On Tuesday morning, the crowded courtroom watched attentively as the defense and prosecution set out to select the two more jurors necessary to proceed with the trial. They did not complete the process until almost eleven o’clock; the court had to call nine more prospective jurors in order to confirm the last two. The prosecution rejected six for having contributed to the defense fund of Milam and Bryant and used one of its peremptory challenges to block another. In the end nine cotton farmers, two carpenters, and an insurance salesman were selected: all men, all white.47 The Greenwood Morning Star described the local men as “a jury mostly composed of open-collared, sunburned farmers,” although the Memphis Commercial Appeal noted that one juror wore a necktie that first day.48 Judge Swango selected J. A. Shaw, one of the nine farmers, to chair the jury.
The court sequestered Shaw and his compatriots at the Delta Inn, a hotel about a hundred yards from the Sumner courthouse. They took their meals in the hotel dining room and received $5 a day besides. Barred from watching television, reading newspapers, or listening to the radio, the members of the jury were also barred from discussing the case with anyone. This did not dissuade local members of the Citizens’ Council from calling on jurors individually to ensure they voted “the right way.”49
After jury selection was complete, Murray Kempton of the New York Post observed, “the defense was exuding its satisfaction and its assurance of a two-day trial and a two-minute acquittal.”50 Any jury drawn from Tallahatchie County would have presented a challenge for the prosecution, but this one defied the prospect of a successful outcome. Ten of the twelve hailed from the Mississippi hill country, where race relations were especially harsh. The defense attorneys, in no small measure assisted by Sheriff Strider and Sheriff-elect Dogan, knew enough of the jurors personally to be confident of acquittal. “After the jury had been selected,” said senior defense counsel Breland, “any first-year law student could have won the case.”51
The one fixed opinion that everybody from Tallahatchie County seemed to share was that the jury would find the accused not guilty.52 This did not detract from the high suspense and absorbing interest of the courtroom drama. Perhaps as many as four hundred people packed the place, and most watched the proceedings with rapt attention, though two deputies played checkers in the jury room throughout much of the trial.53 The white spectators were mostly farmers. About forty African American observers occupied half a row and often some of the wall space in the rear. Only about fifteen or so of the spectators, black or white, were women.
Merely feeding and housing all the people attending the trial placed a heavy strain on the meager local facilities. Sumner had no real restaurant except a small hotel dining room on the courthouse square, where the jury took their meals. By Monday afternoon a café owner from Clarksdale, twenty-one miles away, had set up a concession stand in the courthouse lobby and passed the word that he would be selling half-chicken box lunches on Tuesday. Most of the white journalists ate at a drugstore across the street that had never sold food before but stocked supplies of sandwiches and soft drinks during the trial. Coca-Cola prices doubled, even when all the cold ones were gone and people sipped from tepid bottles until the refrigerators could catch up. Three blocks away the jukebox blared from Griffin’s, where the owner and her employees hawked food and drinks to African American spectators and journalists.54 The conspicuous interracial group from Louisiana took their lunch on the courthouse lawn.
Even more conspicuous was the sheer size of the press corps. Sumner, a sleepy village of six hundred, was playing host to nearly a hundred journalists and thirty photographers, most of them from distant states and a few from other countries—New York, Chicago, Memphis, Detroit, Miami, Atlanta, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Toledo, Washington, Ontario, London—and from all over Mississippi: Jackson, Clarksdale, Greenville, and Greenwood.55 Time, Newsweek, Life, the Nation, Jet, Ebony, and several other magazines sent reporters. Newspapers in Jakarta, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf, Paris, Istanbul, Rome, and Stockholm, among others, showed keen interest. Bill Stewart, who broadcast a radio program several times a day to stations in Louisiana, Minnesota, and Ohio, said, “This is the biggest thing we’ve ever done; we’ve got more phone calls from our listeners thanking us for having a man on the scene than anything we’ve done.”56 On the courthouse lawn, writes the historian Robert Caro, there sprung up, “if not a forest, at least a small grove of tripods supporting television cameras.” Three major television networks chartered airplanes that set down in a field seven miles away to pick up film every day and whisk it back to New York.57 National print journalists wired in their stories; Western Union set up a special booth in Sumner that sent nineteen thousand words on Monday, twenty-two thousand on Tuesday, and far more on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.58 Each time court recessed, radio journalists from Memphis, New York, Detroit, Chicago, Hattiesburg, Jackson, and other cities rushed to the few telephone booths to record their stories for immediate broadcast.59
For reporters from London, New York, Chicago, Washington, and even more distant places, Sumner, Mississippi, must have seemed a foreign country.60 “You lie in bed at night listening to the hounds baying,” Dan Wakefield reported, “and during the day you see more men wearing guns than you ordinarily do outside your television screen. I am not ashamed to confess that I was afraid.”61
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Outside a thousand people besieged the courthouse square.62 African Americans sat on the toasted grass beneath a Confederate statue dedicated to “the Cause That Never Failed,” and whites gathered on and around benches across the lawn.63 Observers noted a violent tension in the crowd. “It was like watching a community you thought you knew reveal itself as something else,” said Billy Pearson, a young white man who had been away at the University of North Carolina and come home to run the family farm. Pearson claimed to be appalled by the threatening atmosphere. Sheriff Strider had hired a number of youthful special deputies whom Pearson called “bully-boys” with long sideburns and big pistols who enjoyed pushing people around, he said, especially the black people.64