Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (34 page)

Special Prosecutor Robert Smith said that was about “the most farfetched thing I ever heard in court.” But the defense team was hammering the point home that this was about more than the murder of my son. It was about showing who was in charge. J. W. Kellum made that point crystal clear when he told the white men on the jury “your forefathers will turn over in their graves” if the defendants were convicted.

The District Attorney Gerald Chatham gave a moving summation, filled with emotion and delivered with great passion. Emmett’s murder was “… morally and legally wrong,” he said. Chatham told the jurors they should not pay attention to the testimony of the so-called experts who wouldn’t have known Emmett under any circumstances. But they should
take the word of his mother, “… someone who loved him and cared for him,” he said, “God’s given witness to identify him.”

They say you can tell a lot about the outcome of a trial when you watch the expressions of the jurors. That might be. I couldn’t tell much by looking at that jury because I had always had such a bad feeling about them anyway. But I could tell a lot by watching the faces of some of the black spectators in the back of the court. Some stayed in their places, but some were getting out of there, and those are the ones I studied.

So, as the jury retired, I measured the looks of the folks in the rear and I turned to Congressman Diggs and the others. “The jury has retired and it’s time for us to retire.”

“What?” Congressman Diggs said. “And miss the verdict?”

I told him I thought that was one verdict he might want to miss. If that jury came back with an acquittal, then white folks were going to know for sure that they could get away with murder. It was going to be open season on black folks and we were going to be the prime targets. I was not about to wait around for that.

The jurors deliberated one hour and seven minutes. They took a soda pop break, it was said, to stretch it out a little, make it look better. They reached their verdict. Not guilty. We were on the road, about fifteen minutes out of Mound Bayou when it was announced on the radio. There was such jubilation. The radio reporter sounded like he was doing the countdown for a new year. You could hear the celebration in the background. It was like the Fourth of July. The defendants kissed their wives for the cameras, and lit their cigars. I felt despair. I was speechless. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to think. But I knew one thing for sure: I was not going to be vacationing in Mississippi anytime soon. In fact, I was going to get out as quickly as I possibly could.

In the end, the jury said, they did not think the state had proved that the body was Emmett’s. I had done what I was supposed to do, all that I could have done. It wasn’t enough for them. I had sworn that I recognized my son and had simply been dismissed. I had pleaded for justice and had the courtroom door slammed in my face.

I wonder how different things might have been if the laws and practices of Tallahatchie County had been different. What if blacks could vote there and had qualified to be on that jury? Would there have been enough black folks with the courage of Papa Mose or Willie Reed to convict two white men of murdering a black boy? Could that have happened? What if the law had allowed women to serve then? What if only one woman had been allowed on that jury? Even a white woman in Sumner, in Mississippi, in 1955 would have had to feel something for another woman who had felt
what I did. Wouldn’t she? A mother, someone who understood, as only a mother could, what it felt like to become a mother, what it must feel like to lose a child, a part of yourself. I wonder if a woman could have had much influence over the way things turned out. Then again, a woman did have influence over the whole thing, didn’t she? In this case, a woman was at the very heart of it all, the accusation, the abduction, the acquittal. And, of course, the cause for celebration.

Dr. Howard arranged a driver for Daddy, Rayfield, and me to get to Memphis, where we would catch our plane. Somewhere along the way, someone asked the driver, a black man, if he knew who he had in his car.

“Three very nice people, seems to me,” the man said.

When he found out that I was Emmett Till’s mother, my God, that man went into such a cursing panic. He knew, as anyone from that area would know, that it could mean a death sentence for him just to be seen with us. He actually turned off the headlights for a while as it was getting dark, and he seemed to be taking all kinds of back roads. But what would I know? They all looked like back roads to me. Especially in the dark. His reaction scared me. It reminded me of just how much we had to fear down there. How much of a threat existed down there. Oh, I was terrified and could only imagine the horrors that lay around every turn. And then an even more terrifying thought rushed over me: Was this what Emmett saw, was this what he thought on his last ride in Mississippi in the pitch black of night?

