Getting Away with Murder

by Chris Crowe

  By the time the trial began, about 350 spectators were crammed into the courtroom designed for only 280 people, and an overflow crowd of nearly 1,000 waited outside on the courthouse lawn to receive regular updates on the trial.

  Scene of the trial: the Tallahatchie County courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi

  Despite the seriousness of the event and the heat and humidity of a late summer Delta heat wave, the courtroom buzzed with excitement. Ruby Hurley, an NAACP worker who attended the trial, recalled the scene: “It was just like a circus. The defendants were sitting up there eating ice-cream cones and playing with their children in court just like they were out at a picnic. Everybody was searched going into the courtroom to make sure none of the Negroes carried weapons.“ Even though deputies had searched most people who attended the trial, many of the Black spectators worried about becoming targets of violence from resentful whites. Some of the Black journalists had even worked out an escape plan they could use if gunfire broke out.

  J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant in court with their sons

  The courtroom atmosphere and the unfair treatment of Blacks in the audience foreshadowed a number of departures from standard legal practice that would occur during the weeklong trial in Sumner, Mississippi. The procedural inconsistencies, however, would have no effect on the trial’s outcome; according to nearly everyone involved in the case, even before the trial began, no one in Sumner doubted that Bryant and Milam would be declared innocent.

  Judge Swango called the court to order and directed the lawyers on both sides to begin interviewing prospective jurors. Hoping to prevent jury candidates from excusing themselves because of a reluctance to use capital punishment, prosecuting attorney Chatham startled everyone in the room when he announced that the state would not seek the death penalty. “A substantial part of the state’s evidence is circumstantial evidence,” he said. “This case has received wide publicity. The state is going to take every precaution to see that we have a fair and impartial jury.” His surprising announcement drew such a stir from the audience that Judge Swango had to bang his gavel repeatedly to restore order.

  Even in jury selection, Chatham faced an uphill battle. Mississippi state law required that only registered male voters who were at least twenty-one years old and could read and write were eligible for jury duty. Even though 63 percent of the residents of Tallahatchie County were Black, the pool of prospective jurors contained only white men because Tallahatchie County had no Black registered voters. Chatham knew in advance that the jury would be all white, but he hoped that he could convince the jurors that race wasn’t an issue in the trial. As far as he was concerned, murder was murder; the race of the killers and the victim was irrelevant. In addressing all the prospective jurors, he stressed that the state wanted a fair and impartial jury and asked them to put aside “any prejudice because the defendants are members of the white race and the deceased was a member of the colored race.”

  Interviewing and selecting jurors took all day, and the audience watched restlessly while lawyers carefully questioned jury candidates. Even with the case stacked in their favor, the defense attorneys relied on input from Sheriff Strider, who knew almost everyone in the county, to select men who would be friendly to their cause. Strider’s recommendations and J. J. Breland’s questions helped his team select jurors who would play along with the defense’s approach to the trial. Breland identified jurors who would be sympathetic to Bryant and Milam by asking “Will you be sure beyond a reasonable doubt that the dead body found in the river was Emmett Till?”

  The prosecution’s questions took a different approach. Chatham and Smith asked candidates if they were racially prejudiced, if they were personal friends of Bryant or Milam, or if they had contributed to the defense fund. Many candidates were disqualified by their answers or by challenges from the defense, but after interviewing more than fifty men, both sides finally agreed on twelve men and one alternate for the jury. Court adjourned at 4:30 Monday afternoon, and spectators filed out of the stuffy, crowded courtroom anxious to return for the next day’s action.

  From left to right: Prosecuting attorney Hamilton Caldwell, District Attorney Gerald Chatham, and Assistant Attorney General Robert B. Smith

  Sheriff H. C. Strider, standing at right, addresses the jury that would determine the fate of J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant

  Tuesday’s trial highlight was the entrance of Emmett’s mother, accompanied by Charles C. Diggs, Jr., one of the few Blacks in the United States Congress at the time. The crowd turned quiet as Mamie Till Bradley entered the courtroom and was seated at the Black press table in the rear. Deputies blocked Representative Diggs from entering, and when he identified himself as a member of Congress who had received permission from Judge Swango to attend the trial, one deputy couldn’t believe what he had heard. “A nigger congressman?” he exclaimed. “Hell, that ain’t even legal.” Eventually Diggs was searched and allowed to enter. Not long after Mrs. Bradley was seated, Sheriff Strider pushed his way through the crowd and handed her a subpoena to testify in the trial. She accepted it without speaking.

  The courtroom audience, which had swelled to almost four hundred people on Tuesday morning, was disappointed when Chatham asked the judge for a recess to allow him and his assistants to search for and question potential witnesses that Medgar Evers and other NAACP workers had been trying to locate. Chatham’s request and the overcrowded courtroom conditions prompted Judge Swango to recess court until Wednesday morning. Bryant and Milam’s lawyers, confident of victory no matter what evidence or testimony the prosecution presented, were frustrated by what they considered Chatham’s stalling tactics.

