South Side Chicago and parts of Detroit. Black comedians make it part of their act.
[8] Some “histories” of Mississippi claim the bottomlands were unsettled, but former slaves and other blacks moved into the region after the Civil War and established farms, which were later wrested from them. However, it is a historical fact that whites moved into the region along the Yalobusha River immediately after the land was purchased from the Choctaw. Some came down from West Tennessee, which had just been settled a few years before.
[9] Farmers were allotted the amount of cotton they could grow by the Federal government as part of a program instituted during the Roosevelt Administration called the Farm Service Agency. Allotments were determined by the amount of acreage owned by the farmer. I don’t know what our allotment was but it was somewhere around ten acres. Landowners could rent their allotment out to other farmers to grow cotton on their land. Payment was often a share of the revenue from the sale of the cotton.
[10] Some would have probably referred to the house we lived in as a shack. It was an unpainted clapboard house that had been built in the 1840s-1850s. We had no running water; we got our water from a well outside until my dad had a well put in several years after we moved there.
[11] The induction center served West Tennessee, Eastern Arkansas and North Mississippi.
[12] “White trash” is a term coined by slaves to describe the poor whites who lived near plantations and sometimes did menial tasks such as cutting and hauling wood.
[13] Why an intelligent black woman who had been educated in white schools would move with her son into an all-black neighborhood and send him to an all-black school is inexplicable.
[14] “Parents” is used in the Wikipedia article about her but her father was living almost 250 miles away.
[15] His grandmother’s husband had died and she had remarried. Although her new husband liked children, he didn’t want them in the house.
[16] She was probably working on procurement of items for classified projects.
[17] Some accounts claim he’d been there three times, the second time as a toddler.
[18] I have some problems with Mrs. Mosley’s account. My family raised cotton and I picked cotton each fall. We couldn’t start picking until the dew was off – wet cotton causes problems at the gin – and didn’t get to the field until mid-morning. She also claimed they were paid $2.00 per hundred-weight. I don’t know about Mississippi, but where I came from, cotton pickers were paid a nickel a pound, which amounts to $5.00 a hundred.
[19] In those days composite pictures were made of elementary school classes but they were not wallet-size. If Emmett Till had one, he wasn’t carrying it around in his wallet unless he’d folded it.
[20] I have a copy of Huie’s book Wolf Whistle and Other Stories – I did not pay $400 for it! The book is becoming rare.
[21] His mother indicated that he went to Argo nearly every weekend.
[22] Actually, his mother told Huie when he asked her if Bobo had been having sex that he was of the age when boys discover sex and if he had, he certainly wasn’t going to tell her. Mamie Till-Mobley would make no mention of having talked to Huie in her memoir. She only mentions that she mounted a – unsuccessful – lawsuit against Huie and Look for “defaming” Emmett Till.
[23] In Huie’s account, he gives her height at five feet even.
[24] This places their marriage at the end of the 1951 school year, when she was seventeen. Accounts claim she “dropped out” of high school. Schools in the South got out in May then went back in July for the next year, then got out again in September for six weeks for “cotton-picking.”
[25] The so-called “N-word” was not considered a slur in the South in the 1950s. It was in common use by blacks as well as whites.
[26] Woke journalist Jerry Mitchell, who has written numerous articles claiming Carolyn lied, W.B Huie lied and so forth, claims that he asked Agent Killinger, the agent who investigated claims against her, says the person referred to was Juanita Milam.
[27] Roy and Carolyn Bryant remained married for twenty years after the Till incident. They divorced in 1975. Till’s mother claimed in her memoir that J.W. Milam and Juanita Milam were also divorced but there is no record of a divorce and her obituary mentioned him as her husband.
[28] His mother, who wasn’t there, later claimed it might not have been a wolf whistle at all but just a whistle. She said he sometimes whistled, she had taught him to whistle when he was having trouble with a word. Some of his relatives later claimed he was whistling at a checker move (which makes no sense at all since they said Carolyn Bryant had got her gun out of Juanita Milam’s car.)
[29][29][29] Simeon Wright was twelve years old at the time of the incident. He made his claim a half-century later when he wrote a book about himself. He accompanied some of his relatives to Mississippi and talked to an FBI agent. Whether he actually went in the store or his memory is faulty will never be known.
[30] Although there were later questions about who identified Till, it was obviously his uncle.
[31] Simeon Wright later claimed that his father told him the voice was a woman.
[32] In Huie’s account, Preacher Wright and his wife went to her brother’s home. Her brother, Crosby Smith, went to the sheriff’s office in Greenwood.
[33] It’s claimed that the sheriff didn’t want to arrest her because she was a mother.
[34] There are a lot of things in her memoir that don’t ring true. Roy was at home in his bed in the back of the store sleeping when the sheriff came by. Whether his wife was there or not is unclear. She may have been running the store. She claimed that Bobo’s remains only had two remaining teeth but a 2005 autopsy seems to indicate that only one tooth was missing. I say “seems” because much has been redacted in the report.
[35] Some accounts claim Bobo’s mother identified the body; it was actually Moses Wright. After identification, the body was embalmed and shipped to Chicago where Mamie Till-Mobley, as she later identified herself, insisted on an open-casket funeral even though Mississippi officials had directed that it remained closed.
[36] In reality, the state of Mississippi had charged Bryant and Milam with murder after they were indicted by a grand jury. They were tried but acquitted.
[37] Till apparently took his wallet with him when they took him and they found the picture of the white girl.
[38] The fan turned out not to be heavy enough for the swift current and the body drifted several miles downstream and hung up in a drift.
[39] I personally believe that Mary Phagan’s death was accidental but it occurred because she fell while Frank was having sex with her, probably from behind, and she hit her head on a lathe.
[40] Mrs. Donham’s daughter-in-law claims that Tyson had promised to help them get her manuscript published but he claims he made no such promises. He did submit the manuscript to the University of North Carolina archives. He made a copy and gave it to the FBI to review.
[41] Mrs. Mosley does not admit to talking to Huie in her memoir. However, he described her home as it was in his article “Wolf Whistle,” on the second story of a two-story building. She was there with her boyfriend Gene Mosley and a police officer who had been detailed as her bodyguard.
[42] Although I have not been in the store where the incident took place, there were several similar stores around where I grew up. My uncle operated one for a while. Although they had electric lighting, they were dimly lit. I find it doubtful that outside observers could have seen far into the store.
[43] They failed to weight it down properly. The fan was attached to his neck and his body floated free. Had they weighted down his feet, it probably wouldn’t have been found. The current was strong enough to move the body and the fan. Still, if it hadn’t hit a snag, it might have floated all the way down the river to the Yazoo then into the Mississippi and all the way to New Orleans. It might have never been found.
[44] After word of the discovery of the ages-old warrant against Carolyn Bryant and Tyson’s release of her manuscript, black activists in North Carolina stormed a nursing home where they thought she was. This shows how callous they are. As it turns out, she is not in North Carolina.
[45] There doesn’t seem to be any public record of the finances of this organization. I found one site that shows them with just under $1 million but whether this is how much revenue they have or how much they have collected is unclear.
[46] The ancient warrant the foundation uncovered is evidence, but it’s a state of Mississippi warrant, not a Federal warrant, and the FBI has no jurisdiction over it. Furthermore, a grand jury met in Greenwood after Bryant and Milam were acquitted to consider indictments for kidnapping but their proceedings resulted in a “no bill.” In short, the warrant is for a crime for which the actual kidnappers were never charged. Good luck proving something with that warrant!
[47] In the Look article, Huie related that Milam and Bryant said they did not take Till to Bryant. Milam told Wright they were there to get the “boy who did the talking” in Money and Wright took them to him.
[48] It is possible that Till really didn’t have good sense, as Preacher Wright told Milam when he and Bryant came to his house to get him. He said the boy “didn’t know what he was doing.” Till may have not had the sense to shut up, but kept going on and on and making Milam madder and madder. Milam was not the kind of man to make mad.
