The Blood of Emmett Till(61)
As flimsy as it was, Smith had to deal with Strider’s conspiracy theory about the identity of the body and the unscrupulous schemes of the NAACP. The prosecutor described this theory in terms considerably less admiring than the defense had used and ended by calling it “the most far-fetched [proposition] I’ve ever heard in a courtroom.”29
At the end of the day the prosecution team was counting on the testimony of its African American witnesses—Moses Wright, Mamie Bradley, and Willie Reed, in particular. Wright tied both defendants to the kidnapping, and both of them acknowledged as much. He also identified the body, though Mamie’s testimony went much further to establish that the body belonged to her son. Reed, only eighteen, proved himself as brave as Wright, pointing straight at Milam when asked to identify the man he saw come out of the equipment shed with a pistol strapped to his waist. His account of these events tied Milam and his truck to the place where the murder occurred and was substantiated by two other witnesses. But all these witnesses were black, and for a white Mississippi jury to weigh their word against Sheriff Strider’s and the defense’s version of events would have been revolutionary.
So when Smith asked the jury to look beyond race for the truth of the brutal murder of Emmett Till, he did so in terms they could accept: “Old Mose Wright is a good old country Negro, and you know he’s not going to tell anybody a lie”; Mamie Bradley spoke with the authority of a mother’s love; and Willie Reed was a plainspoken young man of great courage. “I don’t know but what Willie Reed has more nerve than I have,” Smith added. Then he made his way back to the prosecution’s table.30
At 2:34 the jury retired to the jury room to decide the verdict. Mamie, sitting at the black press table with Representative Diggs and the contingent of reporters, decided she did not need to wait. “As the jury retired,” she wrote later, “I measured the looks of the folks in the rear and I turned to Congressman Diggs and the others. ‘The jury has retired and it’s time for us to retire.’?” She and Diggs, taking the still-trembling Reed with them, made their way through the milling crowds to their car and headed back to Mound Bayou.31
16
THE VERDICT OF THE WORLD
Milam, Bryant, and their accomplices expected a select audience for their abduction and butchery of a black teenager. They expected that audience to be local rather than regional or national, and it is unlikely they gave world opinion any thought. They assumed any attention given their crimes would be whispered rather than broadcast. They abducted Emmett Till, killed him, and disposed of his body in ways they knew would promote those whispers. With their guns and flashlights and swagger, they knew that every black person in the Delta would soon hear of his disappearance, and their role in it. From the moment they got in the truck to grab the boy who “did the talking” they were determined, as they would soon say publicly, to send a message that would serve as both signpost and pillar of the social order of white supremacy. From the moment they decided to kill him, their act was a lynching, not an assassination or a simple murder.
White authorities were determined to claim otherwise. “This is not a lynching,” declared Governor White. “It is straight out murder.”1 Yet despite such official and editorial claims, this was a lynching in the sense that a group of people killed someone and presumed they were acting in service to race, justice, tradition, and widely held values in their community.2 The lynch mob never intended Emmett Till’s killing to be one of the old spectacle lynchings, once common in the South, with the victims burned alive or hanged before an audience of hundreds or even thousands, body parts taken as souvenirs, lynching photographs bought and sold, lurid accounts published in local newspapers.3 As the twentieth century marched onward, extrajudicial murders conducted for public viewing and participation were less acceptable. But while Carolyn Bryant’s kinsmen intended, at least initially, that the details of their torture and killing of Emmett Till would remain their own family secret, they knew neighbors would talk, and they expected them to do so. The decision to take the boy started with storefront rumors, and they intended that his murder would become a matter of local gossip and lore, a badge of honor among the faithful.
A quiet joke went around: “Isn’t that just like a nigger to try and swim the Tallahatchie River with a gin fan around his neck?”4 That kind of local winking and terror were as far as the men who killed Emmett Till expected their murderous handiwork to go. Instead Till’s body rose from the dark waters of the Tallahatchie, ended up on worldwide television, and painted his death brightly in the unimaginable global imagination. Mass media and massive protest may have made his murder the most notorious racial incident in the history of the world. White mobs lynched thousands of African Americans—even children occasionally—but it is Emmett Till’s blood that indelibly marks a before and after. His lynching, his mother’s decision to open the casket to the world, and the trial of Milam and Bryant spun the country, and arguably the world, in a different direction.
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When the jurors filed out of the courtroom to begin their deliberations, the crowd surrounding the Tallahatchie County Courthouse thinned, but not in expectation of a drawn-out deliberation. Fat raindrops had begun to bounce on the streets and sidewalks of Sumner.5 The rain did little to cut the late summer’s oppressive heat, and after just eight minutes the twelve jurors sent out a request for Coca-Cola. In the courthouse Milam read the newspaper and rocked on the back legs of his cane-back chair. Roy and Carolyn Bryant looked nervous; she worried that her children might grow up without a father in the house and that she would have no way to support them. But whatever nervous tension was running between Roy and Carolyn, it had dissipated enough that by the time the foreman knocked on the inside of the jury room door after about an hour, J.W. and Roy had already lit big cigars, swaggering with confidence in their exoneration.6 Mamie Bradley, Moses Wright, and all the other black witnesses had long ago left the courthouse.