The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy B. Tyson

Author:Timothy B. Tyson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

15

EVERY LAST ANGLO-SAXON ONE OF YOU

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.

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