  Chatham, like everyone else in Mississippi, knew the defense’s plan relied on creating reasonable doubt about the identity of the killers and the body. He hoped that eyewitness testimony might be so irrefutable that even a white, racist jury would have to vote to convict Bryant and Milam of murder. Various sources in the Delta had reported to Chatham that at least two Black men, Leroy “Too Tight” Collins and Henry Lee Loggins, may have been witnesses to the murder and that other people would be able to testify that they had seen these men with Emmett Till after the kidnapping or with Bryant and Milam on the morning of the murder. A newspaper article reported on the potential witnesses, but unfortunately for the prosecution, these men were never found. (Unbeknownst to Chatham’s team, shortly after the murder indictment against Bryant and Milam, Sheriff Strider had had Collins and Loggins locked up in the Charleston jail under false identities; they remained there until after the trial.)

  Chatham’s assistants were finally able to locate three new witnesses who agreed to appear in court. Several other Black farm workers who had been interviewed by Medgar Evers and his assistants may have provided important testimony against Bryant and Milam, but they refused to show up at the trial because they feared for their lives. All of them knew that testifying against a white man would ruin—or end—their lives in the Delta.

  Finally, the investigative work of Chatham’s team was finished. The actors were all in place, and the stage was set for the evidence and testimony portion of the tense and widely publicized courtroom drama.

  CHAPTER 6

  GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER

  Judge Swango opened court Wednesday morning by reminding the audience about proper courtroom etiquette and by scolding several photographers for taking pictures while court was in session. That would not be his last warning to spectators, reporters, and photographers to abide by proper courtroom etiquette, and it’s ironic that while the judge vigorously policed audience behavior throughout the trial, he allowed some judicial proceedings to occur that were both illogical and inconsistent with standard legal practice. Despite those inconsistencies, however, Judge Swango would conduct the trial in a way that earned him the respect of almost everyone involved in the case.

  After the judge finished admonishing the audience, the trial finally began. Before calling his first witness, Chatham faced the jury and announ
ced, “The state has found six new witnesses who will place the defendants 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.“

  An overhead view of the courtroom during a recess in the trial. Black spectators, required to sit at the back of the room, do not appear in this photograph.

  The state’s first witness, Mose Wright, had to push his way through the crowded courtroom to get to the witness stand. The chair was almost too big for the small man, and under the hateful glares of hundreds of hostile spectators, he sat uncomfortably on its edge, waiting for his opportunity to testify. Chatham began by asking Wright to describe what had happened on August 28.

  Wright straightened up in the chair and told how two men had come to his front door that Sunday around 2:00 A.M. One of them said, “This is Mr. Bryant,” and then demanded to see “the boy who done that talk at Money.” Wright said that when he opened the door, Milam stood there with a pistol and a flashlight; nother man stood beside Milam in the shadows.

  Wright continued his story, but Chatham interrupted him to ask, “Uncle Mose, do you see Mr. Milam in the courtroom?”

  The audience fell silent, wondering if Wright would risk his life to accuse a white man in open court. For a moment no one moved. Excruciating tension filled the room while people waited for Wright’s reply. Then, in one of the most dramatic moments in Mississippi trial history, Mose Wright, a poor Black sharecropper, stood up, raised his arm, pointed at Milam, a white man, and said, “There he is.” Wright then pointed at Bryant, identifying him as the man who had assisted Milam in the kidnapping. Wright later said that while he was on the witness stand, 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.”

  Murray Kempton, a reporter for the New York Post, admired Wright’s courage. Kempton wrote that after Wright singled out Milam and Bryant, he “sat down hard against the chairback with a lurch which told better than anything else the cost in strength to him of the thing he had done. He was a field Negro who had dared try to send two white men to the gas chamber for murdering a Negro. [He] had come to the end of the hardest half hour in the hardest life possible for a human being in these United States.“

  During his testimony, Mose Wright stands and points out the two men who kidnapped Emmett Till

  After identifying the two killers, Wright, who, at that moment, exiled himself from Mississippi forever, responded to the rest of Chatham’s questions with a firm, confident voice, detailing the fateful events that began the night Bryant and Milam pushed their way into his house and ended the day Wright identified Emmett Till’s body on the banks of the Tallahatchie River. Wright was able to identify the body, he said, from Emmett’s father’s ring, which the boy was wearing.

  When Chatham finished his questions, defense attorney Sidney Carlton quickly started his cross-examination. He challenged Wright’s ability to recognize the two men in the darkness. Carlton hammered away at Wright’s testimony, but Wright refused to change his answers, insisting that he was confident that he had correctly identified Bryant and Milam as the kidnappers of Emmett Till.

  After Wright was excused from the witness stand, Chatham called on Sheriff George Smith to testify that Roy Bryant had confessed to kidnapping Emmett. Smith reported that Bryant “told me he went down there to Wright’s shack and brought Till up to Bryant’s store and he wasn’t the right one and he turned him loose.” The defense had no questions for Sheriff Smith.

