Newspapers in major international cities as well as religious and socialist publications reported outrage about the verdict and strong criticism of American society, while Southern newspapers, particularly in Mississippi, wrote that the court system had done its job.[122] Till's story continued to make the news for weeks following the trial, sparking debate in newspapers, among the NAACP and various high-profile segregationists about justice for blacks and the propriety of Jim Crow society.
In October 1955, the Jackson Daily News reported facts about Till's father that had been suppressed by the U.S. military. While serving in Italy, Louis Till was court-martialed for the rape of two women and the killing of a third. He was found guilty and executed by hanging by the Army near Pisa in July 1945. Mamie Till-Bradley and her family knew none of this, having been told only that Louis had been killed for "willful misconduct". Mississippi senators James Eastland and John C. Stennis probed Army records and revealed Louis Till's crimes. Although Emmett Till's murder trial was over, news about his father was carried on the front pages of Mississippi newspapers for weeks in October and November 1955. This renewed debate about Emmett Till's actions and Carolyn Bryant's integrity. Stephen Whitfield writes that the lack of attention paid to identifying or finding Till is "strange" compared to the amount of published discourse about his father.[123] According to historians Davis Houck and Matthew Grindy, "Louis Till became a most important rhetorical pawn in the high-stakes game of north versus south, black versus white, NAACP versus White Citizens' Councils".[13] In 2016, reviewing the facts of the rapes and murder for which Louis Till had been executed, John Edgar Wideman posited that, given the timing of the publicity about Emmett's father, although the defendants had already confessed to taking Emmett from his uncle's house, the post-murder trial grand jury refused to even indict them for kidnapping.[124][125] Wideman also suggested that the conviction and punishment of Louis Till may have been racially motivated, referring to his trial as a "kangaroo court-martial".[126][127][125][128]
If the facts as stated in the Look magazine account of the Till affair are correct, this remains: two adults, armed, in the dark, kidnap a fourteen-year-old boy and take him away to frighten him. Instead of which, the fourteen-year-old boy not only refuses to be frightened, but unarmed, alone, in the dark, so frightens the two armed adults that they must destroy him ... What are we Mississippians afraid of?
—William Faulkner, "On Fear", 1956[129]
Protected against double jeopardy, Bryant and Milam struck a deal with Look magazine in 1956 to tell their story to journalist William Bradford Huie for between $3,600 and $4,000. The interview took place in the law firm of the attorneys who had defended Bryant and Milam. Huie did not ask the questions; Bryant and Milam's own attorneys did. Neither attorney had heard their clients' accounts of the murder before. According to Huie, the older Milam was more articulate and sure of himself than the younger Bryant. Milam admitted to shooting Till and neither of them believed they were guilty or that they had done anything wrong.[130]
Quote from Milam on why he killed Till. Displayed at the National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, TennesseeReaction to Huie's interview with Bryant and Milam was explosive. Their brazen admission that they had murdered Till caused prominent civil rights leaders to push the federal government harder to investigate the case. Till's murder contributed to congressional passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957: it authorized the U.S. Department of Justice to intervene in local law enforcement issues when individual civil rights were being compromised.[47] Huie's interview, in which Milam and Bryant said they had acted alone, overshadowed inconsistencies in earlier versions of the stories. As a consequence, details about others who had possibly been involved in Till's abduction and murder, or the subsequent cover-up, were forgotten, according to historians David and Linda Beito.[131][o]
