That's when drunk, disgusting crackers lynched Emmitt Till, 14 years old, in Mississippi. Two of them had to stand trial. Twelve other crackers, comprising a token jury, tampered with by the local White Citizens' Council, found them not guilty after an investigation that went way too quick in the wrong jurisdiction. Because Till's mother defied the state of Mississippi and allowed an open casket with the boy's very decomposed body within, and because it was taken back to the Chicago area for viewing prior to burial, the incident became an international cause celebre, much more rare in 1955 than in today's instantaneous display of nearly everything, everywhere.
Till, apparently, had not treated the wife of a Southern racist properly. He had put the money he had paid for something in the general store her husband (one of those accused; the other was his cousin) owned in her hand, not on the counter. Partly because she was beautiful, he also might have made remarks that, quite honestly, should have gotten him a lecture about manners. He was from out of town, of course, just a kid, a bit of a showoff, and liked making his cousins laugh. But they shouldn't have caused his savage beating and gotten him a bullet in the head, which 'uppity blacks' got when they 'stepped out of line'--when they acted as if the unspoken but very real white supremacist code no longer mattered. The woman herself said so, a half-century after she had lied about the incident on the stand, making it look like a possible sexual advance. It took the jury an hour to return the not guilty verdict.
It didn't take the two killers long to spout off. Look magazine (Remember that?), in a notable example of 'checkbook journalism,' paid them to discuss the incident just months after the trial ended. Under our Constitution, of course, they couldn't stand trial for the same crime twice, so they were off the hook. They confessed to the murder, cloaking it in the protection of the Southern way of life.
The book out of which I've taken these facts, The Blood of Emmitt Till, by Timothy Tyson, published three years ago, is an excellent re-creation of the incident, the hoopla surrounding it, the context in which the murder took place (very important factor, one which few know), and, interestingly, the reaction of the national black community afterwards, also largely forgotten. They didn't have 'Black Lives Matter' as a rallying cry, but the intensity and the perseverance with which they pursued their collective, organized protests was impressive and a forerunner of the George Floyd protests.
Mississippi's white folks were running scared. In 1954, the Supreme Court had ruled, in Brown v. Board, that segregation of schools had to end. All kinds of fear-mongering ensued, particularly that black boys would start dating, dominating, and raping white girls (indeed, the defense attorney made sure to paint the impression of the possibility of rape upon the jury) and mixed-race children would decorate the landscape, reducing society to a bunch of half-breeds. Blacks were also trying to vote, many for the first time, in Mississippi for the first time since Reconstruction. The white world seemed to be coming apart. Blacks seemed to be taking over.
The response was violence and repression and a recommitment of the white supremacist code. Black local leaders turned up dead, sometimes with plenty of witnesses who wouldn't dare testify. Some Blacks simply left town, never to return. The intimidation usually worked. And the local law enforcement officers often looked the other way, if they didn't side with the perpetrators altogether.
The sheriff of the county in which the trial took place greeted the crowded table of black press members thusly: "Mornin', [n-word]s." He tried to write off the murder as a concoction of the NAACP, a common scapegoat of the time.
But unsung heroes abound:
- Emmitt's uncle, Moses Wright, dared to identify the two assailants, who barged into his home and kidnapped (which they admitted in open court but for which were never tried) Till in the middle of the night;
- Emmitt's mother, Mamie, who took the train from Chicago to tell the jury the condition of her son's body (and who told Studs Terkel, who interviewed her as part of his book Race, that she forgave his killers, something quite amazing);
- T.R.M. Howard, famed speaker, who worked the black "underground" to dredge up witnesses to varying degrees of success;
- Lamar Smith, murdered in broad daylight, with plenty of witnesses, because he dared get absentee ballots for his black brethren;
- Rev. George Lee, vice-president of the Regional Council on Negro Leadership, also known for his brilliant speaking, gunned down for daring to sue a sheriff for refusing to accept poll tax payments;
- Amzie Moore, who helped create the RCNL; and
- Medgar Evers, RCNL program director, who would challenge white supremacy at every turn, become the NAACP's field secretary, and would be murdered himself in 1963.
There were others. But what caught my attention was the degree to which Till's death sparked protests and meetings coast-to-coast, much like George Floyd's has. It wasn't just that Till was from Chicago, which, along with his mother's push, gave the incident national attention; it was the continuation of the disgust and indignation among blacks in the same cities we've watched the recent protests--name the city. Perhaps it was not quite with the same numbers and not in the same way, but certainly with the intensity accompanying Floyd's murder.
It showed me that such demonstrations, more peaceful perhaps but just as noticeable, have been going on now for 65 years. Rosa Parks, whose refusal to take a back seat in a public bus in Montgomery was the event that sparked the famous bus boycott, said that she thought of Emmitt Till when she did so.
The author, who wrote this after the turmoil in Ferguson, Missouri, makes his cogent comment:
We are still killing black youth because we have not yet killed white supremacy. As a political program white supremacy avers that white people have a right to rule. That is obviously morally unacceptable, and few of its devotees will speak its name. But that enfeebled faith is not nearly so insidious as its robust, covert, and often unconscious cousin: the assumption that God has created humanity in a hierarchy of moral, cultural, and intellectual worth, with lighter-skinned people at the top and darker-skinned people at the bottom...
The ancient lie remains lethal....White supremacy leaves almost half of all African American children growing up in poverty in a de-industrialized urban wasteland. It abandons the moral and practical truth embodied in Brown v. Board of Education and accepts school resegregation even though it is poisonous to the poor. Internalized white supremacy in the minds of black youth guns down other black youth, who learn from media images of themselves that their lives are worth little enough to pour out in battles over street corners. White supremacy also trembles the hands of some law enforcement officers and vigilantes who seem unable to distinguish between genuine danger and centuries-old phantoms.
Isn't that what's going on right now? Why does a white cop have to kneel on the neck of an already handcuffed black man for nearly nine minutes? What were the phantoms that drove him to do that?
By trying to drain money from the public schools, isn't Betsy DuVos directly contributing to the reversal of Brown? Isn't 45, by saying that white supremacist protestors in Charlottesville, VA, are "fine people" encouraging them to spread their hate agenda?
Isn't this yet another reason to throw them out before they do more damage? It's bad enough that the attitudes have yet to subside; it's bad enough that we must revisit them. We have work to do, yet we also have to deal with these fools. 65 years is long enough. Four years of this present gang of hoodlums and wannabes is way too long.
Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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