Willie Reed: The Witness Who Returned Home

Willie Reed: The Witness Who Returned Home

This article relates to The Barn

The plan had to be executed perfectly by Willie Reed, an eighteen-year-old native of the Mississippi Delta. He had to walk into the darkness by himself making sure his bearings were correct. He had in his possession a coat and another pair of pants. He had to walk six miles on rural roads absent of all light. That would protect him, the inky night. The Drew-Cleveland Road was close to the edge of the Dockery Farms. Willie Reed kept walking.

"If someone wanted to kill you, there would be nobody to hear you scream. If someone approached, there would be no place to hide. The road was by far Reed's safest option, lined with poor black families," explains Wright Thompson in his stunning book The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.

Willie had limited options. The Drew-Merigold Road would have cut through white farmers' land. Catastrophe. The downtown section of the town of Drew would have been deadly. So he walked the 6.6 miles from his house. He passed his girlfriend's house without saying goodbye.

A car was waiting at the end of the road in the dark and Willie opened the door. The driver went north on Highway 61. It reached Mound Bayou and another car, an Oldsmobile 88, waited. Inside that car were two black men. The passenger was Charles Diggs, the first black congressman elected in Michigan. The driver was activist Medgar Evers. Evers had purchased the Oldsmobile with its V-8 engine to outrun white terrorists who liked to chase him through back roads because they hated his voter registration efforts. Now he was pushing sixty to get to the Memphis airport. To get Willie to Chicago. And freedom.

All of this cloak-and-dagger stealth had a point. Willie was a witness to a murder.

A few weeks earlier, on August 28, 1955, Willie woke to mockingbirds. He made his way to Patterson's country store. His grandfather wanted meat to cook for breakfast. He passed abandoned shacks of those who had already fled the violence and poverty of the Delta for Chicago. He cut through Leslie Milam's farm and was about to cross over the bayou when he heard a Chevrolet pickup truck. It passed him and he glanced at the passengers. Four white men and a scared fourteen-year-old child who he later would learn was Emmett Till.

Willie Reed heard Till's screams for his mother. He heard his grunts and cries and saw the truck parked in front of the barn. He stopped at a sharecropper's house, where he asked a woman named Amanda Bradley, "Who they beating to death down there?"

In the days that followed, Willie was too frightened to tell what he saw until he noticed an account in a local newspaper. The boy was named Emmett Till. He was from Chicago. Willie then told his grandparents. Eventually J.W. Milam, one of Till's killers, approached Willie and asked, did he see anything. Willie lied and said no, sir. "Boy, did you hear anything?" He answered the same. No, sir.

When Willie testified it was an anomaly. "At that time, it was virtually unheard of for a black person to testify against a white, particularly if that person was a sharecropper, dependent on whites for his livelihood," says George Curry, editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association's wire service. Willie identified the killers Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam but to no avail. The all-white jury acquitted the men in a little over an hour.

In Chicago, Reed changed his name to Willie Louis to forget his Mississippi past. Willie worked as a surgical technician and he never told his story, how he was a witness to Till's brutal murder and that he was outside the barn when Till was beaten. He suffered nightmares and a nervous breakdown.

Then, in 2003, almost fifty years after the murder, an FBI agent named Dale Killinger knocked on the door and told Willie the agency was reopening their investigation into the Emmett Till murder to see if new information was available. They needed Willie to go back to Mississippi.

"You could see how powerful it was for him to go back there," Killinger remembers. Willie still heard the screams of Emmett Till. He told Killinger the screams were from the right side of the barn. Everything about the place he grew up in, after all this time, was forever changed. His grandfather's house was gone. The country store was gone. Everyone he knew, including his girlfriend Ella Mae, was gone. But the barn remained.

If the barn was the ghost of the incident that would never, ever die, Willie Reed was the glue that held it all together. He was the only eyewitness to the crime and it was his words that established the chronology of events. Historians like David T. Beito hold him in high regard: "His act in some sense was the bravest act of them all. He had nothing to gain: he had no family ties to Emmett Till; he didn't know him. He was this 18-year-old kid."

Drew, Mississippi
Photo by Lauren McCauley (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This article relates to The Barn. It first ran in the October 16, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.