The Blood of Emmett Till(48)
At eight o’clock Monday evening some members of the Mississippi underground conducted a strategy meeting in Mound Bayou to choose a course of action. Aside from Howard, Hurley was present, as were several African American reporters, including Hicks, Booker, and L. Alex Wilson of the Chicago Defender. They agreed that white reporters might fare better in dealing with local law enforcement officials and decided to ask John Popham of the New York Times and Clark Porteous of the Memphis Press-Scimitar to act in concert with them. All the reporters would have to agree to hold off filing any stories until after the Tuesday night meeting with the witnesses.5
What happened next was probably an unintentional blunder. When Howard phoned Porteous to come to a meeting, he neglected to tell him to bring only Popham and to tell no one else. Thus when Porteous arrived that night, he not only failed to bring Popham, but he had recruited W. C. Shoemaker and James Featherston of the Jackson (MS) Daily News, the most reactionary segregationist newspaper in Mississippi. What is more, rather than demur or equivocate, Howard declared to the three reporters, “I can produce at least five witnesses at the proper time who will testify that Till was not killed in Tallahatchie County but killed in Sunflower County . . . in the headquarters shed of the Clint Sheridan Plantation which is managed by Leslie Milam, brother of J. W. Milam.”
It was, as Howard knew, a bombshell.6 But rather than hide the witnesses in his compound and produce them at the trial at the moment most damning for the defendants, he showed his cards in advance and neglected to swear the reporters to secrecy. Only after considerable wheedling and a promise that they would be the only white reporters invited to the Tuesday evening meeting with the witnesses did Porteous, Shoemaker, and Featherston promise to keep mum for now.7
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Tuesday’s courtroom drama began at a morning break, when Mamie Bradley “walked quietly but purposefully through the center aisle of the courtroom,” wrote Rob Hall of the Daily Worker, which was filled with “relatives, friends and neighbors of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, the two men charged with the murder of Emmett Louis Till, her child.” Walking alongside her were two men she introduced to the press as her father, Wiley Nash “John” Carthan of Detroit, and her cousin Rayfield Mooty.8 Fifty or sixty reporters immediately surrounded her, and photographers leaped over chairs and stood on the black press table to get pictures of her. Sheriff Strider pushed his 270-pound frame through the crowd and handed her a subpoena to be a witness, stating, “You are now in the state of Mississippi. You will come under all rules of the state of Mississippi.”9 Judge Swango seated her near the black press at the front of the courtroom and instructed deputies to locate a larger table for that group. “She is a demure woman whose attractiveness was set off by a small black hat with a veil folded back, a black dress with a white collar,” Hall wrote. “In the more than 99-degree heat of the courtroom, she fanned herself with a black fan with a red design.”10
Arriving with Bradley in a heavily armed motorcade from Mound Bayou was Charles Diggs, U.S. congressman from Michigan, whose family was originally from Mississippi. It took him about an hour to gain entrance, however. Diggs had written to Judge Swango and received a reply inviting him to attend the trial.11 Even so, according to Hicks, Sheriff Strider initially refused to grant Diggs admission to the courthouse, so Diggs sat in his car with the armed guards and asked Hicks to take the judge his business card. Strider told his deputy, “This nigger here”—gesturing toward Hicks—“says there’s a nigger outside who says he’s a Congressman, and he has corresponded with the judge, and the judge told him to come on down and he would let him in.”
The deputy replied, “This guy said a nigger Congressman?”
“That’s what this nigger said,” Strider responded and waved Hicks into the courthouse. Hicks made his way inside and sent Diggs’s card to the judge, who instructed the bailiff to make room for Diggs at the newly enlarged black press table.12
“Local people were obviously surprised when white newsmen shook hands with Rep. Diggs and addressed him as ‘Mr. Congressman,’?” wrote Rob Hall.13 A reporter for the Jackson Daily News opined, “Diggs has about as much business being at the trial as he has being in Congress” and added that his presence “indicates the political ore to be mined from this judicial molehill by cynical vote-seekers.”14
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It took the court well over an hour to select the two remaining jurors. After the mid-morning break, the jury was seated and District Attorney Chatham took the floor to begin his case. First he summoned these witnesses: Deputy Sheriff John Ed Cothran of Leflore County; Dr. L. B. Otken, who examined the body; C. M. Nelson, the undertaker who dispatched the body to Chicago; Deputy Sheriff Garland Melton of Tallahatchie County, who was present when the corpse was taken from the river; Chester Miller, the African American undertaker from Greenwood who initially took the body; Charles Fred Mims, who helped retrieve the body from the water; W. E. Hodges, a commercial fisherman, and his son Robert Hodges, the seventeen-year-old who initially found the body; Moses Wright; and Mamie Bradley. The defense called the same witnesses plus Roy Bryant, J. W. Milam, Carolyn Bryant, Juanita Milam, Eula Lee Bryant, and Sheriff H. C. Strider. Judge Swango called an early lunch recess at 11:15.
The new jury dined on barbecued pork chops at the Delta Inn, while Milam and Bryant enjoyed the air-conditioning at a lunch spot in Webb with Strider. Mamie, Representative Diggs, and the black press assembled at James Griffin’s Place, a black joint on Front Street. During the break, defense attorney Sidney Carlton gathered reporters around him and began to paint Till as a menace to white womanhood who brought his fate upon himself. Till entered the store, “propositioned” Carolyn Bryant, and assaulted her, Carlton said. He “mauled her and he tussled her and he made indecent proposals to her, and if that boy had any sense he’d have made the next train to Chicago.” Meanwhile, reporter Clark Porteous, acting as an emissary from T. R. M. Howard, approached the district attorney and gave him a statement from Howard that revealed the existence of the new witnesses and that their testimony would change the location of the murder and tie Milam and Bryant directly to the crime.15