Emmett Till

by Devery S. Anderson

  “I was well pleased with the outcome, that’s all I’m going to say,” said Milam. “If you want anything else, you’ll have to talk to my lawyers.”

  Juanita Milam admitted that she was scared throughout the proceedings. Carolyn Bryant said that “I feel a lot better” now that the trial was over, as did her husband. “We feel so good,” Roy said. Carolyn refused to comment when another reporter asked about the pending kidnapping case. “She’s not allowed to make any statement,” insisted Roy. Regarding the prosecution, the defendants’ mother, Eula Bryant, said she “didn’t think they had any evidence.” A sister, Mary Louise Campbell, cried quietly.148

  Court spectators also made their way to the acquitted pair, shaking their hands and offering congratulations. Jurors trying to get through the crowd for their $25 pay warrants also received pats on the back and words of approval, such as “good work” and “nice going.” Downstairs, people surrounded reporters and listened closely as they called in and dictated their stories. Large crowds also stood around the lobby discussing the case. Sandwiches and soft drinks remained available.149

  A few of the jury members spoke to the press on Friday, either in person or on the phone, providing some insight into the hour and seven minutes they spent deliberating. The “not guilty” verdict was reached on the third ballot. On the first vote, nine voted for acquittal and three abstained. On the second, ten wanted to acquit, while two held back. No one voted to convict, according to Shaw, but those abstaining wanted to go over the evidence further. On the third vote, the decision to acquit was unanimous. The jury studied two photos—one of Till when alive, and another taken after he was retrieved from the river.150

  Charles Gruenberg, of the New York Post, spoke with a few of the jurors by telephone later that day, and they talked freely about the case. Jim Pennington agreed that Mose Wright and Mamie Bradley were “good witnesses,” and that “it would be hard for a mother to make a mistake about her own boy.” Yet he believed she was wrong, nevertheless. The state did not have enough evidence “all the way around.” Pennington rejected Willie Reed’s testimony as unbelievable. “I think he was prompted.”151

  Ray Tribble also dismissed Reed. “It looked like he just had a good story.” The dead body in the photo seemed too large to be Till, he thought. “I don’t see how the body could be identified.” Tribble denied that any of the men were influenced by racist attitudes, “either on white or black,” and that the group “was a very fine jury on that particular thing.” Bishop Matthews, one of the nine voting for acquittal on the first ballot, said that he too, had difficulty with the corpse. “The body they pulled out of the river didn’t look like nobody.” As for the eighteen-year-old surprise witness, “I don’t think Willie Reed knew what he was talking about.”152

  Jury foreman Shaw spoke antagonistically toward Mamie Bradley in his comments. “If she had tried a little harder she might have got out a tear.” He also said the jury found credible the defense argument that Till was alive and that another body was planted in the river.153 It is not known just how long the jury discussed the evidence during its sixty-seven-minute deliberation. However, one juror revealed to a Time magazine reporter: “If we hadn’t stopped to drink pop, it wouldn’t have taken that long.”154

  District Attorney Chatham, tired after the five-day trial, remained dignified until the end. He told the press that “the only comment I have, [is] that they had a trial by jury, one of the sacred guarantees of our federal constitution. I accept it and I abide by it. I have no further comment.” Ill health had prevented Chatham from running for reelection earlier that year. However, he still had one important case ahead before retiring in January. It involved a black man charged with killing a white store owner near the Mississippi-Tennessee state line. This case would be tried in Chatham’s hometown of Hernando.155

  Before long, the courtroom, which had been the scene of an internationally followed trial, stood empty. Window shades had been ripped out of place, and cigarette burns had damaged chairs and tabletops. Cane-bottom chairs were scattered in every direction, while paper cups, cigar butts, and cigarette packages lined the floor. Newsmen left behind telegraph blanks, cardboard film boxes, and used flashbulbs. Forty-five minutes after the verdict, Charlie Cox sat alone in the room sorting through papers, while two young black boys picked up pop bottles. Outside, Ralph Hutto of the Jackson State Times observed that “an occasional reporter wandered blankly through the halls, as if not quite convinced that it was actually over and the drama which was there so evidently a short time ago was now gone.”156

  If there was any comfort to be had by those who had hoped for a conviction, it was that Milam and Bryant were not yet free men. After a brief conference at their attorney’s office across the street, where a crowd followed and waited outside, Sheriff Strider drove the pair to Greenwood. There, they were booked and jailed on kidnapping charges. They celebrated their first night as acquitted killers still behind bars, back in the custody of Sheriff George Smith and Leflore County.157

  Mamie Bradley; her father, John Carthan; cousin Rayfield Mooty; Representative Diggs; Basil Brown; and their driver, Ed Ramsey, were about forty-five minutes out of Sumner when they heard the verdict over the car radio. When Mamie arrived at Dr. Howard’s home in Mound Bayou, reporters were waiting. She had left Sumner because she expected an acquittal, she explained, “and I didn’t want to be there when it happened.” She was surprised, however, that the jury reached its decision so quickly. The state “did a very good job,” she said. She also kept the belief alive that Emmett’s death had not been in vain. “I take what little consolation I can in the hope that Emmett’s death and the trial which resulted may deter other such killings.”158

  Diggs said a few words also. He praised the judge as “fair,” and the prosecution as “impressive,” but believed that “the deep-rooted prejudices of the jurors would not permit any kind of objective consideration of the case.” The way to fix this problem was through black voter registration. Jurors come from the voter rolls, but not one black citizen in Tallahatchie County was listed upon them. He now planned to address that problem in Washington by challenging the seats of all of Mississippi’s congressmen.

  “I think the basis of representation in Congress from Mississippi should be reduced,” Diggs declared. “The total population is used for basing the number of Congressmen, but the Negroes, included in the total, are not permitted to vote.”159

  The NAACP, through officers such as Medgar Evers and Ruby Hurley, had been assisting the prosecution all week, and from the beginning, Roy Wilkins, of the national office, had kept his eye on the situation. The NAACP issued a statement, and in responding to the verdict, Dr. Channing Tobias, chairman of the board, did not hold back:

  The jurors who returned [the verdict] deserve a medal from the Kremlin for meritorious service in communism’s war against democracy. They have done their best to discredit our judicial system, to hold us up as a nation of hypocrites and to undermine faith in American democracy.

  Their intolerance is all the more glaring in the light of Judge Swango’s fair and impartial conduct of the trial, the prosecutor’s skill and vigor and the full and fair coverage of the trial by press, radio and television.160

  When the New York Post’s Charles Gruenberg asked jury foreman Shaw what he thought of the NAACP statement, Shaw simply shot back, “I don’t give a damn what the NAACP says.”161

  Any accurate assessment of the Till trial needs to acknowledge the fairness of Judge Curtis Swango and the passion of the prosecution toward securing a conviction. Reporters praised them both, and the black journalists who covered the trial signed a memorandum after the verdict commending Judge Swango “for the distinguished, the astute manner in which you presided, under trying conditions, at this trial . . . the sense of fairness and decency was evident in your court.”162

  It has been argued, however, that similar accolades for the prosecution were not entirely warranted, that Chatham and Smith wer
e simply “going through the motions.”163 Dr. Howard said that Chatham told him personally that winning the case on circumstantial evidence would be impossible.164 However, Mississippi governor Hugh White believed that outside pressure proved the biggest obstacle for a conviction.165 With two unsolved racial murders in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, Mississippi could not afford to whitewash this one, and White knew that. Although the governor’s office appointed Robert Smith as a special prosecutor and sent Gwin Cole to investigate, everyone aiding the state, the governor included, was undoubtedly conflicted. The murder troubled them, but the international attention it received also put segregation in the spotlight. And that tradition they were willing to defend. Thus, Milam and Bryant were not being tried alone, observed reporter Bill Minor. On trial with them was “a system as old as the Constitution of the United States, and a way of life which may be older.”166

