Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (30 page)

Somebody must have said something to Sheriff Strider about trying to be more polite to the black visitors, the press, the observers, the rest of us. So he began greeting us all, “Mornin’, niggahs.”

As we sat there and as I fanned away the indignities and tried to listen to the jury questions, I glanced in the direction of Bryant and Milam. I could only see the backs of their heads from where we were sitting. And, really, that’s about all I cared to see. I didn’t want to look at them. But I was kind of drawn in that direction. Even from behind, they seemed so calm, like they didn’t have a care in the world. There was no stress. They smoked cigarettes, at times they read the newspaper. Their wives were constantly at their sides; sometimes even their mother was there. Mostly, though, I found myself watching their children. The way they played with their daddies. I watched those four little boys. I could see those babies playing on their daddies’ laps, pulling on their noses and their ears and doing all kinds of things that they might well have been doing at home. I thought about how Emmett used to play like that. On my lap, or Mama’s. I thought about how I had looked forward to his children one day doing the same thing. I considered that, how I would never have the chance to play with my grandchildren on my lap. And then I thought about those little boys across the way from me, the Bryant boys and the Milam boys, and
how I could take each of those boys and raise them as my own, and love them in the process. I caught myself. That thought even shocked me. But, then, maybe it shouldn’t have. Maybe I just wanted to save them from their fathers, save them from themselves. The way any mother might want to do. Or maybe it was to save other mothers and other mothers’ sons from the legacy of hatred that just might be handed down to them by their fathers. That is, after all, how it works. We don’t come here with hatred in our hearts. We have to be taught to feel that way. We have to want to be that way, to please the people who teach us to want to be like them. Strange, to think that people might learn to hate as a way of getting some approval, some acceptance, some love. I thought about all that before I realized that I couldn’t let myself think about it any longer.

There was tension in the air. It wasn’t just the hostility of the white folks, the antagonism they felt just seeing all the media attention that had been given to me and to Congressman Diggs. There was something else, too. It was just beneath the surface, or maybe floating just above it, at the table with the black press. The proceedings were dull as the lawyers worked their way through the jury prospects. Someone mentioned that you could tell by the questions that the prosecutors didn’t plan to seek the death penalty. You have to ask jurors how they feel about that if you expect them to decide on it. The prosecutors didn’t ask about that and it meant they might not have felt they had a strong enough case. That wasn’t reassuring. It wasn’t that I wanted the death penalty for those men. But I wanted to know that the prosecutors felt they had a solid case to get a conviction.

I looked across our table and Ruby Hurley was taking notes. She would take notes like that during the entire trial, just like the reporters. She wrote the field reports for
The Crisis
, but she always seemed to be noting things, analyzing things, keeping records.

Finally, the lawyers came up with two more people to sit on the panel. It took all morning to do that, but it meant they were being very careful in making the choices. There were ten farmers, an insurance man, and a carpenter. And that tension lingered. It was like everybody at the black press table knew something was about to happen and nobody was saying anything. We had had a discussion earlier. I can’t recall who came up with the plan, but somebody thought we needed one. There had been a story about a trial somewhere in the Delta where a black defendant had been shot and killed by one of the white spectators right there in the courtroom. If something happened in this trial, we would not be in a good spot, since we’d have to run through a huge mob of angry white folks just to get to the doorway in the back. So somebody had suggested a plan to head for the
window right there next to the table. If a problem should arise, somebody would help the ladies out first and then it would be every man for himself. I didn’t know how serious this plan was. It was quite a drop down to the ground, but that had been the nature of the anxiety there at the table. Even so, that wasn’t it. This tension was more like anticipation. Something was about to happen. Everybody knew it, but nobody was saying anything about it.

With the selection of the last juror, the judge dismissed the rest of the prospects. Nobody left their seats. Everybody wanted to stay for the trial, for the show. But it would be a short day for this audience. The district attorney, Gerald Chatham, stood to ask for a recess. He had been given information about surprise witnesses and needed time to locate them. J. J. Breland, the lead defense lawyer, rose to object. The judge ruled that the request was a reasonable one. He adjourned until nine the next morning. So, for the second time, there would be a recess: the first to serve the interests of Jim Crow, the second to serve the interests of justice. And there was an odd sort of balance to that. The judge also told the crowd that he was going to have to limit picture taking while court was in session. No exceptions. There also would be no one standing in the aisles the next day. If you didn’t get there early enough to get a seat, you couldn’t stay if you weren’t taking part in the trial.

The black reporters at our table didn’t say anything. There would be plenty of time to talk later about the things that were yet to unfold. Plenty of time to write about them. Jimmy Hicks would report the whole thing in a four-part series that would run in the
Baltimore Afro-American
, the
Cleveland Call and Post
, and the
Atlanta Daily World
, compiled years later by Christopher Metress. Simeon Booker would call it “an incredible interracial manhunt” in his version of the story written for the
Nieman Reports
, published by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, which would come out within a month or so after the trial. But at the black press table at that moment, on Tuesday, as the judge ordered a recess until Wednesday, the reporters said nothing about it. Reporters can be like that. They are used to protecting their sources. In this case, though, they were protecting lives. And to hear their chilling accounts of this story is to learn why they felt they had to do it that way.

All of the twelve black reporters and photographers covering the trial were based in Mound Bayou. Dr. Howard’s place was big, all right, but not quite big enough to accommodate everyone, so some out-of-town people stayed at a motel owned by a woman named Mrs. Anderson. But it seems no one could stay put. Almost as soon as they landed in town that Sunday,
Simeon Booker, Clotye Murdock, and photographer David Jackson traveled to Money to talk to Papa Mose. Jimmy Hicks went a different way; he always seemed to be going his own way. But they would all have fascinating stories to swap sometime later. The
Ebony-Jet
team ran into a truckload of white men carrying guns. It was not hunting season. But, as Papa Mose would remark, that depends on “what you’re hunting.” The journalists took this as a warning not to stray too far. When Strider would set down the rule the next morning that there would be no mixing of black and white reporters, it would become clear that all the local forces were working together to draw a sharp line for blacks covering the murder trial. It means something to a reporter when you start drawing lines. It means you have something hidden somewhere. Something hidden is exactly what a reporter wants to find. Digging for something hidden is exactly what a reporter lives to do.

