Fifties (71 page)

There were no surprises in the story they told Huie: Moses Wright had produced Till. Milam had shined his flashlight in Till’s eyes. “You the nigger who did the talking?” he asked. “Yeah,” Till answered. “Don’t say ‘Yeah’ to me: I’ll blow your head off. Get your clothes on,” Milam had said. Then they drove away with Till. They told Huie they did not intend to kill Till, they wanted merely to scare him and teach him a lesson. But when he proved to be unrepentant, only then, much to their sorrow, did they realize that they had to kill him. “What else could we do?” Milam explained to Huie. “He was hopeless. I’m no bully; I never hurt a nigger in my life. I like niggers in their place. I know how to work ’em. But I just decided it was time to put a few people on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are going to stay in their place. Niggers ain’t gonna vote where I live. If they did, they’d control the government. They ain’t gonna go to school with my kids. And when a nigger even gets close to mention sex with a white woman, he’s tired of livin’. Me and my folks fought for this country and we’ve got some rights. I stood there in that shed and listened to that nigger throw that poison at me and I just made up my mind. ‘Chicago boy,’ I said. ‘I’m tired of ’em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddamn you, I’m going to make an example of you—just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.’”

They decided to kill the boy and throw the body in the Tallahatchie River. What Milam needed most was a weight. There was a cotton gin nearby where they had just brought in some new equipment, and he remembered some workers carrying out the old gin fan,
about three feet long: the perfect anchor. They drove over to the cotton gin and found the fan. By then it was daylight and Milam boasted to Huie, for the first time, that he was a little nervous. “Somebody might see us and accuse us of stealing the fan,” he said. Then he and Bryant took Till to a deserted bank of the Tallahatchie. Milam made the boy strip naked. “You still as good as I am?” “Yeah,” Till answered. At that point, Milam shot him in the head with the .45. Then they wired him to the gin fan, which weighed seventy-four pounds, and they tossed the body in the Tallahatchie River.

Moses Wright did not call the police, as ordered by the two white men, but Curtis Jones did. The next day Jones went to the home of the plantation owner and called the sheriff to say that Emmett Till was missing. He also called Till’s mother in Chicago. The local authorities began to dredge the river. It took them three days to find the body, heavily weighted as it was and snarled in tree roots. It was the body of a boy who had been badly abused: There was a bullet hole in his head, which had been bashed in. The body was so badly mangled that Moses Wright identified it primarily from Emmett’s ring. The body was shipped north to Chicago, where Mamie Bradley opened the coffin and decided to hold an open-casket funeral. “Have you ever sent a loved son on vacation and had him returned to you in a pine box so horribly battered and waterlogged that this sickening sight is your son—lynched?” she told reporters. She delayed the burial for four days, so that the world could see “what they did to my boy.” Thousands lined the black funeral home to see the body.

The murder electrified the large black communities in the nation’s Northern industrial cities. White newspapers, aware of this new constituency and of the magnitude of the black emotional response, began to pay attention. White readers, as well, were stunned by the sheer brutality of the act and the idea of vigilante justice at work. In Mississippi, Milam and Bryant were arrested and charged with the murder of Emmett Till. For whatever reason—the brutality of the murder of a child, the public funeral in Chicago, or the vague sense among many in the North that something like this was bound to happen—the case became a cause célèbre. Here was what the Northern press had been waiting for: a rare glimpse beneath the deep South’s genteel surface, at how the white power structure kept the blacks in line—using the rawest violence, if necessary.

The Till case marked a critical junction for the national media. Obviously, the Supreme Court decision had made a critical difference
morally and socially; for the first time there was a national agenda on civil rights. The national media was going to cover not just the killers but the entire South. The editors of the nation’s most important newspapers were men in their fifties, who by and large held traditional views of race but who, because of the
Brown
decision, were going to pay more attention to the race issue. Their reporters were different. They were younger men in their thirties, often Southern by birth, more often than not men who had fought in World War Two and who thought segregation odious. Moreover, they thought World War Two was, among other things, about changing America and the South, where things like this could happen. They had long been ready to cover the South. Now they had their chance. The educational process had begun: The murder of Emmett Till and the trial of the two men accused of murdering him became the first great media event of the civil rights movement. The nation was ready; indeed, it wanted to read what had happened.

