Eyes on the Prize

by Juan Williams

  What we do know is that Mose Wright heeded the kidnappers’ order. He did not call the police. But the next morning, Curtis Jones went to the plantation owner’s house and asked to use the phone. He told the sheriff Emmett Till was gone.

  Till’s body was found three days later. The barbed wire holding the cotton-gin fan around his neck had become snagged on a tangled river root. There was a bullet in the boy’s skull, one eye was gouged out, and his forehead was crushed on one side.

  Chicago Defender coverage of the Till killing.

  Milam and Bryant had been charged with kidnapping before the gruesome corpse was discovered. They were now charged with murder. The speed of the indictment surprised many. But white Mississippi officials and newspapers said that all “decent” people were outraged at what had happened and that justice would be done. Milam and Bryant could not find a local white lawyer to take their case. The Mississippi establishment seemed to be turning its back on them.

  Meanwhile, the tortured, distended body pulled from the river became the focus of attention. It was so badly mangled that Mose Wright could identify the boy only by an initialed ring. The sheriff wanted to bury the decomposing body quickly. But Curtis Jones called Chicago, passing word to Till’s mother first of Emmett’s death and then of the imminent burial. She demanded that the corpse be sent back to Chicago. The sheriff’s office reluctantly agreed, but had the mortician sign an order that the casket was not to be opened.

  As soon as the casket arrived in Chicago, however, Mrs. Bradley did open it. She had to be sure, she said, that it was really her son, that he was not still alive and hiding in Mississippi. She studied the hairline, the teeth, and in vengeance declared that the world must see what had been done to her only child. There would be an open-casket funeral.

  The thirty-three-year-old mother collapsed to the concrete train platform, crying, “Lord, take my soul.” She had to be taken from the station in a wheelchair.

  “Have you ever sent a loved son on vacation and had him returned to you in a pine box, so horribly battered and water-logged that someone needs to tell you this sickening sight is your son—lynched?” Mamie Bradley asked reporters afterwards.

  That body would shock and disgust the city of Chicago, and after a picture of it was published in the black weekly magazine, Jet, all of black America saw the mutilated corpse.

  On the first day that the casket was open for viewing, thousands lined the streets outside the Rainer Funeral Home. The funeral was held on Saturday, September 3; 2,000 people gathered outside the church on State Street. Mrs. Bradley delayed burial for four days to let “the world see what they did to my boy.”

  Till’s mother sobs hysterically as her son’s casket arrives in Chicago.

  It is difficult to measure just how profound an effect the public viewing of Till’s body created. But without question it moved black America in a way the Supreme Court ruling on school desegregation could not match. Contributions to the NAACP’s “fight fund,” the war chest to help victims of racial attacks, reached record levels. Only weeks before, the NAACP had been begging for support to pay its debts in the aftermath of its Supreme Court triumph.

  The Cleveland Call and Post, a black newspaper, polled the nation’s major black radio preachers and found five of every six preaching on the Till case. Half of them were demanding that “something be done in Mississippi now,” according to the paper.

  White Mississippians responded differently as the case became a national cause. As northerners denounced the barbarity of segregation in Mississippi, the state’s white press angrily objected to the NAACP’s labeling of the killing as a lynching. Jackson Clarion Ledger writer Tom Ethridge called the condemnation of Mississippi a “Communist plot” to destroy southern society. Civil rights activists were frequently accused of being Communists or Communist sympathizers.

  Public opinion in Mississippi galvanized in reaction to the North’s scorn. Five prominent Delta attorneys now agreed to represent Milam and Bryant. A defense fund raised $10,000. Signs of support suddenly appeared from the same local officials who had at first put distance between themselves and the men charged with the boy’s brutal murder. The sheriff, declaring that the body was too badly decomposed to be positively identified as Till’s, did no investigative work to help the prosecution prepare its case. A special prosecutor had to be appointed by the state, but he was given no budget or personnel with which to conduct a probe.

  On September 19, less than two weeks after Emmett Till was buried in Chicago, Milam and Bryant went on trial in a segregated courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi. The press, particularly the black press, was in the courtroom. Reporters from across the country knew that, in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling on school desegregation, this could make a good story—a telling example of how the South was reacting to the changing status of blacks.

  Roy Bryant, charged with the murder of Emmett Till.

  No one knew if any black witnesses would dare testify against the white men. Curtis Jones, who in later years became a Chicago policeman, recalls that his mother forbade him to return to Mississippi to testify at the trial of his cousin’s accused murderers. “My mother was afraid something would happen to me like something happened to Emmett Till,” he said.

  Without a witness, there would be no case. But in 1955, for a black man to accuse a white man of murder in Mississippi was to sign his own death warrant. Violence had long been used in the South as a means of intimidating blacks into passivity, but this murder was particularly brutal and all the more threatening. White Mississippi, angry at the northern press’ interest in the case, was closing ranks. The word spread throughout the black community: Keep your mouth shut.

