Whatever their personal belief, it would not form the basis of their verdict. Thirty years later, in 1985, a few of the jurors defended their decision, pinning it all on the lack of evidence by the state. Reaching a verdict was easy, said James Toole, then eighty-four. “We took what came across and they never proved them boys were at that place at that time.” For juror Jim Pennington, seventy-seven, the trial was “closed and shut and it should stay that way. The prosecutors didn’t bring in any proof and didn’t prove nothing.” The jurors, said Pennington, “were just doing our civic duty. There was no pressure.”179
All things considered, it is clear that a jury in Sumner, Mississippi, allowed two men to get away with murder.
Friday night, Mamie Bradley and her party took a taxi from Mound Bayou to Memphis, and then boarded a plane to Chicago. After a four-hour flight, they arrived at Midway Airport at 5:40 Saturday morning, where they were met by Alma and Henry Spearman, Gene Mobley, several Chicago Defender reporters, and a number of policemen.180 Diggs took two of the prosecution’s witnesses on the plane to start a new life in the North, and, fortunately, both already had connections in Chicago. Willie Reed, who had never traveled more than 125 miles from his home near Drew, boarded the flight with only the clothes on his back, a coat, and one extra pair of pants. After testifying at the trial, he briefly returned to the plantation and then walked or ran for about six miles to a prearranged meeting point, where he was taken to Mound Bayou and driven to the Memphis airport. No one had threatened him, he said a week later. “They didn’t have to. I knew what they would do.” His grandfather, Add Reed, also a state witness, said he felt safe in Mississippi and decided to stay on the Shurden plantation. His wife was ill, he explained, and he had to care for her. Willie’s mother, Edith, had married W. D. Thomas and moved to Chicago three years earlier, and Willie would join them in their apartment on South Michigan Avenue. Reed, who had an interest in science and health, planned to work but also to return to school. He had already received several job offers.181
Mandy Bradley’s decision to flee Mississippi came at the last minute on Friday night. After she testified Thursday, someone came looking for her, and she became afraid. Friends suggested that she go to her mother’s house, but whoever was after her learned of her whereabouts and went there also. Bradley hid under a bed while the men made a threat to her relatives, promising that she would never testify at another trial if they found her. Before she went to the trial in Sumner, Bradley later reported, a white woman warned her mother that the Milams might seek revenge, and urged her “to be careful.” When she left Mississippi with Diggs, it was so sudden that she took only the dress she wore and even forgot her eyeglasses. “Paid $45 for them in Greenwood,” she said later. “I don’t know how I’ll replace them.” Her husband, Alonzo, stayed behind for the time being. The couple had just finished their third year sharecropping for Leslie Milam, and, according to Mandy, they had never made “one red cent.” The year before, Milam told Alonzo that he owed him $11, but offered to call it even if they agreed to stay on. “So we stayed to take another chance with him.”182
Between the time that Emmett Till’s kidnapping made news and the end of the murder trial, Mose Wright received mail from all over, even as far away as Russia, Japan, and France. One letter came from Baier Lustgarten, owner of Middle Island Nurseries in Long Island, New York. Lustgarten had seen Wright on television and was so taken by his story that he offered him a lifetime job and a bungalow for his family. For a time, Wright seriously considered the offer but wanted to stay in Mississippi long enough to secure the income from his remaining cotton, which still sat unpicked on sixteen acres.183
However, something happened that Friday night that sped up his decision to leave. After returning home from the trial, he decided to lie down around 9:30 P.M. Feeling restless and fearful, however, he grabbed a pillow, got into his car, and drove out to his church. There, he parked in the cemetery, locked his doors, and slept in the car the rest of the night. When he returned home in the morning, a neighbor told him that shortly after he left, two white men came to the house and shined flashlights all around outside.184
Wright was so frightened after this incident that he no longer felt safe in Mississippi. By Sunday, he was gone. He managed to sell a cow and a few chickens, but was forced to leave behind his furniture, tools, and cotton. It was an emotional moment for Wright as he gave away his dog, Dallas. “I have to leave this dog. He’s the best dog in seven states,” said Wright, as he wiped away a tear. The dog let out a whimper as he was loaded into a car and taken to the home of a neighbor. Wright asked his brother, Will, to try to sell off the corn from his vegetable garden and his 1946 Ford. Yet Will Wright would have to fetch the car from the station at Winona because Mose left it there on Sunday night when he and his sons boarded a train. Mose promised to return to testify at the kidnapping trial, but it was clear that his life in Mississippi was over.185
The lives of Mose Wright, Willie Reed, and Mandy Bradley changed forever after they testified in Sumner. That they instinctively fled their homes speaks volumes about black life in a Jim Crow world. It is impossible to really predict what would have happened had they stayed in Mississippi. Perhaps everything would have blown over soon. Yet again, it may be that they were literally fleeing for their lives.
