“He Went All the Way”
Murray Kempton
Mose
Wright, making a formation no white man in his county really believed he would
dare to make, stood on his tiptoes to the full limit of his sixty-four years
and his five feet three inches yesterday, pointed his black, workworn finger
straight at the huge and stormy head of J. W. Milam and swore that this was the
man who dragged fourteen-year-old Emmett Louis Till out of his cottonfield
cabin the night the boy was murdered.
“There
he is,” said Mose Wright. He was a black pigmy standing up to a white ox. J. W.
Milam leaned forward, crooking a cigaret in a hand that seemed as large as Mose
Wright’s whole chest, and his eyes were coals of hatred.
Mose
Wright took all their blast straight in his face, and then, for good measure,
turned and pointed that still unshaking finger at Roy Bryant, the man he says
joined Milam on the night-ride to seize young Till for the crime of whistling
suggestively at Bryant’s wife in a store three miles away and three nights
before.
“And
there’s Mr. Bryant,” said Mose Wright and 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. He was a field Negro who had dared try to send two
white men to the gas chamber for murdering a Negro.
He
sat in a court where District Attorney Gerald Chatham, who is on his side,
steadily addressed him as Uncle Mose and conversed with him in a kind of pidgin
cotton-picker’s dialect, saying “axed” for “asked” as Mose Wright did and
talking about the “undertaker man.”
Once
Chatham called him “Old Man Mose,” but this was the kindly, contemptuous
tolerance of the genteel; after twenty-one minutes of this, Mose Wright was
turned over to Defense Counsel Sidney Canton and now the manner was that of an
overseer with a field hand.
Sidney
Carlton roared at Mose Wright as though he were the defendant, and every time
Carlton raised his voice like the lash of a whip, J. W. Milam would permit
himself a cold smile.
And
then Mose Wright did the bravest thing a Delta Negro can do; he stopped saying
“sir.” Every time Carlton came back to the attack, Mose Wright pushed himself
back against his chair and said “That’s right” and the absence of the “sir” was
almost like a spit in the eye.
When
he had come to the end of the hardest half hour in the hardest life possible
for a human being in these United States, Mose Wright’s story was shaken; yet
he still clutched its foundations. Against Carlton’s voice and Milam’s eyes and
the incredulity of an all-white jury, he sat alone and refused to bow.
If
it had not been for him, we would not have had this trial. It will be a miracle
if he wins his case; yet it is a kind of miracle that, all on account of Mose
Wright, the State of Mississippi is earnestly striving here in this courtroom
to convict two white men for murdering a Negro boy so obscure that they do not
appear to have even known his name.
He
testified yesterday that, as Milam left his house with Emmett Till on the night
of August 28, he asked Mose Wright whether he knew anyone in the raiding party.
“No, sir, I said I don’t know nobody.”
Then
Milam asked him how old he was, and Mose Wright said sixty-four and Milam said,
“If you knew any of us, you won’t live to be sixty-five.”
And,
after the darkened car drove off, with his great-nephew, Mose Wright drove his
hysterical wife over to Sumner and put her on the train to Chicago, from which
she has written him every day since to cut and run and get out of town. The
next day, all by himself, Mose Wright drove into nearby Greenwood and told his
story in the sheriff’s office.
It
was a pathetic errand; it seems a sort of marvel that anything was done at all.
Sheriff George Smith drove out to Money around 2 P.M. that afternoon and found
Roy Bryant sleeping behind his store. They were good friends and they talked as
friends about this little boy whose name Smith himself had not bothered to find
out.
Smith
reported that Roy had said that he had gone down the road and taken the little
boy out of “Preacher’s” cabin, and brought him back to the store and, when his
wife said it wasn’t the right boy, told him to go home.
Sheriff
Smith didn’t even take Bryant’s statement down. When he testified to it
yesterday, the defense interposed the straight-faced objection that this was
after all the conversation of two friends and that the state shouldn’t
embarrass the sheriff by making him repeat it in court. Yet, just the same,
Sheriff Smith arrested Roy Bryant for kidnaping that night.
When
the body supposed to be Emmett Till’s was found in the river, a deputy sheriff
drove Mose Wright up to identify it. There was no inquest. Night before last,
the prosecution fished up a picture of the body which had been in the Greenwood
police files since the night it was brought in, but there was no sign the
sheriff knew anything about it, and its discovery was announced as a coup for
the state. But, with that apathy and incompetence, Mose Wright almost alone has
brought the kidnapers of his nephew to trial.
The
country in which he toiled and which he is now resigned to leaving will never
be the same for what he has done. Today the state will put on the stand three
other field Negroes to tell how they saw Milam and Bryant near the murder
scene. They came in scared; one disappeared while the sheriff’s deputies were
looking for him. They, like Mose Wright, are reluctant heroes; unlike him, they
have to be dragged to the test.
They
will be belted and flayed as he was yesterday, but they will walk out with the
memory of having been human beings for just a little while. Whatever the
result, there is a kind of majesty in the spectacle of the State of
Mississippi honestly trying to convict two white men on the word of four
Negroes.
And
we owe that sight to Mose Wright, who was condemned to bow all his life, and
had enough left to raise his head and look the enemy in those terrible eyes
when he was sixty-four.
[Sumner, Mississippi, September 22, 1958]