The story was front-page news Wednesday morning. That’s the way everybody had agreed it would go. The three white reporters were able to go forward with their insider accounts. They wrote about how the surprise witnesses were found and brought in to testify. That had been their reward, but it also had been part of the strategy of Medgar Evers, Dr. Howard, and Ruby Hurley, working with the black reporters. The Clark Porteus story in the Memphis Press-Scimitar made news across the country through the Scripps-Howard news service. Porteus wrote about how Dr. Howard had identified five witnesses who might be able to show that Emmett’s murder had taken place at the Sheridan Plantation in Sunflower County. Like Leflore, Sunflower was right next to Tallahatchie County. The Sheridan Plantation was managed by Leslie Milam, J. W. Milam’s brother, and Roy Bryant’s half-brother. The Porteus story gave a detailed account of Dr. Howard’s discussions with a witness about the possible scene of the crime. As many as four white men and two black men were seen with Emmett at the Sheridan Plantation in a green Chevy truck, like the one that drove off from Papa Mose’s place with Emmett in the back. Porteus had been the person who delivered Dr. Howard’s report to the prosecutors. Everyone saw right away that this new evidence might mean the whole trial would have to move to Sunflower County. They brought in Leflore County Sheriff George Smith, along with his deputy, John Ed Cothran; the Sunflower County district attorney; the Sunflower County prosecutor; and a forensic specialist sent down by Governor White. After Judge Swango granted the recess on Tuesday, Porteus wrote, the white officials went to the Sheridan Plantation to examine a shed. There was some information that the shed might have been the place where Emmett had been beaten, and where someone had been trying to clean up bloodstains. The officials didn’t find any traces of blood, and they probably scared off quite a few potential black witnesses in the process.
Even though Porteus didn’t mention Jimmy Hicks, he did report that two more potential witnesses, Levy “Too Tight” Collins and Henry Lee Loggins, were still being sought. And that only fueled the growing feeling that these two men were long gone.
Papa Mose was sworn in at nine-fifteen Wednesday morning. He had been waiting there in court over the last two days just for this moment. On Tuesday, he had stood around because there were no vacant seats. He’d just stood, waiting to be called. Then court was recessed so that the surprise witnesses could be found, and he’d had to wait overnight. But he had been waiting for this moment even longer than that. He had been waiting nearly a month to have the chance to bear witness, to tell everybody what had happened at his home the night Emmett was taken away.
Papa Mose wasn’t a tall man, but people had always looked up to him. He was respected by the people who knew him. When he spoke, they listened. In court, they listened intently, not so much because the white folks there cared about what he was saying, but because they cared more about what he was speaking against. Yes, he was testifying against Bryant and Milam. But, more than that, his very presence there spoke out against a custom that said you don’t do what he was about to do. You see, through his testimony, Papa Mose would cross a line that no one could remember a black man ever crossing in Mississippi. He wasn’t afraid of Bryant and Milam, sitting there in court, staring him down. “They oughtta be scared of me,” he had said before he got his moment, before he was sworn in, before he settled into the cane chair on the witness stand. This was Papa Mose’s chance. He had been waiting for this chance, for this moment. He was not going to let Bryant and Milam off. They had violated his home. They had terrorized his family. Beyond all else, they had tortured and killed Emmett.
The District Attorney Gerald Chatham started off. He addressed the witness as “Uncle Mose,” and the witness addressed him as “sir.” On questioning, Papa Mose once again told the story about how he was awakened at two in the morning by the banging on the front door and the voice calling out to him, the one identifying himself as “Mr. Bryant.” He told how he came out to the screened-in porch to see that there were two men, one with a flashlight and a gun, who asked for the boy from Chicago, the one who had done the talking. There was a third man, who stayed behind on the porch outside when the other two came in.
Papa Mose testified how the two men woke Emmett and threatened him and took him out to the truck. He told how he heard Milam ask someone in the truck whether Emmett was the right boy. There was that voice from inside the truck: “Yes.” A fourth person, a person with a voice that was lighter than a man’s voice. They put Emmett in the back of the truck. And they drove away.
Chatham looked straight across at Papa Mose. “Did you ever see your nephew alive again?”