Perhaps this was Faulkner’s world after all.
7
Protests, Rumors, and Revelations
The day after the verdict in the Till trial made news around the world, Sumner was quiet, except for the usual business expected at the town square on a Saturday. Joe and Gee Bing, Sumner’s Chinese grocers, were back to selling meat and neck bone instead of the large quantities of beer that northern visitors had demanded all week. Even though it was the weekend, Judge Curtis Swango was in his chambers reading over an upcoming arson case. The only visible sign that a crowd had come and gone was the trampled, dying grass on the courthouse lawn, which looked as though it would take years to fully rejuvenate.1
Most of the reporters had packed up and left, but at the Alcazar Hotel in Clarksdale, one remained. This was fifty-two-year-old James Boyack, a white New Yorker who had covered the trial for the Pittsburgh Courier, a black weekly. He was finishing his story when B. J. Skelton of the Clarksdale Press-Register came by for a visit. Boyack, born near London and raised in Ireland, was a former public relations man who spoke five languages.2 Skelton certainly saw the handsome, charismatic outsider as a sophisticated man of the world, yet he was more impressed, and undoubtedly surprised, by Boyack’s pro-Mississippi assessment of the trial.
“Nobody can convince me that the people of Mississippi are lynchers,” Boyack assured the Delta-based newsman. “While they have their own local culture based on Mississippi traditions and institutions, they are no different from other people in this country or any other country.”
Although he believed that locals had misjudged the northern press as wholesale critics of the South, he affirmed that he had been treated kindly by all of the officials and citizens he had encountered in Sumner. As a matter of fact, Deputy Ben Selby, who had refused to let Boyack in the overflowing courtroom on the first day of the trial, later invited the reporter to go fishing. Boyack praised Judge Swango, who took the “dingy little courtroom” and “turned it into a marble palace” by his fair-mindedness. Boyack agreed with Gerald Chatham’s postverdict statement that the right to a trial was a sacred guarantee of the US Constitution. Like Chatham, Boyack accepted the verdict. He was pleased that both sides fought bitterly to the end.3
Deltans reading Boyack’s sentiments in the Press-Register the next day surely gave a nod of approval. Yet it would be a gross understatement to say that he used restraint as he tried to appease Skelton and his local readers. In his Courier piece, which he had been writing since Friday night, Boyack described the trial as “the most revolting, the most disgusting, the most callous miscarriage of justice that has been my lot . . . in more than twenty years of crime reporting.