Finally, at the airport in Memphis, the driver could not seem to get us out of his car fast enough. He did not even want to stick around long enough to collect his money, which we kind of tossed onto the backseat as he tore off into the night. I have no idea whatever became of that poor man. But I will never forget the great fear he had. Later, back in Chicago, I would remember his face and the terror he and so many others had to endure in Mississippi, USA. I prayed for his well-being and for all those we left behind.

 I
t was the shock heard around the world. The newspaper headlines only echoed the public outcry over that Sumner jury’s verdict. They told of one hundred thousand people who turned out across the country to protest, to demonstrate their outrage. New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell called for an economic boycott of everything from the state of Mississippi. There were demands for antilynching legislation, the end to racial segregation, black voting rights. Some even suggested sending federal troops down to Mississippi. In Chicago, NAACP attorney William Henry Huff announced that he would file a civil suit against Roy Bryant, J. W. Milam, Carolyn Bryant, and Leslie Milam, seeking $400,000 in damages.

There were demonstrations as far away as France, where Josephine Baker led a protest rally. In Germany, an editorial writer commented that a black life in Mississippi wasn’t “worth a whistle.” Ten thousand people turned out at a rally in Chicago to hear journalist Simeon Booker and others. As many as sixty-five thousand people rallied in Detroit, where Congressman Charles Diggs and Medgar Evers talked about the trial. In Baltimore, nearly three thousand came to hear Dr. T.R.M. Howard. I was brought fresh from Mississippi to New York, where about fifteen thousand people came to a rally headed up by Roy Wilkins and A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

People were energized, they were angry. They were moved to action in ways they hadn’t been before. It had been a little more complicated sorting Supreme Court decisions, as people began to realize that “all deliberate speed” meant just the opposite of what it sounded like it meant. That took a little more thought.

The message of the Emmett Till story was a lot simpler. And it only took feeling. In New York and in so many other cities where I would appear, I spoke from the heart about what it meant to send a boy away on vacation and bring him home in a box. I spoke of what it meant to have to examine every inch of a body to even recognize it as a human being, let alone your own flesh and blood. I spoke about the pain a mother feels when she learns about the suffering of her baby. And I spoke about a murder trial that was really a farce. I spoke about Mississippi justice, where the laws seemed to be turned inside out. Where innocent people were punished and guilty people went free. I spoke about just how close Mississippi really was to Chicago and to New York. How I once had believed that the problems of the people of Mississippi and the rest of the South were not my problems. I knew better as a result of my great loss. As a people, we had to see that what happened to any of us, affected all of us. Which is why I urged people not to give up on our fight for justice, equal justice and equal rights. I had come to see that Emmett had died for a reason. That’s what I had learned from my own reflection, and from listening to all those dedicated black people back in Mississippi. I had come to realize that we had to work together to turn the sacrifice of Emmett’s life into some positive gain. As I had heard the NAACP leaders in Mississippi say, we, as a nation, had to work as hard at breaking through the “Cotton Curtain” of the Deep South as we were working at breaking through the Iron Curtain of Eastern Europe. I would not harbor any hatred toward whites. But I could no longer accept their hatred of me or black people. I had learned what their hatred had cost us. As important as anything else, of course, I urged people to contribute money to help finance the fight that we could see ahead of us.

Oh, and those contributions just rolled in. Thousands and thousands of dollars, I was told. It had started at Emmett’s funeral, when huge tubs of money were collected, as one minister had said, to help the NAACP. Rayfield Mooty had arranged other public appearances for me before the trial through his labor contacts and organizations. There was always a collection. At the rallies following the trial, tens of thousands of dollars were collected. NAACP membership also increased dramatically, I was told. As I understand, the organization had been strapped following the costly school desegregation fight. But following Emmett’s death and the trial, contributions would hit new highs.

Apart from the fund-raising, the New York stop had been important to me for another reason. That meeting with Roy Wilkins led to discussions about my public speaking. From the very beginning, it had been so hard for us to manage all the requests that came in. Rayfield Mooty had done a
pretty good job with many of the early arrangements. But we would get so many more requests following the trial. And there were quite a few groups that would announce my appearance even when they had no confirmation, sometimes misrepresenting that I would appear when they had never contacted us.

