Getting Away with Murder

by Chris Crowe

  Under Prosecutor Smith’s questioning, Reed said that at around 8:00 A.M., Sunday, August 28, he saw four white men and two Black men drive up to a barn on the plantation owned by Leslie Milam, J. W. Milam’s brother, in nearby Sunflower County. The two Black men rode in the back of the pickup with Emmett Till. When the truck stopped, the men carried Emmett into the barn from where Willie later heard screams and “licks and hollering.”

  Over the defense’s repeated objections, Reed testified that when he heard the screams, he ran to the home of his aunt, Amanda Bradley, who lived on the plantation, and asked, “Who are they beating to death down at the barn, Aunt Mandy?” Not long after that, Reed saw J. W. Milam, with a pistol on his hip, leave the barn to get water from the well. A few moments later Milam was joined by three other white men.

  Reed said that after he heard the screams and saw Milam and the other men, he went to a country store and then returned home to get ready for Sunday school.

  “On the way back, did you hear anything or anybody?” Smith asked.

  “No, sir,” answered Reed.

  “Was the truck gone?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Reed’s testimony presented a threat to the defense’s “reasonable doubt” strategy, and Bryant and Milam’s lawyers moved quickly to undermine Reed’s statements. First they tried to create doubt that Reed even knew who J. W. Milam was. Reed stated that he had seen Milam three or four times but had never before seen that pickup truck.

  “Was Mr. J. W. Milam driving the truck?” a defense lawyer asked.

  “No, sir,” said Reed.

  “Did you see Mr. Milam in the truck?”

  “No, sir.”

  In preparation for his testimony, Willie Reed, center, talks with Gerald Chatham

  “You wouldn’t say Mr. Milam was inside the truck?”

  “No, sir, I wouldnt,” Reed answered.

  Then, in an effort to weaken the credibility of Reed’s testimony, the defense asked a series of questions about how far Reed had been from the truck when he first saw it, and how far he was from the barn when he saw Milam leave the barn to get a drink. The threatening pressure from the defense lawyer caused Reed to stumble in his testimony, and he admitted that he didn’t know exactly how far away he had been from the men. Seeing a chance to cast a cloud of doubt over Reed’s testimony, the defense continued to press the boy about the distances involved. After a barrage of questions that rattled the teenager’s confidence, Reed finally guessed that he had observed the men from a distance of about four hundred yards.

  GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER

  When the defense finished its cross-examination, Prosecutor Smith asked Reed a final question. “Did you see [Milam] before you heard the noise in the barn and the hollering?”

  “After I heard it,” replied Reed.

  Willie Reed testified that he heard “licks and hollering” coming from this building on Leslie Milam’s plantation

  With Willie Reed’s testimony over, Judge Swango recessed court until 1:30 P.. Reed quickly left the court building and was rushed out of town by Congressman Diggs. For his own safety, Reed would flee Mississippi soon after the trial.

  After the lunch recess, four witnesses testified for the prosecution. Fifty-year-old Mary Amanda Bradley, Willie Reed’s aunt, told the jury that she saw four white men going in and out of Leslie Milam’s barn, where Reed said he had heard the screams and beating. Reed’s grandfather, Add Reed, reported that he had seen Leslie Milam at the plantation that same morning.

  The final two witnesses for the state took the stand over objections from Bryant and Milam’s lawyers. Leflore County Sheriff George Smith told the court that Roy Bryant had admitted to him that he had kidnapped Emmett from his uncle’s home but that he had released him unharmed later that night. Deputy Sheriff John Edd Cothran testified that J. W. Milam had also confessed to having abducted Emmett. The lawmen’s testimony combined with Mose Wright’s made obvious what everyone in the courtroom already knew: Roy Bryant and his half brother, J. W. Milam, had kidnapped Emmett Till early in the morning of August 28. Unfortunately for the prosecution, the two men were on trial for murder, and none of the witnesses had testified that they had actually seen Bryant and Milam kill the boy; it would take that kind of direct testimony from a white Southern man to convince this jury to convict the two brothers.

