The Emmett Till Memorial Commission originally planned for only a single river site sign to mark the spot of the body’s recovery. It was to be placed at Graball Landing, 2.6 miles downstream of this site. This sign was a last-minute addition to direct tourists down the lonely River Road towards Graball.  When the Commission was writing this sign, however, they used a story they had originally planned to use for the sign at Graball Landing. They crafted a small, mostly accurate narrative that noted that the body was discovered by fishermen “at this location” after three days in the water. It noted further that the body was weighted down with a cotton-gin fan and that it was identified by the Till family ring still clinging to the body. All of this was true.

Unfortunately, the Commission scrapped their accurate draft based on faulty information from historian Plater Robinson. Based on information that he learned firsthand from Simon Garrett (a mortician from Greenwood), Robinson fundamentally rewrote the sign. In a strongly worded letter to the Commission, Robinson insisted that, according to Garrett: "The body was never in the river, which was twenty yards away. Instead, the body was rolled down the levee into the “drift” (the area between the river and the levee). Heavy rains had bloated the river. When the water subsided, Emmett’s body was revealed. There was a black community (houses, church, and cemetery) a few feet away." This was a novel theory! In the fifty-three years between the murder and this communiqué, the fact that Till’s body was found in the river had never been questioned. The fact that the ETMC rewrote their sign according to these suggestions is a measure of just how much they trusted Plater Robinson. In place of their mostly accurate draft, they crafted (and installed) a sign that claimed Till’s body was never in the river. Although it is unclear where the fault lies, the preponderance of evidence suggests that the body was, in fact, in the river. In an undated follow-up letter to the ETMC, Robinson tried to correct the record, noting that he had been fed faulty information from Garrett. Whether the letter was received too late, or whether the ETMC simply preferred the body-in-the-mud theory, they ultimately chose to go with the story Robinson learned from Garrett. The sign that now stands where the Sharkey Bridge crosses the Tallahatchie River is the only ETMC sign with an egregious factual error. Despite what the sign says, the body was thrown in the river, it was not intended as a warning for an adjacent black community, and there is no evidence that such a community even existed.

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In 2008, the Emmett Till Memorial Commission (ETMC) erected a sign at this spot. Although nothing remains except an overgrown field, in 1955 this was the site of J.W. Milam's home and, critically, his shed.

The sign claims that Till was beaten here in the shed that once stood on this spot. This is not true.

When they wrote this sign, the ETMC was following the story told by LOOK magazine in January of 1956. Titled "The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi," the LOOK article was one of the most influential versions of Till's story ever told. And it was virtually 100% false.

Since the murderers had already been acquitted in a court of law, LOOK magazine refused to print the story unless every named participant signed a waiver (see the documents for an example).

In fact, Till was tortured at the Seed Barn on the Milam Plantation in Sunflower County--27 miles west. But the barn was run by Leslie Milam (J.W.'s brother). Leslie did not sign a release form and could not be included in the story. So Huie moved the torture here, to J. W. Milams' shed in Glendora.

Ironically, barely 500 feet west of this sign is another ETMC sign commemorating King's Place, where the black journalist Jimmy Hicks learned about Levi "Too Tight" Collins and Henry Lee Loggins. But Collins and Loggins are only involved if the torture happened in Sunflower County. This means that the two signs, both erected by the ETMC in 2008, are mutually exclusive.

If Collins and Loggins were key witnesses, then King’s Place is a historic site but Milam’s shed is not. Alternately, if Milam’s shed is a historic site, then Collins and Loggins were red herrings and King’s Place was the site where the black press lost the story.

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On Sunday, September 18, 1955, reporter James Hicks of the Afro-American was in Sumner preparing to cover the Emmett Till murder trial. Looking for a pre-trial story, Hicks stopped by the biracial funeral of “Kid” Townsend—a well-liked black man who had recently passed of a heart attack. Because there were no seats available in the church, Hicks listened to preacher W. M. King from outside. While he was standing there, a stranger approached him, asked if he was covering the Till trial, and, upon learning that he was, urged Hicks to walk behind a nearby car and talk to the woman he found there. Hicks did as he was told. The woman behind the car confided to Hicks that a local black man known to her only as “Too Tight” was with Emmett Till the night of the murder but had not been seen since. Should Hicks want more information, she told him to go to King’s Place, a juke joint in Glendora. Hicks drove directly to King’s Place. He asked the manager about the mysterious “Too Tight” and was directed to a woman. He flirted with the woman in order to gain information. He danced with her, asked her if he could take her out for drinks, and promised to come back to see her (which he never did). It worked. By the time Hicks left King’s Place around dinner time, he had learned a number of important facts about the Till murder—facts that were true but which would be disregarded in the trial and, in large part, forgotten by history. The woman told Hicks that Levi “Too Tight” Collins lived with her and her husband, Henry Lee Loggins. Both Collins and Loggins worked for J. W. Milam and, on the night of the murder, Milam fetched them both to help with the abduction and murder. Both men accompanied the murder party to the Milam Plantation west of Drew (in Sunflower County) where Till was tortured and, according to Milam’s later admissions, killed. Collins and Loggins were thus, in all probability, eyewitnesses to the murder of Emmett Till. Although Loggins publicly denied this for years (most dramatically on 60 Minutes in 2005), it is rumored that he confessed his involvement to his son, Johnny B. Thomas, current Mayor of Glendora, before passing. Despite a vigorous effort to find Collins and Loggins—and to plead with them to testify—they proved elusive. The woman at King’s Place told Hicks that the two men had been put in the county jail in Charleston, 28 miles away, to keep them away from the trial. Prosecutors Gerald Chatham and Robert Smith, however, claimed to search the jail twice with little luck. Despite the fact that Collins and Loggins were not found before the trial (and hence could not testify), the information Hicks discovered at King’s Place is of immense value. The fact that Collins and Loggins were involved in the murder puts the lie to the story pedaled by LOOK Magazine. That story—the story which dominated the memory of Emmett Till for the majority of the century—restricted the murder party to the two people who had already been acquitted (J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant) and placed the site of the murder near Glendora, on the banks of the Tallahatchie River. The story Hicks discovered at King’s Place challenges these conclusions: it suggests that more people were involved than simply those who were tried, and it places the murder site in Drew—a fact that would implicate even more people. 

