THE LAW: Trial by Jury

Sumner, Miss, belongs to the Deeper South—the one without its own memories of ante-bellum order or graciousness.

Sumner was snake-infested swamp until it was cleared for cotton in 1873. Like many another U.S. town, it was built around a courthouse, and its pioneers brought into the wilderness a respect for Anglo-American law. But they also brought the hatreds and half-digested lessons of Reconstruction years and a socio-economic system that would constantly conflict with the tradition of Anglo-American justice as those traditions lived and evolved among the vast majority of their countrymen.

This socio-economic system (in its crudest examples somewhat worse than slavery for all concerned) called for a mass base of cheap Negro labor so thoroughly ruled by a dominant white minority that equal contact in church, social life or politics between the races was held to be impossible.

Last week, in Sumner’s hot and hideous courthouse, the white community of Tallahatchie County came into conflict with the tradition of the law in the person of Circuit Judge Curtis M. Swango. In a way, both won. The immediate and overt victory went to the community. The law’s victory was that so much of it survived in the face of blind hatred.

Home & the River. The case concerned Emmett Louis Till, 14, who was sent by his mother, a Government office worker ($3,900 a year) in Chicago, on a family visit to her home town with her uncle, Mose Wright, 64, a sharecropper and sometime preacher. One day a cousin drove him and some other Negro youths to the nearby hamlet of Money (pop. 75) to buy 2¢ worth of bubble gum. On leaving, his friends later said, Till rolled his eyes and whistled lewdly at a white woman in the grocery, Mrs. Carolyn Bryant, 21. Later two white men took Emmett Till away at gunpoint.

Three days afterward, a corpse was found in the muddy Tallahatchie River. The body was swollen and decomposing, the skull smashed by blows and pierced by a bullet, and a heavy cotton-gin fan was lashed to the neck. Mose Wright said the body was that of his nephew. To the surprise of many Northerners, the Tallahatchie County grand jury promptly indicted two white men for murder: Roy Bryant, 24, storekeeper and ex-paratrooper, husband of the insulted woman; and his half brother, J. W. Milam, 36.

In the stifling courtroom heat, Judge Swango permitted shirtsleeved informality, but he permitted no looseness with the law. The jurors were carefully questioned; many who disclosed some obvious hint of prejudice were excluded.

Asked to identify the men who took Emmett Till from his cabin, Mose Wright stood up and pointed a gnarled finger straight at Milam, then at Roy Bryant. The sheriff of neighboring Leflore County related that Bryant and Milam admitted taking Emmett Till, but claimed that they later let him go when they learned he was the wrong boy. The boy’s mother testified that the body from the river was her son; on his finger was his dead father’s ring, with the initials L.T. (Louis Till). She had cautioned him about Tallahatchie County. She told him “to be very careful … to humble himself to the extent of getting down on his knees.” She explained: “Living in Chicago, he didn’t know.”

The next witness knew; he was Negro Willie Reed, 18, of Sunflower County, Miss., and he was so frightened he could hardly talk. He told his story: early on the morning after the kidnaping of Emmett Till, he had seen a boy who looked like Till’s photographs in a truck with four white men. Soon afterward, he saw the truck outside a barn belonging to Milam’s brother, and heard sounds inside “like someone being whipped.” What sounds? “He say, ‘oh,’ ” said Willie Reed, in a very low voice.

Later, the youth testified, he saw Milam come out “wearing a gun,” then the truck was driven away. Afterward, he said, “I went home and got ready to go to Sunday school.” Other witnesses confirmed part of his testimony.

Earnest Effort. The prosecutors for the State of Mississippi—Gerald Chatham, due soon to retire for ill health, and Robert Smith, a Marine Corps hero and former FBI agent—made an earnest and honest effort to build their case at what can be assumed to be great social cost to themselves. They got no help from Tallahatchie’s Sheriff H. C. Strider, a cotton planter (1,500 acres), who insisted that Till had been whisked away alive. “This whole thing was rigged,” he said.

The white people in the region raised a defense fund approaching $10,000 for Defendants Bryant and Milam. They hired five of Sumner’s resident lawyers, who produced expert witnesses—including a doctor and an embalmer—to testify that the bloated, decomposing body had been in the river for at least ten days, and therefore could not have been Emmett Till. Sheriff Strider took the stand for the defense and said the same thing: “If it had been one of my own boys, I couldn’t have identified it.” In most of the U.S., this conflict over the identity of the body could have been resolved by elementary instruments of police work.

When Mrs. Bryant, the woman whose grievance started the case, was called to the stand, the prosecution objected. Judge Swango sent the jury from the room while he heard her story in order to decide whether it was relevant. It was a tale eminently likely to make a Tallahatchie jury acquit her husband and brother-in-law even if the evidence against the accused had been six times as great as it was. Judge Swango ruled that her story was irrelevant to the actual issues before the court, and did not let the jury hear it.

Sacred Guarantee. Next day Prosecutor Smith in his closing argument told the jury: “You know, gentlemen, we have a Constitution in the U.S. and in Mississippi which guarantees life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to everybody.

Once we get to a point where we deprive any of our people of those, for whatever reason, then we cannot justify ourselves . . . and we cannot complain about what happens to us.” The jury took just over an hour to decide: “Not guilty.” A juror later explained: “If we hadn’t stopped to drink pop, it wouldn’t have taken that long.” When the verdict came in, Prosecutor Chatham stared across the courtroom.

“Trial by jury,” he said slowly, “is one of the sacred guarantees of the Constitution.” Bryant and Milam lit big cigars while the whites of Tallahatchie County cheered. But the two men were not released. They face kidnaping charges in Leflore County and were jailed there, awaiting bail.

In Tallahatchie County, while the whites rejoiced, the Negroes went about the cotton harvest, sullen-eyed. Willie Reed’s family sent him to Chicago. Old Mose Wright and his family plan to move to Albany, N.Y. Tallahatchie County remains 63% Negro—with not one Negro on its rolls of registered voters or on its jury rolls.

Tallahatchie is not the South, either the Old South or the new, burgeoning industrial South. It is an island, and there are many in the Deeper South, where the law of the land and the will of the community—as expressed in trial by jury or otherwise—are in basic conflict. The feeling created in the U.S. by the Till case indicated that something was going to have to give.