Into the tiny Tallahatchie County seat of Sumner poured the elite of the Northern press, more than a little nervous to be in such alien and hostile territory. The reporters were easily recognized. They wore the journalists’ uniform of the day: lightweight seersucker suits, button-down shirts, and striped ties, which advertised their former attendance at the nation’s better schools. As the day wore on, the jackets might be shed and the ties loosened, but in the beginning those young men seemed to take their signals from one slim, graceful man.

Until then John Popham, of
The New York Times,
was the only full-time national newspaper correspondent working the South. Popham, then forty-five, had been covering the beat for eight years, at the request of the
Times
managing editor, Turner Catledge, who was from Mississippi and who knew that profound changes were about to take place. Popham was a true American original: a Virginia aristocrat with a secret radical heart. Educated by the Jesuits, he was the son of a professional Marine officer and had served as an officer in the Marines himself. He was an utterly beguiling man, which was fortunate because his was clearly the most delicate of missions. He was endowed with such natural dignity that he seemed to bestow it on others. It was said that in the courtrooms of the South, all of them without air-conditioning in those days, the judge would give permission to the lawyers and members of the jury to take their jackets off. The judge would even take his jacket off. The only person left in the courtroom still wearing a jacket would be Mr. Popham, obvious to all as the gentleman from
The New York Times.
He had become,
however involuntarily, the pioneer covering the region. When other reporters came down at the last minute, their contact, inevitably, was John Popham. Popham, by contrast, was connected throughout the region, and when a major event was breaking, he would arrive a week in advance to visit with local officials he knew, men from his vast network of connections; everyone in the South knew someone or had been to law school with someone who knew Popham. As such he was never a stranger. So a week before the Till trial began, he called a prominent businessman in Oxford, Mississippi, who had been a fraternity brother of the Till trial judge, Curtis Swango. Popham had visited Oxford, had dined with the businessman, and ended up, of course, staying the night. So when he set off to Sumner, he was already well connected. On his first day, he went to lunch with Judge Swango.

Actually, Swango was almost desperate to see him. “I’ve got all these reporters coming in—seems like there must be one hundred of them,” the judge complained, “and I’ve never dealt with anything like this before. I can pledge to you that as far as I can, I’ll run a fair and honest trial, but I’d like your help in dealing with the press.” So Popham agreed to be the liaison to the press, with the judge setting the ground rules. In accordance with the segregation of the times, he created one press area for whites and one for blacks, finding nonetheless that he was in constant conflict with H. C. Strider, the local sheriff. He also became the unofficial head of security for all reporters. Sumner was not merely a community without motels, it was, after sundown, an extremely dangerous venue for journalists. Filled as it was with smoldering resentments toward all these outsiders, it could explode at any time and a reporter might easily disappear, not to be seen again. Rule number one was: No reporter was to hang around the town at night. Instead, Popham decided, the white reporters should all stay in Clarksdale, some fifty miles away. He also instructed his colleagues on dress codes (once, Murray Kempton, of the
New York Post,
possibly the most talented man covering the trial, came down to dinner in British walking shorts. Popham went over and gently suggested that this was not the time or the place for shorts). He also made sure that the black reporters had a place to stay in Mound Bayou, an all-black community. When one of the blacks was arrested and put in jail for a minor parking violation by Sheriff Strider, it was Popham who got the judge to let him out.

The man who invariably embodied white political power in such small Southern towns was the county sheriff. His job was to protect the economic order for the ruling class and to maintain the racial and
political balance, such as it was (but not to come down so hard on black field hands that they might miss a day of work). That was true all over Mississippi, but it was particularly true in the Delta. Sheriffs were rewarded for their stewardship: It was one of the highest paid jobs in the state, the salary coming from a percentage of the ad valorem tax and, also, payoffs from bootleggers (Mississippi was ostensibly a dry state). A Delta sheriff could officially make as much as forty to fifty thousand dollars in those days, and he could make almost as much again by permitting a certain amount of bootlegging and gambling. In a state where five thousand dollars a year was considered a good salary, that was an unusually handsome income.

