Sumner, Mississippi.

September 22, 1955.

The Tallahatchie County Courthouse sat on the town square, a two-story brick building

with white columns and a Confederate monument out front.

In the morning, the temperature inside the second

floor courtroom had already climbed past 90 degrees. Ceiling fans turned overhead, slow and

useless, pushing the heat from one side of the room to the other. Every seat was taken. White

spectators packed the wooden benches, farmers and overalls, women in church dresses, children brought along like it was a matinee. The back of the room told a different story. Black reporters sat crammed around a folding card table, writing in notebooks they kept close to their chests. Behind them, a handful of black observers stood against the wall,

permitted to watch, but not to sit among the citizens of Tallahatchie County. Sheriff Clarence

Strider had set the terms on day one. When Congressman Charles Diggs, the only black

member of the United States House of Representatives, arrived from Michigan, Strider looked him over

and pointed to the card table. The congressman took his seat with the reporters. At the front of the

room, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam sat with their defense attorneys, dressed in fresh shirts,

passing a paper fan between them. Their wives sat in the first row close enough to touch.

The two men had been out on bail since September 2nd, free to walk the streets of Sumner,

free to drink coffee at the drugstore lunch counter, free to sleep in their own beds while they

waited for 12 of their peers to set them loose for good. The prosecution table was less crowded.

District Attorney Gerald Chatham and his co-counsel Robert Smith had spent three weeks assembling a case they knew would not be

enough. Not here. Not with this jury. But they'd built it anyway, witness by witness, because that was the

job. The witness in the chair was 64 years old his name was

mo's right but most people called him preacher he was a sharecropper a deacon and the

great uncle of the boy they'd pulled from the tallahatchie river three weeks earlier he wore his

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