Mississippi Trial, 1955

by Chris Crowe

  A minute later Sheriff Strider pushed through the crowd, walked back to the Negro benches and handed her an envelope. “You’ve been served,” he said without looking at her. “Don’t leave the area without notifying the court.”

  She only nodded and sat down.

  Tuesday morning dragged like Monday had, but finally, after the lawyers had interviewed more than 100 white men, Judge Swango ordered the twelve jurors and one alternate to sit in a group of chairs on his right and gave them instructions, stuff we’d all heard several times from the lawyers. When he finished, he announced that the trial would be postponed until Wednesday morning because the prosecution and the defense wanted to interview surprise witnesses the prosecution had just subpoenaed. Then he rapped his gavel on his desk and left the courtroom.

  A few people applauded, and everybody except me started talking all excited about what had happened so far and what would be next.

  I didn’t want to think about it, but I knew everything would start tomorrow.

  After supper that night I wanted to go out and see if Naomi might be waiting by the bridge, but Grampa wouldn’t let me. “There’s trouble brewing, son. This trial’s got people riled up, and no telling what some hothead might do, especially if he knows you’re on the potential witness list.”

  I knew he was talking about R.C., but I didn’t say anything.

  “Best thing for you to do is stay inside, listen to the radio or read a while, and then get to bed. Tomorrow’ll be a long day, and even though the paper says both sides want a fast trial, we might be wrapped up in this a lot longer than either of us wants to be.”

  “You think I’ll have to testify?”

  Grampa shrugged. “You’re on their list. Are you still willing?”

  “I never wanted to, but I will if I have to.”

  “You’re letting a bunch of knucklehead lawyers decide what’s going to happen to you, Hiram.” Grampa’s voice shook, and his face turned red. “A man’s got to take charge of his own life. He’s got to do what he thinks is right.”

  I didn’t remind him, but that’s exactly what I was doing.

  Wednesday morning the courtroom was noisier, hotter, and more crowded than ever. The judge reminded us all to behave ourselves and chewed out a couple of photographers for taking pictures in the courtroom; then the trial began.

  Mr. Chatham went first. He faced the jury and said, “The state has found six new witnesses who will place the defendants”—he pointed at Bryant and Milam—“with the Negro boy several hours after he was taken from Mose Wright’s shack. These witnesses will present absolutely newly discovered evidence that will convince you, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam kidnapped and murdered the child named Emmett Till.”

  The first witness was Emmett’s uncle, Mose Wright, a poor sharecropper and part-time minister from Money. The courtroom was so packed with spectators that the small old Negro man had to push his way through the crowd to get to the witness chair. The chair was almost too big for him, and he sat at the edge of it, uncomfortable. After he sat down, Bryant and Milam glared at him for a moment, and then they sat back and ignored him.

  Mr. Chatham approached the witness chair like he thought a fast move might scare Mose Wright out of there. “Uncle Mose,” he said, “what was your relationship with the deceased child?”

  “Bobo Till was my nephew.” His voice was clear and strong; not a hint of fear in it. “He come down from Chicago to visit family for a spell.”

  “Tell us what happened early on the morning of Sunday, August twenty-eighth.”

  Mose Wright straightened up, looked at Bryant and Milam, and then at Mr. Chatham. “ ’Bout two o’clock somebody come pounding at the door. They said, ‘Preacher, Preacher.’ One of ’em said, ‘This is Mr. Bryant.’ I got up and opened the door. Mr. Milam was standing at the door with a pistol in his right hand and a flashlight in d’other.”

  “Uncle Mose,” said Mr. Chatham, “do you see Mr. Milam in the courtroom?”

  Nobody moved, not even the children who had been playing on Bryant’s and Milam’s laps. It felt like everybody was holding their breath, waiting for a bomb to go off.

  Mose Wright stood up from his chair and pointed a knobby finger at J. W. Milam. “There he is.”

  Everyone who’d been holding their breath let it out all at once and started talking. Someone shouted “Lyin’ nigger!” and “Lynch him!” A woman moaned. Somebody was crying. It took Judge Swango a lot of pounding and shouting to get things orderly again.

  While all this was happening, Mose Wright stood as calm as Jesus on stormy water, like he couldn’t see or hear the hell that had broken loose in Judge Swango’s courtroom. When the judge had the room quiet again, Mr. Chatham walked up to the witness chair and rested one hand on the armrest.

  “Uncle Mose, do you see the other man who was on the porch that night?”

  “Yessuh. That’s him there.” He pointed at Bryant.

  “Mr. Roy Bryant?”

  “Yessuh.”

  “Objection!” J. J. Breland jumped to his feet . “Objection! Your Honor, I object to this wild unsubstantiated testimony.” Mr. Breland looked ready to deliver a speech, but Judge Swango stopped him in mid-sentence.

  “Overruled. You’ll have your chance to cross-examine.” Mr. Chatham nodded to the judge, and then turned back to his witness. “What happened next, Uncle Mose?”

