The deputies could not intimidate everyone outside the courthouse. Frank Brown, a labor organizer from Chicago, spent a day there mingling with other black men. Many carried guns, he recalled, and none seemed cowed by the deputies. “Used to be they would charge us with clubs and chase us off the grass,” one of the men told Brown, “but they know we ain’t running no damn where this time.”65 On Monday afternoon a young black man openly brandished an automatic on the courthouse lawn but jumped into his car and drove away before the deputies could question him and find out who he was.66 Amzie Moore recounted, “The tension was so thick until, as the blacks and whites mixed on the courthouse grounds, you just looked for an explosion just any time.”67
One possible spark was an unlikely group of visitors from the United Packinghouse Workers Association, a union with an increasingly strong commitment to civil rights for all Americans; the UPWA would become a vital part of the national civil rights coalition that emerged in the wake of the Till lynching. The union had sent an interracial delegation from Gramercy, Louisiana, a small town with a union sugar refinery. It was in the grips of a strike and had recently been the site of a women’s conference, which had adopted a resolution denouncing the Till murder and calling for justice. “We are building a new, free, unafraid South,” the resolution declared.68 The UPWA sent two white field representatives, two white program coordinators, the African American president of the Women’s Auxiliary, and three white wives of striking workers. Sugar workers from rural Louisiana certainly knew how bizarre it was for them to travel in a mixed group. “The fact that Mrs. Lillian Pittman, a Negro, was in our company caused us to have innumerable problems on our trip to Sumner by auto,” one reported, without going into details. She also mentioned the “shocked glares from the white populace” in Sumner.69
“We motored to Mississippi with Mr. Telfor,” Pittman reported. “Afterward Marjorie Telfor, Grace Falgoust and Mrs. Vicknair and I sat down to eat lunch under a tree in the shade. The three white ladies and I were sitting down and along came a white photographer and took our picture.” He assumed they were from Chicago, but they told him, “?‘No, we are from Louisiana.’ He couldn’t believe it because the people in Mississippi don’t mix.” An older white man nearby suggested that it would be better for the white women to stay away from black people. “I asked the man did he own Mississippi,” said Falgoust. “He couldn’t answer me.”70
At some point Pittman spoke to some African Americans hanging around the courthouse about “political action.” They were speechless. “Then some answered me, ‘Lady, do you want us to be killed and put in the Tallahatchie River?’ They also said they were not allowed to vote. To some of them that [the whites] let register, they said, ‘Politics are for the whites.’ And ‘[Negroes], on the day to vote, you had better not appear at the polls.’?”71
For the first day and a half of the trial, the women of the Gramercy UPWA could not get seats in the courtroom, Pittman reported: “But we tried to make up for it by trying to get as much news as we could out of the courtroom.”72 They interviewed townspeople, handed out leaflets condemning the murder and calling for justice, and “issued press releases to news reporters from all over the country.” According to the UPWA delegates, “A great deal of attention has been given to the presence in this tense situation of a friendly, interracial delegation.”73
In their exchanges with local whites, the women learned much. Pittman overheard two excused jurors acknowledge to one another that they had purposely given answers sure to get them off the jury because they knew “that the defendants had killed the boy, and they did not want to be party to the verdict of ‘not guilty,’ which they knew would be expected.”74 As they interviewed local people, the women discovered that none doubted the guilt of the accused, but all of them added something like “The jury knows better than to do anything to them.”75
On their second day at the trial Pittman managed to get into the courtroom, so the three white women left the grounds and walked through Sumner, talking with whoever would talk to them. All the white people they met were hostile to the prosecution. Several, wrote Freida Vicknair, “insisted that the body sent to Chicago was not that of Emmett Till.” Contradicting this assertion was the common understanding that the accused were guilty: “No one protested the innocence of Bryant and Milam. In fact, we were told that this crime was justified.” The locals were certain of acquittal and believed that in the unlikely event any jurors voted otherwise, they would pay for it with their lives.76
Even stranger to the town of Sumner than the interracial UPWA delegation was the group of black reporters patrolling the small town. There was James Hicks of the Afro-American News Service and the National Negro Press Association, who was pivotal not only in covering the trial but in uncovering hidden witnesses, some of whom testified to considerable effect. Simeon Booker and Clotye Murdock were there for Ebony, along with their photographer, David Jackson. L. Alex Wilson of the Memphis Tri-State Defender accompanied photographer Ernest Withers, who created lasting images of the notorious trial. The Chicago Defender probably slung more ink from Sumner than any newspaper, black or white. Reporters William B. Franklin and Steve Duncan and publisher Nannie Mitchell of the St. Louis Argus attended. All the other major Midwestern black newspapers—the Kansas City Star, the Cleveland Call and Post, and the Michigan Chronicle—covered the trial.77 The very sight of white and black reporters greeting one another and exchanging notes in a friendly manner shocked the Sumner crowd. Therein was some of the trial’s actual drama, for if almost everyone involved could predict the trial’s verdict, few could predict its consequences. The New York Post columnist Murray Kempton, for one, thought the locals’ reaction revealed “more incredulity than menace.”78
This wasn’t true for the sheriff. Strider blamed all the national hullabaloo on outsiders and seemed to focus on the black press as a prime example. At the outset of each day he would walk, his blackjack protruding from his front pocket, past the table where the black press huddled and offer a cheerful “Good morning, niggers.”79 He interfered with their work whenever he could, reserving them only the barest minimum space, and then only at the direction of Judge Swango. “They allotted us chairs at the Jim Crow press table but during the noon recess while we were trying to get our stories filed in a Negro restaurant”—a pool hall, really—“the crowd would come in and take chairs from our table. I stood up more often than I sat down,” complained James Hicks. “We never have any trouble,” Strider told television reporters during a break, “until some of our Southern niggers go up North and the NAACP talks to them and they come back here.”80
Meanwhile Moses Wright slept with a shotgun and harvested his cotton crop, waiting for the chance to speak his truth.
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MISSISSIPPI UNDERGROUND