” Sumner was a “purgatory of racial tension,” a “vale of hate, violence, fear.” For Boyack, it was also a “hell-hole of American democracy.” Far from accepting the verdict as he had assured Skelton, Boyack instead posed a question to his northern readers. “What is the meaning of the phrase: ‘Tried by a jury of his peers’ . . . when no Negro can serve on a jury in this state, because they are denied the right to vote?”4
The anger that Boyack was about to unleash had already been manifest by countless others aroused over the verdict. Technically, neither Boyack nor anyone else could do other than abide by the jury’s decision. Because of the US Constitution’s double-jeopardy clause, neither J. W. Milam nor Roy Bryant could ever be tried again for the murder of Emmett Till, within the same sovereign, no matter what evidence came to light. But with the verdict came a wake-up call, and with that, an endless stream of protests began. New York City seemed to erupt immediately, and there was no sign that it would soon cool down. On Friday night, the Democratic City Committee of New Rochelle passed a resolution to protest the acquittal, and directed its chairman, Salvatore Tocci, to send a telegram to President Eisenhower, urging that Attorney General Herbert Brownell investigate all violations of the federal civil rights statute. In a separate telegram to Mississippi governor Hugh White, Tocci criticized the jury decision. “It is a shock to learn that some of your citizens still choose prejudice over principle.”5
On Saturday, September 24, fourteen members of the Bronx Labor Youth League, with only a two-hour notice, gathered in the rain, passed out over 5,000 leaflets, and received 516 signatures assailing the verdict on petitions to be sent to the president.6 That night, the Harlem Community Clubs of the American Labor Party held three large street-corner rallies where they called upon the Department of Justice to intervene against Mississippi brutalities.7 This demand was about to echo everywhere.
Milam and Bryant were still in the Leflore County jail Saturday. Their attorneys tried arranging bail but were unable to get bond set over the weekend because it first required a preliminary hearing. With plans shattered for a weekend reunion with their families, the brothers “unhappily” resigned themselves to a few more days in jail.8 Although Leflore County bordered Tallahatchie, it fell into a different judicial district. The prosecution of Milam and Bryant on their kidnapping charges would fall to District Attorney Stanny Sanders and Leflore County attorney John Frasier. Should a grand jury indict, Judge Arthur Jordan would preside at the trial.
Mamie Bradley barely had time to rest after returning to Chicago Saturday morning before flying to New York to headline a Sunday rally in Harlem at the Williams Institutional Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church. It was only her third public appearance since her son’s murder and the first after the acquittal in Sumner two days earlier. Thousands of people, both black and white, young and old, made their way to the highly publicized gathering sponsored by the New York division of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. By 3:00 P.M., the church, which held 4,000, was full. An hour later, a crowd estimated to be between 6,000 and 16,000 filled the street between West 131st and 132nd Streets, with people standing twenty deep. Besides Mamie, others on the program included Brotherhood president A. Philip Randolph; New York City Council member Earl Brown; NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins; Rayfield Mooty; Rev. David Licorish of the Abyssinian Baptist Church; and other local religious and labor leaders. A choir, sitting behind the speakers, sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”9
The New York Post described the event as the “most emotion-packed rally since the Scottsboro upheaval in 1931.” There was a moment of silent prayer on behalf of President Eisenhower, who had suffered a heart attack the day before. Religious and labor leaders then urged the ailing president to convene a special session of Congress to consider antilynching legislation. They also called upon Brownell and Mississippi governor White to investigate the disappearances of black field hands Henry Lee Loggins and Levi Collins, two possible witnesses or accomplices to the Till murder. Both had been missing since the morning after the kidnapping. The White House and the federal government, rally leaders insisted, should lead in fighting the “reign of terror in Mississippi and other parts of the South.”10
The crowd was especially anxious to hear Mamie Bradley. Before thousands of anxious listeners, she told her story of viewing her dead child in Chicago, despite promising Mississippi authorities that she would not open the casket. She called the murder trial a “comedy” and let loose other criticisms she had kept to herself while talking to the press in the Delta just two days earlier. “What I saw in that courtroom for the two and a half days I was permitted in it was a shame before God and man,” she said. “It’s about the biggest farce I have ever seen. It is unbelievable and fantastic.” She said that “friendly” whites addressed her, Representative Charles Diggs Jr., and other blacks at the press table as “Niggers,” while the unfriendly ones simply glared.11