  “Well, Mr. Milam had that pistol, and he asked me if I had the boy out of Chicago. Then one of the men said, ‘I wants that boy who done that talk at Money.’ They shoved past me and went looking in the back bedrooms, and a minute later they dragged Bobo from his room, shaking him and sayin’ hateful things. Poor old Bobo was a-tryin’ to get dressed as they dragged him to the front door.

  “I was scared. I didn’t want them hurtin’ my nephew, so I asked them what they was going to do with the boy, and Mr. Milam, he said, ‘If he’s not the right boy, we are going to bring him back and put him in bed.’

  “Before they got to the door, one of the men asked me how old I was, and I tol’ him sixty-four, and he said, ‘You better not cause any trouble, Preacher, or you’ll never live to be sixty-five.’

  “By then my wife heard all the fuss and come outta the bedroom a-cryin’ and beggin’ them to leave the boy home. That made the men real mad and one of them hollered, ‘You git back in the bed, and I want to hear those springs.’ My wife said, ‘Listen, we’ll pay you whatever you want if you release him,’ but they just ignored her.

  “I stayed on the porch while they dragged Bobo out to their car. They hit him a couple times to make him stop complaining. The car didn’t have no lights on, and they pulled Bobo up to the back door and asked somebody inside, ‘Is this the boy?’ and somebody said, ‘Yes.’ ”

  “Was that a man’s voice or a woman’s?” Mr. Chatham asked.

  Mose Wright shifted in his seat. “It seemed lighter than a man’s.”

  “Was there anyone else in the car?”

  “Yessuh. Looked to me like a man was sitting in the backseat along with her.”

  “What happened next, Uncle?”

  “I heard them slap the boy a few more times, heard him cry out. Heard car doors open and close; then they drove away with the lights still off.” His face turned sad. “Didn’t never see the boy alive again.”

  “Were you at the Tallahatchie River when a body was pulled out three days later?”

  “Yessuh.”

  “Did you identify the body?” Chatham asked.

  “It was Bobo, Emmett Till. I watched the sheriff and his helpers pull him out of the water, and I got a good look at him. He had no face hair—Bobo never did have no face hair on him—and the boy didn’t have no clothes on, but they did find a ring on one of his fingers, with the initials L.T. on it.”

  Mr. Chatham turned to face the jury. “You saw the ring?” he asked without looking at Mose.

  “Yessuh. Exact same ring the boy’s daddy, Louis Till, used to we
ar. I seen it on Bobo many times.”

  Mr. Chatham nodded at the men in the jury, then said, “No further questions, Your Honor.”

  As soon as Mr. Chatham sat down, J. J. Breland jumped out of his seat to start questioning. “Mose, you got a porch light on that old shack of yours?”

  “Nosuh.”

  “So at two a.m. things would be pretty dark out there?”

  “I reckon so.”

  “Didn’t you tell defense lawyers that the only reason you thought it was Mr. Milam at the door was because he was big and bald?”

  Mose sat silent.

  “All you saw was a bald-headed man?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And had you ever seen Mr. Milam or Mr. Bryant before that night you claim the boy was kidnapped?”

  “Nosuh.”

  “Was there ever any light turned on in the house?”

  “Nosuh.”

  “Did you ever see the flashlight shine in Mr. Bryant’s face that night?”

  “I could see him good enough.”

  “So, old Mose, it was completely dark inside and out, and the only light came from a flashlight, a flashlight shining directly in your face.” Mr. Breland grinned and shook his head. “And yet you could see clearly, clearly enough to accuse two white men of murder, to claim that the men on your porch were Mr. Bryant and Mr. Milam over there. Could have been any two men, white or black, for all you could see, Mose.” He looked at Mose, his smile gone now. “You got a problem with white people, Mose? Are you trying to even some old score?”

  Mose didn’t answer.

  “You hear me, boy? Do you have a problem with white people?”

  “No.”

  “No problem with white folks, yet there you sit accusing two of our upstanding white citizens of barging into your home in the middle of the night, pointing a gun and a flashlight in your face, and hauling off your nephew. That sounds pretty far-fetched to me, Mose. Does it to you?”

  Mose looked him in the eye and swallowed before answering. “No, it don’t. It’s what happened, and that’s God’s honest truth.”

  Mr. Breland smiled again. “The state’s only eyewitness to this ‘crime’ is an old man seeing things in the dark. Wonder what those other surprise witnesses have seen. I tell you what, Mose, this sure is somebody’s kind of truth, but I wouldn’t be ascribing it to God.” People in the courtroom laughed and somebody shouted something, but Judge Swango quieted them all down by pounding his gavel. Mr. Breland shook his head like a little kid in trouble and sat down.

  Next Mr. Chatham called Sheriff Smith to the stand. When I heard his name, my stomach about dropped right out of me. Was I next? Would the sheriff tell what I had told him about R.C.? I shivered as he was sworn in.

  As soon as Sheriff Smith sat down, Mr. Breland stood up. “Objection, Your Honor. We object to this witness and insist the jury be excused until we can see if this witness is qualified to testify as to facts pertinent to this case.”