  Whatever the motivation behind its efforts, the prosecution headed by Chatham was impressive, even if it was imperfect, given the circumstances. However, Howard believed that the state was ill prepared, and addressed his criticisms in an October 8, 1955, Pittsburgh Courier interview. The state erred, said Howard, in its failure to utilize fingerprint analysis to identify the body. Similarly, its neglect of scientific testing to pinpoint the victim’s age was also a blunder.167 Each would have invalidated the courtroom testimonies of Sheriff Strider and Dr. Luther B. Otken. Yet when Mississippi officials shipped the body to Chicago, they did so with the understanding that its identity was settled, and law officials had yet to say anything to counter that. When he first saw the body at the river, Strider said it appeared to have been submerged for two days, and that the victim had been killed by either a gunshot or an ax. He also called a black undertaker to take it away. He released the body to Till’s Mississippi relatives based on Mose Wright’s identification and the statement of Wright’s sons, made in front of Leflore and Tallahatchie County deputies, that the ring found on the corpse belonged to Till.

  When Otken examined the body at the funeral home in Greenwood that same morning, he did so with Leflore County deputy John Cothran present. If Otken believed then that the body had been dead ten days or more, he never told Cothran. After Strider publicly disputed the body’s identity three days later, both Cothran and his boss, Sheriff George Smith, were dumbfounded. Although the defense questioned the manner of death during the trial, a brief inquest on August 31 determined that the victim had died of a gunshot. At some point, Strider signed a death certificate, which gave the same cause of death. Further eroding any doubts that the body was Emmett Till, Strider had it driven to a cemetery at Mose Wright’s church for burial.

  Even if the prosecution wanted to scientifically examine the body, the shed in Drew, or the truck that allegedly carried Till’s mutilated corpse, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, given the county’s troubled finances. The Chicago American learned that the sheriff’s office in Tallahatchie County was not supplied with the equipment needed for “big city crime detection” and that the district attorney, who covered four counties, had no funds for his own investigations.168 Had the federal government found cause to intervene, it may have been a different story. The only known incident where the FBI did help was when the Greenwood chief of police forwarded a hair and bloodlike sample to the FBI for analysis.169 A Mississippi newsman was quite matter-of-fact about the amateurish methods of Delta law enforcement. “Lack of facilities and training causes criminal investigations to be bungled almost daily [even] in cases that couldn’t possibly be connected to the race question.”170 With little help from Strider as it was, Chatham’s job was even more difficult.

  Was it a coincidence that Strider waited until the day of Till’s funeral to publicly dispute the identity of the body? Mamie Bradley’s decision to postpone the burial for three more days came after Saturday’s funeral services. Strider may have assumed that Till was buried or was about to be when he made his announcement. Had Strider believed, in the beginning, that the identification of the body sent up north was uncertain, he was duty bound to retain it. Certainly it was the body of someone, meaning an unsolved murder still lingered under his jurisdiction. Any investigation into missing persons would be futile without a body with which to link them. The fact that Strider was skeptical of the body’s identity, yet was content to leave it buried in Chicago was inexplicable, except as evidence that his public statements and testimony were a farce.

  Howard also criticized the state’s failure to produce expert witnesses who could have made a thorough examination of the body to determine its age, but it was already on its way to Chicago less than twenty-four hours after it was discovered.171 They apparently did consult pathologists in order to refute defense arguments about the rate of decomposition, however. Indeed, such experts were readily available. Breland admitted several years later that he had talked to pathologists at the University of Mississippi and University of Arkansas medical schools who told him that a body that had been severely beaten would have decomposed at the rate of the one in question in just three days. “I intended to get them to testify, but I sure didn’t then!”172 Although the state blundered by failing to call any experts to the stand, none of them would have actually seen the body. Defense witnesses, on the other hand, had seen or examined it, albeit casually. That advantage would hardly have gone unnoticed by the jury.

  Both Howard and Representative Diggs also criticized the prosecution’s inability to find witnesses, pointing out that it took the black press, or Howard himself, to locate those on the plantations in Drew.173 But nobody, not even Howard, had any idea that Sunflower County held any clues to the case until those with information came to him and reporter James Hicks the day before the trial opened. Without a tip, neither the prosecution, Howard, nor anyone else would have had reason to focus on Drew.

