The Blood of Emmett Till(60)

I want you to think about the future. When your summons comes to cross the Great Divide, and as you enter your father’s house—a home not made by human hands but eternal in the heavens—you can look back to where your father’s feet have trod and see your good record written in the sands of time. And, when you go down to your lonely, silent tomb to a sleep that knows no dreams, I want you to hold in the palm of your hand a record of service to God and your fellow man. And the only way you can do that is to turn these boys loose.21

“I thought I had heard it all during the testimony,” Mamie Bradley wrote, “but those defense lawyers were saving the worst for last.”22

After the lunch recess John W. Whitten provided the final summation for the defense. He took on the job of returning to Sheriff Strider’s theory that the body pulled from the river was not the body of Emmett Till but instead part of an NAACP-sponsored scheme to bring down shame upon the state of Mississippi and drive a wedge between the races. He acknowledged that Milam and Bryant may have abducted the boy, but if they did, they had released him. Perhaps then Moses Wright had taken him to the NAACP, who persuaded Wright to plant that silver ring upon another decaying body so that people would assume that it was Till.23 No doubt the young man had been whisked back to Chicago or to Detroit, where he also had family. Wrote Mamie, “They practically accused Papa Mose and the NAACP of grave robbing.”24

“There are people who want to destroy the way of life of the Southern people,” Whitten intoned. “There are people in the United States who want to defy the customs of the South” by undermining the time-honored and harmonious relations between the races and by “trying to widen the gap which has appeared between the white and colored people in the United States. Those people would welcome the opportunity to focus national attention on Sumner, Mississippi. They would not be above putting a rotting, stinking corpse in the river in the hope that it would be identified as Emmett Louis Till. And they are not all in Detroit and Chicago,” he said pointedly. “They are in Jackson, Vicksburg”—where Medgar Evers organized, where the NAACP had filed school desegregation petitions—“and they are in Mound Bayou, too,” an unmistakable reference to Dr. T. R. M. Howard and the RCNL. “And if Moses Wright knows one, he didn’t have to go far to find him. And they include some of the most astute students of psychology known anywhere. They include doctors and undertakers and they have ready access to a corpse which could meet their purpose.”25

But none of the evidence really mattered, Whitten told the jury. “It is within your power,” he assured them, “to disregard all the facts, the evidence, and the law, and bring in any decision you like based upon any whim. There is no way anyone can punish you for any decision you make. The last time an attempt was made by a judge to punish a jury for refusing to follow his instructions was in England in the time of Charles II, and this was overruled. . . . You are our hope and confidence to send these defendants back to their families happy.”26 Asking the jury directly to acquit Milam and Bryant, Whitten expressed his full confidence that “every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to do it.”27

With that invocation the defense’s perverted passion play performed for the Jim Crow faithful was nearly finished. It was only left to the prosecution to interrogate that script just enough and in just the right way so that at least one Anglo-Saxon juror might find the fortitude to question it. And so Robert Smith, the former FBI agent, rose to give the last summation to the jury.

It was plain that he read the jury much as his colleagues for the defense did: that they were a band of sunburned Mississippi farmers outraged about the outsiders who scorned their state and their way of life. They believed in that way of life as a bulwark against foreign ideologies and disloyal revolutionaries. Preferring to acquit Milam and Bryant, well aware of all the agitation from African Americans since Black Monday, they might be persuaded to seize upon the defense’s suggestion that the corpus delicti was part of an NAACP scheme. But where the defense played on Anglo-Saxon unity and racial tradition—surely a shrewd if predictable tack—Smith thought it possible that basic, heart-deep honesty and perhaps a shred of paternalism toward black people might give the jury room to believe the more plausible narrative: that an old black uncle and a terrified but brave young black man were telling the truth. To Smith fell the difficult task of lighting a narrow pathway for these twelve white men to follow that would preserve their dignity while it protested certain aspects of their way of life, a pathway that defined and defended that way of life by damning its worst excesses. He was asking them, and his closing comments suggested that he knew it, to be as courageous as Wright and Reed and Mamie Bradley.

Like the defense, Smith called upon the jury as fellow white Southerners, men dedicated to their common homeland, though clearly he urged a different strategy for preserving a Southern social order based on defending human rights: “Gentlemen, we’re on the defensive. Only so long as we can preserve the rights of everyone—white or black—can we keep our way of life. . . . Emmett Till down here in Mississippi was a citizen of the United States; he was entitled to his life and liberty.”28

Also like his counterparts at the defense table, Smith played upon the fears and resentments sown by outsiders, with their high-flown, profit-driven assaults on the honor of Mississippi. “Outside influences,” in fact, want the two murderers freed for their own perfidious purposes. “If they are turned loose, those people will have a fundraising campaign for the next fifteen years.”