Most of all, perhaps, the murder of Emmett Till caught the attention of the world because, unlike most similar murder cases in the South, in this one there was a witness who was willing to testify.
When the two half brothers, Roy Bryant and Big Milam, had come that night to Mose Wright’s home, an unpainted cabin behind a cotton field, holding pistols and shining flashlights into his eyes and demanding that he produce “the boy who done the talkin’ in Money,” they had warned the sharecropper, a small man, five feet three inches in height and very skinny, against making any trouble. He had pleaded with them not to take his nephew, saying that the boy had acted badly because he was from Chicago—“He was raised up yonder. He didn’t know what he was doing. Don’t take him”—and his wife had offered to “pay you gentlemen for the damages,” and then, after Milam had said, “You niggers go back to sleep,” and was about to march Emmett off to the truck, one of the men had asked Wright, “How old are you?” and when he said that he was sixty-four, the man had said, “If you cause any trouble, you’ll never live to be sixty-five.” After the body was found, Wright was told bluntly that if he testified he would be killed, but when the Tallahatchie County District Attorney asked him if he would testify, he said he would—which meant that, even in Mississippi, there was going to have to be a trial.
The fact that there was a trial was, of course, unusual, but both the District Attorney, Gerald Chatham, and the judge, Curtis M. Swango, were unusual public officials in Mississippi, and Chatham pursued the case, and Swango presided over it, with exemplary fairness. In other respects, however, the trial was memorable for the vividness with which it furnished documentation of the totality of segregation in the South. Although 63 percent of the residents of Tallahatchie County were Negro, there were no Negro jurors; there couldn’t be: only registered voters (“qualified electors”) were eligible to serve on juries, and not a single Negro in Tallahatchie was a qualified elector; the county clerk, and registrar of voters, had won re-election year after year by promising white voters “to keep vigilance over your registration books.” The courtroom in the town of Sumner was, of course, completely segregated, and most of the spectators were white; it was only after all the white people who wanted to observe the trial had been seated that blacks were allowed to fill in the back rows behind them. The segregation extended to the press table. Fifty to sixty reporters, many of them from the big cities of the North, had shown up to cover the trial, and the white reporters were seated at the press table up front. Some of the reporters, however, were black, from northern black newspapers. Tallahatchie’s sheriff, Clarence Strider, a huge man, at 270 pounds bigger even than Milam, whose own sharecroppers lived in tiny shacks on whose roofs were painted giant letters spelling out “S-T-R-I-D-E-R,” declared that “There ain’t gonna be no nigger reporters in my courtroom,” and when Judge Swango overruled him, Strider sat them at two bridge tables far off to one side; entering the courtroom one afternoon, he greeted them with a loud “Hello, niggers.” A black congressman from Detroit, Charles C. Diggs Jr., came down for the trial, and when he arrived at the courtroom, all the seats allotted to blacks were already filled. When a Negro newspaperman from New York tried to explain who Diggs was, Strider and his deputies could scarcely believe their ears. “This nigger said there’s a nigger outside who says he’s a congressman,” one deputy said incredulously. “A nigger congressman?” another deputy said in disbelief. After the judge had ordered Diggs admitted, Strider said, “I’ll bring him in here, but I’m gonna sit him at you niggers’ table.” Also memorable was the atmosphere in the steaming-hot courtroom in which everyone—spectators, attorneys, jury—seemed to be drinking bottles of beer or Coke. “It was just like a circus,” Ruby Hurley was to say. “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.” Racist jokes made the rounds of the white spectators: Wasn’t it just like that little nigger to try and steal a gin fan when it was more than he could carry?
But nothing was as memorable as Mose Wright. The whites of Tallahatchie had been sure Mose wouldn’t testify. Bryant and Milam had told him he would be killed if he testified, and as soon as the two men had driven off with Emmett that night, the elderly little sharecropper had put his wife on a train to Chicago, and every day since she had arrived there, she had written him begging him to join her, to leave Mississippi, to not testify. And since only he could identify the two men who had taken Emmett, without his testimony there was no case.