[49] Huie is referring to the 96 men who were executed in the European Theater. There were others in Asia and Australia.
[50] Technically, Emmett Till wasn’t “lynched,” he was murdered. The word “lynch,” which dates back to the Revolutionary War, was coined in reference to what was known as “Lynch’s law” in Central Virginia where a judge ordered the hanging of Tories who had collaborated with the British. The true definition of “lynch” is “to put to death (as by hanging) by mob action without legal approval or permission.”
[51] It is true that some 80% of the American soldiers executed for crimes in Europe were black. What this means is unclear. Does it mean white officers were more likely to convict black soldiers of capital crimes or does it mean that blacks were more likely to engage in such offenses. With the exception of Slovik, all of the men executed in Europe were convicted of rape and/or murder.
[52] “Negro” is the correct term, “African” is not because there are other races on the African continent than Negro.
[53]Rosa Parks was an activist. She was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and had attended a seminar at the notorious Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee a few weeks before her famous protest. Although she claimed to have not been a member, she had been involved with Communist Party in Alabama, as had her husband. Four other black women had been arrested before she was. They filed the suit against the Montgomery bus company that led to the changing of the company policy.
[54] Certain black activists believed the Tallahatchie County jury was going to acquit the two men. If they did, they couldn’t be tried again. However, if the judge declared a mistrial because of Reed’s testimony, Sunflower County might be able to arrest and indict them and try them again. Reed, who was only eighteen at the time, was promised that he’d be moved to Chicago if he testified.
Three Texas lawyer-politicians recently released a report they sent to the Texas legislature of their determination after their prompt “investigation” of the massacre of children and teachers in Robb Elementary School on May 24th of this year. As a result of that report, the Uvalde school board decided to take action against the chief of the school police, Chief Pete Arredondo, because of the politicians’ accusations of improper actions against the chief and other law enforcement officers who, in the opinion of the three politicians, were negligent because of the 77-minute delay from the time the shooter, Salvador Ramos, entered the school and his death at the hands of a US Border Patrol tactical team. However, by taking action against the chief, the school board members are overlooking their own failures as reported in the same report.
In response to the 1999 shooting at the Columbine, Colorado high school, Texas schools, like schools all over the country, were fitted with self-locking doors that can only be unlocked with a key or key card, not only on outside entrances but on classrooms as well. All of the doors at Robb Elementary had been fitted with the “Columbine” doors, doors which lock automatically when they are pulled shut. The doors also are solid steel with narrow windows in the middle mounted in a steel doorframe. They open outwardly, rather than inwardly, which makes them more difficult to batter in or open with a prybar or sledgehammer. Although some schools are fitted with locks that can be opened with a key card, the Robb doors seem to require a key. Each teacher was issued a key to his or her room that can only be used for that particular door. The principal, custodian and other school staff were issued master keys that can open any look. Some school police officers were evidently also issued master keys. Teachers and other staff at Robb were under supposedly “strict” orders to keep all doors locked at all times. Responsibility for ensuring that those orders were carried out rests on school officials, including school police, the principal and assistant principal AND the superintendent of schools as well as the school board.
However, a lackadaisical attitude seems to have developed at the school (and possibly other Uvalde schools) in regard to security. Rather than ensuring that doors were locked, teachers were known to prop the outside doors open with rocks to allow students to return to the school. (Although there was a video of a teacher propping a door open with a rock, she was found to have pulled the door shut when she saw the shooter. However, the door had been unlocked and could not lock when she closed it.) Some allegedly kept their classroom doors unlocked because they didn’t want to carry a key. There was also a problem in that substitute teachers were not issued keys and were unable to gain access to their classrooms. They had to have a custodian or someone come and unlock the doors. A method of getting around the locks using magnets had somehow been developed at the school and substitutes were instructed to use the magnets.
Robb Elementary is a multi-building facility rather than a single large structure as most schools are. There are no less than FOURTEEN separate structures on the facility, all connected by walkways. The shootings were in the West building, the western-most of the facilities buildings. Although the school was built in 1955, the West building was more recent; it was built in the 1980s. The outside of the building is brick while the interior rooms seem to be of wooden frames with drywall. The building has three entrances, one on the west, another on the east (or northeast) and the third on the south end of the building at the end of the corridor where most of the classrooms are. Rooms were entered through a door in a vestibule off of the corridor. Adjoining classrooms have a door between them.
For some reason, all three doors in the West building were unlocked on May 24. Whether leaving the doors unlocked is common practice or they were left unlocked on this particular day is not revealed in the report. It was the last day of school and there were visitors on the campus, parents and family who were there for awards presentations and other formalities. District policy was for those doors to be kept locked and both the custodian and school police were required to ensure that they were. School police conducted routine walkthroughs of the district schools, checking doors to make sure they were looked. However, teachers had a practice of warning each other when officers were in the school so they could make sure their doors were locked or lock them if they weren’t.
The report states that there was a negligent attitude in the district regarding maintenance of the door locks. The locks used at Uvalde had been discontinued by the manufacturer but the real problem is that either teachers and staff weren’t reporting malfunctions or they were being ignored – or both. The door to room 111, one of the two rooms Ramos, the shooter, was in was known to require “extra effort” to ensure that it was locked. There is some question as to whether this issue had been reported to maintenance. The report does not state that the door would not lock, only that it required “extra effort” without stating what that effort was. I assume the “extra effort” was either pulling or pushing the door to make sure the lock engaged. Without evidence to indicate which of the two doors Ramos entered, the report assumes that he entered room 111 under the assumption that it was not locked. There have been media claims that the door was not locked although this is an assumption, not a fact.
Ramos entered the school through the unlocked west door of the West building. It is the closest door to where he entered school grounds after driving his grandmother’s truck into a ditch. He was shooting at the school in the some-five minutes from the time he crashed the truck until he gained entry through the unlocked door. His entry and stroll down the corridor to the vestibule of rooms 111 and 112 were captured by a school security camera. (One media article claimed the camera caught him “roaming the halls” of the school.) Although one little girl in another classroom claimed he tried the door to her room and fired a shot into the room, the video does not show this. The video shows him slowing momentarily possibly by a vestibule on the right (north) side of the corridor but he continues on to the vestibule for 111 and 112 without further pause. He’s too far from the camera and inside the vestibule so there’s no way to tell what he did from the video although he starts firing into one of the classrooms then walks in. After that, there are a couple of minutes in which he fires repeatedly.
By the time the first officers come in the building three minutes after Ramos entered, the firing has stopped and the screaming of children referenced in the video has ceased. The officers reported that the hallway was filled with smoke and debris from drywall in the air. Unfortunately, the editors placed lettering right over the most important point on the video and it’s difficult to see what happened by the vestibule of the two rooms. However, once the lettering is removed, the corridor in the vicinity of the vestibule appears murky. The released video is misleading because it’s so far from the two rooms and only shows the officers who came in the east and west entrances. Chief Arredondo and other officers came in through the south entrance and were in the immediate vicinity of the two classrooms the entire time, at least Arredondo was. The video shows at least two figures in the vicinity of the classrooms with four others initially entering through the west entrance, the same entrance used by Ramos. None of the six officers first on the scene in the north end of the corridor are armed with anything but pistols. While they are all wearing vests, some of which were armored, none wore rifle rated vests capable of stopping a rifle bullet. None were wearing helmets or leg protection.
The officers advance down the corridor looking for the shooter. They peer into the glass in doors. After they reach the vestibule for rooms 111 and 112, Ramos somehow becomes aware of their presence and fires a burst of fire at the doorways. Two officers are hit by flying debris, none seriously. The officers retreat out of the line of fire. It is at this time that the officers become aware that Ramos is armed with a rifle. One says “that’s an AR” meaning an AR-15.