Papa Mose swallowed. Then he spoke in a low voice. “No, sir.”
Chatham asked Papa Mose if he could identify the two men. This was the moment. A black man was actually being asked to take a stand in a Mississippi courtroom and accuse a white man of kidnapping a black boy.
“Yes, sir,” Papa Mose said. He could identify them, all right.
Chatham asked him to rise.
Papa Mose did right away. He stood up, straight, erect. He did not waver, he did not shake. It was very dramatic, and everything was suspended in the heat of that moment, the very moment Papa Mose had been waiting for. Chatham asked Papa Mose to indicate the men who came to his house that Sunday morning. Without hesitating, as if he had seen himself doing this in a thousand moments before this one, Papa Mose raised his arm.
At the black press table, off to the left, behind the rail, and near the window, Ernest Withers, the photographer shooting for the Defender, was also waiting for that moment. Ernest Withers knew what that moment meant, and what it would mean. It was a defiant moment that had to be preserved, even if the judge had restricted picture taking. So Ernest Withers pointed his camera very carefully, aimed it between the people in front of him, straight through the opening, right at Papa Mose. That’s where everybody else’s attention was drawn, too. Nobody, it seemed, was watching the black press table at that moment. At least you might hope that would be the case. So, with hope, with patience, and with a steady hand, Ernest Withers waited for the moment.
As Papa Mose pointed, he felt the rush of anger in that room. The heat of the moment. As he would put it later, he could feel the blood of all those white people boiling. But there was scarcely a peep from the crowd. In fact, it was so quiet in that courtroom, you could hear the gentle whirring sound of the ceiling fans stirring the hot air. That, and a single click of a camera shutter over at the black press table. Papa Mose stood straight and firm against the weight of that room. “There he is,” he said, as he pointed directly at J. W. Milam. “And there is Mr. Bryant.”
That done, the moment past, Papa Mose took his seat once again.
As he did, from a spot near the jury, artist Franklin McMahon was preparing for Life magazine a drawing of the same dramatic event photographed by Withers. While he finished his work, McMahon heard a juror mutter a reference to Papa Mose: “Sambo, Sambo.”
When the defense attorney, C. Sidney Carlton, started his cross-examination, it became clear that he wanted to make this his moment. He tried to pin Papa Mose down on how he could recognize anybody in the dark with the flashlight pointed mostly at him. Carlton tried to get Papa Mose to admit that the only reason he even thought he recognized Milam was because Milam was big and bald and white. And couldn’t that description fit a lot of people? He wondered how Papa Mose could even identify Bryant, ignoring what Papa Mose had said under oath. Bryant had identified himself when he came banging on his door. Oh, that man was getting on Papa Mose’s nerves. In fact, at one point, he became so annoyed that he just stopped saying “sir” when he answered.
“So there were four persons there that night?” Carlton asked.
Papa Mose sat back in the chair. “That’s right.”
Finally, Carlton asked about the third man who had come that night, the one who had stayed out on the porch. “Was he a white man?”
“I don’t think so,” Papa Mose said.
“He might have been a Negro?”
“He sure acted like a Negro,” Papa Mose said. “He stayed outside.”
People laughed at this answer and the judge slammed the gavel and shut everything down right away. He was determined to keep control of his courtroom. After about an hour, Papa Mose finally was released. The moment had come and it had passed. An hour that seemed like only a heartbeat, and an entire lifetime.
Leflore County Sheriff George Smith was called next. The judge excused the jury while he listened to what the sheriff had to say. What Smith had to say was how he went to Roy Bryant’s store later that Sunday, after Emmett was taken. Bryant was asleep in back of the store at two in the afternoon. Bryant admitted that he took Emmett out of the house and back up to the store. But he told Smith that he turned Emmett loose, when he found out from his wife that he wasn’t the one. The defense lawyers made a big deal out of the fact that Sheriff Smith and Bryant were friends. They tried to say that the conversation between them was confidential. But the judge wouldn’t allow the objection. The whole thing just seemed too cozy. The sheriff who was investigating the kidnapping was a friend of one of the kidnappers. It looked like the sheriff wanted to do the right thing, but in that crazy place, you could never be sure how things might turn out.