And then the district attorney called Wright to the witness stand, and he came to the stand—in an act of heroism difficult even to contemplate.
The sharecropper looked very small as he sat there, dressed in a white shirt and dark tie, on the stand, just a few feet away from Roy Bryant and the massive Big Milam, so small that, to the journalist Murray Kempton, he was “a black pygmy standing up to a white ox.” And then the district attorney asked if he could identify the two men who had taken Emmett Till away, and the “pygmy” stood up. He stood on his tiptoes, held his right arm out very straight, and spoke, in broken English, two words that were, nonetheless, adequate for the purpose. Pointing at Milam, he said: “Thar he.”
“J. W. Milam leaned forward, crooking a cigaret in a hand that seemed as large as Mose Wright’s whole chest, and his eyes were coals of hatred,” Kempton wrote. “Mose Wright took all their blast straight in his face, and then, for good measure, turned and pointed that still unshaking finger at the man sitting next to Milam, and said: ‘And thar’s Mr. Bryant.’”
With those words, Kempton wrote, Wright “sat down hard against the chair-back with a lurch that told better than anything else the cost in strength to him of the thing he had done.” And that was not the only courageous thing that the sixty-four-year-old sharecropper did on that witness stand. The district attorney, although he was on Wright’s side, nonetheless addressed him without any prenom of respect, but only as “Uncle Mose.” The manner of the defense attorney Sidney Carlton, one of the town’s five lawyers, all of whom were representing Bryant and Milam pro bono, was, in Kempton’s words, “that of an overseer with a field hand”; he “roared at Wright as though he were the defendant,” and “every time Carlton raised his voice like the lash of a whip, J. W. Milam would permit himself a cold smile.” And then, as Kempton wrote, “Mose Wright did the bravest thing a Delta Negro can do; he stopped saying ‘sir.’ Every time Carlton came back to the attack, Mose Wright pushed himself back against his chair and said ‘That’s right,’ and the absence of the ‘sir’ was almost like a spit in the eye.” Two other local black witnesses were to testify: the nineteen-year-old-youth who had heard the screams and thuds from the barn, and his aunt; their testimony was only peripheral, since they never saw Till; they had to be compelled to testify; the youth was so terrified that on the stand he could speak only in a whisper. And Emmett Till’s mother testified. She had to—because the defense was claiming that the body was not really her son’s, a contention bolstered by Sheriff Strider, who, in a somewhat unusual move for a law enforcement officer, testified for the defense. When Mamie Till Bradley, thirty-four years old, neatly dressed, a $3,900-a-year procurement clerk for the Air Force, entered the courtroom, the Memphis Commercial Appeal reported, “an expression of almost painful dislike swept across” the white spectators’ faces. She was very calm as she recalled that she had tried to warn her son that he had to act “humble” in the South, that he had “to be very careful of how he spoke, and to say, ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, ma’am,’ and not to hesitate to humble yourself if you had to get down on your knees,” but that because Emmett had been raised in Chicago, he “didn’t know how” to act that way. She lost her composure only once; when the district attorney held up before her a photograph of her dead son so she could identify it; then she took off her glasses and held a handkerchief to her eyes for a few seconds. But despite the testimony of these other witnesses, it was Mose Wright’s testimony that made the case p
ossible. His half hour on the stand, Kempton wrote, was “the hardest half hour in the hardest life possible for a human being in these United States.” But at the end of it, “against Carlton’s voice and Milam’s eyes and the incredulity of an all-white jury he sat alone and refused to bow.” It was as a result of his courage that two white men were on trial for killing a Negro, a trial in which, whatever the result, “there is a kind of majesty. And we owe that sight to Mose Wright, who was condemned to bow all his life, and had enough left to raise his head and look the enemy in those terrible eyes when he was sixty-four.”
