Civil Rights Events

Montgomery Bus Boycott

Claudette Colvin

 

 

Let’s begin with Rosa McCauley Parks, born in 1913. She was the granddaughter of slaves, whose grandfather taught her courage during a wave of racial violence in 1919. He sat on his porch with a shotgun telling young Rosa that he dared the “Ku-Kluxers” to come. She was soft-spoken but strong-willed and a great student. When a white boy on roller skates tried to push her off the sidewalk, she pushed back. His mother threatened to have her arrested. Another time she threatened a white boy who taunted her on the way to school with a brick. Mrs. Parks reflected later, “I’d rather be lynched than run over by them.”

 

In 1931, she met Raymond Parks, a self-taught, politically active barber, and she married him in 1932. He was known for his willingness to stand up to racism, and was the first man she deemed radical enough to marry. He was active in the Scottsboro Nine case, in which nine young men had been falsely accused of rape and eight were sentenced to death. The Communist Party of America financed their defense and Mr. Parks became an activist in the effort, delivering food to the young men in prison and organizing protests.

 

She and Raymond had thought the NAACP was too elitist and cautious, but after learning a friend was involved she went to her first meeting in December, 1943. She was the only woman there, was asked to take notes, and was elected group Secretary that day, a position she’d hold for the next 12 years. As secretary, she recorded countless cases of unfair treatment, brutality, sexual violence, and lynchings, absorbing the pain of her community.

 

In 1942, E.D. Nixon came to the Parks home to register them to vote. A member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union, he had led a voter registration drive in 1940 when he increased the rolls of African American voters from 31 to more than 700. In 1945, he ran for President of the NAACP, the first working class man to do so. Mrs. Parks said that while he was not formally educated, he was sophisticated in ways that matter. She considered him the first person beside her family and Raymond who was truly committed to freedom.

 

Through the NAACP, Mrs. Parks attended NAACP events in Jacksonville, Atlanta, and Washington D.C. where she received leadership training from legendary organizer Ella Baker, the NAACP’s Director of Branches. Ms. Baker became a role model and mentor to her, and encouraged her to create an NAACP Youth Council in Montgomery.

 

She did, engaging teens to directly challenge segregation in the libraries and write letters to elected officials. And she also took on a larger role in the NAACP. In 1947, she joined the executive committee of the state NAACP, in 1948 spoke at the state convention, and she was elected State Secretary. In 1949 with her support, E.D. Nixon was elected President of the State NAACP. When the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling came down in 1954, Mr. Nixon and Mrs. Parks marched 23 African American students to the white school in town. They also took the lead on a Voter Registration drive in the 2nd Congressional District in 1954.

 

… Claudette Colvin, the 15 year-old secretary of her [Rosa’s] Youth Council, was on her [Rosa’s] mind. On March 2, 1955, Ms. Colvin refused to move to the back of the bus and was arrested. Her arrest outraged the community. While Mrs. Parks and Mrs. Durr raised money for her case, the male leaders in town were concerned that she was too dark skinned, poor, and young to be a sympathetic plaintiff to challenge segregation. The police also charged her with assaulting officers rather than with violating segregation laws, which limited their ability to appeal (Schmitz  2-4).

 

Few Americans who know that Rosa Parks’s refusal in 1955 to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus know that there were a number of women who refused to give up their seats on the same bus system. Most of the women were quietly fined, and no one heard much more.

 

[Claudette] Colvin was the first to really challenge the law.  … She remembers taking the bus home from high school on March 2, 1955, as clear as if it were yesterday.

 

It was Negro history month, and at her segregated school they had been studying black leaders like Harriet Tubman, the runaway slave who led more than 70 slaves to freedom through the network of safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. They were also studying about Sojourner Truth, a former slave who became an abolitionist and women's rights activist.

 

The class had also been talking about the injustices they were experiencing daily under the Jim Crow segregation laws, like not being able to eat at a lunch counter.

