Emmett Till

by Devery S. Anderson

  This assessment was not motivated wholly by family loyalty. Armis Hawkins, district attorney in Tippah, Robert Smith’s home county, assured Illinois attorney general Latham Castle that Smith was “one of Mississippi’s ablest and most capable trial lawyers.” Likewise, Chatham “is one of the best and most experienced district attorneys in the State.” Together, “these gentlemen are the soul of honor, and their integrity is beyond question. You need have no fear of the prosecution in this case proceeding vigorously and capably.”37 Chatham even advised an inquiring reporter with the Memphis-based Tri-State Defender to check him out with local NAACP official Sam P. Nesbitt. The reporter asked around not only in Hernando but as far away as Memphis and received a good report. Chatham, who had been reelected to his office three times without opposition, was indeed respected and praised for his fairness.38

  Playing a lesser role on the prosecution team was J. Hamilton Caldwell, fifty-seven, then serving a fourth term as Tallahatchie County attorney. Like Chatham, he had been battling health problems and had even suffered a heart attack the previous year. He had initially opposed the indictments of Milam and Bryant, believing that a conviction was impossible. Caldwell joined the prosecution just two days before the trial started.39

  The five attorneys representing the defendants exhausted the entire Sumner bar. Sixty-seven-year-old Jesse J. Breland, who had practiced law in Sumner since 1915, headed the team. His partner, John Whitten, thirty-six, had been practicing for fifteen years. Whitten’s first cousin was Mississippi congressman Jamie Whitten, who had served in the House of Representatives since 1941. (Jamie Whitten went on to serve until shortly before his death in 1995, becoming the longest-sitting representative up to that time.40) The Milam-Bryant family was already known to the law firm of Breland and Whitten, because Eula Bryant, mother of the accused killers, had retained them when she filed for divorce from Henry Bryant in 1949.41 Breland had nothing but praise for J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant. “I’ve known those two boys for years. They’re men of good reputation, respected businessmen in the community, what I’d call real patriots . . . 100 per cent Americans.”42

  J. W. Kellum, forty-four, had been a Tallahatchie County resident for thirty-five years and was admitted to the Mississippi bar in 1939, despite never having gone to college. He had run for Gerald Chatham’s job as district attorney but lost the election just a few days before the Till murder. The two attorneys in the firm of Carlton and Henderson rounded out the defense team. Forty-year-old C. Sidney Carlton started his career in Sumner in 1945, and Harvey Henderson, the youngest of the five at thirty-four, had been in practice for eight years. In 1954, when Eula Bryant returned to court to make a motion for contempt against her ex-husband for defaulting on his child support payments, she hired Carlton and Henderson. That case was still pending while her attorneys prepared to defend her sons, and would not be settled for another five months.43

  It may have been only a coincidence that in nearby Leflore County on Friday, September 9, Greenwood citizens honored eleven-year-old Dianne Kearney, of Money, for risking her life to rescue her nurse from drowning in the Tallahatchie River back on May 26. Kearny was white; the nurse, Jimmie Arans, was black. Kearney and her sisters had been fishing under Arans’s watch when Arans fainted and fell into the river. Shortly before Kearney received her award, an editorial in the Greenwood Morning Star blasted the press for making the Till murder a national story while Kearney’s courageous act received very little attention outside of Greenwood.44 Yet it was the white press that had chosen to ignore the Kearney story. Two days after this editorial ran, the Red Cross presented Kearney with its certificate of merit for applying the life-saving skills she had acquired from that organization.45 Whether or not this recognition had already been planned prior to the Till murder, or even before the Morning Star editorial, is unknown, but Mississippians could now contrast the two incidents. Both involved white and black citizens, the town of Money, and a tragedy and near-tragedy in the Tallahatchie River. Moreover, they could point to the actions of people in Money as positive examples of race relations at a moment when the town, not to mention the state, desperately needed it.

  Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, Attorney General Brownell forwarded Huff’s request for federal protection for Mamie Bradley to FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover eventually responded to Huff on September 20 that “it is not within the jurisdiction of the FBI to afford the protection you desire for Mrs. Bradley.”46 By then, the trial had already started. In Mississippi, Chatham had probably already been balking at Huff’s demands because he was clearly irritated with Mamie for the same reason. Building on Huff’s appeal, Mamie announced that she now wanted two Chicago detectives to accompany her to the South. Upon hearing this, Chatham could hardly contain himself. Calling Mamie’s request “absurd,” he told the press that “if they’re trying to make a farce of this trial that’s a good way to go about it. We offered any reasonable protection. She won’t need any as far as that goes.”47 In fairness to Mamie, she had received threats even at home, as had Chicago mayor Richard Daley, and Daley quickly assigned a policeman to guard Mamie’s residence.48 Under such circumstances, Mamie was justified in thinking that if she needed protection in Chicago, surely she would need it even more in Mississippi.

  Although the FBI could not help Mamie and was not officially involved in the case, it was staying apprised of events in Mississippi and maintained a growing file of correspondence. The FBI’s most immediate concern was the American Communist Party and its attempts to sensationalize the case for its own purposes. During the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in 1928, the party had defined blacks in America as an oppressed people and a separate nation. The realization of black equality was crucial to the triumph of the working class in the United States, and that goal made the black cause a focus of the Communist Party’s financial and political resources.49 By the 1950s, the party had become a shell of its former self, having lost support in the post–World War II era, but Red scares at home and the Cold War abroad kept it under close scrutiny. On September 9, a letter to FBI director Hoover and Attorney General Brownell warned that the Communist Party of Illinois and Indiana had issued a leaflet titled “Punish the Child Lynchers!,” which laid blame for the Till murder on both the state of Mississippi and Brownell, and called upon President Eisenhower to dismiss Brownell from his post.50

  The letter also noted that on the same day, the official newspaper of the party, the Daily Worker, published an article quoting New York City councilman Earl Brown strongly urging people all over the nation to protest and for blacks to hold mass meetings and speak out against the murder. “Then they ought to throw a picket line around the White House demanding at least moral support from the President in their time of trial,” Brown continued, “to dramatize their lot in a country which shoots their children down like dogs.” It was this sort of action that brought about Brown a year earlier, the councilman argued, and “the Negro must implement his great Supreme Court victory by direct action against the enemy.”51

  The FBI also learned from an informant that the Civil Rights Congress, which since 1947 had been on the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations, planned a September 15 demonstration addressing the Till case in northern Philadelphia’s black section, complete with a sound truck. The FBI special agent in charge, a man by the name of McCabe, was told to keep the Bureau informed of any important developments. The Bureau shortly sent letters to Dillon Anderson, special assistant to the president, and to the assistant chief of staff of the Department of the Army, alerting them to these Communist activities and of a rally organized by the local steelworkers’ union in Chicago, held on Sunday, September 11. There, leaders launched a petition to President Eisenhower, urging him to “call a special session of congress in order to recommend passage of additional anti-lynch and anti[–]poll tax laws.” “Only in this way,” it stated, “can we be assured that other Negro Americans will not meet a similar death.” The FBI also reported
that Rayfield Mooty, cousin and adviser to Mamie Bradley, spoke at this event.52

  News of Communists and their sympathizers stirring up the emotions of northern blacks fit in nicely with Sheriff Strider’s announcement on Sunday. Reminiscent of earlier rumors that mobs of black Chicagoans were racing to the Delta to capture and lynch Milam and Bryant in their cells, Strider told the press that he had received over 150 threatening letters from people in Chicago, Milwaukee, Indiana, California, and Memphis. “I know that many of the letters are sent by cranks, but some of them sound dangerous,” he said. “It would be serious if the threats in some of them were carried out.” The letters promised various and unspeakable methods of murder and torture by weapons as varied as knives and bombs. Strider turned them over to the postal inspector for further investigation.53

  Strider also updated the press on the murder investigation, but there was nothing promising to report. The search for Till’s clothing had finally been called off after investigators failed to uncover any clues at all. Officers still knew nothing about the origin of the cotton gin fan that had been found tethered to the body.54

