The Blood of Emmett Till(63)

With varying degrees of interest and drawing a wide array of lessons, white America wrestled with what had happened in Judge Swango’s courtroom. Almost all of them agreed to knowing what the jury had known, that Bryant and Milam had participated in killing Emmett Till, and for the oldest of reasons white Southern men sometimes killed African Americans: for an unacceptable sexual affront to their sensibilities and status. Not mere prejudice but the inbred fear of the Black Beast Rapist called the tune in Sumner’s courtroom, several reporters noted. Max Lerner of the New York Post wrote, “On the sanctity of white womanhood, a Mississippi jury is only a vehicle for expressing the mass fear and hatred of the Negro.”18 The accusation that Emmett Till had attacked Carolyn Bryant boiled the blood of white spectators. Jurors had almost certainly heard rumors of “the talk” that had sent Bryant and Milam to kidnap the boy, and their interpretation of that talk was steeped in centuries of fearful myths. In his incendiary summation defense attorney Sidney Carlton stated that Till “molested” Carolyn Bryant as if it were a fact established by the proceedings. Bill Sorrells, who covered the trial for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, observed that the defense “was built on emotion and Mrs. Bryant was the key.”19 The defiant editors of the Greenwood Morning Star seemed to confirm this analysis; Mississippi’s misfortune, they wrote, was partly because the trial had become known as the “wolf whistle case” or the “Till murder case,” when all along it should have been called “this rape attempt case.”20

White Mississippians’ reaction to the legal process ranged from the resentful to the surreal. Hodding Carter Jr. at the Delta Democrat-Times, a Pulitzer winner and a moderate who had earned the hatred of many white Mississippians, blamed the laxity of law enforcement for the acquittals and blamed the NAACP for that laxity. Had local officials not been put on the defensive, he opined, they “might otherwise have made an honest effort to do more than what resulted in an effective cover-up.” Carter sounded almost like the reactionary editor of the Jackson Daily News as he blasted the NAACP for “blanket accusations of decent people, their studied needling of the citizens who had to decide a matter of local justice, and their indifference to truth in favor of propaganda-making.”21

The editors of the Jackson Daily News agreed with Carter that the evidence had been insufficient, but they felt none of his disapproval of the outcome: “The cold hard fact concerning the acquittal in Tallahatchie County of the two alleged slayers of a black youth from Chicago is that the prosecution failed to prove its case.” The Memphis Commercial Appeal affirmed that “evidence necessary for convicting on a murder charge was lacking.”22 A great many white Mississippians responded with pride that the trial had been a paragon of fair play that demonstrated the Magnolia State’s critics wrong. “Mississippi people rose to the occasion and proved to the world,” declared the Greenwood Morning Star, “that this is a place where justice in the courts is given to all races, religions and classes.”23

Carter became a kind of national expert on the occasional insanity in his adopted home state. Outside Mississippi he spoke of the terrible injustice of the Till affair, but at home he often seemed to consider the blot on Mississippi’s good name to be the real tragedy. Attempting to speak for enlightened Southern opinion, he wrote, “It was not the jury that was derelict in its duty, despite the logical conclusions it might have made concerning whose body was most likely found in the Tallahatchie River, and who most likely put it there, but rather the criticism must fall upon the law officials who attempted in such small measure to seek out evidence and to locate witnesses to firmly establish whoever was or was not guilty.” He chose to blame the investigation that had produced such weak evidence, not the jury that had assessed it.24

In a widely cussed and discussed piece in the Saturday Evening Post titled “Racial Crisis in the Deep South,” Carter described Mississippi as the most stubborn Southern state in its resistance to integration and called the recent murders of George Lee, Lamar Smith, and Emmett Till “symptomatic.” Whites considered the NAACP “the fountainhead of all evil and woe,” and the factual nature of most of the NAACP’s “bill of particulars . . . doesn’t help make its accusations any more acceptable.” He admitted, “The hatred that is concentrated upon the NAACP surpasses in its intensity any emotional reaction that I have witnessed in my Southern lifetime.” This reflected the NAACP’s demands for voting rights and school integration as much as it did their protests over the Till case. Carter also raised the sex bugaboo, describing Till as “sexually offensive” and stating that “sexual alarm on the part of white men may explain the failure to convict the men accused of the slaying of Emmett Till.”25

Carter often stood on an increasingly precarious middle ground; he was an early if sometimes wavering articulator of ideas that would eventually herald a different sort of South, when the civil rights movement rose to create it, only small thanks to people like him. In this instance, however, he ran hard up against a butchered fourteen-year-old. Carter tried, but there was scarcely a “Southern moderate” place to stand. Many white Mississippians, particularly those running the state, considered him a traitor. More liberal critics took shots at him for defending the indefensible. Roi Ottley of the Chicago Defender dismissed editor Carter of “pathetic Mississippi” as “a victim of the South’s pernicious folkways,” a pitiful apologist who was “attempting to smooth over the facts.”26