 

"We couldn't try on clothes," Colvin says. "You had to take a brown paper bag and draw a diagram of your foot ... and take it to the store. Can you imagine all of that in my mind? My head was just too full of black history, you know, the oppression that we went through. It felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. I couldn't get up" (Alder 2).

 

Here is Claudette Colvin’s account of her terrifying experience, as told by Phillip Hoose.

 

CLAUDETTE: One of them said to the driver in a very angry tone, "Who is it?" The motorman pointed at me. I heard him say, "That's nothing new . . . I've had trouble with that 'thing' before." He called me a "thing." They came to me and stood over me and one said, "Aren't you going to get up?" I said, "No, sir." He shouted "Get up" again. I started crying, but I felt even more defiant. I kept saying over and over, in my high-pitched voice, "It's my constitutional right to sit here as much as that lady. I paid my fare, it's my constitutional right!" I knew I was talking back to a white policeman, but I had had enough.

 

One cop grabbed one of my hands and his partner grabbed the other and they pulled me straight up out of my seat. My books went flying everywhere. I went limp as a baby—I was too smart to fight back. They started dragging me backwards off the bus. One of them kicked me. I might have scratched one of them because I had long nails, but I sure didn't fight back. I kept screaming over and over, "It's my constitutional right!" I wasn't shouting anything profane—I never swore, not then, not ever. I was shouting out my rights.

 

It just killed me to leave the bus. I hated to give that white woman my seat when so many black people were standing. I was crying hard. The cops put me in the back of a police car and shut the door. They stood outside and talked to each other for a minute, and then one came back and told me to stick my hands out the open window. He handcuffed me and then pulled the door open and jumped in the backseat with me. I put my knees together and crossed my hands over my lap and started praying.

 

All ride long they swore at me and ridiculed me. They took turns trying to guess my bra size. They called me "nigger bitch" and cracked jokes about parts of my body. I recited the Lord's Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm over and over in my head, trying to push back the fear. I assumed they were taking me to juvenile court because I was only fifteen. I was thinking, Now I'm gonna be picking cotton, since that's how they punished juveniles—they put you in a school out in the country where they made you do field work during the day.

 

But we were going in the wrong direction. They kept telling me I was going to Atmore, the women's penitentiary. Instead, we pulled up to the police station and they led me inside. More cops looked up when we came in and started calling me "Thing" and "Whore." They booked me and took my fingerprints.

 

Then they put me back in the car and drove me to the city jail—the adult jail. Someone led me straight to a cell without giving me any chance to make a phone call. He opened the door and told me to get inside. He shut it hard behind me and turned the key. The lock fell into place with a heavy sound. It was the worst sound I ever heard. It sounded final. It said I was trapped.

 

When he went away, I looked around me: three bare walls, a toilet, and a cot. Then I fell down on my knees in the middle of the cell and started crying again. I didn't know if anyone knew where I was or what had happened to me. I had no idea how long I would be there. I cried and I put my hands together and prayed like I had never prayed before.

 

…

 

MEANWHILE, schoolmates who had been on the bus had run home and telephoned Claudette's mother at the house where she worked as a maid. Girls went over and took care of the lady's three small children so that Claudette's mother could leave. Mary Ann Colvin called Claudette's pastor, the Reverend H.H. Johnson. He had a car, and together they sped to the police station.

 

…

 

CLAUDETTE: When they led Mom back, there I was in a cell. I was cryin' hard, and then Mom got upset, too. When she saw me, she didn't bawl me out, she just asked, "Are you all right, Claudette?"

 

Reverend Johnson bailed me out and we drove home. By the time we got to King Hill, word had spread everywhere. All our neighbors came around, and they were just squeezing me to death. I felt happy and proud. I had been talking about getting our rights ever since Jeremiah Reeves was arrested, and now they knew I was serious. Velma, Q.P. and Mary Ann's daughter, who was living with us at the time, kept saying it was my squeaky little voice that had saved me from getting beat up or raped by the cops.