There is no fire from Ramos and officers said they heard no screaming and no voices to indicate there were children alive inside the two rooms. It’s not until a half hour later that one of the victims calls 911 on her cell phone. (She was apparently in room 112 while Ramos was in 111.) Whether this changes the situation is debatable. Although he said he did not consider himself the on-scene commander – there were other officers in the building from both the school police and the Uvalde police department who got there the same time he did or perhaps slightly before – Chief Arredondo took action. He sent a man outside to call for a SWAT team. Ironically, the Uvalde police SWAT commander was already in the building. He also requested a Halligan tool or some other means of breaching the door, although he didn’t consider it likely they would be able to break the door down considering their construction. Arredondo said he now considered that the shooter had been neutralized in that he was inside a locked classroom and was no longer a direct threat to those in other rooms. He said he believed the most important thing was to evacuate the school and he sent officers outside to initiate an evacuation using the school windows out of fear the shooter would hear children in the hallway and fire through the walls. There were children in room 109 and their teacher had been hit by a bullet that came through the wall. Not all classrooms were occupied. Ramos entered the school at 11:33. Some children were in the cafeteria and others had been on the playground.
The authors of the report somehow jumped to the conclusion that room 111 was not locked. They saw reports that the lock wasn’t working properly and assumed the door had not been locked when Ramos arrived and that he entered through that door. The teacher in the room, who was wounded but survived, said the door was locked. He also said Ramos came into his room from room 112. The “investigators,” if they should be called that since they are lawyer/politicians, concluded the door had been unlocked and that it remained unlocked. They never acknowledged the possibility, at least not in the report, that Ramos could have found the door unlocked but then pulled it shut as he entered, thus causing it to lock. (The door was unlocked by the BORTAC agent in charge of the team so it would have been unlocked when investigators looked at it.) Chief Arredondo was close enough to the door that he could see the cylinder protruding into the door frame. The Border Patrol tactical team commander, who physically unlocked the door with a key, said the door was locked. In short, the report authors and the “experts” who scrutinized some investigative reports are second-guessing.
The criticism of the officers is that they didn’t take action soon enough but chose to protect their own lives. Media reports often mention that there were 379 officers involved, without acknowledging that some of those officers came from as far as an hour away and didn’t get there until near the time when Ramos was finally shot. The BORTAC team that finally ended the incident came from Del Rio, a border town some 70 miles to the west. Map Quest shows a driving time of one hour and six minutes. Granted, the agents were no doubt driving at much higher speeds but by the time they learned of the situation and got there, at least an hour had elapsed. There were other Border Patrol agents at the school but they were from the local station. Some were parents of children in the school. One group of Federal marshals came from San Antonio, which is 84 miles and an hour and 25 minutes away. It wasn’t until the Federal marshals arrived that a rifle rated shield became available. Other shields had been brought in but were not rifle rated.
Critics and “experts” advocate that the officers should have breached the door and rushed right in but they didn’t always have the facts. ALLERT, a law enforcement academic department at Texas State University at San Marcos, put out an unfactual report claiming officers should have used equipment they did not have. [1]
Then there is another issue: There is evidence to indicate that the Uvalde school system failed Salvador Ramos. His school records indicate that he had a learning problem but no action was ever taken to help him. He wasn’t placed in a special education class nor was he offered any tutorial help. His situation was complicated even further because of the bullying he received, not only from fellow students but also allegedly from teachers. His family says that both he and his female cousin were bullied, perhaps because they were poor. Ramos’ grandmother was a Uvalde school system employee who retired with 27 years’ service according to the report. His mother, however, who worked as a waitress and was known in the community, had a reputation among some neighbors as a drug user. His parents had split up at some point while he was a child. He had an older sister who had finished school. He was found to have researched the learning comprehension problem dyslexia, a medical condition that causes the person to misunderstand words. Dyslexia can be overcome; there have been people in history who were dyslexic, General George S. Patton for one, famed physicist Albert Einstein for another. Ramos stuttered; stuttering can be dyslexia-related. Following are symptoms of dyslexia:
Salvador Ramos exhibited many, if not all of these symptoms.
In short, there were many failures at Uvalde and a lot of people should be held responsible, including the staff and teachers at the school and even the school superintendent as well as Chief Arredondo and others.
[1] I have read the ALLERT report and found it to be mostly theory and little fact. For example, they state that Ramos entered through room 111 then went back out and shot in 112 and went back in when there is no proof of such an action. The video does not show what took place in the vestibule for the two rooms. They also state that the rooms had to be locked from outside without recognizing that the complaint about the room 111 lock was not that it wouldn’t lock, but that it took additional effort to ensure that it engaged.
Now that the Texas legislature has released a report of their investigation into the events of May 24th at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, a somewhat clearer picture is starting to emerge. For one thing, we now know that the shooter, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos (the legislature report refuses to name him – they refer to him as “the attacker”), had some kind of fixation on the idea of killing a bunch of children. Just what prompted his plan is unknown and may never be known, but there are indications that he held some kind of grudge against children at Robb, where he himself had been a student, possibly particularly fourth graders. He reportedly mentioned something to someone a few weeks before he went on his rampage about something that happened in fourth grade. His female cousin, who was his fourth-grade classmate, told investigators that he was bullied by other children. One girl tied his shoelaces together and he stood up and fell, suffering injuries in the fall. She said they were both bullied, including by teachers. (Ramos’ teacher was at the school at the time of the shooting but was in another room.) His family said he was teased because of a stutter. His former girlfriend said she believed he had been sexually abused as a child by one of his mother’s boyfriends and his mother ignored his cries.
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Whatever Ramos’ motivation was, he seems to have decided some time ago that he was going to be a school shooter, apparently whenever he could lay his hands on suitable weapons. He let his hair grow long and changed his style of dress; he began dressing in black and wearing combat boots. It was about this time that his girlfriend dumped him. (There are theories put forth that mass shooters are sex-starved loners but Ramos had girlfriends.) As for him personally, he was born in North Dakota but his parents returned to Uvalde where his mother and possibly both of his parents were from. He had an older sister. His mother was known around Uvalde, as was his grandmother. His mother worked as a waitress and had a reputation as a drug user. Their relationship was strained as was his relationship with his father. His grandmother worked for the Uvalde school district for twenty-seven years. (There were reports that she was a teacher’s aide at Robb at the time of the shooting but this seems to have been in error. The report says she was retired.)
Although he seems to have been a good student as a young child, he got off track somewhere, possibly around fourth grade, and became truant. He sometimes missed as many as 100 days in a school year. His grades were failing. The last grade he completed was ninth. He was expelled from school due to his constant truancy and failing grades. He got a job at a local Whataburger (a well-known Texas fast-food line) but was fired after a month when a female coworker complained about comments he made to her. He then got on with Wendy’s. He also worked for his grandfather in his air-conditioning business. His grandfather paid in cash. His family said he hoarded his money. They thought he planned to buy a car or get an apartment. He didn’t have a drivers license. His family said he didn’t know how to drive.
Like many other teenagers, Ramos spent time on Internet chat groups. He expressed a fondness for guns but his family says he’d never even shot one, much less owned one, other than a BB gun. He posted a video in which he was riding around town “dryfiring” at pedestrians with a BB gun. (There were earlier media reports that he was shooting people with BBs.) He posted another video of him with a dead cat in a clear plastic bag. He made hostile comments to girls in chat rooms. He had a reputation around Uvalde among other teenagers, some of whom had started referring to him as “school shooter.” A local student he knew advised him that he was being called by that name. He made several efforts to obtain a firearm. He tried to get his older sister to buy one for him but she refused. He had the money. He ended up spending some $5,000-6,000 on two AR-15 knockoff rifles along with accessories and ammunition. He told someone that he was waiting for a shipment; when it came in “something is going to happen”, something that he said would make him famous.
