Across the courtroom Carolyn Bryant watched in awe as Mamie Bradley testified. “I had all these things running through my mind,” she recalled. “My husband’s going to the penitentiary, maybe for life. I have children to support.” In her memory, however, her fears did not squelch her astonishment at the African American mother across the room. She could not stop thinking about her. “Here is this woman whose child has been brutalized, just brutalized every kind of way—how could she stand it? I don’t know how she went through the trial the way she did.”1
One answer might be that no African American took the stand for the prosecution without having first thought deeply about what doing so was going to ask of them then and thereafter. In unique ways each had already wrestled with the question of how they would live with the consequences of their testimony. Mamie had decided beforehand what her life would mean from then on. The rest of the black witnesses had already made arrangements to leave Mississippi, probably forever, and move to Chicago—including the next witness, just four years older than Emmett Till, who by agreeing to testify was saying goodbye to his home, his friends, his church, and everything he had grown up around.2
Willie Reed was one of the witnesses unearthed by Howard’s Mississippi underground as they scoured the cotton farms. He was an eighteen-year-old who lived on the old Clint Sheridan place, a large farm in Sunflower County managed by Leslie Milam. His testimony would tie J. W. Milam to the site of the murder; with it the prosecution shifted from trying to inspire sympathy to offering eyewitness evidence of the crime. Like Moses Wright, Reed was asked to point out Milam in the courtroom. Like Moses Wright, he provided another icon of courage, knowing, as did most in that courtroom, that he would have to move, perhaps change his name, live somewhere else for the rest of his life. He surely also imagined that doing all of this might not be enough, that his life might be taken anyway; he was testifying, after all, against two white men in the murder of a black boy. Nevertheless, when asked to identify the killers, he did not hesitate.
“He is sitting right over there,” said Reed, pointing at the bald-headed bear of a man at the defense table. Prosecutor Smith asked Willie, for it was always “Willie” in court and never “Mr. Reed,” if he had seen Milam on Sunday, July 28. “I seen him—when I seen him he was coming to the well. . . . The well from the barn on Mr. Milam’s place.”
Reed had left his grandfather’s house early that morning, between six and seven, headed for a nearby store. From there, on his way to his morning’s work, he went by Leslie Milam’s barn. A truck passed him, a green and white Chevrolet pickup, the top white, the body green. It was full of people. “Well, when the truck passed by me I seen four white mens in the cab and three colored mens in the back. And I seen somebody sitting down in the truck back there. . . . I seen another colored boy.” They were sitting on the sides of the truck, Reed said, and had their backs to him.
“Well,” he continued, speaking so softly that many in the courtroom could barely hear him, “when I looked at this paper, I was sure—well, I had seen it, and it seemed like I had seen this boy somewhere before. And I looked at it and tried to remember, and then it come back to my memory that this was the same one I had seen in the paper.”
“And that was Emmett Till?” asked Smith.
“I don’t know if that was him, but the picture favored him,” replied Reed, who added that he had walked on past the barn.
“And what did you hear?” inquired Smith.
“It was like somebody whipping somebody.”
“We object to that,” Breland snapped.
“The objection is sustained,” Judge Swango responded.
Smith handed Reed a photograph of Emmett Till. “Now I ask you to look at that picture and I ask you . . . does that or does that not resemble the person you saw sitting there in the back of the truck on that particular day?”
Again Breland objected and again he was sustained.
Smith tried another tack: “Have you ever seen that boy before?”
“It is a picture of the boy I saw on the back of the truck.”
“Now, later on in the morning, did you see J. W. Milam out there?”
“Well, when I passed by he came out by the barn to the well.”
“Will you state whether he had anything unusual on or about his person?”
“He had on a pistol,” said Reed. “He had it on his belt.”
“And what did Mr. J. W. Milam do when you saw him?”
“He just came to the well and got a drink of water. Then he went back into the barn.”
“Did you see or hear anything as you passed the barn?”
“I heard somebody hollering, and I heard some licks like somebody was whipping somebody.”
“What was that person hollering?”
“He was just hollering, ‘Oh.’?”
“Was it just one lick you heard, or was it two, or were there several licks?”
“There was a whole lot of them.”3
Silence fell over the room, the Baltimore Afro-American reported. “There was no laughter in the courtroom then. Beer drinking dropped to a bare minimum. Bryant and Milam looked a trifle pale and the defense counsel—all five of them—looked worried.”4 The number of facts the jurors were expected to disregard had increased considerably.
Reed told of walking a little farther down the road and stopping at Mandy Bradley’s house and talking with her. “And after you left Mandy’s house the first time where did you go?” Smith asked Reed.
“I came to the well. . . . I came to get her a bucket of water. . . . I could still hear somebody hollering.” Taking Bradley her water, Reed walked on to the store and went home to get dressed for Sunday school. On his way back the truck was gone, the barn quiet.