 

But I was afraid that night, too. I had stood up to a white bus driver and two white cops. I had challenged the bus law. There had been lynchings and cross burnings for that kind of thing. Wetumpka Highway that led out of Montgomery ran right past our house. It would have been easy for the Klan to come up the hill in the night. Dad sat up all night long with his shotgun. We all stayed up. The neighbors facing the highway kept watch. Probably nobody on King Hill slept that night.

 

But worried or not, I felt proud. I had stood up for our rights. I had done something a lot of adults hadn't done. On the ride home from jail, coming over the viaduct, Reverend Johnson had said something to me I'll never forget. He was an adult who everyone respected and his opinion meant a lot to me. "Claudette," he said, "I'm so proud of you. Everyone prays for freedom. We've all been praying and praying. But you're different—you want your answer the next morning. And I think you just brought the revolution to Montgomery" (Hoose 1-3).

 

 

Passages cited:

 

Adler, Margot.  “Before Rosa Parks, There Was Claudette Colvin.”  NPR.  March 15, 2009.  Web.  < https://www.npr.org/2009/03/15/101719889/before-rosa-parks-there-was-claudette-colvin.>

 

Hoose, Phillip.  “Excerpt: 'Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice'.”  NPR.  March 15, 2009.  Web.  <https://www.npr.org/2009/03/15/101719889/before-rosa-parks-there-was-claudette-colvin.>

 

Schmitz, Paul.  “How Change Happens: The Real Story of Mrs. Rosa Parks & The Montgomery Bus Boycott.”  HUFFPOST.  Web.  <https://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-schmitz/how-change-happens-the-re_b_6237544.html.>



 

Civil Rights Events

Emmett Till -- Part Five

 

"J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant died with Emmett Till's blood on their hands," Simeon Wright, Emmett Till's cousin and an eyewitness to his kidnapping (he was with Till the night he was kidnapped by Milam and Bryant) … [years later] stated. "And it looks like everyone else who was involved is going to do the same. They had a chance to come clean. They will die with Emmett Till's blood on their hands" (Emmett 6)

 

Two women especially intrigued visitors at the trial, Mamie [Till] Bradley, mother of the victim, and Carolyn Bryant, the former high school beauty queen working at the store. A third woman, 27-year old Juanita Milam, was a less conspicuous part of the proceedings. She was the wife of J. W. Milam, and as she watched her husband's trial and sat on the stand as one of his character witnesses, she clearly wanted to be anywhere but a courtroom. Clark Porteous of the Memphis Press-Scimitar said that Juanita appeared "shocked by the proceedings," and he described her as a "sad-faced woman." Like Carolyn, Juanita said next to nothing publicly in the six decades after the trial.

 

Mary Juanita Thompson was born in Greenville, Miss., on Dec. 10, 1927, the fifth of six children born to Albert and Myrtle Thompson. She married World War II veteran John William Milam on Dec. 10, 1949, her 22nd birthday. They had two sons, Horace William, born in 1951, and Harvey, born two years later. They made their home in Glendora, Miss., where J. W. ran a store. It burned down in 1954, and after that, J. W. helped out in other family stores, did trucking and worked on local plantations.

 

The Till murder would change their lives forever. Less than a month after the verdict, journalist William Bradford Huie offered to pay the brothers $3,150 for their story. Knowing that double jeopardy prevented them from being tried again, they weaved a tale of kidnapping and murder, yet they were careful enough not to indict any accomplices. Their story, which appeared in the Jan. 24, 1956, issue of Look magazine, contains gross inaccuracies. Nevertheless, the article captivated readers all over the nation (Anderson 2).

 

Huie had gained defense attorney Breland's permission to write an article about Milam and Bryant. He would simply state facts, including quotes, without saying how he came to know them. In order to protect themselves from their Mississippi neighbors and from being indicted for crimes for which they'd not yet been tried, the brothers would publicly continue to maintain their innocence. But they would sign a release that protected Huie from a libel suit. In addition to the cash payments Milam, Bryant, and Breland's firm would each receive a significant percentage of future profits from any book or film that came out of Huie's article.