  On Monday, September 12, one week before the trial was to begin, the drawing of the jury list got under way, and attorneys for both the defense and prosecution spoke to the press. Gerald Chatham declined to disclose whether he planned to seek the death penalty, but defense attorney Breland predicted that the prosecution would indeed ask for the maximum punishment. Breland said he was “ready to go to trial right now,” and had no qualms about trying both men together. “It’s alright with us. The facts are the same.” It was more than “alright.” One member of the defense team, speaking anonymously to a reporter for the Jackson State Times a week later, pointed out that trying the men together allowed them to use Carolyn Bryant to their advantage. “Mrs. Bryant can testify against Milam but she can’t testify against her husband. Try ’em together and the state can’t force her to testify against either one.” Should she take the stand, she would do so as a defense witness. “How else can we get the wolf whistle in the testimony?”55

  Attorney Breland’s buoyancy was based in part on the burden of proof that would fall upon the state. The prosecution’s job, as described by Breland, was to prove that Till had been murdered, that it happened in Tallahatchie County, and that Bryant and Milam did it. “It’s all circumstantial, which is o.k. when you’re returning an indictment but quite different when you’ve got to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.”56 In a letter to a supporter written three days later, Breland was even more confident:

  These defendants are to be tried by a jury of their peers, all of whom will be good, white, Anglo-Saxon men. Frankly, we do not anticipate that either of the defendants will be found guilty by a jury, on the other hand, we seriously doubt that the State will be able to offer probative evidence which will show their guilt. We seriously doubt that the body taken from the Tallahatchie River in this County was that of Emmett Till. Not only do we believe that the State will be unable to prove this essential fact, but on the other hand, we believe that the proof for the Defendants will convince any reasonable person that the body taken from the River was not that of Emmett Till, but in all probability, the body of a dead man that was transported from some other section to this county.57

  To counter this theory, as unbelievable as it might seem, was why prosecutors needed Mamie Bradley in Mississippi. On Tuesday, September 13, she was sick in bed in Chicago and still unsure about attending the trial. She had not received the promised invitation from Chatham, but even if she had, she was not sure that she would go. Any decision, she insisted, would require the approval of her family. “Right now they’ve almost got me in chains to keep me from going. They fear for my personal safety.”58 She would decide once she received Chatham’s telegram, “along with assurances beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would be safe.”59 So far, communication between Mamie and Chatham had only been carried out in the press. Chatham may have concluded that this was sufficient, because Jet magazine later reported that the telegram never arrived.60

  By Thursday, September 14, Mamie finally made up her mind that she would attend the trial. She was persuaded to go after having a dream, as she later explained it, “and it seemed to me that my place was in Mississippi, that I had more business in Mississippi than anybody down there.”61 She remained fearful, however, unsure whether she would leave Mississippi alive. Yet her new resolve trumped that worry. “My coming back dead or alive was of less importance than my being there on the scene alive as long as I could maintain life,” she said in 1996. “And it was on that basis that I went.” That decision left her mother devastated.62

  After Mamie made her intentions known, Huff announced that his client would take along two friends from Chicago. “Mrs. Bradley assures me that she has no ill will against the citizens of the state of Mississippi.” He added that Mamie “knows, as we all know, that the majority of people in that state are opposed to brutalities perpetrated upon her son.”63

  If this seemed like an attempt to downplay her earlier fears, Mamie made it known that she was still keeping her travel plans secret. Her concern now focused on the likelihood of strangers showing up at the airport and her inability to discern who among them might be “friend or foe.” Huff was equally uneasy. “We don’t know what might be cooked up if they knew her plans.”64 Over the weekend, Mamie revealed that she would not leave Chicago until she could be called as a witness (in other words, she would not be there for jury selection), and disclosed that she had received around fifty letters from Chicagoans warning her not to go at all.65

  Mamie would have one stop to make before journeying to Mississippi. Earlier in the week she accepted an invitation to appear at a September 18 rally in Cleveland, Ohio, where she would share the stage with NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins for the opening of the association’s 1955 fund-raising campaign.66 For the time being, Mamie also kept this part of her itinerary quiet.

