Part V
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IF AN AMERICAN CITIZEN of African descent—a “Negro,” to use the term then in common usage—wanted to register to vote in Bullock County, Alabama, during the 1950s, he had to register under what the county’s Board of Registrars called the “voucher system.” He was required to bring with him a “supporting witness” (called by the Board a “voucher”) to attest to his character, morals, and general “fitness” to be a voter. But only Bullock County residents who were already registered voters were eligible to be supporting witnesses, and no witness could vouch for more than three persons during each four-year term of the Board. And since, by inviolate Bullock County custom, no white person would ever vouch for a Negro, eligible “vouchers” for Bullock Negroes were in rather short supply.
For out of the county’s eleven thousand Negro residents, exactly five were registered voters.
This meant, of course, that no more than fifteen Negroes could be registered during any four-year period, but even this number was apparently more than the Board was disposed to allow—as a small group of Negroes, perhaps a half dozen, learned when, on January 18, 1954, they showed up at the Board’s office in the Bullock County Courthouse in Union Springs with their supporting witnesses. “What’s your trouble?” Board Chairman S. B. Wilson asked them brusquely, and when one of them, Aaron Sellers, a forty-year-old farmer, replied that they were there to register, Wilson said, “Well, we’re busy today. You all come back tomorrow.”
They returned the next day. Wilson and his fellow Board members let them sit there for an hour, until finally another white man, Allen B. Tucker, “who,” as a federal judge was to note, “was not connected with the board in any official capacity,” came over to them, and asked the same question: “What’s your trouble?” Sellers, speaking for the group, said, “We were here yesterday, and the chairman told us to come back today.” Tucker asked them why they wanted to vote. Sellers said something to the effect that they wanted to vote because they were citizens, and Tucker said, “You all are citizens already—you pay taxes, don’t you? If I were you, I would go back home.” And when they didn’t take his advice, but remained sitting—the Board continuing to ignore them—for perhaps another half hour, the veneer of civility, thin though it was, disappeared entirely. Returning to the room, Tucker stood over the Negroes and said in a low, threatening voice, “I thought I told you to get the hell out of here.”
The Negroes were all aware not only of incidents of violence against members of their race who had defied white wishes, but of other forms of intimidation as well. “The white people in the town kept a list of the names of who was trying to vote, and they kept the list in their pockets for ready reference,” Sellers would recall. There were many ways in which that list could be used. Word had been passed that “the banks were organizing” and might “stop lending colored people money,” he says. The county’s impoverished Negro farmers would shortly—in March or April—need “crop loans,” money to buy seed and fertilizer to plant their cotton and peanut crops. And, as Sellers says, “you had to have a little to live on, too, you know,” until the crops were harvested in October. Tucker’s threat was effective. “We were all somewhat afraid,” Sellers says. “We got up and left.” When he decided to make another attempt—on February i—he was able to persuade only three men to come with him, not that it made much difference. Their approach to the courthouse had been noted, and this time when they walked up the stairs and knocked on the door to the Board of Registrars office, there was no reply, and when Sellers finally worked up the nerve to open the door, the room was empty.
Encountering a white courthouse clerk in a corridor, the four Negroes asked where the Board was meeting, and the clerk, a smirk on his face, said he didn’t know. Afraid to go looking in every office, the Negroes finally left the courthouse and stood outside, waiting for the registrars to come out and go to lunch; when they returned, they followed them to the unmarked office in the basement in which they had been meeting. But although all three members of the Board went into the room, when Sellers knocked on the door, only Wilson appeared, stepping through the door and closing it quickly behind him. And when Sellers told him that he and his friends wanted to register, Wilson, as Sellers was to recall, “told us he couldn’t register us because he was alone and the law required two at least to be present.”
They knew now that the Board was not going to allow them to register, Sellers was to say, so “we didn’t go back anymore.” Instead, they decided “to go to law,” to sue the Board of Registrars for denying them the chance to vote. “We were citizens. We knew the law said citizens could vote,” Sellers was to say. “We thought we would win.” They found an attorney—Arthur D. Sholes of Birmingham, one of the handful of black lawyers in Alabama—who was willing to represent them, and Sholes brought suit in Federal District Court in Montgomery, the state capital, asking for a declaratory judgment that the Board had discriminated against them, and for an injunction prohibiting the Board from such discrimination and ordering it to use the same criteria for registering Negroes as it did for whites. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had no difficulty in confirming their story—no sooner had an FBI agent, looking for witnesses, entered a pool hall in Union Springs and pulled out his badge than Tucker told him proudly, “I just run off a bunch a niggers who were tryin’ to vote.”