 

Breland, then 67, was a Princeton graduate and a leader in the Mississippi Citizens Council, a Main Street version of the Ku Klux Klan formed in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. Breland had originally been reluctant to take on Milam and Bryant's defense. But he came to see the prosecution as an affront against Mississippi, another assault like Black Monday, as the day of the Brown ruling on desegregation was known across the South.

 

Breland agreed to Huie's terms. "They're peckerwoods," he said of Milam and Bryant, according to accounts of the conversation in Huie's private correspondence. "But, hell, we've got to have our Milams to fight our wars and keep our niggahs in line … there ain't gonna be no integration … there ain't gonna be no nigger votin'. And the sooner everybody in this country realizes it the better. If any more pressure is put on us, the Tallahatchie won't hold all the niggers that'll be thrown into it."

 

Breland arranged a week of clandestine, nighttime meetings between Huie, Milam, and Roy and Carolyn Bryant. Frank Dean, Look's senior counsel, brought the money for the payoffs to Mississippi in a satchel. In a haze of cigarette smoke and profane justification, the brothers told their story.

 

Huie's "Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi" was published in January 1956. The article told the story of Till's murder from Milam and Bryant's point of view—a brutal tale of a beating that ended on the bank of the Tallahatchie River with a gun shot to the side of the head.

 

Huie concluded his article by indicting Mississippi for failing to convict Milam and Bryant or condemn their actions. His piece caused a firestorm.

 

His deal with the two men bound him to frame the story as they told it (Sparkman 3-4).

 

Within four years after Till murder trial, over 21% of the black population of Tallahatchie County had left.

 

For Bryant and Milam, the trial in some ways was the beginning, not the end of their troubles.  Milam's and Bryant's stores, which catered almost exclusively to local blacks, were boycotted and within fifteen months all the stores were either closed or sold (Linder 21]

 

Former friends and supporters, who never really doubted the guilt of the half-brothers to begin with, wanted nothing to do with them once their confession was in print. A year after the murder, the Milams were reported to be living on a farm in Mississippi between Ruleville and Cleveland. Around that time, Huie interviewed the brothers for a follow-up article that also appeared in Look. In the accompanying photographs, both men look happy, but it was obvious the smiles were only a facade. Huie described them as having "been disappointed," explaining further, "They have suffered disillusionment, ingratitude, resentment, misfortune," but as yet, no guilt.

 

Few had pity on them. Milam owned no land and could not get his former backers to rent to him. He was finally able to rent 217 acres in Sunflower County with the help of his brother-in-law and secured $4,000 to plant cotton from a Tallahatchie County bank where one of his defense attorneys, John Whitten, sat on the loan committee. Blacks would no longer work for Milam, and that forced him to pay whites a higher wage for the same work.

 

He reflected on how the tide had turned, saying his wife and children were having an especially hard time. "I had a lot of friends a year ago," he told Huie. "They contributed to my defense fund — at least they say they did. I never got half of what they say was contributed. I don't know what happened to it, but we never got it."

 

For three years, Milam held several menial plantation jobs. The Milams later moved to Orange, Texas, but stayed for only a few years, returning to live near Juanita's parents in Greenville.

 

He found himself back in the courtroom on occasion after the acquittal in Sumner, but his crimes -- among them writing bad checks, assault and battery, using a stolen credit card -- were miniscule when compared to the murder charge he faced in 1955. J.W. later worked as a heavy equipment operator until his retirement, which was forced upon him early because of ill health. He succumbed to cancer of the spine on New Year's Eve, 1980 at age 61.

 

By the time the Milams returned to Mississippi a decade after the Till trial, the outrage over the murder had subsided, and they were able to live quietly, for the most part. At some point in the 1960s, Juanita began working as a hairdresser at the Greenville Beauty Salon. In 1971, Greenville Mayor Pat Dunne declared Feb. 14-20 as National Beauty Salon Week, and Juanita served as chairwoman. In 1975, Juanita served as president of the local affiliate of the Mississippi Hairdressers and Cosmetologists Association. Clearly, Juanita felt at ease in her local community.

 

Juanita's only known public statements about the Till case following the trial occurred when the FBI came knocking after the federal government reopened the case in 2004. During the 1955 trial, Carolyn Bryant said Juanita had been in the Bryant's apartment behind the store the night Emmett Till came in, where she was babysitting the Bryant and Milam children. When asked about this, Juanita denied being there. "I thought I was in Greenville," she said, and insisted that "I would not have been babysittin' for her."

 

Juanita accused Carolyn of fabricating the entire story. "The only way I can figure it is that she did not want to take care of the store. She thought this wild story would make Roy take care of the store instead of leavin' her with the kids and the store. … the only thing to me would upset her would be if she wanted Roy to stay at the store more."

 

That night at the store, however, Carolyn went to a car that she said belonged to Juanita, to get a gun. The Bryants didn't own a car; the Milams did. If Juanita was not there, who was?

 

Students of the Till case remember seeing Juanita stand by her man during the trial and after the jury read the verdict. More than one photographer in Sumner captured her smiles as her husband was set free. That, of course, only tells part of her story.

 

Whether or not the 25 years she lived with J.W. after the trial, or the 33 she lived after his death were marked by pain, sadness, regret, or guilt, only those who were the closest to her might know (Anderson 5-8).

 

Sheriff Strider came under heavy attack in both national and Mississippi newspapers.  Five black families left his delta plantation for work elsewhere.  In 1957, Strider narrowly escaped an assassination attempt as he was seated in his car in front of a store in Cowart, Mississippi.

 

 In 1985, five years after Milam died of cancer, some of Bryant's recollections of the Till case were secretly recorded on audiotape.  On the tapes, Bryant says of the night of the kidnapping, "Yeah, hell we were drinking."  He claims that after "we done whupped the sonofabitch," he briefly "backed out on killing the motherf----r," and decided instead to "take him to a hospital."  But it soon became clear that the injuries already were too extensive for Till to survive, so they decided to "put his ass in the Tallahatchie River."  Bryant did not name others involved in the crime and indicated that he never would: "I'm the only one living that knows--and that's all that will ever be known."  Bryant died nine years later, also of cancer, at the age of 63.

 

None of the other men who participated in the kidnapping, beating, or murder of Emmett Till ever faced charges, although the Department of Justice reopened the case in 2004.  In 2005, Till's body was exhumed and autopsied by the Cook County coroner.  After analysis using dental comparisons, the body was positively identified as Till's.  Metallic fragments in the skull suggested he was shot with a .45 caliber gun (Linder 25-29). In 2007, a grand jury decided not to indict Ms. Carolyn (Bryant) Donham, or anyone else, as an accomplice in the murder.

 

“I was hoping that one day she would admit it, so it matters to me that she did, and it gives me some satisfaction,” said Wheeler Parker, 77, a cousin of Emmett’s who lives near Chicago. “It’s important to people understanding how the word of a white person against a black person was law, and a lot of black people lost their lives because of it. It really speaks to history, it shows what black people went through in those days” (Perez-Pena 6)

 

In 2008, Duke University professor Timothy B. Tyson, received a call from Carolyn Donham’s sister-in-law, who said that she and Carolyn had liked another book of his, and wanted to meet him.  It was in that meeting that she [Carolyn] spoke to him about the Till case, saying, “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”  She had lied about Till making advances toward her.  She could remember nothing else that had happened in the store. 

 

Ms. Donham told him that soon after the killing, her husband’s family hid her away, moving her from place to place for days, to keep her from talking to law enforcement.

 

She has said that Roy Bryant, whom she later divorced, was physically abusive to her.

 

“The circumstances under which she told the story were coercive,” Dr. Tyson said. “She’s horrified by it. There’s clearly a great burden of guilt and sorrow (Perez-Pena 2-7).

