The Blood of Emmett Till(49)

This news shocked Chatham and prosecutor Robert Smith. Right after lunch, Chatham likewise shocked the court and caught the defense off-guard. Due to a “startling development” in the investigation, he asked for a recess in order to locate several new witnesses. Chatham said that it might require the entire afternoon to run them all down; though he did not say so, Dr. Howard had arranged to meet with the witnesses and Chatham hoped it would not take that long to assemble them, but managing black murder witnesses in rural Mississippi, where their lives were in danger every moment, could get complicated. Breland leaped to his feet and accused the state of stalling. The trial should proceed at once, he insisted. Judge Swango replied with cool courtesy that the state’s request seemed perfectly reasonable to him.

The effort to gain more and better testimony for the prosecution launched what Simeon Booker called “Mississippi’s first major interracial manhunt” and Murray Kempton described as “hunting through the cotton fields for four Negroes with a strange story to tell.” It involved Booker, Howard, the sheriffs of Leflore and Sunflower counties, Clark Porteous of the Memphis Press-Scimitar, W. C. Shoemaker and Jim Featherston of the Jackson Daily News, James Hicks of the National Negro Press Association, Clotye Murdock of Ebony, David Jackson of Jet, L. Alex Wilson of the Chicago Defender, Amzie Moore, Medgar Evers, and Ruby Hurley of the NAACP, and perhaps a few others.16

Both sheriffs first drove to Leslie Milam’s place with Howard and searched the floor of the barn for bloodstains. They found none, but it was obvious that someone had cleaned the floor recently; it was newly covered with corn and soybeans. Unfortunately the investigators did not have the resources or the time to perform a more scientific examination.

Sheriff Smith, who had been battling Sheriff Strider ever since Till’s body was retrieved from the Tallahatchie River, acknowledged that he had been looking for witnesses for several weeks and joined the hunt with enthusiasm. “These witnesses have a story to tell,” he said. “We’ve got to find them if it takes all night.”17 The teams agreed to reconvene at eight for a meeting with the witnesses. None of the expeditions went easily. Frank Young did not turn up until one in the morning and refused to talk to anyone but Howard, who was not available.

Moore, Evers, and Hurley put on their farmhand disguises, whisked up the black reporter Moses Newsome of the Memphis Tri-State Defender, and combed the plantations and swamplands for witnesses, finding three: Willie Reed, eighteen; his grandfather Add Reed; and their neighbor Amanda Bradley, fifty. Their stories generally confirmed the one Frank Young had told. After Howard promised to protect them in the short term and afterward relocate them to Chicago, all three agreed to testify.18

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A number of things about the Till trial did not conform to the stereotypes of Mississippi justice in 1955. Judge Swango’s fair-minded, even-handed conduct from the bench ran counter to what most observers expected. But perhaps nothing was quite so striking as the workings of Howard’s Mississippi underground, a collection of NAACP activists, black and white newspaper reporters, and law enforcement officials who scoured the countryside for witnesses. For Howard and the NAACP contingent, the struggle for justice was motive enough. The reporters sought justice, too, perhaps, but also a story. Judge Swango seems to have genuinely wanted a fair and impartial trial, though it was perhaps more a question of honor than outcome. As for the two sheriffs, they knew that these witnesses could shift the trial from Strider’s jurisdiction to their respective jurisdictions, but was a desire for justice their motive for joining the search? They may have simply disliked Strider. Or perhaps they just wanted to be able to face themselves in the mirror. Whatever their reasons, this strange, seemingly fearless group swung into action and found the only witnesses for the prosecution that could tie Milam and Bryant to the scene of the crime.





14


“THERE HE IS”


The trial resumed at 9:20 on Wednesday morning. As Moses Wright made his way toward the front of the sweltering courtroom, quiet fell so that you could hear feet shuffling and the low whump, whump, whump of the ceiling fan. It was the third day of the trial. The authorities had brought in a hundred or so cane-bottom chairs in an effort to keep people off the windowsills and away from the faded lime-green walls. If it had been empty with a good breeze, the room would have reached ninety degrees that day; stuffed sweatbox fashion, the temperature likely reached a hundred or more. The Delta Democrat-Times called the courtroom “an oven-hot, smoke-filled room that was jammed to the walls with spectators.”1 The two four-blade ceiling fans seemed only to stir the cigarette smoke. Such oppressive heat discouraged movement other than the polyrhythmic batting of several dozen handheld cardboard church fans of the sort common in the South before air-conditioning.2

After two days of jury selection and delays, the short, wiry, dark-skinned preacher was the first witness called. That was not the only reason for the rapt attention in the room, however. Moses Wright was a black man called to testify against two white men charged with murder. In Mississippi that constituted an almost suicidal affront to white supremacy. And he had been duly warned.

Neatly dressed in a white shirt, black pants, a thin, dark blue tie with light blue stripes, and white suspenders, Wright settled into the big wooden witness chair, the back of which reached nearly to the top of his head. He tugged nervously at his thick, workingman’s fingers that had been clearing fields of cotton. “I wasn’t exactly brave and I wasn’t scared,” he said later. “I just wanted to see justice done.”3