The quiet announcement came as an anti-climax to the rising oratory of summing up arguments that held jury and audience in rapt attention.

Except for one loud exclamation, there was no demonstration. They were taken back into custody a few minutes after they embraced their wives happily as Shaw intoned: “We, the jury, find the defendants not guilty.”īoth men accepted the verdict gladly, as did the spectators who jammed into the muggy courtroom. “The jurors who returned it deserve a medal from the Kremlin for meritorious service in communism’s war against democracy.”īryant and Milam spent the night in the Leflore County Jail in Greenwood when their attorneys conferred with the state officers over the amount of bond needed for their release under the kidnap charge. for the Advancement of Colored People in a statement from its New York headquarters. “The verdict is as shameful as it is shocking,” said the National Assn. Shaw said identification of the body was the deciding factor in the one hour and seven minute deliberation that resulted in an innocent verdict on the third ballot.

The two men were tried in Tallahatchie County because a battered, bullet pierced body - buried as Till’s, but later rejected by the jury - was fished from the muddy Tallahatchie River inside the county line. Roy Bryant, 24, and John Milam, 36, still face charges of kidnapping Emmett Louis Till from the sharecropper shack in Leflore County where he was vacationing with his uncle, Mose Wright. An all-white jury, composed mainly of Delta cotton farmers, acquitted two white storekeepers of the murder of a 14-year-old Chicago Negro boy yesterday, but the half-brother spent the night in the county jail.

What happened to emmett till