 

Nine years later Tyson published the book The Blood of Emmitt Till.  On January 26, 2017, Vanity Fair published the story of Tyson’s interview with Donham.  Tyson said that she had changed since Till’s murder, but she hasn’t repented. … “She was glad things had changed [and she] thought the old system of white supremacy was wrong, though she had more or less taken it as normal at the time,” Tyson told Vanity Fair.

 

Bryant told Tyson that she “felt tender sorrow” for Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who fought for civil rights and died in 2003 (Goronja 1-2).

 

Though she never stopped feeling the pain of her son's death, Mamie Till (who died of heart failure in 2003)…recognized that what happened to her son helped open Americans' eyes to the racial hatred plaguing the country, and in doing so helped spark a massive protest movement for racial equality and justice.

 

"People really didn't know that things this horrible could take place," Mamie Till said in an interview with Devery S. Anderson, author of Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement, in December 1996. "And the fact that it happened to a child, that make all the difference in the world" (Emmett 7).

 

"People often talked about Emmett, but Simeon [Wright] had a story of his own," a family spokeswoman Airicki Gordon told the Chicago Tribune. "That incident changed him as a person."

 

Wright went on to work as a pipe fitter and for many years remained quiet about what had happened.

 

The Tribune reports that he was filled with anger. But by the 2000s he was ready to talk about it.

 

"He really wanted people to know what happened that night," his wife Annie Wright told the paper. "There were so many versions. When I first met him, he never talked about it. But then he wanted people to know the injustices and indignities."

 

Wright spent recent years touring the country speaking to groups about his experiences, reports The Clarion-Ledger (Held 1).

 

The Justice Department is reopening the investigation of Emmett Till’s 63-year-old murder.

 

 

Works cited:

 

Anderson, Devery.  “Widow of Emmett Till Killer Dies Quietly, Notoriously.”  The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger.   Feb. 27, 2014.   USA Today.  Web.  <https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/27/emmett-till-juanita-milam/5873235/.>

 

“Emmett Till.”  Biography.   July 13, 2018.  A&E Television Networks.  Web.  <https://www.biography.com/people/emmett-till-507515.>

 

Goronja, Ariel.  “Carolyn Bryant Donham: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know.”  July 12, 2018.  Heavy.com.  Web.  <https://heavy.com/news/2018/07/carolyn-bryant-donham/.>

 

Held, Amy.  “Cousin Who Witnessed Emmett Till Abduction Dies at 74.”  NPR.  September 5, 2017.  Web.  <https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/05/548647220/cousin-who-witnessed-emmett-till-abduction-dies-at-74.>

 

Linder, Douglas O.  “The Emmett Till Murder Trial: An Account.”  2012.  Web.  <http://famous-trials.com/legacyftrials/till/tillaccount.html.>

 

Perez-Pena, Richard.  “Woman Linked to 1955 Emmett Till Murder Tells Historian Her Claims Were False.”  New York Times.  January 27, 2017.  Web.  <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/us/emmett-till-lynching-carolyn-bryant-donham.html.>

 

Sparkman, Randy.  “The Murder of Emmett Till: The 49-Year-Old Story of the Crime and How It Came To Be Told.”  Slate.  June 21, 2005.  Web.  < http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2005/06/the_murder_of_emmett_till.html.>



Civil Rights Events

Emmett Till -- Part Four

 

Local authorities covered Till's body with lime, nailed his coffin shut, and tried for a quick, local funeral. Till's mother insisted her son's body be returned to Chicago for burial (Sparkman 3).