  At 1:56 P.M., emotionally and physically exhausted, and without any more witnesses or evidence to support the state’s case against Bryant and Milam, Gerald Chatham told Judge Swango that the prosecution had finished its presentation.

  As soon as Chatham sat down, the defense attorneys asked Judge Swango to end the case immediately by declaring Bryant and Milam innocent. The judge rejected their request, and it then became the defense’s turn to make their case. Defense attorney Sidney Carlton called Carolyn Bryant, wife of Roy Bryant and the woman who had been “molested” by the boy from Chicago, as their first witness.

  Before Judge Swango allowed Carlton to question Mrs. Bryant, he dismissed the jury because, he explained, too much time had elapsed between the incident at the store in Money and the kidnapping. Her testimony was, however, included in the official court record.

  This was the kind of show many of the whites in the audience had come for. They leaned forward in their seats to better hear all the juicy details of the alleged assault that had taken place at Bryant’s store. As the spectators listened, Mrs. Bryant told how a Black man with a Northern accent had molested her in the store a few days before Emmett Till was kidnapped.

  “This negro man came into the store,” she said, “and stopped at the candy counter.” He asked for bubble gum, she told the jury. “I held out my right hand for some money and he caught my hand. I pulled away and he said, ‘How about a date, baby?’

  The courtroom audience turned dead silent, the air hot with hatred.

  “I turned and started to the back of the store,” she continued, “but he caught me at the cash register ... and put both hands around my waist. He said, ‘What’s the matter, baby, can’t you take it? You needn’t be afraid of me.”’ While the sympathetic white audience listened, horrified and furious, Mrs. Bryant said she wrenched herself out of his grasp, and when she did, the man said unprintable words to her, filthy words she refused to repeat in court. The last thing he told her was, “I’ve been with white women before.”

  At that point, she said, another Black man came in and pulled the first man out of the store. “I started out for my pistol,” she said, “and he was standing on the front porch of the store. He whistled.”

  Mrs. Bryant’s testimony would have been enough for nearly any white jury in Mississippi at the time to justify the murder. Southern womanhood had been assaulted, they would have rationalized, and the woman’s husband had no choice but to kill the perpetrator. White racists believed it was the only way to protect white women and to keep “those people” in their places. The jury didn’t need to hear her testimony, however, because they, like everyone else in the county, already knew what had happened. The story of the alleged assault in Bryant’s store had been all the evidence most white citizens in the area needed to decide that Emmett Till got what he deserved.

  The jury reentered after Carolyn Bryant’s testimony and heard briefly from Juanita Milam, J. W. Milam’s wife. Then the defense called its surprise witness, Sheriff H. C. Strider.

  Sheriff Strider followed the defense strategy exactly. His goal was to convince the jury that it would have been impossible for anyone to positively identify the body, thus giving the jury enough reasonable doubt that Emmett Till was really dead to acquit Bryant and Milarn. Strider testified that based on his previous experience, the body found in the Tallahatchie River on August 31 had been in the river for at least ten to twenty days. He said that the corpse was so decomposed that it was impossible for him to recognize the victim or even determine if the body was Black or white. “If one of my own boys was missing, I couldn’t really say if it was my own son or not,
or anybody else’s.... All I could tell, it was a human being.”

  The prosecution let Strider’s testimony go unchallenged, but during a break in the proceedings, Clotye Murdock Larsson, a Black reporter covering the trial, angrily approached the judge to contest what Strider had said. “I pushed my way through the milling crowd of Whites,” she recalled, “and asked Judge Curtis Swango ... why, if Sheriff Strider was unsure of the victim’s racial identity, he had asked a Black undertaker to take charge of the body!” Larsson received no reply, only angry stares from whites that made it clear she had risked her life to make that sort of accusation in their presence.

