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.>