The Blood of Emmett Till(59)

Gerald Chatham, the powerfully built district attorney, delivered the opening summation for the prosecution, followed by summations from several members of the defense team, with Robert Smith of the prosecution closing out. Chatham spoke with powerful emotion that seemed to wring sweat from his body; his shirt was dripping wet by the time he finished speaking in the sweltering courtroom.

“By every courtroom standard, the Mississippi born district attorney made a great plea for the dead colored youth,” James Hicks wrote, comparing Chatham to a Southern evangelist. “For his numerous moments of brilliant oratory, he brought tears to the eyes not only of those seated at the colored press tables but to some of the white listeners as well.”13 Pounding the table occasionally, Chatham asserted that he was not moved by “the pressure and agitation of organizations outside or inside the state of Mississippi.” In other words, he didn’t like the NAACP any more than the jury did. Instead, he told them, “I am concerned with what is morally right. To be concerned with anything else will be dangerous to the precepts and traditions of the South.”

Chatham, knowing his jury well, hewed to a certain vision of Southern identity. Foremost, a true Southerner would never kill a child. “I was born and bred in the South, and the very worst punishment that should have occurred was to take a razor strap, turn [Emmett Till] over a barrel, and whip him. I’ve spanked my child and you’ve spanked yours. The fact remains, gentlemen, that from the time Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam took Emmett Till from the home of Mose Wright he hasn’t been seen since.” What these two former soldiers did was give a fourteen-year-old boy “a court martial with the death penalty.”

“The very first words of the State’s testimony were dripping with the blood of Emmett Till. What were those words, gentlemen? They were, ‘Preacher, preacher, I want that boy from Chicago, the one that did the talking in Money.’ . . . That wasn’t an invitation to that card game [as] they claimed.”14

In addition to navigating notions of Southern loyalty and manners, Chatham knew that he had to offset defense arguments that the body in the river was not Emmett Till’s. So he told a story about the disappearance of a beloved family dog. His son came to him one day and said, “Dad, I’ve found Old Shep,” and led him to the badly decomposed body of their dog. “That dog’s body was rotting and the meat was falling off its bones, but my little boy pointed to it and said, ‘That’s Old Shep, Pa. That’s old Shep.’ My boy didn’t need no undertaker or a sheriff to identify his dog. And we don’t need them to identify Emmett Till. All we need is someone who loved him and cared for him. If there was one ear left, one hairline, then I say to you that Mamie Bradley was God’s given witness to identify him.”15

“They murdered that boy,” Chatham said finally, “and to hide that dastardly, cowardly act, they tied barbed wire to his neck and to a heavy gin fan and dumped him in the river for the turtles and the fish.”16

When Chatham headed for his seat, Hicks heard Mamie, who was sitting next to him, whisper to herself, “He could not have done any better.”17

C. Sidney Carlton offered the first summation for the defense. He poured himself a paper cup of water from a green pitcher on the judge’s desk as he began to speak and sipped it intermittently.18 The final curious twist in the testimony of Carolyn Bryant then played out. “Where is the motive?” Carlton asked. The incident at the store was immaterial, he suggested to the jury. The “testimony by Bryant’s wife did not implicate Till.” Her story of a black man who “molested” and whistled at her did not reflect on the boy, and his clients certainly did not kill him on that account. By this rhetorical feint he managed to inform the jury that Carolyn Bryant had testified that she had been sexually manhandled. The inevitable implication: after hearing what happened to her, any red-blooded white man would have responded the same way.

Moving from the racially visceral to the seemingly rational, Carlton reminded the jury of the “scientific” evidence that the battered, bloated body in question had been in the river much longer than Till’s could have been. He then questioned the lighting at the Wright home and whether it was plausible that the old man could have made a positive identification. The most damning evidence—that Roy Bryant had said “This is Mr. Bryant”—the defense attorney sought to transform into a weakness: “Had any of you gone to Mose Wright’s house with evil intent, would you have given your name? There’s nothing reasonable about the state’s case.” He began to shout: “If that’s identification, if that places these men at that scene, then none of us are safe.”19 Of course Carlton didn’t mention that Milam and Bryant had both confessed to the kidnapping. There was “nothing reasonable about the state’s theory that Milam and Bryant kidnapped Till in Leflore, drove several miles to a plantation in Sunflower County, then doubled back into Tallahatchie County to dump the body into a river.”20 In short, Milam and Bryant hadn’t kidnapped or killed Emmett Till, but they would have been justified in doing so. Here was the cold, unspoken fear running through the white South in the 1950s: If we condemn Milam and Bryant, what else must we condemn? If you vote to acquit these defendants, Carlton closed, “may you feel, in the words of Charles Dickens, that ’tis a far, far better thing you do now than you have ever done.”

J. W. Kellum, Sumner’s homegrown attorney, spoke briefly just before the lunch recess. He called the jury “a peerage of democracy” and “absolutely the custodians of American civilization.” A guilty verdict would be tantamount to “admitting that freedom was lost forever,” Kellum said solemnly. “I want you to tell me where under God’s shining sun is the land of the free and the home of the brave if you don’t turn these boys loose.” If you do not, “your forefathers will absolutely turn over in their graves.” So began his flight of oratory, some of it borrowed from Mississippi’s late governor Paul Johnson: