Louis Till

Life

Louis Till grew up an orphan in New Madrid, Missouri. As a young man he worked at the Argo Corn Co., was an amateur boxer and was very popular with women. At the age of 17 he began courting Mamie Carthan, a woman of the same age. Her parents disapproved, thinking the charismatic Till was "too sophisticated" for their daughter. At her mother's insistence Mamie broke off their courtship but the persistent Till won out, and they married on October 14, 1940. Both were 18 years old. Their only child, Emmett Louis Till, was born on July 25, 1941. Mamie left her husband soon after learning that he had been unfaithful. Louis, enraged, choked her to unconsciousness, to which she responded by throwing scalding water at him. Eventually she obtained a restraining order against him. After he violated this repeatedly, a judge forced Till to choose between enlistment in the United States Army or imprisonment. Choosing the former, he enlisted in 1943.

While serving in the Italian Campaign, Till was arrested by military police, who suspected him and another soldier, Fred A. McMurray, of the murder of an Italian woman and the rape of two others, in Civitavecchia. After a lengthy investigation he and McMurray were court-martialed, found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out at the United States Army Disciplinary Training Center north of Pisa on July 2, 1945. He was a fellow prisoner of American poet Ezra Pound, who had been imprisoned for collaborating with the Nazis and Italian Fascists; he is mentioned in lines 171-173 of Canto 74 of Pound's Pisan Cantos:

Till was buried in Grave 73, Row 4 of Plot E in Oise-Aisne American Cemetery.

Aftermath

The circumstances of Pvt. Till's death were not revealed to his family. Mrs. Till was only told that her husband's death was due to "willful misconduct". Her attempts to learn more were comprehensively blocked by the United States Army bureaucracy. The full details of Louis Till's crimes and execution only emerged ten years later.

On August 28, 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi, after reportedly trying to flirt with Carolyn Bryant. Years later, Bryant disclosed that, in 1955, she had fabricated testimony that Till made verbal or physical advances towards her in the store. Her husband and brother-in-law abducted Till and beat him to death, then threw his body into the river. Both men were arrested, charged and tried with first-degree murder, but were acquitted by an all-white jury. After the trial gained international media attention, Mississippi senators James Eastland and John C. Stennis uncovered details about Louis Till's crimes and execution and released them to reporters.

The Southern media immediately leaped upon the story: various editorials claimed that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the "Yankee" media had covered up or lied about the truth of Emmett Till's father. Many of these editorials specifically attacked a short piece that had appeared in Life magazine, which presented Louis Till as having died fighting for his country in France. This article was in fact the only published piece that ever lionized Pvt. Till. In response, Life quickly published a retraction. For white Southerners, however, the impression was left that the erroneous Life article was representative of the Northern media in general. Subsequently, other editorials went so far as to tar Emmett Till with his father's crimes. These editorials essentially portrayed Emmett as a serial rapist after the fashion of his father, thereby justifying his murder.

But there always appeared to be more to this story. In October 1955, one month after Emmett Till's abductors and murderers had been acquitted of the murder, the fate ten years earlier of Louis Till, Emmett's father, was made public for all to know (even though his military record had been confidential). The effect, then, was to smear the reputation of young dead Emmett with the military court conviction from his dead father's past. In November 1955, one month later, a grand jury declined to indict the two abductors for kidnapping, despite the testimony given that they had admitted taking Till.

In 2016, 71 years after the death of Louis Till and 61 years after the death of his son, Emmett, author John Edgar Wideman explored the circumstances leading up to and including the military conviction of Louis Till. In the book, Writing to Save a Life – The Louis Till File, Wideman examined the trial record from the US military United States v. Louis Till (CMZ288642). Upon his request, it had been sent to him by the United States Court of Criminal Appeals, Arlington, Virginia. This trial record was over 200 pages long. In his review of the trial record, Wideman finds there may indeed be questions to ask about the conclusions about Louis Till's criminal conduct drawn in and from the transcript. In 2016, Wideman stated that he couldn't "rescue Louis Till from prison and the hangman”.