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According to the century’s most influential account of the murder, the so-called “confession” published in LOOK Magazine in January 1956, the Charleston jail played no role in the Till story. If we believe the LOOK account, then the murder was carried out by J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, both of whom were tried, and acquitted, in a court of law. It may be a sad story of racism taking the life of an innocent boy, but at least each of the perpetrators stood trial--or so LOOK would have you believe.

In 1955, however, there was no such consensus. The black press believed that far more people were directly involved in the murder and, in 2006, the FBI confirmed that hunch. As the number of perpetrators grows, so too does the likelihood that the Tallahatchie County Jail in Charleston played a key role in restricting the number of men brought to trial.

The story began when Baltimore Afro-American reporter James Hicks went undercover at King’s Place—a Glendora, MS juke joint—where he was informed that two of Milam’s black employees were forced to be involved in Till’s kidnap and murder. The employees were Levi “Too Tight” Collins and Henry Lee Loggins. Because Loggins and Collins were eyewitnesses to the murder they held the potential, if they could be found and convinced to testify, to fundamentally alter the legal proceedings. They could have testified, for example, that Till was tortured on the Milam Plantation in Drew, MS by a party of at least four white men. They also, of course, could testify to the simple fact that Till was murdered (a fact the jury chose not to believe).

Loggins and Collins, however, could not be found. According to Hicks’s source, the men had been booked in this jail, in Charleston, 28 miles away from the trial, to preclude the possibility that they might be found and might testify. Concerns about the safety of the potential witnesses kept Hicks from pursuing this lead immediately. By the time prosecutors Gerald Chatham and Robert Smith checked the jail, there was no sign of Collins or Loggins.

Although neither Loggins nor Collins could be found to testify in the trial, the story Hicks learned at King’s Place—and which implicated this jail—was corroborated in 1955 by the work of Dr. T. R. M. Howard in Mound Bayou, in 1963 by historian Steve Whitaker, and in 2006 by the FBI. The more we learn about the Till case, the more likely it seems that Loggins and Collins were involved in the murder and detained here, lest they bear witness at the trial.

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According to the so-called “confession” penned by journalist William Bradford Huie in the January 24, 1956 issue of LOOK Magazine, Emmett Till was beaten in a shed behind J.W. Milam’s house in Glendora, taken to a steep bank on River Road, shot in the head, and dumped into the Tallahatchie River weighted down by a 75-pound blast wheel from a cotton gin.  For decades, Huie’s account functioned as the definitive word on what happened to Emmett Till in his final hours. We now know that Huie’s account was wrong. Till was tortured and killed in a seed barn on what was once the Milam Plantation. Huie’s story leaves out the explosive eyewitness testimony of 18-year-old Willie Reed, a black plantation worker walking to a local store early on Sunday morning, August 28.  Reed saw Milam’s 1955 Chevrolet pickup arrive on the Plantation with Emmett Till and two guards in its bed and four white men in its cab. Reed then heard screams coming from the plantation’s small seed barn, which was managed by Milam’s brother and Bryant’s half-brother, Leslie. There is a reason Huie eliminated Reed’s testimony from his story. LOOK refused to print the story without signed consent and release forms from every named participant in the murder. Unsurprisingly, Huie could only obtain such forms from the two men (Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam) who had already been tried and were therefore no longer in legal jeopardy. Leslie Milam had not been tried, he did not sign a release form, and he could not be implicated in Huie’s story. So Huie moved the murder to an abandoned spot of riverbank in Tallahatchie County, thus eliminating the roles of Willie Reed (witness) and Leslie Milam (accomplice). Although it is wrong, Huie’s story has been so influential that every single map published on the Till murder between the publication of LOOK’s article in January 1956 and 2005 left the Milam Plantation off the map entirely. Remarkably, among the many Till commemorative sites and signs dotting the Delta landscape, this terribly important place continues to exist in a memory void. There is not a single plaque, marker, or memorial at the still-standing seed barn. 

But things are beginning to change. Led by civil rights legend Gloria Dickerson, the town of Drew is beginning the process of commemorating the site. On August 28, 2022--the 67th anniversary of the murder--hundreds of townspeople attended the first ever commemorative ceremony at the barn. 

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