The result, of course, was the traditional result. Judge Swango had not allowed the jury to hear what the journalist I. F. Stone called “Mrs. Bryant’s sexy whopper,” that Till had grabbed her around the waist, made “unprintable” suggestions to her, and boasted, “I’ve been with white women before.” But that didn’t matter. After defense attorney Carlton had told the jury that if they found Bryant and Milam guilty, “your ancestors will turn over in their graves, and I’m sure every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men in the face of that [outside] pressure,” the jurors proved that they did indeed have that kind of courage: the verdict, after the jury had been out of the courtroom for an hour and seven minutes, was “not guilty”; the foreman told reporters that it wouldn’t have taken that long “if we hadn’t stopped to drink pop.” In fact, it hadn’t taken that long; jurors were to say later that they had delayed coming back into the courtroom to “make it look good.” (The foreman was later asked what he thought of Mrs. Bradley’s testimony. “If she tried a little harder, she might have got out a tear,” he said.)
But although the verdict in the trial was simply one more in the long line of defeats for justice in the South, in a larger sense the Emmett Till trial was not a defeat. For the trial, and the verdict, had been brought to the attention of the world. Fifty or sixty print reporters had covered it, and outside on the courtroom lawn there was, if not a forest, at least a small grove of tripods, supporting television cameras. “For the first time,” the Delta Democrat-Times noted, “a number of small local stations [in Mississippi and Louisiana] are staffing a news event.” The interviews shot by some of the cameras reached more than local audiences. Planes chartered by the three major television networks set down every day of the trial in a field about seven miles away to pick up film, and while network television coverage was not extensive, there was coverage.
This coverage had an effect on blacks in the South. “We’ve got more phone calls from our listeners thanking us for having a man on the scene than anything we’ve ever done,” said a radio reporter from a black station in New Orleans. The Till trial brought home to them with a new vividness the peril in which they lived. “Emmett Till’s murder” instilled in Anne Moody, a fourteen-year-old black girl from Alabama, “the fear of being killed just because I was black.” It was the senselessness of the murder of the fourteen-year-old boy that she couldn’t get out of her mind, she was to say. “I didn’t know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period was enough, I thought.” “The Emmett Till case shook the foundations of Mississippi, because it said even a child was not safe from racism and bigotry and death,” recalls Myrlie Evers. It made southern blacks more willing to fight for their rights. Myrlie’s husband, Medgar, “cried…over this particular vicious killing,” Mrs. Evers says. “He cried out of the frustration and anger of wanting to physically strike out and hurt. Medgar made it his mission to see that word of it was spread as widely and accurately as possible. Publicizing the crime and the subsequent defeat of justice became a major NAACP effort.” She says that the case helped provide a “frame of reference for us to move on to do more things, positively, to eliminate this from happening ever again…. 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.” Emmett’s mother came back to Mississippi, and spoke, and when she spoke, the audiences were large and emotional, and when she asked for contributions to help her publicize her son’s death, “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.” The tide was rising even in the Deep South.
And not just in the Deep South. By the 1950s, millions of American Negroes had never lived in the South, and while they may have been intellectually aware of conditions there, of what segregation was like, they did not really know those conditions. James Hicks of the leading black newspaper in New York City, the Amsterdam News, 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…. When the people started coming into the courtroom, they filled up the white section, then the black filled up what was left.” This, of course, was simply the normal court routine in the South, but now reporters like Hicks made northern blacks see it. And they responded. A new wave of mass meetings swept across black communities in the North, and the response came not only in cheers but in cash. Before the Till trial, the NAACP had been deeply in debt because of its legal expenses in the Brown trials. Now contributions to its “fight fund,” the war chest to help victims of racial attack, soared to record levels.