He bought two rifles soon after his eighteenth birthday, one from Daniel Defense, a firearms manufacturer in Savannah, Georgia that is famous for its high-quality rifles modeled on the 1950s-era AR-15. Daniel sells both to individuals and the government. He ordered the one rifle, which cost right at $2,000, from Daniel’s website but had it delivered to Oasis Outback, a local outfitter that features a barbecue restaurant as well as a sporting goods store. Federal law requires that mail-order (and Internet) gun sellers deliver their weapons to another licensed firearms dealer for the customer to pick up. He bought a second rifle from Oasis’ stock. The salesman told interviewers that he asked where he got the money for such expensive purchases and Ramos said, “I saved it.” The Oasis clerk said his conduct wasn’t unusual. However, customers who claimed to be there when he was in the store said he was “weird.” He purchased clips and other accessories from various sources and bought ammunition as well, some by mail order. His last order, a shipment of over a thousand rounds of .223 hollow-point cartridges arrived the night before he went on his spree.
Some believed that he planned to go to the elementary school the day graduating seniors went there to walk through the hallways. If so, he missed it, perhaps because his ammunition hadn’t arrived yet. The next day was the last day of school for elementary students. He was upset with his grandmother because she had told him she was going to remove him from her cellphone family plan. She had also banned his rifles from her house. His uncle agreed to keep at least one of them but he evidently spirited it away and had both rifles at his grandmother’s house. Whether shooting his grandmother was part of his plan is not certain, but he told a young German girl that he was “friends” with on the Internet that he was going to shoot her. After he shot her in the face, he got back on his phone and told the girl he had shot her. She replied “cool” but later deleted the post. However, it was on Ramos’ phone.
After shooting his grandmother, he jumped in her truck (even though he had no license) and drove toward the school a few blocks away. His grandmother’s neighbor called police. A video released by Texas media – without permission from investigators – shows the truck crashing into a concrete drainage ditch next to the school yard. The video, which came from the funeral home across the street, shows two men walk toward the truck, then turn around and start running away after he shot at them. His family believes these are the first shots he ever fired. They don’t think he had ever fired a firearm of any kind before. His uncle said he didn’t even know how to insert the clip into the rifle, he fumbled with it and dropped it on the floor. The video then shows him walking toward the school. He jumps over a five-foot fence (such fences are NOT common around Texas schools. There’s a school only a few thousand feet from my house and there is no fence around it) after throwing a bag of ammunition over it.
There were children outside playing and a coach dressed in black was outside with one group. Police had rushed toward the school after being alerted by the grandmother’s neighbor. One officer saw the coach and thought he was the shooter. Fortunately, he didn’t fire. Teachers alerted the school that there was someone on campus shooting and an announcement was made for students and teachers to get in their rooms and lock down. School personnel thought it was a “bail-out,” which is common in Uvalde. The town is only fifty miles from the border. Vehicles carrying illegal immigrants are chased into town by law enforcement. They hit something or are stopped and the illegals “bail-out” and take off running. Some are armed.
Ramos walked to the western entrance to the west building – Robb Elementary has several buildings connected by walkways. Video from a school security camera shows him coming through the door. For some reason, he left his bag and one of his rifles outside. The report claims that all three doors to the building were unlocked, a violation of school policy that called for them to be locked at all times. The doors are equipped with automatic locking doors but they can be rendered ineffective with a key. Someone had unlocked the doors, perhaps to make it easier for children and teachers to go in and out during recess or maybe because it was the last day of school and there were a lot of visitors on campus. Ramos had recently talked to his cousin’s son, who was an elementary student, about their activities. The video shows him coming through the door then it switches to show him walking some 70-80 feet down the hallway to rooms 111 and 112 where he starts shooting and walks through the door of one of the classrooms. He only hesitates for a second before he disappears. One of the rooms is his former classroom. The report states that several school employees said that the lock to room 111 was faulty, that it had to be forcibly locked rather than locking automatically as soon as the door came shut. They DO NOT say that the door could not be locked. The school, as are most Texas schools, is equipped with self-locking doors that can only be opened by someone with a key or card reader. The report is unclear whether or not the Robb locks used card readers, they apparently had keys. Several school staff and students knew the door didn’t always lock; they often went there when it was unoccupied to use a printer. This led the investigators to conclude that the door to room 111 “may” not have been locked.
Just which classroom Ramos entered is unclear. There is a vestibule with the doorways to rooms 111 and 112. The teacher in room 111 was wounded but survived. He told interviewers that Ramos entered room 112 first then came into his adjoining room and started shooting. He also stated that the door was locked. The legislature investigators decided he must have entered room 111 under the assumption that it was unlocked. Ramos proceeded to fire off clip after clip. Law enforcement estimated he fired “at least” 100 of the 142 spent cartridges later found in the two rooms and killed and wounded most, if not all, of the victims. The video captures the sound of the firing but the sounds of screaming are edited out. By the time law enforcement got into the building some three minutes after Ramos entered, he had already done most of his shooting.
The video is shot from the north end of the corridor some 80 feet from the doors to the two rooms and does not show the whole picture. Two groups of officers, all from the Uvalde police and school police, entered the building at about the same time, one group from the north and one from the south, including the chief of the school police and a police lieutenant who was acting chief since the chief was on vacation. (He was in contact with him by phone.) The head of the police SWAT team also entered the building shortly after the shooting. The officers who came in from the north advance down the hall to the two rooms where Ramos is believed to be. One, who is in civilian clothes wearing a police vest, appears to be trying the door when a volley of shots are fired. Bullets tear through the wall around the door and perhaps the door itself. Several officers are hit by fragments, though none are seriously injured. The officers retreat to the end of the corridor. However, the other group does not retreat. The video doesn’t show them clearly because they are too far away. Occasionally, legs and lower bodies appear almost as shadows.
The media and politicians accuse the officers, all of whom are local Uvalde residents, of inaction. Some had relatives and friends inside those rooms. One officer’s wife is one of the teachers who was killed. To accuse them of inaction is inaccurate and callous. Although no one seems to have assumed responsibility as the on-scene commander, they were taking action, including calling for a tactical team with the necessary equipment to breach the door without exposing the officers to fire. The officers, most of whom were armed with pistols, were in a very difficult situation. They were facing a shooter armed with a semiautomatic high-powered rifle (any centerfire rifle is high-powered) inside a room possibly filled with children they could not see. Several officers came in with rifles but they were helpless as they had no target to shoot at. (Other officers came in, some armed with rifles. A total of nineteen officers were reportedly in the hall by the two classrooms.) Ramos, on the other hand, could fire through the walls and possibly hit someone. The suggestion that they could have broken a window and shot him from outside is not exactly sound. Ramos was inside and less hampered by visibility than those outside who were attempting to see in a darkened room. He also had the advantage of being able to fire at anyone trying to see in a window.
Critics cry that the officers had armor and shields. This is only partially true. While they were wearing vests, they only protect the upper body and they cannot stop rifle bullets. They do not protect the head and extremities. It wasn’t until almost half an hour after Ramos entered the school that the first shields arrived and they were not designed to protect against rifle fire. They have also been criticized for not trying to batter the door down. First, anyone trying to batter the door would have been exposed to rifle fire. Second, the doors were solid steel designed to open outward. The frames were also steel. Battering rams, which they did not have, are effective against doors that open inward, as most doors do, but not against outward opening doors. Sledgehammers have also been suggested but whoever might attempt to use one would have been putting themselves in mortal danger. Yes, police procedures for school shootings call for neutralizing the shooter as soon as possible without regard for personal safety but procedures are written by staff on desks who most likely have never been in a shooting situation in their life. Plans and procedures go out the window when reality sets in as it did at Uvalde.
