The Blood of Emmett Till(42)
Despite the openly political nature of the Mississippi attacks, the national news media soft-pedaled the murders of George Lee and Lamar Smith and said little about the attempted murder of Gus Courts. So it’s easy to understand why the murderers and those who sympathized with them would think that the country didn’t care about the rights or even the lives of African Americans in Mississippi. And it is no surprise that J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant would assume they could murder Emmett Till without real consequences.
After Courts was released from the hospital in Mound Bayou, his wife and Evers persuaded him to relocate his family to Chicago, where the NAACP set him up in a small grocery business on the South Side.61 Gunmen sprayed the Jackson home of A. H. McCoy with bullets. Dr. C. C. Battle, who had performed the autopsy on George Lee, fled for Kansas City. Dr. Howard sold his home and nearly eight hundred acres and moved, first to California and then to Chicago, where he opened a medical practice and went into politics. They all felt sure they would be killed if they stayed in Mississippi.62 Amzie Moore wrote to a Chicago friend in late 1955, “It’s ruff down here and a man’s life isn’t worth a penny with a hole in it. I shall try to stay here as long as I can but I might have to run away up there. Look for me right after the first of the year.”63 Moore managed to stay, but his house became a virtual arsenal and was lit up like Christmas every night of the year.64
Courts never returned to Belzoni. “You see before you an American refugee from Mississippi terror,” he testified two years later before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. “We had to flee in the night. We are the American refugees from the terror in the South, all because we want to vote.”65
Rumor had it that friends had smuggled him out of town in a casket.66
12
FIXED OPINIONS
On the Sunday afternoon before the trial of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam began, C. Sidney Carlton, one of the five attorneys defending them, visited the chief witness for the prosecution. Carlton, a round-faced, bespectacled man well into middle age, would soon become the president of the Mississippi Bar Association.1 The kindest term for what he was about to do is witness tampering. He knocked at the door of the unpainted tenant farmhouse where Reverend Wright lived, the same door that Milam and Bryant had pounded on when they came to snatch the black boy from Chicago. Carlton had come to warn Wright about testifying against his clients.2
Like much about the trial of Emmett Till’s murderers, there was a performance quality to Carlton’s visit. His warning was superfluous. After meeting the heavily armed minister at his home, Moses Newsome of the Memphis Tri-State Defender wrote, “[Moses Wright] seems certain he can handle any situation that comes up while he is awake. Each time that cars slowed down in front of the house, he kept telling this reporter, ‘Don’t worry. It is all right here.’?”3 Wright avoided sleeping at his house, however, as he waited for his chance to testify in court; instead he slept in his car in a rural cemetery or another secret location. “I spend some nights here and some nights I don’t,” he told reporters. “I’m superstitious.” Every day, as he and his sons picked his twenty-five–acre cotton crop, his shotgun was nearby. He also kept a rifle close at hand. The boys were living with relatives.4
Wright knew to a certainty who had abducted his nephew, tortured and butchered him. He knew how remarkable it was that there would even be a trial and knew to a near certainty that the murderers would be found not guilty by a jury of white men. He knew that African Americans had been killed by whites for centuries without real consequence. There was no reason to imagine that this time would be any different. But like George Lee, like Gus Courts, like countless other African Americans pasting bumper stickers to their cars, attending rallies, signing their names on school integration petitions, and attempting to register and vote, he chose courage. That was why he stayed in the Delta. “There was not a trace of fear about [Wright] as he asked his visitors to enter,” a reporter visiting the reverend’s home wrote later. “There was even a little defiance when Carlton suggested that things might not go well with Moses Wright if he fingered Milam and Bryant.”5
Wright had to wait only three weeks. The trial began on Monday, September 19, a mere twenty days after the sheriff’s deputies fished Emmett’s bloated body from the Tallahatchie River. This left little time for a proper investigation, which was the point. Sheriff Strider of Tallahatchie County, who had successfully claimed jurisdiction and so was responsible for that investigation, had in fact urged the judge to begin the trial only a week after they found the body even though he had not found any evidence or witnesses.6 “We haven’t been able to find a weapon or anything,” he told reporters. Nor did the state have any credible notion of where the murder had taken place.7 This lack of information would cast a lingering shadow over the question of Strider’s jurisdiction, since the kidnapping clearly occurred in Leflore County.
In fact, it was Leflore’s Sheriff George Smith who had arrested Milam and Bryant. Had he been given jurisdiction, the effect on the trial might have been different. No less a pillar of Mississippi civil rights politics than Dr. T. R. M. Howard called Sheriff Smith “the most courageous and the fairest sheriff in the entire state of Mississippi.” Ruby Hurley of the NAACP’s southeastern regional office also sang Smith’s praises.8 But Strider made his claim based on the discovery of the body about ten miles into his county. He also claimed that he had found some blood on a bridge that indicated where the body had been dumped. The FBI lab soon determined that it was not human blood, but that did not matter; Strider got jurisdiction anyway.