 

Later, at the Illinois Central Station in Chicago, a large crowd watched five men lift a paper wrapped bundle containing the body of Till and place it in a waiting hearse.  As they did so, Mamie Bradley wailed, "Oh, God.  Oh, God.  My only boy."  Bradley insisted that her boy be displayed in an open casket so that viewers could see the gruesome damage inflicted by the murderers.  Approximately 50,000 persons filed by Till's casket in the funeral chapel at 4141 Cottage Grove.  Bradley told reporters, "Unless an example is made of the lynchers of Emmett, it won't be safe for a Negro to walk the streets anywhere in America."  Bradley said she was determined to see her son's killers executed.  Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley joined the fight for justice, wiring President Eisenhower with a call for federal action against the lynchers (Linder 17).

 

In the weeks that passed between Till's burial and the murder and kidnapping trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, two black publications, Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender, published graphic images of Till's corpse.

 

By the time the trial commenced—on September 19, 1955—Emmett Till's murder had become a source of outrage and indignation throughout the country (Emmett 4).

 

In the first few days following the discovery of Till's body, there was reason to hope that justice might follow.  Mississippi Governor Hugh White telegrammed District Attorney Gerald Chatham "urging vigorous prosecution of the case."  For his part, Chatham said, "Murder is murder whether it is black or white, and we are handling this case like all parties are white."  Mississippi citizens expressed shock over the crime.  Ben Roy, a white merchant in Money, told reporters, "Nobody here, Negro or white, approves of things like that."  Local newspapers added their condemnation.  The Greenwood Commonwealth editorialized, "The citizens of this area are determined that the guilty parties shall be punished to the full extent of the law."

 

Then everything changed. When Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the NAACP, described Till's killing as a "lynching" and opined that "the state of Mississippi has decided to maintain white supremacy by murdering children," many Mississippians were deeply offended and angered.  According to historian Hugh Whitaker, the strident remarks of Wilkins and other northern opponents of segregation caused the local power structure to dig in, and throw its support to Bryant and Milam, two men they otherwise might have been happy to see put away.  All five lawyers in the town of Sumner, where the Bryant-Milam trial would be held, agreed to serve as defense counsel.  One of the defense lawyers acknowledged later that he only agreed to represent Bryant and Milam after "Mississippi began to be run down" (Linder 18).

 

On September 3, two days before a grand jury in Tallahatchie County would indict Bryant and Milam on both murder and kidnapping charges, the County's sheriff, H. C. Strider, made the surprising statement that he doubted the body pulled from the Tallahatchie River was that of Emmett Till.  Strider told reporters "the body looked more like that of a grown man instead of a young boy" and had probably been in the river "four or five days"--too long to have been the body of Till, abducted just three days earlier.  Strider expressed his opinion that Till "is still alive."  The theory for a murder defense, with the now obvious support of the County's sheriff, had been laid.

 

 

In 1955, none of the black residents of Tallahatchie County were registered voters and thus, under the jury selection rules then in place, no black was eligible to serve as a juror.  During the six hours of jury selection, the county's sheriff-elect assisted the defense team, advising the lawyers as to which jurors were "doubtful" and which were "safe."  All of the twelve white men seated for the jury seemed safe.  One of the defense attorneys said later, "After the jury was chosen, any first-year law student could have won the case."

 

When the state began presenting its case in the Bryant-Milam murder trial, more than seventy reporters (some from as far away as London), photographers, and radio and television newspersons packed the courtroom.

 

Asked to identify the two men, [Moses] Wright rose dramatically from the stand and pointed his finger directly at the defendants.  Wright also told jurors he identified the body pulled from the river as being Emmett Till and that he was "looking right at" the undertaker as he pulled the ring with the inscription "L.T." from one of Till's fingers.  He also identified the silver ring in the courtroom, one of the prosecution's key exhibits, as being the ring he saw removed from Till's body.

 

Deputy Sheriff John Ed Cothran testified that after his arrest J. W. Milam freely admitted kidnapping Till from Wright's home.  Then three surprise witnesses placed the defendants at Leslie Milam's barn in the early morning of August 28.  Most compelling was the testimony of Willie Reed, who said that after he witnessed Milam, Bryant, and several other men park a pickup on Milam's property, he heard "licks and hollering" from within the barn.  (Two potential key witnesses, both blacks who allegedly assisted with the abduction and murder of Till, were unavailable to the prosecution.  Both Leroy "Too Tight" Collins and Henry Loggins, who prosecutors assumed only to be missing, were actually being held under false identities in a jail in Charleston, Mississippi under orders of Sheriff Strider, who had thrown the full weight of his office behind the defense efforts.) 