  Because Howard did not inform prosecutors of the surprise witnesses until two days into the trial, they were left with little time to investigate the plantation more thoroughly, even with the help of Gwin Cole. Had the witnesses come to light before or just after the indictments, time would have been on their side for a few weeks of solid investigation. Either way, postponing the trial until the spring term was out of the question. Smith explained later that the murder, which occurred at the end of Strider’s and Chatham’s careers, could not have justifiably been handed to their successors for investigation and trial. Also, according to Smith, the press “would have roundly denounced a postponement.”174 Similarly, recessing court for a lengthy investigation two days into the trial would have had the same effect, or worse, especially since the jury had already been called. Truly, an unfortunate combination of poor timing and even poorer finances put the state at a severe disadvantage.

  There have been other criticisms, such as the state’s failure to call Leslie Milam to the stand.175 However, such a move would probably have backfired. Surely Milam would not willingly implicate his brothers, and any direct refutation of Willie Reed’s testimony would have entirely demolished the young sharecropper’s credibility for the jury. Significantly, defense attorneys did not call Leslie Milam either. Perhaps they did not want to face the ethical dilemma of Milam perjuring himself, or worse, addressing the whereabouts of Levi Collins and Henry Lee Loggins. Chatham surely had Leslie Milam in mind above all others when he told the jury during his closing arguments that defense counsel could have produced a parade of witnesses to refute Reed had he been lying.

  Certainly J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant had a constitutional right to a defense, and according to their attorneys, the brothers never admitted guilt. Sidney Carlton, in a nine-paragraph defense of the verdict published after the trial, said that the prosecution never proved the body to be Emmett Till’s, or that the victim met his death through any “criminal agency.”176 The attorneys did what any defense team would have done by raising doubts about the victim’s identity. Yet in his closing arguments, John Whitten clearly crossed ethical boundaries by perpetuating a theo
ry that he knew was false and which no evidence had been presented during the trial to back it up.177 That was, of course, the idea that the murder was faked. However, the jury found it credible, or so they said. And ultimately, a conviction or an acquittal would come from those twelve men.

  If the NAACP had staged a homicide, then Mose Wright would have had to have been involved, just as Whitten theorized. What about Mamie Bradley? J. W. Kellum, also part of the defense, said in his closing argument that Mamie believed the body was her son but was mistaken. A synthesis of the two arguments would suggest that Wright did not let her in on the hoax. Did he intentionally let her hold a funeral and continue to grieve? And if Emmett Till were still alive, did Till willingly keep that fact from his mother also? If Mamie, on the other hand, was in on the hoax, were her tears at the train station, at the funeral, at the grave, and in the courtroom all an act? Did she knowingly bury a different body and go to Mississippi to further perpetuate a fraud, just to embarrass the South and raise awareness of Jim Crow? For the jury members to seriously consider Whitten’s theory, these were only some of the questions they would have had to consider. Countering such wild speculation, of course, was Mose Wright’s testimony of the kidnapping, Milam’s and Bryant’s confessions to Leflore County authorities, the ring, Mamie Bradley’s familiarity with it, and, last but not least, her positive identification of the body itself. In the end, these failed to bear any weight at all.

  Any speculation as to what the jury really thought, however, ended seven years later. As part of his research for his 1963 master’s thesis, Hugh Stephen Whitaker interviewed many of the trial participants. “All parties concerned—the judge, prosecuting attorneys, defense attorneys, the jury, and the accused—knew that a verdict of not guilty was certain,” wrote Whitaker. His findings revealed that, “of the jurors polled, not a single one doubted that Milam and Bryant, or the Negroes supposedly with them, had killed Emmett Till. Only one juror seriously doubted that the body was Till’s.” Although they were speaking from the perspective of time, most said their verdict had not been swayed by publicity surrounding the trial. “If the Northern reporters and all those outsiders hadn’t intervened,” said one, “it might have been different. . . . But it probably wouldn’t have affected the verdict.”178