  Mose Wright had not slept at his home since the kidnapping. He feared the men might return. His wife, Elizabeth, never went back to the cabin after that night. “Tell Simmie [her son] to get any corset and one or two slips or a dress or two and bring them to me,” she wrote in a note to her husband from her hiding place. After the indictment, Wright received anonymous warnings to leave the state before the trial began. He was told to take his family and “get out of town before they all get killed.”

  J. W. Milam, also accused of Till’s murder.

  But Wright didn’t leave the state. Although he had been intimidated by the kidnappers the night they took Emmett, he was now going to be a witness for the prosecution. A black man was going to testify.

  Just before the trial began, black reporters had gotten word that Wright would be a witness. Twenty years earlier, in another Mississippi courthouse, when a black boy accused of raping a white woman got up to testify, a white man in the courtroom pulled out a revolver and started shooting. Anticipating the fury that Wright’s testimony would prompt, the black reporters made plans for the moment, just in case the whites in the courtroom turned on the few blacks. James Hicks, a reporter covering the trial for the Amsterdam News, described their plan this way. “We had worked it out where I was going to get the gun [from a bailiff seated in front of the black reporters], somebody else was going to take this girl [Cloyte Murdock Larsson, a reporter for Jet] to the window, she was going to go out the window two floors down … then we were just going to grab the chairs … and fight our way out—if we could.”

  The NAACP in Mississippi: An Interview with Myrlie Evers

  In the mid-1950s, Myrlie Evers was secretary to her husband, Medgar Evers, Mississippi’s field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Mississippi was probably the most challenging state for an NAACP organizer.

  Although more blacks lived in Mississippi than in any other state—or perhaps because of that fact—segregationists controlled black people not only through legal restrictions but also through intimidation.

  A biracial organization, the NAACP was founded in 1909 “to achieve, through peaceful and lawful means, equal citizenship rights for all American citizens by eliminating segregation and discrimination in housing, employment, votin
g, schools, the courts, transportation, recreation.” A white Boston lawyer, Moorfield

  The Emmett Till case shook the foundations of Mississippi, both black and white—with the white community because it had become nationally publicized, with us blacks, because it said even a child was not safe from racism and bigotry and death.

  Medgar was field secretary for the NAACP, and he and others who worked with him had the responsibility of going into these areas where there might have been problems and investigating these cases. I can recall so well that Medgar cried when he found that this happened to Emmett Till. He cried out of the frustration and the anger of wanting to physically strike out and hurt. I myself felt anger, frustration, almost a hopelessness at that time that things were going to continue to happen. But it said something else to me too—that Medgar’s life was in danger twenty-four hours a day, because at that particular time, he was the only person who was in the forefront of investigations, getting the word of these hypocrisies out to the public.

  Medgar played a very important role in the Emmett Till case. As field secretary for the NAACP, part of his responsibility was to investigate murders. He and Amzie Moore and a few others dressed as sharecroppers and went to the plantations to ask people about the murderers or the accused murderers. [His responsibilities included asking] what had happened, making contact with local officials, and getting the press out.

  It was a very dangerous job. Medgar was also responsible not only for finding witnesses but helping to get them out of town. I remember one case where he put a witness in a casket, in conjunction with a mortuary, and got the person out of town, out of the state, across the border to Tennessee and then north.

  Storey, was the organization’s first president. With its northern roots, the NAACP grew slowly among southern blacks. But by 1919, southern membership in the NAACP surpassed that in the North. Even so, southern segregationists never stopped thinking of the NAACP as a group of “outside agitators.”

  When Emmett Till was murdered, Medgar Evers had been an officer for the NAACP less than one year. He went to Money, Mississippi, to investigate the murder and found witnesses and evidence for the prosecution. He was in the courtroom in Sumner during the trial.

  I bled for Emmett Till’s mother. I know when she came to Mississippi and appeared at the mass meetings how everyone poured out their hearts to her, went into their pockets when people had only two or three pennies, and gave … some way to say that we bleed for you, we hurt for you, we are so sorry about what happened to Emmett. And that this is just one thing that will be a frame of reference for us to move on to do more things, positively, to eliminate this from happening ever again. It was a sad and terrible time. It’s too bad to have to say that sometimes it takes those kinds of things to help a people become stronger and to eliminate the fear that they have to speak out and do something.

  Medgar Evers, Field Secretary for the NAACP, Jackson, Mississippi, 1955.

  A packed courtroom watched intently as sixty-four-year-old Wright took the witness stand. The prosecuting attorney asked him to identify the men who had come to his home and taken young Till away with them. Before a white judge, an all-white jury, and armed white guards, Wright pointed to J. W. Milam. “Thar he,” said Wright, identifying Milam as one of the men. He then pointed to the other defendant, Roy Bryant, as the second man.