The recess for lunch was going to be two and a half hours long. The defense team wanted to have time to question the surprise witnesses being called by the prosecutors.
As people began filing out for the extended break, somebody approached Ernest Withers, stopped him in his tracks. Somebody had seen him take that picture, capture the moment: Papa Mose standing to accuse Bryant and Milam. As it turned out, the man was from one of the wire services. He bought the film right out of Ernest Withers’s camera.
It must have been unsettling for Willie Reed. Awful, really. It sure had been that way for me. Walking into that court for the first time, not knowing what was in store, what to expect. Oh, for me, it was the worst. But, for him, it was worse still. He had never been inside a courthouse in his entire life, and what he was about to do there would change his life from that point on. His first stop on this first trip on Wednesday was the judge’s chambers. There, seated with their feet up on Judge Swango’s desk, were Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam. Their lawyers were there, too. That was not a good sign to Willie. He might not have ever been in a courthouse before, but he didn’t have to have experience in a courthouse to know what it meant for a black man to be in a room like that with people like those. He had lived in the Delta long enough to know this much: Even when you’re brought into the room, you’re still an outsider.
Willie didn’t take a seat. He didn’t even think about that. He just stood there and answered the questions about the testimony he would give. The same way the other surprise witnesses would be doing. Willie was under a great deal of pressure, but he believed he could get through it. He had gotten so much support during his stay at Dr. Howard’s place the night before. People knew he would need that. Willie had been very hard to find at first because his grandfather had moved him about three miles away from his house when things had started heating up, when word started spreading about the people who might have information about Emmett’s death, especially Willie. His grandfather needed to protect Willie. Even so, even several miles away from his grandfather’s place, he hadn’t felt completely safe. Somebody still could have gotten to him. As it turns out, the people who finally did get to Willie wound up bringing him to safety in Mound Bayou. He thought about that. That, and all the encouragement everybody had given him the night before. He had been impressed to meet a U.S. congressman, a black congressman. He told Charles Diggs as much. He told me he wanted to help and I told him how much I appreciated his help, how grateful I was. He felt relieved being in an all-black town, on Dr. Howard’s grounds, with bodyguards. Oh, that made him feel very good, and very safe. To him, it was like being at the White House. Trying to get to Dr. Howard, he said, would have been like trying to get to the president.
That was Tuesday night. Being in that court on Wednesday morning, though, being invited into the judge’s chambers and still being an outsider in the presence of all those insiders—well, that was another thing altogether. But he was prepared to do what he had promised he was going to do. So he answered the questions about his testimony, about what he had seen, what he had heard very early in the morning on the fourth Sunday in August, about the two white men sitting there with their feet on Judge Swango’s desk. He was prepared to do what he had promised he was going to do, and he was approved as a witness to do just that.
That afternoon, the state called Chester Miller, the black undertaker from Greenwood; Robert Hodges, who discovered the body; and Sheriff Smith’s deputy, John Ed Cothran. Robert Hodges told about how he contacted Sheriff Strider after seeing Emmett’s foot rising above the surface of the river, and how the body was towed to shore. Chester Miller described the condition of the body he came to pick up in his ambulance. He also saw a hole above the right ear, probably the bullet hole. Part of Emmett’s head had been crushed and a piece of the skull had fallen off into the boat. He remembered that. Who could forget seeing something like that? He also described the gin fan and the several feet of barbed wire tied around Emmett’s neck. The fan had been brought into court, all seventy-five or eighty or ninety pounds of it, and it sat there, like a silent witness or an accomplice to the murder. Deputy Cothran had arrested J. W. Milam. He testified that Milam admitted taking Emmett and, just like Bryant, said he had let him go when they found he was not the right one. That was their story. That they had just released Emmett, let him walk back the three miles from the store in Money to Papa Mose’s home. That Emmett had simply disappeared into the early morning darkness.
Chick Nelson, the first witness on Thursday morning, seemed to blend into all the rest. He was the undertaker from Tutwiler, the white man who ultimately was the one who took the body from Chester Miller and turned it over to Uncle Crosby to bring back to Chicago. In fact, everything after Papa Mose’s testimony on Wednesday morning seemed to blend together. In that horrible compression chamber of heat and hate, it all seemed like one big transition from Papa Mose to me, the second witness called on Thursday.