  Two local experts, a white doctor who reported that he had viewed the body at a distance because of the smell, and a white embalmer who had helped prepare the body for shipment to Chicago, both backed up Strider’s statement. The two men said that the body they had examined was so decomposed that it must have been dead for at least ten days before it had been found. It was, said the embalmer, “bloated beyond recognition.” Their statements concluded Thursday’s activities, and Judge Swango rapped his gavel on his desk, closing court for the day.

  Nature provided an appropriate setting for the final day of the trial. Early Friday morning, a huge thunderstorm rocked Tallahatchie County. The storm ended before the last day’s events began, making the air in the crowded and cramped courtroom hotter and heavier than ever before.

  With Chatham and Smith watching, the defense began their presentation by interviewing five character witnesses who testified to Milam’s impressive record in World War II, of Bryant’s military service, and of the two men’s good reputations. After the last witness, Breland told Judge Swango that the defense rested. Soon, both sides would deliver their final arguments.

  After a brief recess, Chatham began his closing argument, a rousing oration that would last for almost an hour. Sweating profusely and with his sleeves rolled up, he raised his arm over his head and shouted to the jury, “They murdered that boy, and to hide that dastardly, cowardly act, they tied barbed wire to his neck and to a heavy gin fan and dumped him in the river for the turtles and the fish.” Chatham then reviewed all the evidence and testimony presented in the case, including the eyewitness testimony that showed beyond a doubt that Bryant and Milam had kidnapped Emmett Till. He also reminded the jury that this case was not about race or equality. It was about the murder of a boy.

  A deputy shows the gin fan used to sink Emmett’s body in the river

  Throughout Chatham’s argument, Bryant and Milam showed little emotion. Reporter Dan Wakefield wrote that while Chatham spoke, “J. W. Milam, the bald, strapping man who leaned forward in his seat during most of the sessions with his mouth twisted in the start of a smile, was looking at a newspaper. Roy Bryant lit a cigar. With his eyebrows raised and his head tilted back he might have been a star college fullback smoking in front of his coach during the season and asking with his eyes, ‘So what?”’

  Ignoring the two defendants, Chatham continued his closing statement. “The first words that entered this case were literally dripping with the blood of Emmett Till,” Chatham said in a booming voice. Then he rehashed the events of that August night when Emmett had been kidnapped. “As far as the state of Mississippi is concerned, this is not about race, it’s just another murder. But I want to say to you that the murder of Emmett Till was a cowardly act and a brutal and unnecessary killing of a human being. His abduction at gunpoint was unjustified. This was a summary court martial with the death penalty. That child had done nothing that would cause the defendants to invade the privacy of that home.

  “When those two defendants took Emmett Till from the home of Uncle Mose Wright, they were absolutely and morally responsible for his protection. I was born in the South. I’ll live and die in the South. The very worst punishment that should have occurred, if they had any idea in their minds this boy did anything, would have been to take a razor strap, turn him over a barrel and give him a little beating. I’ve whipped my boy. You’ve whipped yours. A man deals with a child accordingly as a child, not as a man to a man.” As Chatham spoke, the jury looked attentive but unmoved. The defense attorneys could not look Chatham in the face while he concluded his valiant effort to bring justice to the segregated courtroom in the Mississippi Delta by pleading with the jury to convict Bryant and Milam of murder. One of Chatham’s last statements was a quotation from the twenty-eighth chapter of Proverbs that explained, in part, his reasons for prosecuting these two men: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion.”

  Robert Smith made the final arguments for the prosecution. Hoping to convince the jurors that an acquittal in this case would further damage the state’s reputation, he built his concluding argument on the defensiveness white Mississippians felt at the time. Facing the jury, he said, “I tell you, gentlemen, that Emmett Till was entitled to his constitutional rights; he was entitled to his liberty, and once we go taking away his rights, then we are on the defensive and we can’t complain what people do to us. Those people, outside agitators, want J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant turned loose. If they’re convicted, those people are silenced. They can’t say the state of Mississippi didn’t do its duty.” His closing remarks finished, Smith joined Chatham at the prosecution’s table o wait out the remainder of the trial.

