The Blood of Emmett Till(62)
As the jurors returned, the sun broke through the clouds outside and a loud murmur arose from the crowd. Judge Swango rapped his gavel and decreed that there would be no demonstrations in his courtroom when the jury announced their verdict, nor were any photographers to take pictures.7
The members of the jury looked solemn. Judge Swango asked them to stand: “Gentlemen of the jury, do you have a verdict?” J. A. Shaw, the foreman, answered, “We have,” then said, “Not guilty.” A shout of celebration went up from the crowd, and the judge demanded quiet. He reminded the jurors that he had instructed them to write down the verdict, and sent them back into the jury room. Even so, spectators in the stairwells rushed downstairs, and the refrain “Not guilty” echoed in shouts through the corridors. When the jurors reemerged, the judge asked Shaw to read the verdict aloud, which he did: “We the jurors find the defendants not guilty.” By this time word of the acquittals had reached out into the throngs, now increasingly white, that were gathered outside, and a great commotion arose as they sent up a cheer.8
Journalists, photographers, and well-wishers crowded around the Milams and Bryants, shaking hands and slapping backs. Photographers urged the couples to kiss for the cameras, which they did. “I don’t remember anything about when the verdict was brought out,” Carolyn said, “because all that went through my head was ‘Oh, thank God, my children have a father,’ and so I don’t remember.” While the Milams appeared genuinely happy, the Bryants’ affection seemed oddly forced, perhaps an early sign of the centrifugal forces that eventually would lead to divorce.9
The performance of the trial wasn’t over, however; now it was the jury’s turn onstage. Having fulfilled their civic duty, the jurors filed through the crowded room, exclamations of “Good work” and “Nice going” trailing behind them.10 One juror explained to reporters that the jury reached its verdict on the third ballot during the hour-long deliberation. “There were several reasons for the verdict,” he said. “But generally everyone reached the conclusion that the body was not definitely identified.”11 The first ballot had three abstentions, the second had two abstentions, and the third was unanimous—not one juror had cast a “guilty” ballot. The hour’s delay had been staged, with Sheriff-elect Harry Dogan sending word to the jury to “make it look good” by taking their time. “If we hadn’t stopped to drink pop,” one juror said later, “it wouldn’t have taken that long.”12 In public, however, most stayed on script. Shaw, a farmer from Webb—Mamie Bradley’s birthplace—explained to reporters why they had voted to acquit Milam and Bryant: “We had a picture of the body with us in the jury room, and it seemed to us the body was so badly decomposed it could not be identified.” But in the atmosphere of victory that suffused the Sumner courthouse, decorum was hard to maintain. Asked whether Mamie Bradley’s testimony had impressed the jury at all, Shaw sneered, “If she had tried a little harder, she might have got a tear.”13
Hugh Whitaker, a graduate student from the Sumner area whose father had worked the trial as a law officer, returned half a dozen years later and interviewed nine of the twelve jurors. He found that not one had ever doubted that Milam and Bryant had killed Emmett Till, and only one had even entertained Sheriff Strider’s suggestion that the corpse might not be Till’s. Nobody had based his vote to acquit on “outside interference” by the NAACP or the flood of reporters and media coverage. All of the jurors Whitaker interviewed agreed that the sole reason they had voted “not guilty” was because a black boy had insulted a white woman, and therefore her kinsmen could not be blamed for killing him.14
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Mamie Bradley, Willie Reed, and Charles Diggs were on the highway bound for Memphis, where they would catch northbound airplanes. As promised, Diggs had bought a plane ticket to Chicago for Reed, who had left the Delta only once in his life, and then only to go as far as Memphis. They traveled quietly until the news came. “We were on the road about fifteen minutes out of Mound Bayou,” Mamie wrote, “when it was announced on the radio. There was such jubilation. The radio reporter,” who appeared to be broadcasting from the courthouse square, “sounded like he was doing the countdown for a new year. You could hear the celebration in the background. It was like the Fourth of July.”15
Whatever hopes any in that car had maintained during the trial, none of them was surprised at the verdict. Nor was Reverend Wright, his cotton harvested and his duty done. The most thoughtful observers awaited not the jubilation of Sumner but the verdict of world opinion.
The cluster of cameras outside the courthouse should have reminded the men and women of Sumner that much of the planet was not only watching but judging them, judging Mississippi, and judging the United States. That was a realization that would fully descend upon them only over the ensuing months. For now they felt real pride. No doubt the jurors and many local observers would have seconded the secretary of the Citizens’ Council, who told Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune, “Sir, this is not the United States. This is Sunflower County, Mississippi.”16 Others cheerfully asserted that the trial exonerated Mississippi of the slurs slung at her. It had been a fair trial and a proper verdict, proving the state could handle its own affairs, thank you very much.
The journalists who covered the trial were more circumspect; none of them was cheerful, although most considered it a fair trial but for the verdict. “No prosecutors in the United States could have worked harder or longer for a conviction than did District Attorney Gerald Chatham and Special Prosecutor Robert B. Smith, both native white sons of their state,” wrote James Hicks, who had come to Sumner expecting “Mississippi white man’s justice” and nothing more. “And no judge, whether on the Supreme Court bench or the rickety rocking chair of the bench at Sumner could have been more painstaking and eminently fair in the conduct of the trial than Judge Curtis M. Swango of Sardis, Miss.” Unfortunately, lamented Hicks, white Mississippi and the jurors held tightly to their age-old blind spot of racial prejudice, “which prevents them from seeing and thinking straight when they look upon a black face.”17