“And will you point that man out, Uncle Mose?” asked Chatham.
“It was Mr. Bryant,” said Wright, rotating slightly and pointing at Milam’s brother-in-law again. Bryant betrayed no emotion, but Milam again shifted nervously in his chair.6 Only somewhat obscured by the passage of time, the significance of what had just occurred, arguably as significant as anything that would transpire in the courtroom, wasn’t lost on most of those watching the testimony. No doubt many thought that Wright had pronounced his own death sentence by identifying the two white men who had taken his nephew. He knew the risks as well as anyone. Murray Kempton wrote that Wright then “sat down hard against the chair-back with a lurch which told better than anything else the cost in strength to him of the thing he had done.”7
The district attorney’s next questions carefully took Wright through his account of the kidnapping, ending with his story of standing on the porch for twenty minutes, watching the darkness into which the boy his niece entrusted to his care had disappeared. “Now tell the Court and Jury when was the next time after they took Emmett Till away from your home that you saw him or his body,” Chatham finally directed.
Wright replied, “I saw him when he was taken out of the river.”8
After Wright explained that he had identified his nephew’s body in part by the silver ring on his finger, it was the defense counsel C. Sidney Carlton’s turn to cross-examine. Carlton and Wright had spoken three days earlier, of course, when Carlton, in an illegal attempt to prevent the moment that had just come and gone, had dropped by Wright’s tenant house to advise him that testifying against Milam and Bryant would be very bad luck, to put it mildly. He tried a less subtle approach in court. “Sidney Carlton roared at Moses Wright as if he were the defendant,” Kempton wrote, “and every time Carlton raised his voice like the lash of a whip, J. W. Milam would permit himself a cold smile.”9
Carlton berated Wright as though the older man were changing the facts of his story, which he wasn’t, and Wright calmly pointed out that he had not said any such thing. The defense attorney tried to insinuate that there had not been enough light in the cabin for Wright to identify Milam or Bryant, that his identification of them was mere speculation. He tried to fool Wright into testifying that Emmett Till’s own initials were on the silver ring rather than his father’s. He tried to suggest that since Wright had testified that he could not see the men putting the boy into the car and had not been able to see Till in the car as it pulled away, he could not prove that they had taken the boy. He attempted to shake Wright’s confidence in his identification of his nephew’s body by the river. Alternating between accusatory and indignant theatrics, however, Carlton never tripped up Wright, who stuck to answers like “That’s right” and “I didn’t say it” and “I sure did.” When Carlton’s frustrated questions became repetitive, Judge Swango sustained the prosecution’s objections, the defense lawyer gave in, and the judge announced a twenty-five-minute recess.10
Moses Wright did not go into hiding for the rest of the trial. He did not follow his wife and leave immediately for Chicago. Every day of the trial he could be seen around the courthouse, wearing blue pants and a crisp white shirt, his pink-banded hat tilted back on his head. Wright seemed transfigured by his bravery on the witness stand. “He walked through the Negro section of the lawn,” wrote Dan Wakefield for the Nation, “with his hands in his pockets and his chin held up with the air of a man who has done what there was to do and could never be touched by doubt that he should have done anything less.”11
When court resumed, defense attorney Breland said, “If the Court please, the Clerk has just handed Defense Counsel a list of additional witnesses which the Clerk states he has subpoenaed both for the state and defense. We now move the Court that the defendants’ counsel have the opportunity of examining these witnesses in the witness room before they are offered as witnesses by the state. The names of these witnesses,” he continued, “are as follows: Amandy Bradley, Walter Billingsley, [Add] Reed, Willie Reed, Frank Young, and C. A. Strickland.” These were the local African Americans discovered by the Mississippi underground, and the defense had no idea what they might tell the court. The judge acceded to the request and let the state call its next witness, Chester Miller, the African American undertaker from Greenwood who had taken Till’s body from the riverside to his funeral home.12
On August 31, Miller testified, Deputy Sheriff John Ed Cothran called him to pick up a body in Tallahatchie County. He took one of his helpers and found the body lying in a boat beside the river. Tallahatchie County law enforcement officers suggested that Miller remove a silver ring from the finger of the deceased for purposes of identification. “I laid it on the floorboard of the ambulance,” he said. Before he could load the body into the ambulance he had to detach the barbed wire that lashed a heavy gin fan around the neck. “It was well-wrapped,” he testified.
He had then asked Moses Wright to identify the body, which Wright did. In the courtroom, Special Prosecutor Robert Smith asked Miller, “In your opinion, was the body that was put in your ambulance, was it possible for someone who had known the person well in their lifetime to have identified that person?”
Before the defense could shout their objection, Miller replied, “Yes, sir,” but Judge Swango sustained the objection and asked the jury to disregard the answer.
Taking another tack, Smith asked Miller to describe the body. “Well, it looked to be about five foot four or five inches in height,” the undertaker said. “Weight between one hundred and fifty or sixty pounds. And it looked to be that of a colored person.”
“Could you tell whether it was the body of a young person, or middle age or an old person?” Smith inquired.
“It looked like it was the body of a young person.”
Miller told the prosecutor there was a hole in the head that “looked like a bullet hole.” The defense again objected successfully, though Miller managed to say on the record that it was a half-inch hole just above the right ear. Smith asked about the other side of the head. “Well,” said Miller, “it was crushed on the other side. You couldn’t tell too much, it was crushed so. And it was all cut up and gashed across the top there.”
“Would you state whether or not the wounds described here were sufficient to cause his death?” Smith asked.
Defense attorney Breland broke in: “We object to that, Your Honor. He is no expert to that. And the jury knows as much as he does about that. I think that is within the province of the jury.”
“I am going to let the witness answer the question,” Swango responded.