The Blood of Emmett Till(43)

And Strider was determined to maintain control of the proceedings. Another reason for the hasty trial was that Strider’s four-year term ended in three months’ time; postponement until the next session of court would allow Strider’s successor to take over the leading law enforcement role.9

Henry Clarence “H.C.” Strider was a tobacco-chewing, cigar-smoking former football player with a bad heart and a gruff demeanor.10 The owner of 1,500 acres of prime cotton land, Strider farmed his plantation with 35 black sharecropping families and kept a general store and filling station on the property. He also operated a crop-dusting company with three airplanes.11 Seven tenant houses lined the driveway to his home and each had one huge letter on its roof, visible from the highway or one of his planes: S-T-R-I-D-E-R.12 “He was like a godfather over the Delta,” Carolyn Bryant recalled. “All of the other sheriffs and police departments and all, whatever Strider said, that’s what they did.”13 Elected in 1951, he was “as tough a sheriff that’s ever been around here,” recalled Crosby Smith, Emmett Till’s uncle. “He weighed about three hundred pounds and he walked heavy.”14 If he carried a gun in the courthouse during the trial it was not visible, but an oversized blackjack protruded prominently out of the right front pocket of his trousers.15

Sheriff Strider ruled at the Tallahatchie County Courthouse, a badly aging three-story brick castle erected in 1915 in Sumner.16 Built around the courthouse square half a mile from the highway, Sumner, one of two county seats in Tallahatchie, had a population of nearly six hundred, more than two-thirds of them black and not one registered to vote. Strider kept security for the trial tight. “Deputies wearing gun belts ambled in and out, as if it were the set of a TV western, and frisked everyone who entered the courtroom,” wrote Dan Wakefield for the Nation.17 “I have received over 150 threatening letters and I don’t intend to be shot,” Strider announced to the press. “If there is any shooting, we would rather be doing it.”18

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To judge from the initial press coverage, much of white Mississippi shared Chicago’s outrage at Till’s murder. On September 1, the day after his body was found, the Clarksdale Press Register called it “a savage and useless crime” and stated flatly, “If conviction with the maximum penalty of the law cannot be secured in this heinous crime, then Mississippi may as well burn all its law books and close its courts.” The Greenwood Commonwealth ran a front-page editorial asserting, “Citizens of this area are determined that the guilty parties shall be punished to the full extent of the law.” The Vicksburg Post called it a “ghastly and unprovoked murder” and urged “swift and determined prosecution.” Governor White dispatched telegrams to District Attorney Gerald Chatham urging energetic prosecution of the case and to the national office of the NAACP promising that the Mississippi courts “will do their duty.”19

T. R. M. Howard, the civil rights leader and surgeon from Mound Bayou, was on a business trip to Chicago when he heard that Till’s body had turned up in the Tallahatchie. “There will be hell to pay in Mississippi,” he told reporters.20 Mamie Bradley also fired on the Magnolia State, vowing, “Mississippi is going to pay for this.”21 Much to the chagrin of most white Mississippians, Mamie called what had happened to her son “an everyday occurrence” there, and said visiting Mississippi was “like walking into a den of snakes.”22 In New York, Roy Wilkins made an even more vehement condemnation, which appeared in newspapers across the nation and on the front page of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. “It would appear by this lynching that the State of Mississippi has decided to maintain white supremacy by murdering children,” he said. “The killers of the boy felt free to lynch him because there is in the entire state no restraining influence of decency, not in the state capital, among the daily newspapers, the clergy nor any segment of the so-called better citizens.”23

These statements would linger in the minds of white Mississippians. Their outrage at the Till murder dissipated as they began to smart at all the criticism directed at their state, and by implication at them. Within days a full-scale backlash began to roll. White Mississippians resented the sweeping condemnations of their state in the Northern press and particularly the excoriating denunciations by Wilkins and other civil rights leaders. Many Mississippi editors began to fire back indiscriminately.24 The editor of the Picayune Item snarled that a “prejudiced communistic inspired NAACP” could not “blacken the name of the great sovereign state of Mississippi, regardless of their claims of Negro Haters, lynching, or whatever.”25

Some used the searing national criticism of Mississippi to explain the performance of justice unfolding in the courtroom: the state’s critics, they argued, had swelled Strider’s sympathy for Roy and Milam. But prosecutor Hamilton Caldwell countered that Strider “was for the boys all along.” Carolyn Bryant later noted that well before the murder the Milams and Bryants believed that their association with Strider made them immune to prosecution. As early as September 3, only three days after Till’s body was found, Strider told reporters he did not believe the body was Till’s: “The body we took from the river looked more like that of a grown man instead of a young boy. It was also more decomposed than it should have been after that short a stay in the water.”26 This contrasted sharply from his assessment of the body’s condition right after they pulled it from the river, when he said it looked like it had been there only two days. This shift had a political purpose, of course; if it had been in the water for more than a few days, the body could not have been Emmett Till’s. The following day Strider told reporters, “The whole thing looks like a deal made up by the NAACP.”27 Sheriff George Smith of Leflore County quickly and publicly disagreed. His deputy, John Ed Cothran, could not keep silent, either, and stated emphatically that he’d been present when Moses Wright identified the body by the silver ring engraved with Till’s father’s initials.28