Summary

“The Verdict of the World,” the title of Chapter 16, begins with the courtroom verdict which took only about an hour for the white jury to decide. Even then they had dragged it out. Since the corpse of Till had decomposed, members of the jury maintained that the body could not be definitively identified. The crowd cheered as “not guilty” was announced, and photographers urged Milam and Bryant to kiss their wives. The reaction of white Mississippians was divided, but many asserted that justice had been done considering the nature of the Till’s so-called sexual attack on a white woman. Their opinion perpetuated their fear and hatred of black men raping white women, and this assessment transcended mere white prejudice against blacks. Many Americans in general, including native Mississippi novelist William Faulkner, perceived the Till case as a dangerous distraction from the...