Until I saw the video, I was under the impression that the walls were made of concrete blocks. However, they appear to be sheetrock. The school was originally built in the 1950s and the west building was added in the eighties. While concrete would at least partially block a bullet, sheetrock will not. A teacher in room 109, two rooms away from room 111, was hit by a bullet that came through the wall. The officers spoke in whispers and kept their movements to a minimum to prevent Ramos from knowing where they were and firing through the walls.
Over the hour and seventeen minutes from the time Ramos entered the building until he was killed, hundreds of law enforcement personnel showed up at the school, almost 400 in all. Most were Border Patrol and Texas Department of Public Safety personnel – state troopers – who came in from surrounding counties. (Texas Rangers are DPS but the report doesn’t show any Rangers separately.) Officers from sheriffs and police departments in other counties and cities arrived, as did Federal officers who came from San Antonio some eighty miles away. There was a large contingent of Border Patrol agents, which isn’t surprising since Uvalde is only some 50-70 miles from the Mexican border, depending on which direction. It’s closest at Del Rio. There is a Border Patrol office in Uvalde and a number of Border Patrol officers live in and around the town. One off-duty Border Patrol agent borrowed a shotgun from the barber who was cutting his hair when word of the shootings was announced. He proceeded to the school and went inside and got his child, although which part of the school he actually went in hasn’t been revealed; Robb Elementary, which includes second through fourth grades, has some fourteen buildings on the campus.
Although the media has accused law enforcement of doing nothing, they were actually very involved. Some 500 students were brought out of the school. They didn’t want to risk bringing the children in the west building out into the halls where Ramos might fire at them through the walls so they brought them out through the windows. News accounts don’t reveal where the children were taken although they seem to have been taken to a central location, possibly the cafeteria or gymnasium, so school officials and law enforcement could get an accurate count before they were released to their parents. Parents and others who gathered at the school were kept at a distance both for their protection and to avoid chaos and confusion. Media has described the scene at the school as “chaotic” and while that might have been true outside since hundreds of LEs had shown up and had nothing to do, the scene in the hall by the classroom is anything but chaotic. Officers are waiting patiently for tactical personnel to arrive. Sharpshooters are on station with their rifles aimed at the doors in case Ramos attempted to come out. Some officers expressed concern about the possibility of being caught in a crossfire if officers started shooting from different directions.
Finally, over an hour after Ramos entered the school, the Border Patrol TAC team, or BORTAC, arrives. They are carrying the first rifle-proof shield to arrive at the school. US Marshalls had brought it in about a half hour before. They also have a device for opening doors. However, the BORTAC commander is advised to try it on another door first. He concludes that using the device would be too dangerous as the officers would be exposed to Ramos’ fire for too long. He elects to use a key to open the door. The legislatures concluded, based on conclusions from law enforcement personnel who weren’t there, that the door to room 111 was unlocked. However, the teacher in the room said it was. Chief Arredondo of the school police said it was. He could see the lock protruding into the door sill. The BORTAC commander, who actually opened the door, said it was. The claim that the door was not locked is based purely on conjecture. The irony is that the investigators never even addressed the possibility that even if the door wasn’t locked when Ramos found it, he might very well have pulled it shut behind him when he went in the room. The door was definitely closed. The “effort” to lock the door was probably simply tugging on it to make sure the lock engaged.
There were several rings of keys floating around. Chief Arredondo had a ring and some of the other officers had keys but none of them worked in other classroom doors. The principal and other school staff supposedly had master keys but weren’t consulted. Regardless, someone finally found a key that worked. The BORTAC commander opened the door and, using the rifle shield, the team rushed through the door and shot Ramos dead.
Some ten months ago, the nation and some of the world, at least those on social media, were obsessed with the case of Gabrielle Petito, a young new Long Island woman and wannabe social influencer, who disappeared while on a trip with her fiancée, Brian Laundrie. Laundrie, Laundry; Petito, Potato – tennesseeflyboy (wordpress.com) Laundrie also disappeared – but was “seen” all over the country, particularly along the Appalachian Trail in the Smoky Mountains of Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee. Ms. Petito’s remains, or what was left of them, was found a couple of weeks after her parents reported her to New York law enforcement as missing and Laundrie’s remains were also found a few weeks later after flood waters subsided in the park near his home where he had gone hiking. Among his belongings was a notebook. FBI specialists were able to replicate the pages, or some of them, and the FBI, who has sole jurisdiction over the case since Ms. Petito died on Federal land, issued a cryptic statement that Laundrie “took responsibility” for her death. The young couple’s belongings were recently returned to the two affected families’ attorneys, including Laundrie’s notebook which the Laundrie family attorney released to the media, at least in part including the last pages in which he related generally what had happened. Her death is shocking to say the least.
At this point let me comment on my background – I grew up on a farm in rural West Tennessee and spent most of my time out of doors. Later in life I became a hiker, backpacker and caver in northeast Kentucky where I lived for a time. As an Air Force aircrewmember, I completed extensive survival training in the mountains of Washington State and Idaho and sea survival training off of Okinawa. I also had a neighbor die of exposure recently practically in my backyard. I’ve been in every state in the Union as well as several foreign countries and have hiked in the Rockies. I find Laundrie’s explanation perfectly plausible.
According to what Laundrie wrote in his last minutes before he put a pistol to his head and blew his brains out, he and Petito were exploring along Spread Creek in the Bridger-Teton National Forest south of Yellowstone National Park when she slipped and fell in the water and suffered injury to her forehead. Night fell quickly and temperatures dropped. She was in agony and after failing to carry her back to where their van was parked, he decided to put her out of her misery. Naturally, those who had already made their minds up that Laundrie was an abuser and had killed her in an act of domestic violence pooh-pooh his account. However, as an experienced outdoorsman, I see nothing wrong with it. Barring evidence to contradict it, I must accept his account at face value. The FBI seems to have.
Laundrie and Petito were camped on a spur of the main forest road leading into the Spread Creek dispersed camping area. The Forestry Service designates camp sites where people may camp for specified periods. Spread Creek drains from east to west into the Snake River about 3.5-4 miles from where Petito’s body was found. He doesn’t say whether they went exploring upstream or downstream from where their van was parked. He only says they were caught by darkness and were making their way toward their vehicle when he heard her cry out in pain. The creek bed is over 1,000 feet wide although the stream, which is divided into forks in places, is only a few feet wide except when it’s filled with water during wet weather. Darkness fell quickly. They were east of the Grand Tetons and thus in their shadow. Concerned about the sudden approach of darkness, they hurried toward their van. She fell in the water.
He didn’t see her fall but heard her cry out. It took him awhile to find her in the darkening twilight. When he did, he picked her up and started carrying her toward their van. Her clothes were soaking wet and she was shivering. He carried her as far as he could until he could carry her no further. He had apparently carried her to within 500-1,000 feet of their van but could carry her no further. He put her down and built a fire. He doesn’t say how he built it but he was an experienced backpacker and probably had matches. Although the coroner didn’t say much when he announced his findings – Wyoming coroners are prohibited by law from revealing the results of an autopsy – he did acknowledge that Petito had “blunt force” trauma to her head along with evidence of strangulation. This is consistent with Laundrie’s description of a growing knot on her forehead.
Falling in a stream is not uncommon, especially since she was hurrying and in dwindling daylight. Laundrie says the bump was on her forehead, which may indicate she fell forward and hit a rock. Spread Creek is very rocky. He also says the bump was rapidly enlarging, an indication of bleeding under the skin. She was shaking and complained about her feet hurting. How Petito was dressed is unclear. Regardless, her clothes were soaking wet after her fall in the stream. He believed she was becoming hypothermic, which is very well possible. Hypothermia is a cooling of the body. An internal body temperature of 50 degrees F is fatal. One “expert” interviewed by FOX News claimed the temperature in Wyoming then was “only” in the high forties, which is definitely cold enough to cause hypothermia, especially if the person is wearing wet clothing. As an Air Force crewmember, I often flew over cold Arctic waters. I attended survival training and refresher training several times. We were taught that our survival time in such waters without an exposure suit, a rubber suit in which some water is allowed in to form a layer of insulation, is measured in minutes. A few years ago a neighbor died of hypothermia almost in my back yard. It was on New Year’s Eve. This is the Texas Gulf Coast and it wasn’t that cold that night, probably in the forties. He went to a New Year’s Eve party at another neighbor’s house. He was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. His wife left him and went home. The next morning someone saw him sitting with his back propped against a fence. Several people passed by before someone went over to check on him. He was dead. He died only a few hundred feet from his house.
