Mississippi Trial Quotes

Some aweful things happened to a Negro kid named Emmett Till, and I was right in the middle of it,smack in the heart of crazy, senseless hatred.

I can't tell you how much I hated him. Not the soap but his sermons and him acting like he was out for the good of everyone.... -Mississippi Trial 1955

Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina—where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United States then lived.

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.

a tragic roster of activists and innocents had died for the crime of being black or supporting blacks in their state. There was Willie Edwards Jr., the truck driver forced off a bridge to his death by four Klansmen in Montgomery. There was William Lewis Moore, the man from Baltimore shot and killed in Attalla while trying to walk a letter denouncing segregation 385 miles to the governor of Mississippi. There were four young girls, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, killed by the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. There was thirteen-year-old Virgil Lamar Ware, shot to death on the handlebars of his brother’s bicycle in the same city. There was Jimmie Lee Jackson, beaten and shot by state troopers in Marion while he tried to protect his mother and grandfather during a protest. There was the Reverend James Reeb, the Unitarian minister beaten to death in Selma. There was Viola Gregg Liuzzo, shot by Klansmen while trying to ferry marchers between Selma and Montgomery. There was Willie Brewster, shot to death while walking home in Anniston. There was Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a seminarian registering black voters who was arrested for participating in a protest and then shot by a deputy sheriff in Hayneville. There was Samuel Leamon Younge Jr., murdered by a gas station owner after arguing about segregated restrooms.

It was the first time in the history of Mississippi that a Negro had stood in court and pointed his finger at a white man as a killer of a Negro,” said Michigan congressman Charles Diggs, who attended the trial.

I tire of this.” the SWAT member reached for his sidearm, and then shot Matthew in the leg, making him collapse to the ground. Allison started crying, but Matthew still said nothing. “Well?” “I don’t know, maybe they went to Mississippi. I can’t possibly keep track of everyone, you know,” “You church-types tick me off. Especially since a church like yours abandoned bus kids like me when I turned thirteen. You don’t know how angry that makes me feel. If you don’t tell me, I will do something you will regret,” “I’m sorry a church abandoned you as a bus kid, but we’re not the ones responsible for it. We would’ve made sure you came to church. Please let go and let God come into your life. You don’t have to do this, and you don’t have to blindly and mindlessly follow the government down this path,” Matthew pleaded, wincing from the pain shooting through his leg. “Platitudes, all platitudes. Where

Minor also recalled that once Strider was in the legislature, he was not the same man that the world saw in Sumner during the Till murder trial. Although he is remembered for regularly insulting the black journalists in the hot, crowded courtroom in Sumner, his election to the Senate after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 forced him to deal with a black constituency that finally had the power of the ballot. Yet Strider would have been happy to rid the Delta of its black citizens. In February 1966, he cosponsored a bill to relocate Mississippi blacks to other states, as a new farm bill was making it harder for laborers to earn a living. A proposed relocation commission would seek federal funds for the removal of those who wanted to go. “If they (Negro farm workers) feel like they are put upon or have to live in tents and opportunities are brighter somewhere else, we’ll be glad to get them there,” said Strider’s cosponsor, Senator Robert Crook of Ruleville.96 Nothing ever came of the proposal, however.

Tragedy preceded the verdict when Beulah Melton’s car went off the road and into a bayou on a dark night four days before the trial began. She drowned, but the two children who were with her were rescued, just in time to join their two other siblings as orphans. The drowning was ruled an accident, the sheriff surmising that because Beulah was a new driver, she probably lost control of the car.12 Others believed that someone close to Kimbell intentionally ran her off the road. Regardless, it was clear by the verdict that in the six months since Emmett Till’s killing, things had not changed in the Mississippi Delta.

the May 2002 release of the novel Mississippi Trial, 1955, written by Brigham Young University English professor Chris Crowe. Geared toward youth, the book was first picked up by the McComb County, Michigan, school district and currently is part of the curriculum in schools throughout the country.

The articles were written by a journalist under the pseudonym Amos Dixon. An introductory note in the first installment described Dixon as a white southerner who had covered the murder trial in Sumner and “talked freely to those who knew what happened.”79 Unlike Huie, Dixon maintained that Milam and Bryant had accomplices, and he names them. His account aligns more closely with the testimonies of Willie Reed, Mandy Bradley, and Add Reed, which “Shocking Story” ignored completely. Midway through publication of the series, a thirty-five-page booklet appeared, titled Time Bomb: Mississippi Exposed and the Full Story of Emmett Till, and it told a similar story as Dixon had provided. It was written by Olive Arnold Adams, wife of New York Age Defender publisher Julius Adams. A seven-page chapter dealt specifically with the Till case.80 Dr.

judge flipped open the file, lifted his pen, and announced, “Court rules in favor of the plaintiff.” My jaw dropped. How could he? I could feel my temper flushing a shade of pink up my neck. How could I have lost this? I had clawed through law school on the belief that my gut instincts were generally right. Growing up poor in small Mississippi towns, I had learned at an early age to anticipate other people’s reactions. And when my gut failed me, I had my fists. Too bad I couldn’t throw a punch at the county judge. Darla Lamar was at my elbow, tugging on my secondhand jacket. I gingerly pulled away, afraid the fabric would pop a seam. “What does he mean?” Darla asked in a frightened whisper. Keeping my voice low, I said, “Darla, we lost. The judge found in favor of your landlord.” Darla’s face contorted. “Where does that leave me? And my kids? You said we was going to win.” Oh, no, I had not said that. My trial practice prof had beat

Most of these techniques, including lying to a suspect about evidence against him or others who have implicated him, are perfectly legal and accepted. In fact, detectives are specifically trained in these methods, and there are few rules limiting what they can do in interrogations. In 1936, the Supreme Court decided in Brown v. Mississippi that evidence obtained through physical torture, in this case being hung from trees and whipped, was not admissible in a trial. In 1940, the Supreme Court overturned the convictions of three men in Chambers v. Florida because they had been held for nearly a week and subjected to continuous and intimidating interrogations in the presence of up to ten police officers at once before confessing. The court found that these extreme conditions, though not physical torture, still constituted circumstances that invalidated those confessions. Despite that second ruling, there is still no absolute definition of when this type of psychological pressure crosses the line and constitutes coercion or, worse, torture.