  “It was the first time in the history of Mississippi that a Negro had stood in court and pointed his finger at a white man as a killer of a Negro,” said Michigan congressman Charles Diggs, who attended the trial. Actually, Wright’s testimony was not literally the first such instance, but it was indeed a rare and courageous act for that time and place.

  Afterwards, recalling that moment, Wright said he could “feel the blood boil in hundreds of white people as they sat glaring in the courtroom. It was the first time in my life I had the courage to accuse a white man of a crime, let alone something terrible as killing a boy. I wasn’t exactly brave and I wasn’t scared. I just wanted to see justice done.”

  After Mose Wright testified, other blacks came forward. Willie Reed, the son of a sharecropper, told the court that around six o’clock that morning he was on his way to buy meat for breakfast when he saw Emmett sitting in the back of a passing pickup truck. Two other blacks and four white men were also in the truck, but Reed recognized only Till and J. W. Milam. The truck drove to a shed on the plantation, and Reed said he then heard cries coming from inside. He ran to the home of his aunt, Amanda Bradley. The cries became wails and pained grunts, and then a chant of “Mama, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy.”

  “Who are they beating to death down at the barn, Aunt Mandy?” Reed asked Mrs. Bradley. Then he saw Milam, with a gun in his holster, come out of the shed to get water from the well. Three other white men came out and joined him. Eventually, the truck was backed up to the shed, Reed said, and three black men helped the others roll something wrapped in a tarpaulin into the back of the pickup. Later he saw the blacks washing out the back of the truck, the blood-red water soaking into the Mississippi soil.

  Amanda Bradley testified to hearing the sound of a beating coming from the shed.

  An Interview With Congressman Charles Diggs

  When the voters of Michigan sent Charles Diggs, Jr., to the United States House of Representatives in 1954, he became the first black congressman in the state’s history. He was not, however, the first black congressman in the United States. During the period of Reconstruction, from 1865 to 1877, the United States government tried to rebuild the South after the political and economic devastation of the Civil War. Black citizens held prominent government positions throughout the nation, including the posts of mayor, governor, lieutenant governor, state supreme court justice, U.S. senator, and U.S. congressman.

  Congressman Diggs, elected as a Democrat, was one of only three blacks in the 84th Congress. He traveled to Sumner, Mississippi, to attend the trial of the men accused of killing Emmett Till.

  I think the picture in Jet magazine showing Emmett Till’s mutilation was probably the greatest media product in the last forty or fifty years, because that picture stimulated a lot of interest and anger on the part of blacks all over the country.

  When I read about the Till case, I became immediately interested, first because it was in Mississippi, which was the bottom line for the arch segregationists in the United States. Second, it was the home state of my father and my grandfather, and all the people on the Diggs side of the family. Third, being a pioneer member of Congress, I thought that I could serve the purpose well and be a witness to the prosecution of a case of this type.

  There was a great deal of tension at the trial. The court was located in a very, very rural community. They were not used to the kind of attention that was generated by the Till case. The racial dimensions brought in a whole lot of people from the outside, black and white, from the North.

  I think it was almost a foregone conclusion that these people would not be found guilty … I certainly was angered by the decision, [but] I was not surprised by it. And I was strengthened in my belief that something had to be done about the dispensation of justice in that state.

  In talking about the Till trial, you have to repeat the atmosphere. This is Mississippi in 1955, with a long history of intimidation of witnesses and fear on the part of blacks to testify, in racial situations in particular. For someone like Mose Wright and others to testify against white defendants in a situation like this was historic.

  The Black Press At The Trial: An Interview with James Hicks

  In the early days of the civil rights movement, the black press was a powerful and unifying force. During the 1930s and 1940s, many local black newspapers began to publish national editions, and by the late 1940s, sixty percent of their circulation crossed state lines. By 1955 there were more than 200 black magazines and newspapers being published in the United States. Newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Baltimore Afro-American and magazines such as Je
t and Ebony reached black readers in every corner of the country.

  In 1955, the Amsterdam News was one of the most successful black newspapers in the country. During the trial of J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, James Hicks reported for the Amsterdam News as well as for the National Negro Press Association. James Hicks died in 1986.

  James Hicks (at near end of table) sits with others at the black press table in the courtroom. Also at the table, third to Hicks’ right, is Congressman Charles Diggs. Across from Diggs sits Mamie Bradley, Till’s mother.

  I had covered the courts in many areas of this country, but the Till case was unbelievable. I mean, I just didn’t get the sense of being in a courtroom. The courtroom was segregated … The local people who tried to get in had to stand back until the whites came in and filled the place up. They sat in the back of the courtroom.

  The black press sat at a bridge table far off from the bench. The white press sat right under the judge and jury. but we had a bridge table. They sat the boy’s mother at the bridge table.

  I was the one that got Congressman Diggs in, because the sheriff wouldn’t let him in. The congressman had sent a telegram to the judge to say he’d like to come down and observe this trial. The judge was the one white person that appeared to be fair-minded. He wired Diggs back and told him to come down.