I had my own experience with hypothermia one January night. I flew a load of automotive parts, Holly carburetors, from the factory in West Tennessee to Detroit. The Piper Navajo I was flying had a Janitrol gasoline heater. The heater worked part of the way up but didn’t come on at all on my return trip. I spent over 2 ½ hours in the cockpit in temperatures below zero. I have no idea what the temperature was in the airplane but it was COLD. I was dressed warmly, or so I thought. I had on flannel pajama bottoms under corduroy slacks with a flannel shirt under a sweater. To top it, I wore my L.L. Bean Stadium Coat, a long pile-lined coat with a hood. I also had on a stocking cap, gloves and insulated hunting boots. Still, I got cold, really cold. I was shivering. Every minute seemed like hours until my home airport finally came in sight. After I landed and parked the airplane, I went outside and started my car then went back inside the office, a large room with a gas heater, to do my paperwork. I continued shivering. I shivered all the way home even though I had the heater on full blast. I didn’t stop shivering until I got in a warm bath my wife drew for me. Gabby Petito was shivering while Brian Laundrie “spooned” against her in front of a fire he had built.
Petito was in agony. Her head was hurting and she was fading out of consciousness. Fearing she had a concussion, Laundrie kept waking her up. She berated him for bringing her back to the agony she was enduring. He wanted to leave her by the fire and go try to find their car and get help, although just where he would have found it is uncertain. They were next to a creek bank in a National Forest in Wyoming, some thirty miles from Jackson, the nearest town. He doesn’t mention trying to call on a cell phone. Chances are, there was no service since it was a remote area. Gabby wouldn’t let him leave her. She was afraid the fire would go out. She was unable to move and wouldn’t be able to put wood on it. Laundrie feared the same thing, that the fire would go out and she’d die of hypothermia. He didn’t know what to do.
Laundrie was in the worst kind of predicament. He was thirty miles from the nearest civilization in a national forest with no facilities. His partner, his fiancé, was seriously injured and in agony. He had no way to relieve her pain and felt unable to leave her side. He had no idea of the extent of her injuries other than the knot on her head, which was growing larger, and that she was in excruciating pain. He does not state that she asked him to kill her but the implication is certainly there. He doesn’t say how he did it – he merely says, “I ended her life.”
Immediately after he did it, he felt he’d made a terrible mistake. It occurred to him that he should have built a fire as soon as he found her rather than trying to carry her to the car. How far away they were from the car when she fell is unknown. Her remains were found several weeks later on the side of Spread Creek less than 1,000 feet from where their van showed up in a passerby’s video. He does not say what he did immediately after her death other than to say that he “panicked”, although he doesn’t state if it was before or after he killed her. He apparently decided right then to kill himself but he wanted to go back home and see his parents and other family first. Just when he killed Petito is unknown nor is it known when he left for Florida. All that’s known is that he returned to his parent’s home on September 1; a traffic camera captured the van coming off the interstate at 10:30 AM.
Just what Laundrie told his parents when he returned home without Petito is unknown. Either he or they contacted an attorney they knew in New York and he told them not to talk to anyone, including Petito’s family. The situation has been complicated because her parents and stepfather have filed a wrongful death suit against the Laundries, although how they can expect to win such a suit is unclear since they had nothing to do with her death. They hired an attorney soon after they reported her missing and set up a foundation and started collecting money from the public immediately after her remains were found. They are linking her death to domestic violence even though Brian’s suicide note states that she was injured in a fall and he killed her to end her misery. The suit is ongoing and the attorneys are restricted as to what they may make public.
The FBI put out a statement that Brian “took responsibility” for her death in a suicide note several months ago. Both the Laundries and the Petito/Schmidt families were advised of the contents. Schmidt’s attorney alleges that there is another document “on an electronic device” that is different. The Laundrie’s attorney has acknowledged that there is something else. The contents of that document have yet to be revealed. Unless there is something dramatically different about it, I see no reason to doubt Laundrie’s account. He was the only one who knew what happened.
Since the tragic shooting deaths of nineteen school children and two teachers at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas on May 24, there has been a lot reported in the media about the events, nearly all of it wrong. This is not surprising since, for all their crowing about being the source of truth, media knows absolutely NOTHING except what they’re told and what they publish is mostly the product of their own mind. After word of the shooting got out, a massive army of media descended on the small Texas community and reporters proceeded to interview anyone they could get to talk. They probably interviewed live oak trees if they couldn’t find a person. (They’d have interviewed cactus except the only cacti in that part of the country are prickly pear and they’re notorious for their silence.) All that could be said with certainty was that a Uvalde teenager named Salvador Ramos entered the school with a rifle and started shooting. Besides that, things were sketchy. Even the Texas Department of Public Safety, the state law enforcement agency, failed to get the facts straight before the commander, Steven McCraw, conducted a press conference in Uvalde three days later. Some of the things McCraw said turned out to be different than he reported. McCraw said that Ramos entered the school through a door a teacher had propped open with a rock. It turned out the teacher hadn’t left the door open; video showed she had pulled the self-locking door closed. He also said that Uvalde school district chief of police Pete Arredondo had assumed the role of on-scene commander and that he had ordered a pullback and prevented officers from “breaching” the classroom because the incident had gone from a shooting in progress to a hostage situation. This has also turned out to be untrue. McCraw also stated that “based on hindsight,” Arredondo “made the wrong decision” and has caused massive criticism of Uvalde law enforcement by people who had no clue what had actually happened. The media in many articles left out McCraw’s “based on hindsight” comment along with his other comment “I was not there.” Media took the word of parents who came to the school and saw members of law enforcement outside and assumed no one was going after the shooter.
Now that Arredondo has told his story to the media, a clearer picture has emerged, at least it’s clearer to those who don’t have their own preconceived notions of what happened. There has been a lot of “woulda, shoulda, coulda” on the part of media, political pundits, and “experts,” none of whom were present. They point to a protocol developed by the FBI after the Columbine, Colorado shootings – by an FBI agent who has never been involved in a mass shooting in her entire life – that establishes that law enforcement must rush in and kill the shooter without regard to their own life. Unfortunately, protocols are theories, not reality, usually advocated by those who have never been there and never will be, and what law enforcement is taught in classes and seminars may be entirely different from real-life situations such as the one at Uvalde.
Just how Ramos got into the building is still not clear. Since it’s been confirmed by video footage that the teacher who allegedly left the door propped open actually closed it, it’s been theorized that the self-locking door somehow failed to lock. Now, my wife is a Texas teacher and I know for a fact that outside doors automatically lock when they’re closed and the only way to get in is with a key. Although she’s a certified teacher, she now substitutes. She frequently mentions that she had to find someone with a key to let her class back inside the building after recess. None of the articles I’ve read – including the one linked above – consider that Ramos may have actually had a key to the building. Not a lot of attention has been paid to it in the media, but his grandmother is allegedly a Uvalde school district employee, and she worked at Robb Elementary as a teacher’s aide at the time of the shooting. Why she wasn’t at the school at the time is unclear. Perhaps she had the day off or perhaps she went home for something during lunch. Regardless, Ramos shot her in the face before he went to the school. He got from her house to the school in her truck, which means he had her keys. Whether or not he took the keys when he jumped out of the truck after driving it into a drainage ditch has not been addressed.
