The Blood of Emmett Till(22)

Miller testified that when he approached the body, it was lying facedown in a boat. Turning it over, he saw what looked like a heavy wheel attached to the corpse with a strand of barbed wire that “was well wrapped” around the neck. He unwound the wire to remove the fan. Miller turned to Moses Wright and asked, “Will you identify the body as the boy who was taken from the house?”24

“I was standing right up over him,” Wright recalled. “They turned him over and then I saw all of it.” He nodded at Miller, who saw no reason why Wright should have any trouble identifying the body, even in its state of considerable damage and decomposition. Deputy Cothran told reporters soon afterward that Wright “definitely identified the body as the boy.” The law officers asked Miller to remove the silver ring from Till’s finger. Miller gestured to his assistant, who was wearing rubber gloves. “Well, he had the gloves on,” Miller explained, “and then I said to him, ‘Take [the ring] off.’ And then he took it off and handed it to me. I laid it on the floorboard of the ambulance,” referring to the hearse he had driven to the river. Miller noted that the ring was engraved with the initials “L.T.”25

As he prepared to transfer the body to a casket, Miller was stunned at the extent of the wounds. “The crown of his head was just crushed out and in, and a piece of his skull just fell out there in the boat, maybe three inches long [and] maybe two and a half inches wide, something like that.” There was a hole perhaps half an inch square above the right ear, which Miller assumed was a bullet hole. He and his assistant placed the body in the casket and hefted the casket into a metal shipping case, which they then pushed into the hearse and drove to the Century Burial Association.

Given the state of the body, there was little magic that the undertaker’s art could perform; a closed-casket funeral seemed certain. An officer from the Greenwood Police Department took pictures of the corpse. Miller assumed that the family would contact him about the funeral, but Sheriff Strider phoned Miller with an unusual demand: he should bring the body to Reverend Wright’s Church of God in Christ in East Money for burial that very day. Apparently Strider wanted no one to see the condition of the corpse. Miller did as he was told: “I delivered it to the cemetery at Money.”26

Strider announced his jurisdiction over Milam and Bryant’s case even before murder charges had been filed against them. Although the kidnapping had occurred in Money, which is in Leflore County, and no one knew where the boy had been killed, Strider maintained that the body was put into the river “a good 10 miles” into Tallahatchie County and must have been dumped there since “it couldn’t have floated up the river.”27 District Attorney Sanders sided with Strider: the youth was abducted in Leflore County but the body was recovered in Tallahatchie County, thus giving Tallahatchie jurisdiction for prosecuting the case.28

His authority over the case confirmed, Sheriff Strider determined that the body would be buried immediately. Charged with investigating a presumed murder, he saw no reason for an autopsy. They needed to get on with it, he thought. Nobody needed to see this body. And so someone notified a few of Till’s Mississippi family members that the body was to be buried right away and that they might want to be present. That they immediately complied probably illustrates the extent to which it was not safe for African Americans to challenge white men in 1950s Mississippi, which was doubly true if the white man in question was Sheriff H. C. Strider. Moses Wright began preparing his eulogy, and others readied their funeral clothes.

When Curtis Jones, Emmett’s Chicago cousin, saw preparations for burial proceeding, he called his mother in Chicago, who notified Mamie. She was incensed. She had already decided to hold the funeral in Chicago. She called her uncle Crosby Smith in Sumner, who promised “to get Emmett’s body back to Chicago if he had to pack it in ice and drive it back in his truck.”29 He drove to the cemetery with Chester Miller and one of the sympathetic Leflore County deputies. “[The grave diggers] had got the body out to the cemetery and dug the grave,” Smith recalled. “I got there and had the deputy sheriff with me. He told them that whatever I said, went.” Smith told the grave diggers, “?‘No, the body ain’t going in the ground.’ That body went to Chicago.”30

Here was another moment when the Till case could have become just another private bereavement and another mother’s appeal to her church and the local press for justice. Had his body been buried hastily in Mississippi soil, most of the rest would almost certainly not have followed. There would have been a trial and some outrage, but without the Chicago funeral, would the rest of America, let alone the world, have paid attention?

Miller, who had already hauled the corpse from the river to the funeral home in Greenwood and from there to the cemetery in Money, got Smith to help him trundle the coffin back into his hearse and headed back to Greenwood. However, he told Wright, “I don’t dare let that body stay in my establishment overnight.” He considered it very bad luck, to put it mildly, to defy Sheriff Strider. “I wouldn’t have any place in the morning and perhaps wouldn’t be alive by morning.” Wright then telephoned a white undertaker, C. M. Nelson, in Tutwiler, forty miles west of Greenwood, and asked him to pick up the body. Nelson owned two funeral homes: one for blacks and one for whites. A man of considerable wealth, he also served as mayor of Tutwiler.

Nelson agreed to prepare Till’s body under one condition: Wright had to promise that the seal on the casket would never be broken and that no one would ever be allowed to view the body. Wright agreed, making a promise he’d be powerless to keep, but events were moving quickly in a new direction. The badly swollen body prevented intravenous embalming, so to ensure at least minimal preservation Nelson’s embalmer immersed it in a vat of formaldehyde and made incisions to release the tissue gas.31