The defense made two motions to strike all of Reed’s testimony, but each time Judge Swango refused. This was the most damning testimony so far, tying Milam directly to the killing of Emmett Till and showing clear evidence of murder. It also changed the place where the murder had been committed from Tallahatchie County to Sunflower County, which could have implications for jurisdiction. Buttressing Reed’s testimony were two subsequent witnesses, Mandy Bradley and Reed’s grandfather Add Reed. Both of them confirmed the eighteen-year-old’s account of that brutal morning. At 1:15 on only the second day of the trial, the state rested its case.5
James Hicks, who had done so much to help locate the witnesses and had discovered the story of the witnesses still hidden in Sheriff Strider’s jail, was baffled. The closing of the prosecution’s case seemed premature; at the least it left several witnesses still to be heard from. Hicks was not alone; the Mississippi underground and the black and white reporters who had helped round up the new witnesses also were surprised the others were not called. Frank Young, whose midnight visit to Dr. Howard’s place had set the underground to action, was believed to have important evidence in the case. But Young, reportedly seen outside the courthouse that morning, had disappeared. Later some would fault the prosecution for not managing the witnesses better, though it is hard to imagine that Young’s testimony would have been decisive, since Reed told essentially the same story and his grandfather and neighbor confirmed it.6 All five of the defense lawyers later acknowledged to an interviewer that the state had presented “sufficient evidence to convict” Milam and Bryant. The defense now needed to offer jurors committed to acquittal some plausible pretext for their votes.7
The first thing the defense did when the state rested its case was to move that the court exclude all evidence offered by the state and issue a directed verdict of not guilty for both defendants. Judge Swango dismissed the motion out of hand. The second thing the defense did was to call to the witness stand Mrs. Roy Bryant. It was time to play the old song of the Bruised Southern Lily and the Black Beast Rapist. Somewhere, perhaps while her husband’s family kept her hidden from the world, hidden even from her own family, Mrs. Roy Bryant seemed to have learned all of the verses.
Carolyn took the stand, swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and answered Carlton’s questions about her name, weight, height, marital status, and the like. “Now, Mrs. Bryant, I direct your attention to Wednesday night, on the 24th day of August. On that evening, who was in the store with you?”
Special Prosecutor Smith broke in: “If the Court please, we object to anything that happened on Wednesday evening unless it is connected up.” Breland interjected for the defense that they intended to connect the testimony to existing testimony. Judge Swango retired the jury so they could not hear the discussion or Carolyn’s testimony, if any.
To anyone still committed to reading the Till trial as an exploration of facts and justice, this is where things take an odd and revealing turn. The jury had been given powerful prosecutorial evidence that Bryant and Milam kidnapped and murdered Emmett Till. Rather than refute that evidence, the defense now wanted to tell the jury why Milam and Bryant had every reason to do so: because that black boy had tried to rape this white Southern woman. There was the oddity: the defense wanted to admit evidence that would further damn their clients, and the prosecution wanted to stop the defense from explaining why their clients were guilty.
So here is another shard of truth, which we must accept if we are to make sense of the trial: faith in our courts and our laws, in the statement chiseled above the columns of the U.S. Supreme Court building—“Equal Justice Under Law”—can obscure the obvious, particularly with the passage of time. There was no equal justice, no universal protection of law in the Mississippi Delta, certainly not in 1955. If the real question was whether or not Milam and Bryant had committed murder, wouldn’t each team of attorneys have approached the trial differently? Of course. So why didn’t they? The obvious answer is that every lawyer in that courthouse knew that a jury of white male farmers from Tallahatchie County would hear a story about a black boy and a white woman and approve of that boy’s murder. The contradiction of a defense team strategizing to introduce a motive for the crime they professed their clients did not commit provided glaring evidence, if any were needed, that the trial had never been about justice.
Fifty years later Carolyn summoned her courage to tell me that her testimony had not been true, even though she didn’t remember what was true, but that nothing Emmett Till did could ever justify what had happened to him. But in 1955 she provided the court and the case with a billboard: My kinsmen killed Emmett Till because he had it coming.
Carolyn knew then, as she would admit much later, that her testimony was a lie. If Till had deserved what happened to him, then why did she hide the incident at the store from her husband and brother-in-law, if that is what she did? If Till had done something terrible, something he ought to have been brutally punished for, then why had she been reluctant to identify him? If he had laid his hands on her, then why didn’t she tell her lawyer so only a few days after it happened? Why did her husband and brother-in-law persistently refer to Till’s alleged crime as “smart talk” and “ugly remarks”? Is it plausible that Till put his hands on Carolyn and yet his assailants referred only to his verbal transgressions, never uttering a word about something approaching a rape attempt?
But that day in the Sumner courthouse, the jury didn’t even need to hear her testimony. After a brief discussion of legal points, the question before Judge Swango boiled down to this: the unchallenged testimony in court had heretofore been that Milam and Bryant came to get “the boy that did the talking over at Money,” and now the defense wanted to fill in the details of just what that “talking” had concerned. Except whatever may have occurred in the store at Money clearly did not alter the facts of a kidnapping and murder that occurred several days later at the instigation of the defendants. What should not have been a matter of courage—ruling appropriately on a matter of law—became one in that Jim Crow courtroom: Judge Swango ruled that the jury was not going to hear Carolyn Bryant’s testimony.