Although numerous articles have been written implying that law enforcement left the building and did not reenter it until well over an hour after the shooting started, McCraw pointed out that officers entered the building within two minutes after Ramos and a total of nineteen officers were in that particular section of the building. He did not make clear that there were officers in the building the entire time – including Chief Arredondo, who was one of the first officers in the building and did not leave until after all of the dead and wounded children and teachers had been carried out. Although parents implied that law enforcement did nothing, they had actually evacuated the building, except for the two adjoining classrooms where Ramos did his killing and wounding. Some five hundred (500) children and staff were brought out of the building during the hour and seventeen minutes from the time Ramos entered the building until he was shot and killed. Just where they were taken is unclear, although law enforcement apparently kept them somewhere, perhaps in the gymnasium, in order to make sure that all were accounted for. The parents and onlookers outside had no clue what was going on in the building.
Many articles implied that Ramos was continually shooting and killing kids the entire time up until he was killed. McCraw made clear in his press conference that law enforcement believed the killing took place in the first five minutes when Ramos fired at least a hundred rounds. (Around 120-125 empty cartridges were found in the classroom and 22 others were found outside – he fired at people in the parking lot at the funeral home across the street and possibly at the school building.) After that, he fired sporadically at the doors where he knew there were law enforcement officers waiting outside. Some of his bullets penetrated the steel door and others went through the wall into the opposite wall. Much has been made over Arredondo not having a radio with him. He said in his interview that he left them in his vehicle because they would get in the way as he rushed inside to confront the shooter. Even though he didn’t have a radio, he had a cell phone and was in contact with his office and local law enforcement. He was NOT out of communication as the media has implied.
Once the word got out about the shooter, dozens of law enforcement personnel rushed toward the school. Some came from as far away as San Antonio some eighty miles away – including US marshals. A Border Patrol tactical team came from Del Rio, a border town some sixty miles due west of Uvalde. It would have taken them an hour or more to get there from the time they left which means that, other than local law enforcement, most didn’t arrive until just before Ramos was killed. Other Border Patrol personnel were in the town; many live there. Some were off duty but had children in the school as did members of local law enforcement. One of the slain teachers was married to a local officer. Much has been made of how one Border Patrolman took his barber’s shotgun and proceeded to the school and went in and got his children. (He did not get them out of one of the two classrooms where Ramos was holding up.) Those same articles fail to mention that law enforcement were in the process of evacuating the school while being careful not to attract Ramos’ attention. Those in the classrooms in the section where Ramos was in a locked classroom were brought out through the windows – the officers in the hallway didn’t want them to be brought out into the hall where they could be fired on by Ramos – .223 bullets can penetrate concrete. Media and political pundits have focused on a woman who claims she drove forty miles after she heard of the shooting and was arrested by “Federal” officers for interfering with police. She claims that after they let her go, she went “inside the school” and got her children. Her story does not jive with the fact that children had been brought out of the school by the time she would have arrived. However, they were being kept away from the parents until a determination had been made that all children were accounted for. She also claimed that law enforcement “threatened her” if she went public but the facts are that the woman is on probation and defying law enforcement is clearly a violation.
There were actually two groups of law enforcement outside the classrooms where Ramos had locked himself in. Arredondo, who grew up in Uvalde and attended Robb Elementary, had entered the building through the south entrance along with a Uvalde officer and was outside the southernmost of the two classrooms while another group of local Uvalde police (possibly including Arredondo’s subordinates) had come in through the main entrance and entered the hallway from the north. They were pointed to the classrooms where the shooter had gone by teachers. Ramos fired at the group on the north and wounded two of them, but their wounds were sleight and they returned to the hallway outside the classroom after temporarily withdrawing.
They had no means of breaching the reinforced steel doors; the doors open outward and couldn’t be battered in. They also have steel door jambs rather than the usual wood. Some have raised the question of using shotguns to shoot out the locks but this requires special shells with clay rounds inside and some articles indicate that only specially designed shotguns should be used. Arredondo says that he called for breaching equipment along with a sniper and armored shields but the breaching equipment never arrived. He and the other officers tried for some time to find the right key to open the classroom doors. Apparently, the school does not have a single master key but each door is keyed separately.
Although Arredondo’s interview doesn’t say, apparently the Border Patrol tactical team arrived at some point with tactical equipment, including shields, and came in the hall. Someone in the group on the north end of the hall finally found the right key and notified Arredondo. Allegedly, someone told the Border Patrolmen through their headsets not to enter the classroom but they chose to ignore it. (There may have been a jurisdictional issue.) Someone opened the door and they rushed inside. Ramos started shooting at them but one finally killed him.
Much is being made over the fact that Ramos was able to buy two AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles manufactured by a Georgia firm called Daniel’s Defense. Although they fire the same ammunition as AR-15s, they are actually knockoffs and sell for twice as much as most AR-15s and AR-15 clones, which sell for around $800-$900. Just what makes them more expensive is unclear. The company manufactures rifles for law enforcement and the military as well as for consumers. Ramos’ age is often brought up – Federal law prohibits anyone under the age of 18 from purchasing ANY firearm. The age limit for firearms purchasing was implemented in 1968 in the wake of the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations.[1] That Ramos was able to purchase the two rifles is only indirectly related to the shootings – thousands of 18-year-olds purchase firearms, including semiautomatic rifles, each year and only very rarely is one used in a so-called “mass” shooting.
Contrary to popular belief, the AR-15 and other military-looking semiautomatic rifles are NOT assault rifles! The definition of an assault rifle is one that can fire fully automatically. Nor is the AR-15 the first military-style semiautomatic rifle or even military rifle available to the public. Civilians have been able to purchase M-1 carbines since they became surplus after World War II. Along with the larger caliber M-1 Garand rifle, the M-1 carbine is semiautomatic. It also is capable of firing as many as thirty rounds if a 30-round clip was used. Originally, the carbine came with a 15-round clip while the more powerful Garand used an eight-round clip. The M-1 was initially intended to have a fully automatic feature but the feature was left off due to production considerations. A later version with full-automatic capability was produced as the M-2. Civilians are allowed to own M-1 carbines but the M-2 requires special licensing due to 1934 Federal firearms laws that prohibit the ownership of unlicensed automatic rifles. (The same laws prohibit ownerships of shotguns with less than a 26-inch barrel.)
Air Force chief of staff Curtis Lemay chose the AR-15 as the official rifle of the Air Force to replace the carbine in 1963. Carbines were issued to Air Force air police security forces as well as aircrews and other Air Force personnel who might be exposed to combat and all male Air Force recruits were required to qualify with it in basic training. I went through Air Force basic training at Lackland AFB, Texas in July and early August 1963 and, like every other recruit, was given training on the disassembly and reassembly and cleaning of the carbine then went to the range to fire it. I was looking forward to firing the carbine as I’d had an interest in firearms all my life. My dad had a .22 rifle and several shotguns and I started hunting at a very early age (9 years old). I was given my first firearm, a 20-gauge Ithaca pump shotgun at age eleven (I still have it.) I started hunting squirrels with the .22 at around 12 and fired the 30/06 automatic my dad bought to hunt deer. I didn’t do as well with the carbine as I thought I would. At that time the Air Force used standard targets with bullseyes and all of my shots weren’t in the center of the bullseye. Still, I did okay. After firing, we took our carbines to a nearby shed and broke them down and cleaned them. That time on the firing range was my only exposure to the carbine.