 

On Thursday afternoon, the state rested and the defense presented its first witness, Carolyn Bryant.  Testifying with the jury excused, Carolyn Bryant described the August 24 incident at Bryant's Grocery & Meat Market.  Bryant said that "just after dark" with her alone in the store, Till strongly gripped her hand as she held it out on the candy counter to collect money.  She said she jerked her hand loose "with much difficulty" as Till asked her, "How about a date, baby?"  When she tried to walk away, she stated, Till grabbed her by the waist and said, "You needn't be afraid of me.  I've"--and here Bryant said Till used an "unprintable word"--"white women before."  Bryant testified, "I was just scared to death."  After listening to Bryant's testimony, Judge Curtis Swango ruled it inadmissible though, as courtroom observers noted, every juror undoubtedly had heard Bryant's story already anyway.

 

Sheriff H. C. Strider took the stand as a witness for the defense.  Strider claimed, based on his experience, that the body found in the Tallahatchie River must have been there from "ten to fifteen days."  He insisted the corpse was unidentifiable, claiming, "All I could tell, it was a human being."  H. D. Malone, Till's embalmer, added support to the defense theory by testifying the body was so decomposed it had to have been in water for at least ten days and was "bloated beyond recognition."

 

It is safe to say that almost no one, not the prosecution witnesses and not the jurors, really believed the body pulled from the river was not that of Emmett Till.  The testimony of Strider, Malone, and a white physician merely provided the jury with the "reasonable doubt" excuse it wanted to acquit Milam and Bryant.

 

After brief testimony from five character witnesses for Milam and Bryant, closing arguments began.  …  Defense attorneys, for their part, told jurors, "Every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to set these men free."

 

When the jurors were sent out to begin deliberations, according to Hugh Whitaker, Sheriff-elect Dogan told jurors to wait a while before coming out to make "it look good."  The jurors enjoyed Cokes before returning 68 minutes later to the courtroom to announce their verdict of "Not Guilty," explaining that the state had not proved the identity of the body. Many people across the nation were outraged both by the decision and the state’s decision not to indict Milam and Bryant on the separate charge of kidnapping.  Six weeks after the murder trial, a Leflore County grand jury refused to indict Bryant and Milam on kidnapping charges, and both men were released from custody.

 

The jury's verdict provoked both angry editorials and calls for federal legislation to protect the civil rights of black Americans.  Protest rallies, drawing thousands in some cases, were held in several cities.  In the south, the verdict seemed to spell the end to the system of "noblesse oblige," and marked the real beginning of the civil rights movement in that part of the country.  In parts of Mississippi, at least, the verdict seemed a declaration of open season on blacks for even small offenses.  Two months after the verdict, a white man killed a black gas station attendant at a service station in Glendora after an argument about the amount of gas the attendant put in his car.  (The killer, Elmer Kimbell, was acquitted after trial in the same Sumner courtroom where Bryant and Milam heard a jury foreman announce, "Not Guilty.") (Linder 18-21) 

 

 

Works cited:

 

“Emmett Till.”  Biography.    July 13, 2018.  A&E Television Networks.  Web.  <https://www.biography.com/people/emmett-till-507515.>

 

 

Linder, Douglass O.  “The Emmett Till Murder Trial: An Account.”  2012.  Web.  <http://famous-trials.com/legacyftrials/till/tillaccount.html.>

 

 

Sparkman, Randy.  “The Murder of Emmett Till: The 49-Year-Old Story of the Crime and How It Came to Be Told.”  Slate.  June 21, 2005.  Web.  < http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2005/06/the_murder_of_emmett_till.html.>