Jimmy Hicks knew how to dig. He was a seasoned investigative reporter and, as he would recall in his series, his nose took him to the black juke joints of the area. There were stories in those juke joints. Stories that had been carried on hot summer breezes out of the cotton fields. Stories that had been served up by the shot at the bars. Pickers in overalls and barefoot gals in cotton dresses like to tell stories straight up, or over the rocks, and over the blaring music in the juke joints of the Delta. There were stories about people who saw things, people who heard things. Jimmy Hicks listened and over time he heard names and facts and situations. What he learned most of all was that there was more on the line in the Delta than just a story.

Dr. Howard had been hearing stories, too. Stories about people who had seen things, people who had heard things. He didn’t have to go to the juke joints. People came to him. They came to him with names. Dr. Howard had found out about a witness who had seen two black men on the back of a truck with Emmett in Sunflower County. Milam and Bryant and maybe one or two other white men had been on the scene. Jimmy Hicks had heard a couple of names, the names of two black men connected to J. W. Milam. Two men who had disappeared after Emmett’s murder: Henry Lee Loggins and Levy “Too Tight” Collins, sometimes called “Leroy.”

Meanwhile, a couple of white reporters violated Sheriff Strider’s rule about talking to blacks, and comparing notes. These reporters slipped out to Mound Bayou on Monday night and told Simeon Booker and other black reporters they thought the trial was doomed. The only eyewitnesses for the prosecution were going to be Papa Mose and little Simmy. They could only testify about the abduction. The investigation into the rest of it
had been limited because the prosecutors hadn’t gotten any help. There hadn’t been any resources to speak of. And Sheriff Strider, the chief investigator, was working for the other side, raising questions about the identity of Emmett’s body. There was some talk that the defense might not even put on one single witness. The fear now was that there was only going to be a show trial for the media.

No one was going to let that happen. Jimmy Hicks had information, Dr. Howard had information, and Ruby Hurley felt that might be enough information to have everything moved to Sunflower County, where it was beginning to look like the murder actually had occurred, and where everybody thought there might be a better chance of getting a conviction. They knew they would have to reach out to the witnesses, Hicks and Booker reported. The NAACP folks had been out looking. They knew that people were scared about giving up information. They knew they were going to need more time. The only way to get more time would be to reveal the information to the authorities. But the white authorities couldn’t be trusted and probably wouldn’t take the word of NAACP people and the black reporters, anyway.

Despite it all, the decision was made to bring in some white reporters who could reach out to the authorities, maybe get them to do the right thing. The decision was made that Simeon Booker would talk to Clark Porteus of the
Memphis Press-Scimitar
. Like Booker, he was a former Nieman fellow. A couple of other white reporters were brought in and, after a little arguing and a lot of negotiating, an agreement was struck to share information, according to the reports. But they would hold off on reporting any stories until the witnesses could be secured. The white reporters would appeal to the authorities for help in protecting the witnesses and delaying the trial.

Now, ordinarily, there are two things reporters will never do. The first is to share information with one another. They’re much too competitive to do that. The second is to get involved with law enforcement, revealing information to help the police track down criminals or witnesses to a crime. That crosses the line. The reporters are supposed to stay outside the stories they cover. If they are out there helping, then they’re part of the stories. But these reporters quickly worked it all out. This trial was the biggest story many of them had covered. It was not going to be a complete story without these witnesses, and they needed one another to get the information together. As for the second part, well, somebody figured out that they would have been obstructing justice if they didn’t help out, Booker wrote. Now for the final part, the safety of the witnesses. How could they trust the law enforcement people? Strider already was showing
his true colors. These reporters might be jeopardizing people who came forward. Dr. Howard agreed to pay for the relocation of any witnesses who agreed to testify, and hopefully that would take care of everything.

The call for new witnesses may have been a surprise to the court, but it was a shock to the defense team. No one had ever imagined that witnesses might come forward to testify against white men accused of killing a black person.

As both Hicks and Booker reported later, teams were formed of sheriff’s deputies, reporters, and NAACP people. The black journalists included Hicks, Booker, Clotye Murdock, L. Alex Wilson, Moses Newson, David Jackson, and Ernest Withers. NAACP representatives included Medgar Evers, Amzie Moore, Aaron Henry, and, of course, Ruby Hurley, who put on a red bandanna and work clothes to help her fit in when she walked out into the fields, trying to convince people to trust her. That was the only way it was going to work. Black witnesses might trust other black folks, if they would trust anyone at all. But they were not going to trust anybody they thought was an outsider.

There were other risks, too. On Monday, Moses Newson had made the rounds with Medgar Evers, Ruby Hurley, and Amzie Moore, all dressed in work clothes. As they searched the plantations for witnesses, they talked about how careful they would have to be. Newson would recall later that they didn’t want to scare anybody away. But they also didn’t know who to trust. After all, there was talk that at least a couple of black men had been loyal to J. W. Milam. There had even been talk that it was a black man, not Carolyn Bryant, who first told Roy Bryant about “the boy from Chicago.” So, there was no telling who might turn you in, once you got to talking out there in those fields. Besides all that, Newson remembers, those sheriff’s deputies had a strange way of just popping up out of nowhere. Right in the middle of a cotton field, where there was no place to hide.