After basic and technical training as an aircraft mechanic, I went to Pope AFB, NC. Sometime the next spring we were told that the Air Force had purchased the M-16 to replace the carbine. I knew that the M-16 was the military designation for the AR-15 but that the military had ordered new features – including a selector switch on the side to allow full-automatic fire. We went to the range and went through the same training as we had at Lackland – instruction on the weapon itself followed by instructions and practice breaking it down and cleaning it – then fired it from the standard Air Force positions, prone, standing and kneeling. The Air Force had gone to silhouette targets rather than conventional bullseyes. The instructor demonstrated the full-automatic feature by firing at a concrete block. The block exploded as it was hit by numerous rounds – I could have done the same thing with a single round from a 30/06. We did not fire it on full-automatic; we only fired single-fired rounds. We were also admonished that firing full-automatic for more than a couple of bursts would burn up the barrel and cause the weapon to jam.
We were also given instruction on the 5.56 millimeter bullet used by the M-16/AR-15. The bullet is actually .223 caliber, which makes it only slightly larger than the .22 bullets I had hunted with and used in the .22 rifle I have in my closet (and which is semiautomatic with a 15-round magazine.) The .223 caliber is not new. Hunting rifles with .222 cartridges to hunt varmints such as groundhogs have been around a long time. However, they were forbidden for use to hunt deer, which required a larger caliber bullet. Although the bullet is the same size but longer, the .223 cartridge is much larger than the common .22, which makes it “high-powered.” (The “high-powered” term is in relation to the smaller .22 and pistol cartridges such as those used in the .30-caliber carbine.)
At the time, the Air Force was the only service using the M-16. Army special forces had acquired some and liked it because of it’s light weight but Army and Marine infantry were using the M-14, a larger .30-caliber rifle. They started issuing M-16s to troops after LBJ sent troops to South Vietnam in 1965. I later went on flying status as an aircrew member and started flying missions in Southeast Asia. The two enlisted men on our C-130 crew were required to carry an M-16 as well as a .38-caliber revolver. All Air Force aircrew were required to carry a pistol on combat and combat support missions. At one point the Air Force ran out of .38s and we carried .45 automatics. We went to the range and learned to clean the pistols then fired them for qualification. I checked out a M-16 and pistol every time we went into the combat zone. Later on they decided we didn’t need the M-16s since we were no longer going into secure fields but we continued carrying the pistol. Fortunately, I never had to fire either one in combat.
With that said, I don’t feel there is a need for people to have AR-15s and other semiautomatic rifles, except for one thing which I’ll get into. I’ve only known a few people who owned an AR-15, AK-47 or similar rifle. Although I no longer hunt, my brothers and their sons are hunters. To the best of my knowledge, all of their rifles are bolt-action. I don’t think they even own an automatic except, possibly, for the automatic 30/06 our dad bought back in the late 50s when he started hunting deer. My uncle had a similar rifle but it was a pump rather than an automatic. AR-15s aren’t really suitable for deer hunting. Someone in Uvalde mentioned that he hunts pigs with an AR-15. Wild hogs are rampant in Texas, to the point they have become pests. AR-15-type rifles are popular with some people for a couple of reasons, with one being that the LOOK LIKE military rifles. Actually, there have been actual military rifles available to civilians all along. Some, like the M-1 Garand, are much more powerful than the AR-15. So are most high-powered hunting rifles. In fact, Army and Marine snipers used common hunting rifles with telescopic sights in Vietnam. Sniper rifles have since been developed but they are basically modifications of hunting rifle designs. AR-15s and AR-15 clones are also popular with target shooters. I’m sure it gives them a thrill to shoot at a watermelon and watch it explode (watermelons and other fruits will explode when hit by a .22 long rifle too.)
Now for the really big elephant in the room – the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Only those who wish to construe it otherwise don’t accept that it gives the right of ownership of weapons to ALL Americans. The amendment, which reads “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” was adopted by the first US Congress in 1791 after a bitter fight over ratification of the Constitution in 1788-89. Although most Americans seem to have the idea that once the Constitution was drawn up, everything was hunky-dory, In reality, there was strong opposition to the new Constitution, particularly in Virginia where the famed patriot Patrick Henry was in strong opposition as were George Mason and James Monroe. Opposition was so strong that James Madison was in danger of losing the election to the First US Congress to Monroe or a New England Baptist minister named John Leland who pastored a church in Orange. Madison finally convinced Leland to drop out of the race and support him by promising to introduce a bill of rights.
One of the key points of the anti-Federalists, as those in opposition to the Constitution and a Federal government were called, was the maintaining of a standing army. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution provided for a standing army under the command of the President, who would also command the militia when called into Federal service (which meant the Constitution recognized the militia.) By definition, the militia act of 1792 defined the militia as all able-bodied white men from age 18-45. During the debate over the Constitution, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, in particular, advocated that the militia would stand as a defense against any standing army that a president or Congress might attempt to use to suppress the rights of citizens. Hamilton, who was an immigrant from the British West Indies and was commissioned in the Continental Army and served as Washington’s aide de camp, proposed that the militia be part of the army while Madison saw the militia as a safeguard against it. Leftists zero in on the militia clause as the intent of the Second Amendment and link it to the modern National Guard when Madison intended just the opposite.
Hamilton’s views were no doubt prompted by many Continentals lack of confidence in militias during the just concluded Revolution. They saw the militias as ill-disciplined and likely to break and run when under fire in a war where the Continental Army was trying to fight on British terms, meaning standing in lines on fields and shooting back and forth at each other in European style. Hamilton’s service was all in the North and he wasn’t present at Kings Mountain, where a force of “overmountain men” from the Carolina and Virginia frontier which later became Kentucky and Tennessee, routed a larger force of British and loyalists under Major Patrick Ferguson, or Cowpens, where militia under General Daniel Morgan fired the first volley at British troops under Lt. Colonel Banastre Tarleton then pretended to break and run, thus suckering the British into a trap. Militias, particularly those from the Carolinas and Virginias, were often made up of men who had fought Indians and were used to firing from concealment. In many respects, they were the forerunners of modern warfare as nations moved away from the European-style toward armies trained to fight without needlessly exposing themselves.
Madison, who was born and raised in Virginia, saw the militia as local organizations that could be called up by the states in opposition to the Federals. He made this clear in his missive now known as Federalist 46 in which he said: “Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the state governments with the people on their side would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield in the United States an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops.” Madison also recognized that much of the United States was still frontier and that arms, particularly firearms, were needed both to hunt for food and for defense against hostile Indians as well as outlaws. There can be no doubt that Madison saw the necessity of prohibiting Congress from passing any laws that would disarm American citizens.
Opposition to independent state militias rose after the War Between the States when the seceded states were able to quickly raise an army of men. The Federals also depended on state militias and volunteers raised by the states to fill out the Union army. However, it wasn’t until after the Spanish-American War that Congress incorporated the National Guard into the US Army. The Militia Act of 1903, commonly called the Dick Act after Ohio Republican Charles Dick, an Ohio National Guardsman who had served during the Spanish-American War, effectively made the National Guard part of the United States Army. In the modern military, Army Guard and Air National Guard troops are extensions of the active duty forces.
I see the AR-15 and other semiautomatic rifles as important to James Madison’s original intent. Although they are not military weapons per se, they are equal to the M-16 and its successors in every respect. Democrats and liberals (both words are oxymorons) are scared shitless by the millions of firearms in American civilian hands. No one really knows how many AR-15s and AR-15 clones are in civilian hands, but estimates indicate there are well over 20 million. President Joe Biden recently commented that if Americans were to revolt, they’d be going up against tanks and F-15s. Mr. Biden apparently is not aware that a very large percentage of the American arsenal is in state hands, and in the event of a revolution, many National Guard, Air National Guard and possibly active duty and Reserve units would join it. That’s the main reason modern military commanders are trying to purge their units of men and women who don’t go along with current “woke” political thought. Democrats like Beto O’Rourke want to confiscate every firearm in America because they see armed Americans as a barrier to their goals. They’re using Uvalde as ammunition for their efforts.
[1] Just how age became a factor at that time is unclear since neither of the accused shooters was under age 18. They were both adults.
tennesseeflyboy 