  “Sustained,” the judge said, and while the jury moved out of the courtroom, Sheriff Smith shifted uncomfortably on the stand.

  “Proceed with your questions, Mr. Chatham,” the judge said when the jurors were gone.

  “Sheriff, I believe that early on the morning after Emmett Till’s abduction, you arrested Milam and Bryant on suspicion of kidnapping.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And what did they tell you when you picked them up?”

  “Well, sir, they admitted they had kidnapped the boy. Mr. Bryant, he said he went down there to Mose Wright’s house and brought the boy up to his store in Money, and he wasn’t the right boy, the one who did the talking and the whistling, and he turned him loose.”

  “So they confessed to you, Sheriff, that they had kidnapped Emmett Till?”

  “Yessir.”

  “No further questions, Your Honor.”

  Mr. Breland stood up. “Your Honor, this testimony has no relevance to the charges of murder for which this court is convened, and I move that it be disallowed from jury and the trial records.”

  Judge Swango thought a moment and said, “So granted.” When Mr. Chatham stood to complain, the judge motioned for him to sit back down. “The state must first prove Emmett Till was murdered. The only proof is that the boy is missing. There’s no evidence of criminal homicide. You can step down, Sheriff.”

  When Sheriff Smith left the witness stand, I let out a sigh of relief. If his testimony wasn’t relevant, mine probably wasn’t going to be either.

  When the jury came back in, the next witness was Chester Miller, a Negro undertaker who had helped with Emmett’s body when it was pulled out of the Tallahatchie. “It was a Negro boy, for sure,” he told Mr. Chatham, “bruised and beat up something awful. The whole top of his head was crushed in so bad that a piece of his skull bone fell out in the boat when they pulled him out of the water.”

  “Was there a ring with the initials L.T. on the boy’s hand?” Mr. Chatham asked.

  “Yessuh.”

  Mr. Chatham thanked him and sat down.

  Chester Miller looked scared when Mr. Breland started questioning him. Before he asked his first question, Mr. Breland stood in front of the witness chair and stared at him for a few seconds. Then he asked, in a real loud voice, “Chester, what kind of training do you have?”

  He looked confused and said nothing.

  “I mean, what qualifications do you have?”

  Chester stared into his lap, barely breathing.

  “Lookit here, boy”—Mr. Breland’s voice turned mean—“you’ve got to answer me when I talk to you!”

  “Y-yessuh.”

  “Do you have any medical or undertaking training?”

  “Ain’t never been to a doctor, suh.”

  The audience snickered, and Mr. Breland turned and looked at us like a teacher who just doesn’t know what to do with a dumb student. He turned sideways and sighed. “Chester, can you tell me what you do for a living?”

  “Collect folks’ dead ones and get ’em buried.”

  “So you’re a mortician?”

  Again Chester looked confused.

  “An undertaker?”

  “Yessuh.”

  “Chester, when you first saw this body, did you recognize it? Was it Emmett Till?”

  “Well, his head was beaten up pretty bad, so it’d a been hard to tell right off who it was no matter what, but—”

  Breland interrupted him. “When you first inspected it, did you or did you not know the body was that of Emmett Till?”

  “I never knowed the Till boy,” Chester said softly, “so right then, without a picture or a family member, there’d a been no way to tell—”

  “So,” Breland said impatiently, “you were never able to make a positive identification of this body.” Then, in a kind voice, he asked, “You didn’t know who it was, but did you determine the exact cause of death?”

  “Nosuh. I couldn’t tell any one thing for sure. The boy’s body had bruises and cuts all over, and his head was pretty much caved in, from a beatin’ and being shot, I guess. And somebody had wired an ol’ pulley around his neck. And there was one other thing.” He paused and stared at the floor, nervous and embarrassed. “The boy’s manhood’d been cut clean off.”

  Hearing what had happened to Emmett chilled me to the bone, and I would have been sick if I hadn’t seen the look on Mr. Breland’s face. The description of Emmett’s corpse didn’t even faze him; you could tell he didn’t care a hoot about this Negro boy who’d been tortured and murdered. I wanted to jump up and scream at him, at all the hardheaded, heartless people in the room.

  “Have you ever been to a school for undertakers, Chester?” Mr. Breland looked irritated. “Have you had any training, an apprenticeship in the mortuary profession?”

  Chester paused. Finally he said, “Nosuh. I ain’t never been to no school.”

  Breland nodded, and with his hands folded behind his back he walked over to face the jury.

>   He looked like he was trying not to laugh. “No, of course you wouldn’t have,” he said almost to himself. “So, other than the experience you have collecting dead folks, you really have no expertise at all to make a positive or scientific identification of a corpse. You see”—he swept his arm from the jury to the witness chair—“even one of their own cannot testify with a surety as to the identity of the body that was pulled from the Tallahatchie River.”

  The next witness was Sheriff Strider, who had also been at the river when Emmett’s body was pulled out. When Mr. Chatham asked him if he knew the cause of death, the sheriff looked smug and said, “He had a bullet hole just above the ear.”