Selected excerpts from “The Emmett Till Book” By M. Susan Orr Klopfer
Mamie Till Mobley died in 2003 at the age of 81. She had kept frequent contact with several Mississippians, including Drew attorney Cleve McDowell, who was born the same year as her son, Emmett, in 1941. McDowell spoke with Till’s mother often, said his former office manager, Nettie Davis.
“Cleve kept many records on the Till Case. Unfortunately, they were burned up [or somehow disappeared] in a fire that happened six months after Cleve was murdered in 1997.”[i]
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SOME THIRTY YEARS after reporting on the Emmett Till case for Ebony magazine, Cloyte Murdock Larsson, a former Ebony staffer, returned to the Mississippi Delta to observe The New Mississippi.[ii]
The Emmett Till trial coverage she’d initially provided was still in her mind. Larsson and young Till had shared the same birth date. “There are some stories that a journalist can never forget no matter how hard one tries. Like fading pictures in a photo album, certain impressions remain in the mind long after time has erased the details of the events. For me, the Emmett Till murder case was that kind of assignment.”
After the trial was over, Larsson worked abroad for the next thirty years, returning to the United states in 1986 to write the thirty-year anniversary story for Ebony.
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What in the past would have been a quiet lynching had made news around the world and Larsson on her trip back to the Mississippi Delta found some whites were still embarrassed. She traveled to Clarksdale to interview Aaron Henry who by then was serving a second term in the state legislature. Henry had been one of the NAACP officials who had helped produce the “missing witness” that the FBI may never have found.
Henry told Larsson that white men had been killing black boys in the Delta for years without ramifications. But this time, perhaps “the hand of God” was involved, causing the Emmett Till case to become a cog in the wheel of change. ”Perhaps we have television to thank for that,” Henry told Larsson.
Searching for Roy Bryant, Larsson and her team met up with attorney Cleve McDowell in a courtroom in Clarksdale of Coahoma County. McDowell took them to see Bryant during a quick trip around the counties.
The black attorney who was the regional director of the NAACP in his state looked vaguely familiar to Larssan. "We had seen his picture in the newspapers. In 1963, he was the first Black student, after James Meredith, to be admitted to the University of Mississippi and the first ever to study law there. After the murder of NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers, McDowell learned that he and James Meredith were next in line for assassination. McDowell bought a gun. ‘Most everybody else had one,’ he said, ‘but when mine was discovered, I was expelled.’"
McDowell finished his education at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law in Texas, a “better and safer” place to be. The black law school was emphasizing civil rights law and the University of Mississippi was far behind, he would later tell oral history interviewer, Owen Brooks.
Larsson was surprised that Bryant's store was in a black Ruleville neighborhood. But McDowell explained that Bryant wasn’t worried "because blacks forget" and that "even when they know what certain whites have done, they don’t do anything about it."
But this was no reason to think the Klan had gone away, McDowell reminded her. "They're not wearing sheets any longer. They’re wearing gray flannel suits! But some of them have just gone under cover. And some of them are doing it to us in a different way–the Northern way. If Northern whites had been in power down here, we’d still be in slavery!.... Now, we have situations like Black lawyers being harassed by the bar association, and we have economic freeze-outs whenever big money is involved.”
i Close friends of Cleve McDowell believe he was killed under highly suspicious circumstances. A search of court records and the autopsy report along with information gained through interviews indicated foul play. This murder is covered extensively in “Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited,” (LuLu, 2005), by Susan Klopfer with Fred Klopfer and Barry Klopfer.
ii Cloyte Murdock Larsson, “Land of the Emmett Till Murder Revisited,” Ebony, March 1986.