  By Friday, summonses to the 120-man venire had finally been issued in Tallahatchie County, and from this list the jury would be chosen.67 In the final days before the opening of the trial, members of the press began arriving in the Delta. A week earlier Sheriff Strider had announced that outsiders would be welcome as long as they did not cause trouble. Sumner had no lodgings to accommodate blacks, and the sheriff emphasized that no special arrangements would be made for any who were visiting. His advice to any coming to town was to go to Clarksdale, twenty miles north of Sumner.68 Indeed, Clarksdale had three hotels for blacks, totaling forty-five rooms. However, most of the black press was heading to Mound Bayou, to the home of Dr. T. R. M. Howard, Mississippi’s most prominent black citizen.69

  A majority of white reporters checked in at Clarksdale’s air-conditioned Alcazar Hotel. Others went to Sumner’s Delta Inn, which filled up quickly. Rooms were limited there, because several had been set aside to house the sequestered jury once it was chosen.70 A few reporters, such as twenty-three-year-old Dan Wakefield, rented a room at a small Sumner boardinghouse. The Till trial was Wakefield’s first assignment, which he filled for the Nation. Murray Kempton, reporting for the New York Post, helped Wakefield secure the job by recommending him to the Nation’s editor, Carey McWilliams. McWilliams paid the $42 for Wakefield’s bus trip from New York to Sumner, and upon his arrival in the Delta, Wakefield went to work. Somewhat naive to the sentiments of locals and their disdain for outsiders, the budding journalist walked door-to-door, asking for comments about the upcoming trial. Most “simply closed the door or didn’t want to talk,” he remembered.71 John Herbers, in town from Jackson to cover the trial for UPI, noted the reaction of one passerby. “You’re making a mountain out of a mole-hill,” yelled the man who spotted a group of reporters. “The NAACP is really making you work.”72

  Herbers had actually gone up to Sumner a few days early to survey the scene, and he learned quickly that sympathies were stacked in favor of Milam and Bryant. He stopped in Greenwood to see his old boss, Morning Star
publisher Virgil Adams, whom Herbers described as “a hillbilly from east Tennessee,” who fit perfectly in the mindset of the Mississippi Delta. Herbers asked Adams what people thought of the approaching trial.

  “Well, you know, they say that this guy was only fourteen years old, but what they’re saying now is that when they showed the body, he had a dong on him like this,” replied Adams, who raised his fist in the position of an erect penis.

  Herbers concluded immediately that Deltans did not see Till as a boy, but as a man posing a threat to white womanhood.73 Harry Dogan, incoming sheriff of Tallahatchie County, may have known that talk of sex would play a role in the defense strategy. Betty Pearson, wife of a cotton planter in nearby Webb, was intent on attending the trial and secured two press passes from her husband’s uncle, William Simpson, owner of the weekly Sumner Sentinel. Learning of this, Dogan warned Pearson that the things she would hear in court would be far too sensitive and encouraged her to stay home.74

  For the most part, reporters arriving in Sumner that weekend found the town surprisingly quiet. William Street, representing the Memphis Commercial Appeal, wrote that Sumner citizens were friendly and even welcoming of their visitors. Most of the people he talked to did not want to be quoted, however, but they shed light on the atmosphere. Sumner was innocent of the murder, one person emphasized, unlike other Delta towns. Yet “no matter the outcome—these other towns will be forgotten. Sumner won’t be.” Betty Pearson sympathized somewhat with her neighbors, who “felt that they were being spotlighted not only nationally, but all over the world as the place where this horrible crime took place.”75 Neither Milam nor Bryant had ever lived in Sumner, and few of the townspeople knew them well or at all. Another resident spoke positively about race relations in the community, pointing out that whites and blacks had once worked side by side to build the town and trusted each other still. “Why, there are only a few white people in Sumner who would hesitate to leave their children with a trusted Negro woman,” an unidentified woman assured reporter Street.76 Overall, residents seemed calm, if resentful, over the attention their town was getting.