The Blood of Emmett Till(52)

Then Sheriff George Smith, at least an honorary member of that Mississippi underground that had located the new witnesses, took the stand and testified that he had found Roy Bryant sleeping at the store in Money at about two that Sunday afternoon. He’d had a long talk with Bryant in the front seat of the squad car. “I asked him why did he go down there and get that little nigger boy, and he said that he went down there and got him to let his wife see him to identify him, and then he said that she said it wasn’t the right one, and then he said that he turned him loose.”

Because Sheriff Smith’s testimony conveyed Bryant’s admission that he had kidnapped Emmett Till the defense moved quickly to frame the exchange as a private, confidential conversation between two old friends that Bryant never understood was part of a murder investigation. This was before the days of Miranda, the Supreme Court decision, later familiar to all fans of crime dramas, that decrees suspects of a crime be advised of their right to remain silent and that everything they say can and will be used against them in a court of law. Consequently all the defense could do was insinuate that the interrogation was dishonest, that a uniformed officer interviewing a friend without declaring the risks of admitting to kidnapping and perhaps worse was an act of deceit to which a reasonable jury should take affront.16

Next the prosecution called Deputy Sheriff John Ed Cothran of Leflore County. Cothran had been present when the body came out of the water. He had also been the one to arrest Milam and had talked with him about what had happened to Emmett Till. “I asked him if they went out there and got that boy,” Cothran testified. “I didn’t call anyone by name. I just asked him if they had went out and got that boy. And then he said, yes, they had got the boy and then turned him loose at the store afterwards, Mr. Bryant’s store.”

Carlton quickly objected to this testimony and Swango sent the jury out of the room. Carlton suggested that Cothran’s status as “a good friend of that entire family” made it all the more imperative that he should have informed Milam of the risks of his admission to breaking the law. “And we have a further objection to this witness’s testimony at this time on the grounds that there has been no showing whatsoever in the record that the body taken from the Tallahatchie River and alleged to be that of Emmett Till, that the death was caused by any criminal agency whatsoever.” The judge overruled Carlton’s objections and brought the jury back in.

District Attorney Chatham then asked Cothran, in the presence of the jury, if he’d ever “had occasion to investigate the murder or disappearance of Emmett Till” and had ever talked to J. W. Milam about that. Cothran answered both questions in the affirmative and added that he’d talked to Milam in the Leflore County Jail the day he’d arrested him. Cothran assured the court that he had not promised Milam anything nor threatened him in any way. “I asked him if they went out there and got that little boy, and if they had done something with him. And he said they had brought him up to that store and turned him loose.” This second instance of the defendants’ admission to kidnapping went without further comment.17

Under questioning by Chatham, Cothran described the scene at the riverbank after he’d arrived to find the body in a boat on the shore. Seeking to undermine the defense’s implication that there may have been no murder, Chatham asked about the condition of the corpse. “Well, his head was torn up pretty bad. And his left eye was about out, it was all gouged out in there, you know,” Cothran answered. “And right up in the top of his head, there was a hole knocked in the front of it there. And then right over his right ear—well, I wouldn’t say it was a bullet hole, but some of them said it was.”

Breland piped up from the defense table, “We object to what they said it was,” and Judge Swango sustained the objection.

“There was a small hole in his head right above the ear,” Cothran corrected himself, “over on the right side of his head, over here,” gesturing toward the right side of his own head, “and that was all tore up. There was a place knocked in his forehead.” On cross-examination Carlton once again tried to suggest that Cothran’s friendship with the accused invalidated his testimony and that the damage to Till’s head could have occurred after the body was already in the river. With that the court recessed until ten o’clock Thursday morning. That thin veil the defense was offering the jury now required them to ignore the fact that both defendants had admitted to abducting the boy at two in the morning.18

After the session ended on Wednesday, members of the United Packinghouse Workers of America delegation from Louisiana found Moses Wright standing alone outside the courtroom. One of them, Frank Brown, “asked the old man where he found the courage to testify in the face of probable death. ‘Some things are worse than death,’ Wright told Brown. ‘If a man lives, he must still live with himself.’?”19

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On Thursday morning Emmett Till’s mother made her way through the crowd and up to the witness stand. Mamie Bradley “was a composed and well-spoken witness,” wrote John Popham of the New York Times. “She wore a black dress with a white collar and a red sash. She is a pretty brunette.” Murray Kempton noted that she “wore a black bolero and a printed dress with a small black hat and a piece of veil and she was very different from the cotton patch cropper who is the ordinary Negro witness in a Mississippi courtroom.” A columnist for the Greenwood Commonwealth wrote, “The fashionably dressed 33-year-old negro woman had an air of confidence and determination. . . . Her answers were direct and to the point, using good English and speaking in a highly audible tone. At only one point did she display any emotion. This occurred when she was shown a photograph of the body. After looking at the picture, Mamie sobbed, took off her glasses and wiped tears from her eyes.” Throughout, the Greenwood paper attested, she appeared dignified, intelligent, sympathetic, and respectable.20