The prosecutors hadn’t done very much to prepare me for the experience, but there probably wasn’t very much anyone could have done to prepare me. As I walked forward to be sworn in and take my place in that old cane witness chair, I was overwhelmed by the mood. You could feel it, thick as the humidity.
You really can feel things like that. It’s in the air in most places. In church you can feel it. Even when nobody is around, you can feel what was brought there when everybody was around. People who want to connect with God bring a special kind of spiritual power to a place, and it stays there long after they have left. It’s the power of faith, the power of love. You can breathe it in. God is there. It is so uplifting. That was not the feeling I got as I walked to the front of the court. That place was not church. That crowd did not come to sing His praises. In fact, those white folks looked to me like a lynch mob.
For the first time, it seemed, I took a good look at the witness stand. That’s what it was, really. A stand, not a box. There was a chair, but no wall separating you from the lawyers, from the crowd. You would just have to sit there, facing out, up against that wall of hostility, all alone, exposed. So vulnerable.
Special Prosecutor Robert Smith called me “Mamie.” And I called him “sir.” We had already been through why we’d have to go through all that. In court, we worked our way through all the “how-do-you-do” kind of questions, the preliminary things I guess lawyers have to put on the record when they know a record is being made of what they say. That kind of stuff. And then he got right into it. The reason I was there. How did I know the body that was sent to me was my son?
I went through the scene at A. A. Rayner’s, how I had examined Emmett’s entire body, the legs, the torso, the face, mouth, teeth, eye, ear. Everything. And, as I explained it all, I turned from the prosecutor to the jurors. I wanted to talk to them, to reach them directly. I had to. If there was any chance at all that they might even consider a murder conviction, let alone hand one down, then they were going to have to get beyond some things. They had to see past the color of a witness’s skin, and feel the anguish of a mother’s loss.
The prosecutor asked if I could recognize the body.
This was my moment. And I knew how closely everyone would be listening to my words, my voice, my delivery. They were going to measure it all, evaluate it, analyze it, pick it apart a thousand different ways. The strength, the certainty. I had to demonstrate these things just by the way I spoke.
“I positively identified it,” I said firmly. “It definitely was my boy. Beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
The prosecutor showed me the police photo of Emmett, the one taken right after he was pulled from the river. My God. He looked even worse there than he did when I saw him, which was worse than he did when the rest of the world finally saw him. Oh, everything just washed over me again. The force of it rocked me in that old cane chair, back and forth. I bowed my head. I had to do that to collect myself. I mean, the tears were welling up and I wanted so much to hold them back. I wanted to hide them. No one should see them. I had to be strong up there. I couldn’t be weak. I had to be strong for Emmett.
I breathed deeply, worked through it, and, one more time, I made the identification. I nodded. “That was my son,” I said.
He turned to walk back to the table for more evidence. As he did, I took off my glasses, wiped my eyes. There was a job to do. Emmett. We can do it.
The prosecutor brought over another picture. This was one of the Christmas pictures and I said that, too, was Emmett. Next was the ring. I told him it was the ring I had given to Emmett before he left Chicago. I recognized it because of the inscription: LT MAY 25, 1943. I explained that the ring had been left by Emmett’s father, Louis Till. Louis had died July 2, 1945, in the service in Europe. He didn’t ask any more about that. I don’t know what else I would have been able to say, since that was about all I had ever known.
Next, J. J. Breland took his turn on me for Bryant and Milam. He was the oldest defense attorney. But that attack dog hadn’t lost his bite. In another setting, he might have been considered the dean. I saw him there as the ringleader. The first words he spoke were to the judge. He asked permission to keep his seat while he questioned me. He never asked my permission to call me “Mamie.” And that was just the beginning. But there was no way to turn back. I had come to testify, to cooperate, to help find some measure of justice. Whatever it took. I always knew I would be in the spotlight, on the stand. I always knew there would be pressure. But, still, even though I knew all these things and thought I had braced myself, I had no idea that a trial could be such an ordeal.