Rayfield also was concerned about being able to screen the groups that were asking for appearances. There was so much concern back then about communism. I heard that J. Edgar Hoover said that I was a little “pink.” I didn’t even know what that meant when I first heard it. But it was chilling when I finally realized how even little things like that “Cotton Curtain” remark I would make in my speeches might be misconstrued in ways that could be used against me. And to think, if Mr. J. Edgar Hoover had spent more time trying to build a federal case against Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, and less time trying to make Communists out of law-abiding citizens, then maybe there would have been at least two more cold-blooded killers taken off the streets. Anyway, with public appearances, we weren’t always sure when we’d get requests whether there was some connection that might have been embarrassing. We had to be careful. There was too much at stake.

Beyond all this, we had questions about what was going on behind the scenes of some of the events at which I was being asked to speak. We had been noticing that so much money was being collected through contributions at my early appearances; it was hard not to, with all the buckets and pails and tubs being passed around. But we weren’t sure exactly what was happening to all that money. We were blessed to have received enough to handle the funeral expenses for Emmett, and there were contributions to help with travel to Mississippi. But some people told us that so many thousands more had been collected to help the NAACP, and it wasn’t clear whether all that money was making its way to the organization. I remember one appearance I made at a large church in Detroit where people were just packed in like sardines in a can. They were even standing around outside, listening on loudspeakers. Great sums of money were collected there. I mean, when it came time for collection at this service, they didn’t pass the plate. They didn’t pass the bucket. They passed around big waste-baskets. I mean,
garbage cans
. And the people were filling them up. It was just amazing. After I finished my remarks, I asked to see the pastor, a prominent, respected man. I hadn’t seen him since I started speaking. I was told that he was indisposed, or something like that. But I kept insisting and finally barged into his office, just broke past the people out front, opened the door, and went in to find him standing there, putting on his suit coat. Well, on the desk between us there was a satchel, just sitting
there wide open, filled to the brim with greenbacks. I mean, that bag was
stuffed
. My first thought was to wonder how on earth he would even get it closed. But it definitely looked like he was on his way out, and he was not leaving without that money. That church gave me $175 for my efforts that day. But I’ll never forget that satchel and I always wondered what happened after I left.

Now, that was only one situation I happened to see. People were telling me all the time about other cases much like that one. Money was being raised, money was being diverted. There were so many good people who wanted to help us back then, and organizations did all they could to make sure people’s intentions were fulfilled. But, obviously, there also were good reasons for us to raise questions about whether Emmett’s name was being used by some people for their own gain. During the murder trial, Ruby Hurley had issued a statement for the NAACP confirming that it had not participated in any fund-raising activities tied to Emmett’s death and that it had not received any funds that were collected. Well, you can just imagine how alarming that would be. So, there were many reasons for us to try to get some help in managing these public appearances. To make sure there was no overbooking, to make sure we were not being used by the wrong groups, and to make sure that the money would wind up at the NAACP, where it would do the most good.

Rayfield worked something out with A. Philip Randolph, who arranged a meeting with Roy Wilkins in New York. We met to discuss it all. Roy Wilkins seemed like a very serious and determined man, but different from the other NAACP people I had spent time with in Mississippi. He seemed cooler than people like Medgar Evers and Ruby Hurley, who were always so passionate about the work they were doing on the front lines. But, of course, they would be different. The frontline officers deal with people. The generals deal with battle plans. He had come up from the front lines, though. In fact, I had heard about the stirring address he had given at the funeral service for Reverend George Lee in Belzoni. But, unlike the people out in the field, Roy Wilkins had to think about an entire organization as well as all the people in it. He had to think about an agenda. He made that clear in our meeting. And it was with that in mind that he told me at first that he had reservations about working with us to manage a public speaking tour. He had been executive secretary for less than six months, but he had been in important positions at the NAACP for quite a few years before that. He said he felt that some people in the past had used the organization, only to abandon it once they had gotten what they wanted. We talked it through and told him that would never be the case with me. And, besides, we thought there would be benefits for the
NAACP. There would be a chance to raise money and increase the NAACP’s membership at a time when the organization needed both. Finally, he agreed and we worked out the terms. I would receive a fee for speaking, and the NAACP would manage a tour that also would bring in contributions and memberships.