Randolph spoke about the plight of Mississippi blacks and wondered: “If the United States can send its armed forces 6,000 miles across the seas to fight Korean and Chinese Communists, in the interests of world democracy, it would appear that the federal government should use its vast powers to stop the lynching of Negro citizens by Mississippi racists in the interest of American democracy.” The audience interrupted that statement with thunderous applause.12
Simultaneous events held in midwestern towns on Sunday also drew large crowds. That afternoon, 10,000 people attended a rally in Chicago sponsored by the NAACP. Mamie Bradley was originally scheduled to speak at this event, but she was persuaded by her cousin and traveling companion, Rayfield Mooty, that the New York rally would guarantee a higher honorarium.13 The 3,500 people inside the Metropolitan Community Church and 7,000 outside called for a “mass march on Washington.” Willoughby Abner, educational director of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) union and chairman of the executive board of the Chicago NAACP, told those gathered: “If this lynching stirs not only Negroes and liberal whites but also the millions throughout this nation and the world, only then can we say that 14-year-old Emmett Till has not died in vain.” Simeon Booker, the Jet magazine reporter who covered the trial, spoke of his frantic search for witnesses during a late-night rendezvous in the Delta, and introduced one who was present, Willie Reed. Reed, a shy country sharecropper, was out of his element but received a standing ovation before he, too, addressed the crowd. During the meeting, thousands reportedly joined the NAACP.14
Representative Diggs held his own rally in Detroit at the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Diggs spoke to a crowd of 4,000 inside, while 2,000 lined the street. A block away, 1,000 more people filled Scott Methodist Church. The crowds were kept content by Diggs and NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, who alternated between the two churches. According to one report, traffic was blocked on dozens of streets. Diggs answered critics upset that he had left his Michigan district to attend the trial. “I am also a representative of all the people, black or white,” he explained, “and you can expect me to look into any violation of their rights.” Like Mamie, Diggs was far more critical of the trial once he arrived home. He referred to defense arguments as “sheer perjury and fantastic twisting of facts.” He intended to gain an audience with the White House to seek the administration’s support on civil rights issues. Mississippi “represents a shameful and primitive symbol of disregard for the essential dignity of all persons. Until every Negro is allowed to vote, we intend to challenge the seating of every Mississippi congressman.” All of his efforts, Diggs promised, would be done properly, through the American democratic process. He told any Communists present to “stay away from us, we don’t need you.”15
Evers, also speaking at the two churches, assured the audiences that “tremendous good” was occurring in Mississippi because its people have been supporting and donating to the cause, even in the face of abuse by white supremacists. Arthur Johnson, executive secretary for the NAACP’s Detroit branch, summed up the meeting in
four simple words in a letter to Gloster Current, director of branches: “Wow! What an experience!”16
In Baltimore, Dr. T. R. M. Howard hosted a gathering attended by 2,500 people. Howard, fresh from the trial and an exhausting week identifying and gathering witnesses for the prosecution, spoke for over two hours. Addressing not only the Till murder but also the killings of Rev. George Lee and Lamar Smith in May and August, respectively, he noted that it was “getting to be a strange thing that the FBI can never seem to work out who is responsible for killing the Negroes.” Howard, being high profile, wealthy, militant, and certainly hated by the majority of Mississippi whites, revealed that he was a “marked man” who kept two bodyguards on duty around the clock.17
In addition to the speakers at these highly charged rallies, members of two Jewish groups raised their voices in protest that same day. The Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs wired a telegram to President Eisenhower, written by June Gordon, executive director of the organization. After reminding the president that Mississippi was “part of the United States,” she asked that he do all that his authority would allow in seeking justice not only for Emmett Till but also in helping Mississippi’s black citizens obtain the right to vote. In a separate statement, Adolph Held, national chairman of the Jewish Labor Committee, said that “American democracy has, by this evil, bigoted act, received a serious reversal in the eyes of minority peoples throughout the free world.”18
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