  Key evidence: Emmett’s father’s ring, which Emmett was wearing at the time of his death

  The next witness was Chester Miller, an undertaker from the Century Burial Association, a Black mortuary in Greenwood. Local authorities had called Miller to be present when they retrieved Emmett’s body from the river. Under Chatham’s questioning, Miller described the condition of the body: “The whole top of the head was crushed in. A piece of the skull fell out in the boat. I saw a hole in his skull about one inch above the right ear.” Defense attorneys Breland and Carlton constantly shouted objections during Miller’s testimony, and he sometimes became distracted or confused by the loud objections and the stream of questions from Chatham. Miller’s discomfort caused the disrespectful white audience to break into laughter several times, and each time, Judge Swango pounded his gavel and demanded quiet from the spectators. When Miller was finished, a white undertaker, C. F. Nelson, also testified about the condition of the body.

  C. A. Strickland from the Greenwood Police Department was Wednesday’s last witness. He told the court about police photographs of Emmett’s corpse and of the scene where Emmett’s body had been recovered. The defense objected to the admission of some of the photographs as evidence because the captions contained inaccuracies. Their objections were sustained, and the sensational day of testimony adjourned at 2:30 to give lawyers on both sides an opportunity to interview the new witnesses discovered by Chatham’s investigators.

  The most poignant moments of the trial came during Mamie Till Bradley’s testimony Thursday morning. A hush fell over the courtroom when Chatham called her to the stand and she walked resolutely to the front of the courtroom from her seat at the Black press table in the back. The circumstances must have been nearly unbearable for her. Her son had disappeared about a month earlier. Then his mutilated body was discovered, identified, and shipped home. She had collapsed at the train station when she opened the casket. A three-day viewing was followed by a huge funeral. Through all of these ordeals, Mrs. Bradley had to mourn the violent and senseless death of her only child, while at the same time helping to mount an effort to see his killers punished. Despite the inestimable stresses she felt at the trial, she remained remarkably poised and clear-headed. A white local newspaper reporter described her as a “fashionably dressed 33-year-old negro woman” who displayed “an air of confidence and determination. Her answers were direct and to the point, using good English and speaking in a highly audible tone.”

  Many whites in the courtroom were surprised to see a composed, articulate Black woman in such a hostile environment, and it was clear to everyone that Emmett’s mother would not be intimidated. Even though most white spectators resented her presence at the trial, the defense team made a show of treating her civilly when she was first introduced as a witness. It was so unusual in the South for white men to treat a Black woman with respect that their actions caught the attention of a newspaper reporter who wrote: “She was shown every courtesy by both counsel for the prosecution and defense. At no time was she shouted at during testimony.”

  Emmett’s mother took her seat facing the two men who had murdered her son, two men surrounded by their family and supporters. The killers ignored her as Chatham started his questions.

  “Mrs. Bradley,” he asked, “when your son’s body arrived in Chicago, were you able to identify it as him?”

  “Yes, sir, positively,” she replied without hesitation. She explained that because of the horrible condition of her son’s body, she began her examination with his feet. Then she studied his hands, his teeth and gums, and his hairline. “A mother knows her child,” she said, “has known him since he was born. I looked at the face very carefully ... I just looked at it very carefully, and I was able to find out that it was my son, Emmett Louis Till.”

  Chatham then showed her a photograph of the body taken at the Century Burial Association after Emmett had been removed from the Tallahatchie River on August 31. He asked her if she could identify the body in the photo.

  She looked at it and nodded. “That’s my son, my son, Emmett Till.” Her voice broke, and she took off her glasses to wipe away tears.

  �
��Are you sure?” Chatham asked.

  “If I thought it wasn’t my boy, I would be out looking for him now.”

  When Chatham finished questioning Emmett’s mother, the defense lawyers had their turn. From his seat at the defense table, Breland fired questions at Mrs. Bradley, disputing her ability to identify the body found in the river as her son. A lawyer showed her a photo from The Chicago Defender of Emmett in his coffin and challenged her to explain how she could recognize the disfigured corpse. Mrs. Bradley held steadfast to her testimony despite defense attorneys’ efforts to make her admit uncertainty about the identity of the remains. “Beyond a shadow of a doubt,” she affirmed, “that was my son’s body.”

  Many years later, Mamie Till Bradley recalled that day in court. “I remember I was concentrating very hard on using the proper language, the ‘yes, sirs’ and the ’no, sirs,‘” she said. “And I was certainly not treated very gentle on this day and on the witness stand. Particularly when I was so adamant about that being Emmett’s body. I knew that if they could just get me to say this wasn’t Emmett, they could get off scot-free. But I couldn’t say that, because I knew that was Emmett.”

  Eighteen-year-old Willie Reed took the witness stand next. The son of a Black sharecropper had the courage of the previous Black witnesses but lacked the composure of Mose Wright and Mamie Till Bradley. Facing a large audience of antagonistic white people intimidated him, and several times during Reed’s testimony Judge Swango had to admonish the teenager to speak more loudly.