Nor was the tide rising only among blacks. Large, influential newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post and Times-Herald had sent reporters to cover the trial, but while it was still going on, coverage was mostly on inside pages, as if the State of Mississippi, by bringing the killers to trial, had done what was needed, and as if the trial was not major news because conviction was a foregone conclusion. An editorial in the Times before the trial had said, “The fact remains that the Tallahatchie County grand jury, made up of white men, took this step against other white men for a crime against a Negro….[This] prompt action…indicates that the people of contemporary Mississippi are against this form of murder as against other forms of murder.” When justice failed, however, the story wasn’t inside anymore, but on the front page, in the Washington paper under a big banner headline, “TWO ACQUITTED IN BOY’S KILLING.” The acquittal was on front pages everywhere, and not only in America, as if, as one account of the case put it, “both the wolf whistle and the resounding ‘not guilty’ were heard around the world.” “Scandalous,” Le Figaro said of the verdict; “The life of a Negro in Mississippi is not worth a whistle,” said Das Frei Volk in Düsseldorf.
White indignation rose, and with it, a white sense of responsibility. There had really been two verdicts, not one, rendered at Sumner, I. F. Stone wrote. One was the “not guilty” against Bryant and Milam. “The other, unspoken, unintended, unconscious but indelible, was a verdict against the rest of us and our country…. The murder and the trial could only have happened in a sick countryside. Where else would a mother be treated with such elementary lack of respect or compassion?” Stone urged Negroes to fight, to “rouse themselves to make their indignation felt in some dramatic way.” The “American Negro,” he wrote, “needs a Gandhi to lead him, and we need the Negro to lead us—into a better, more just, world.” And the feeling expressed by Stone and Kempton was beginning to spread beyond the audience traditionally commanded by the Stones and Kemptons. Commonweal, the magazine of liberal Roman Catholics, said that the “moral disease” responsible for Till’s murder was not confined to Mississippi. “The same disease…created the Northern ghetto in which he lived, [and] the southern shack from which he was taken to his death,” Commonweal said. “The illness that ultimately killed him confines Negroes to inferior homes, schools and jobs” in the North as well. And at least some northern whites took the point. Now the rallies in the North demanding anti-lynching legislation and other civil rights legislation—demanding justice—were held not just among blacks, but among Jewish organizations and labor organizations; a resolution adopted by the Jewish Labor Committee, whi
ch represented half a million members of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, denounced “this evil, bigoted act.” As David Halberstam was to write, “The Till case marked a critical junction for the national media.” The Brown decision had created “for the first time” a “national agenda on civil rights. The national media was going to cover … the entire South.” And now, with the nation ready at last to read about the South, the Till case had provided reading material more dramatic than school desegregation lawsuits. “The educational process had begun”; the Emmett Till trial “became the first great media event of the civil rights movement. The nation was ready; indeed, it wanted to read what happened.” Some Mississippians still thought the episode was a joke. Two years after the trial, when John Bartlow Martin visited Sumner while researching a book on school desegregation, the head of the local Citizens Council pointed to the Tallahatchie River, and, chuckling, said, “You wouldn’t come all the way down to Mississippi and not see Emmett Till’s River.” But their laughter showed that they didn’t understand. At a recess during the trial, reporters had heard a white spectator say, nodding in the direction of the Tallahatchie, “That river’s full of niggers,” and they had reported the statement, had made America hear it. They had felt the depth of what the Times called the “controlled hostility” in Mississippi, and they had made America feel it; wrote Dan Wakefield of The Nation, “You lie in bed at night listening to the hounds baying, and during the day you see more men wearing guns than you ordinarily do outside your television screen. I am not ashamed to confess that I was afraid.” Congressman Diggs was to call Mose Wright’s unflinching “Thar he” inside that sweltering, hate-filled courtroom an “historic” two words, and they were historic, because thanks to Wright, there had been a trial. The brutality and injustice of white treatment of Negroes in the South was several centuries old, but now the entire nation—the entire world—had been able to read about it for itself.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 112