  J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant confer with one of their defense attorneys, Sidney Carlton

  When it was their turn for closing arguments, the defense lawyers consistently worked to stir up Southern patriotism and racism in the jurors so they’d feel compelled to declare Bryant and Milam innocent. Attorney John Whitten told the jury, “There are people in the United States who want to destroy the custom and way of life of Southern white people and Southern colored people. There are people out to put us at odds, who are willing to go as far as possible, to commit any crime to widen the gap between us. They would not be above putting a rotting, stinking body in the river in the hope it would be identified as Emmett Till. If these people had the opportunity to create a commotion, to stir up a trial such as this and focus national attention on Mississippi and focus national attention on the strained relations here, they would do it.” Whitten concluded by reminding them that “every last Anglo-Saxon one of you men in this jury has the courage to set these men free.”

  Sidney Carlton, who throughout the trial had played to the media as much as to the jury, went next. He emphasized again and again that the state had failed to prove the identity of the body beyond a reasonable doubt. The prosecution had, he said, “talked generalities because the facts just didn’t bear out the guilt of these defendants. Where’s the motive?” he shouted. “Where’s the motive?” Carlton contended that Mrs. Bryant’s testimony about the Black man who had assaulted her did not implicate Emmett Till, so there would have been no reason for Bryant and Milam to harm the boy. It was obvious, according to Carlton, that Emmett had not been the person in the store. “The state did not link up the dead boy with the defendants. The only testimony that Emmett Till did anything in connection with these defendants was Mose Wright’s testimony that he heard the boy had done something. If [Mose Wright] had known Emmett Till had done something down there, he would have gotten him out and whipped him himself.”

  Carlton went on to question Mose Wright’s ability to recognize the intruders who came into his home in the dark of the night. With only the light from the kidnappers’ flashlight illuminating the unlit rooms, it would have been impossible, he claimed, for the old man to see either intruder’s face clearly enough to recognize him. According to Carlton, Wright’s account of what had been said by the two men was also impossible to believe. “Had any of you gone to Mose Wright’s house with evil intent, would you have given your name? How many Mr. Bryants are there in the state of Mississippi? There’s nothing reasonable about the state’s theory. If that’s identification, if that places these men at that scene,” he shouted, “then none of us are safe!”

  The concluding defense statemen
ts were delivered by J. W. Kellum, who told the jury, “I’ll be waiting for you when you come out. If your verdict is guilty, I want you to come to me and tell me where is the land of the free and the home of the brave. I say to you, gentlemen, your forefathers will absolutely turn over in their graves if these boys were convicted on such evidence as this.” He finished by saying that a guilty verdict would be admitting that freedom was lost forever, and then admonished the jury to “Turn these boys loose.” Kellum’s directive were the last words the jury heard from the defense.

  At 2:34 P.M. Judge Swango sent the jury to the deliberation room to consider their verdict. While in the room, the jury cast three ballots, each one with the same result: unanimously not guilty. Their decision hadn’t taken long, but they had been advised to take their time before coming back into the courtroom in order to make it look like they had actually deliberated their decision. They sent out for some Cokes, drank them at their leisure, and then returned to the courtroom just one hour and eight minutes after they had left.

  Once they were seated, the jury foreman handed their verdict to the court clerk, Charlie Cox, who read it aloud for everyone to hear. “We, the jury, find the defendants not guilty.”

  The announcement triggered a loud celebration in the courtroom. Bryant and Milam shook hands and slapped backs with their lawyers; then they turned and kissed their wives. Somebody handed both men cigars, and photographers started snapping photos to capture the scene. Justice, racist style, had been done.

  In the foyer after the trial, a TV reporter asked Sheriff Strider if it was true that he had received threats and hate mail ever since Bryant and Milam had been arrested.

  “I’m glad you asked me this,” replied the sheriff. “I just want to tell all those people who’ve been sending me threatening letters that if they ever come down here, the same thing’s gonna happen to them that happened to Emmett Till.”