Breland wanted to know whether I had insurance on Emmett. It was so nasty. I knew the defense had already set the stage for what they were trying to do. They wanted to create the impression that I could have had something to do with the death of my own son. Maybe I had my son killed for the insurance money. Yes, I had insurance. Yes, it provided for double indemnity in the case of accidental death. Or murder. Breeland wanted to know if I had collected. Well, how could I? Sheriff Strider hadn’t released the death certificate yet. Okay then, so maybe I had worked with the NAACP, digging up a body in the cemetery, putting the ring on a finger, weighting it, and throwing it in the Tallahatchie River. Or, better yet, wasn’t Emmett, at that very moment, walking around the streets of Detroit with my father? Well, my father was sitting just across the room. So how could that be? Breland was doing everything he could to play on the doubts and the suspicions he knew the white people of that community had. After all, he was one of them. Much better off, but no better, really.
Oh, it was like I had been tied up to a target and he was throwing darts at me. Even so, I kept my composure. I responded to every question, and always remembered to say “sir.” Well, almost always. I slipped once and just said “no,” and I hurried up and added “sir.” I mean, there was a gap between those words, but I tried to hook them up before anybody could notice. You didn’t want people to notice something like that. It felt like that place could erupt at any minute. I knew I had no protection. They could drag me off that stand and tar and feather me. Or worse.
Then Breeland shifted gears. “Do you read the Chicago Defender?”
Well, everybody knew where he was about to go with that. The Defender was about as bad as the NAACP to those people. He wanted to try to prejudice the jurors against me. As if they needed any more help with that. But Judge Swango ordered the jury out to see how far he would let this go.
I told him that I bought the paper and read it, even though I didn’t subscribe to it.
Now, to pursue this line, he finally had to stand, after all, and come to me. He handed me a copy of the paper, asked if I had seen it. When I told him that I had, in fact, seen the paper, he directed me to a picture and asked if I recognized it as a picture of Emmett’s body. I told him that I did, and it was Emmett’s body. The judge said there would be no further references to the newspaper or the photo during the trial. There obviously was no point to any of it, except to get people all excited.
Then Breeland shifted again. He asked first if I was from the South. I told him I was born in Webb, not that far from Sumner. He wanted to know what I had told Emmett to prepare him for his trip to the South. How to act around white folks. I said that I had done just that. He wanted to know what I had said.
I repeated a summary of what I had told Emmett, to be very careful how he spoke and to say “yes, sir” and “no, ma’am” and not to hesitate to humble himself, “if you have to get down on your knees.” That’s what I told him.
All the while I was on the stand, I never looked at Bryant and Milam. Never even glanced in their direction. A part of me wanted to do it. Wanted to look into the eyes of my baby’s killers. But I didn’t. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid to do it. Oh, I was very anxious just being there, on the spot, in the spotlight. But, as for Bryant and Milam—well, there was nothing more they could have done to me. Nothing at all. They already had done as much as anyone possibly could have done. Still, I knew that I had to keep it all together, maintain a delicate balance in that courtroom. If I had any chance at all to appeal to that jury, to reach out to them, then I could not let them see me challenge those two monsters. And that’s how it would have been interpreted if I had been seen looking at them. So I looked only at the lawyers who interrogated me and the jurors who evaluated me. And I answered all questions as directly as I could, until my hour was up, and I was dismissed.
As I stepped off the stand, though, I felt, I don’t know, like I really hadn’t connected at all. Like I didn’t matter at all. Like they had blocked out everything I had said. I felt that my words didn’t mean any more to those people than a piece of paper, like trash, blowing down the street. On top of that, I had to walk past all those angry white folks on my way out. There were daggers in their eyes. So I had to stop making eye contact to avoid the cutting looks. I had to start looking ahead to the door, where I was happy to see Daddy waiting to escort me out. It was so good that I had somebody in the courtroom just to be with me at that moment. But then I realized I wouldn’t have been alone in any event. I had faced the cruel stares and the hostile questions with the strength of someone who knew that she was not alone. I had prayed for that strength.
That place was not church. Far from it. But, in the end, God was there for me.