Sheriff Clarence Strider seemed perfectly cast for the role of this showpiece trial. Even more than Milam and Bryant, he reflected the white-power establishment in the deep South. He tried, despite the decision of Judge Swango, to keep the black reporters from covering the trial and wanted to put the white press as far back in the courtroom as possible. Almost every other word out of Strider’s mouth, in conversation with reporters and others, seemed to be
nigger.
“There ain’t going to be any nigger reporters in my courtroom,” he told Popham in their first struggle over media privileges. “Talk to Judge Swango,” Popham answered. Strider did and only reluctantly allowed the blacks to be seated.

Strider was a giant man, weighing at least 270 pounds. He was not pleased when Judge Swango ruled against him on the black reporters, and he was not pleased when others in the local white establishment told him his behavior was not helping the county’s reputation and he should be more polite, especially to the black reporters. After being told this several times, he finally walked over to the black press table one day. “Morning’ niggers,” he said. In fact, Strider was regarded as something of an embarrassment among the local planters; he had managed to accumulate land, money, and power, but he was crude; and he did not know how to behave in someone’s home or, even more important, how to accomplish the unpleasant parts of his job with a little finesse. Clarence, as former governor Bill Winter said years later, was the kind of man who felt threatened by the idea of a black man in a shirt and tie. Other sections of the country, after all, had their rednecks, but here was one who was the chief law enforcement officer. He listed himself in the yellow pages under the letter
P,
for plantation, and he housed his own sharecroppers in a series of shacks, painting S-T-R-I-D-E-R on their roofs. He had 1,500 acres of cotton, and thirty-five black families lived on his land. His sharecroppers bought their necessities from
his own company store. He had three planes for crop dusting. As far as he was concerned, Strider told reporters, the entire case was rigged. Probably, it was all set up by the NAACP. Emmett Till was not dead, he said; rather, he had been whisked out of the county by the NAACP. Not only was he sheriff, he was a key witness for the defense. On the stand he testified that he could not identify the body because it had deteriorated so badly. Of course, he had done none of the elementary police work that would confirm whether or not it was Till’s body.

When Charles Diggs, a black congressman from Detroit, showed up to witness the trial, Strider was furious. His deputies refused to believe that Diggs was actually a congressman. Jim Hicks, a black reporter, took Diggs’s congressional ID card to show one of his deputies in order to get Diggs a seat. “This nigger said there’s a nigger outside who says he’s a congressman,” one deputy said to another. “A nigger congressman?” the other deputy asked. “That’s what this nigger said,” the first deputy added.

In the face of such behavior, the national press corps was prepared to judge Mississippi by the actions of Milam, Bryant, and Strider. That quickly caused a backlash. Soon there were bumper stickers that said: “Mississippi: The Most Lied About State in the Union.” A defense fund easily raised money for the defendants. Racist jokes circulated: Wasn’t it just like that little nigger to try and steal a gin fan when it was more than he could carry. Everyone knew the two men would go free. That was a given. As the trial wore on, the defendants and their families sometimes sat on the courthouse steps eating ice cream and playing with their kids, as if this were all a picnic. Portents of violence seemed to hang in the air. The real drama of the trial never involved acquittal or conviction but whether Moses Wright would have the courage to name in court, at the possible risk of his own life, the two white men who had come and taken his nephew from his shack. He was scared, and there was a good deal of talk early in the case that he might skip town. Only considerable effort on the part of Medgar Evers, the local NAACP agent (who would himself be murdered a few years later), kept him from fleeing. Wright received a number of threats saying that he would be killed if he took the witness stand. But without his testimony there was no prosecution case. Showing exceptional courage, he took the stand and named both Milam and Bryant. The trial lasted five days. Mamie Bradley took the stand and identified the body as that of her son. At one point she took off her glasses and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. The all-white, all-male jury (nine farmers, two carpenters, and one insurance salesman) was not
moved. “If she tried a little harder she might have gotten out a tear,” the foreman, J. A. Shaw, said later. When a Clarksdale radio station referred to her as Mrs. Bradley (in the local lingo for blacks she should have been called “the Bradley woman”), people called for the rest of the day to complain.