But then, having gone to the law, they found out there was no law that could help them.
The District Court judge, Charles Kennamer, ruled, in ringing words, that their cause was just. The Board’s actions “whenever the plaintiffs appeared before them…amounted to discrimination…solely because the plaintiffs were members of the Negro race,” he wrote. “The supreme law of this Republic” is that no voter can be discriminated against. “Therefore, let no Board of Registrars try to devise any scheme or artifice to do otherwise.” The words didn’t mean much, however—as even the judge had to admit. By the time he issued his ruling, it was irrelevant. While the trial was still going on, the three members of the Board simply resigned, and in his ruling Kennamer had to admit that “by virtue of their resignations, the defendants are now beyond the vale of an injunctive directive from this court.” There was no point in ordering them to register Negroes; they couldn’t register Negroes any longer. No one in Bullock County could register Negroes. In his ruling, the judge promised that “The court will grant injunctive relief … in the event…these defendants again become members of the Board”; the defendants did not again become members of the Board: they stayed resigned until their terms expired, in 1956. During this time, their posts remained unfilled. Vacancies were supposed to be filled by a state agency, but the state agency didn’t fill the vacancies for more than two years—and Aaron Sellers and his friends were told that there was no law that could compel the state to fill them. And when, in 1957, a new, different Board of Registrars was appointed, and Sellers and his friends returned, hoping for a better result, they found the Board office again empty (“We couldn’t find out where the Board were,” he says) and they realized they would have to begin the same laborious legal proceeding all over again—with, almost certainly, the same result at the end of it.
ALL ACROSS THE SOUTH, the eleven states of the Old Confederacy that stretched in a great crescent from the Atlantic Ocean to the plains of West Texas, black American citizens being discriminated against—not only in voting but in housing, in employment, in virtually every aspect of life—were trying during the 1950s to turn to the law so that they could enjoy the same rights as white Americans. And all across the South, black Americans were finding what the blacks of Bullock County had found: that there was no law that could help them.
Once, long before, for a brief period, there had been such laws.
Some had been woven into the fabric of the Constitution that was America’s highest law. The three great “Civil War Amendments” to the Constitution had been passed to give force to the concept of the equality of all men which had been proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence but which had then, in submission to the slaveholding South, been omitted from the Constitution itself. The Thirteenth Article In Addition To, and Amendment Of, the Constitution outlawed the institution of slavery; the Fourteenth made former slaves citizens, full citizens entitled to “due process of law,” to “the equal protection of the laws”—to all the rights, the sacred “privileges and immunities,” of citizens; the Fifteenth made specific that among the rights of these new citizens was the right to vote: the right on which all other rights rest in a democracy in which governmental powers were derived from the consent of the governed. “The right of citizens … to vote shall not be denied or abridged … by any State on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude,” the Fifteenth Amendment proclaimed. Each of the amendments, or articles, had an identical final clause—“Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation”—and in the decade immediately after the terrible war, a vengeful Congress determined to “reconstruct” the South had exercised that power, accepted that responsibility, enacting specific national statutes to give teeth to those guarantees. In 1866 it passed the first Civil Rights Act, which enumerated, in provisions both detailed and sweeping, the “civil rights”—the specific rights, privileges, and immunities of citizens—which were not to be left to the varying whims of states but were to be protected by the sovereign central government. In 1867, it passed the First Reconstruction Act, which not only disbanded the governments of the rebel states but carved the South into five military districts subject to martial law to ensure that the black man’s right to vote would be backed by federal bayonets. And when the South thereupon erupted in rage, and the men of the Old Confederacy donned the hoods of the Klan and rode out in the thousands to beat and maim and kill, Congress passed more laws—stiff election-enforcement bills—that prohibited the use of force or intimidation (or of bribery or fraud) to deter citizens from voting because of their race, and that ensured, as well, that, if necessary, those bayonets would be used. And in 1875 it enacted another Civil Rights Act, one that sought to guarantee Negroes the right to serve on juries and that also sought to free them from discrimination in the daily round of life, guaranteeing their rights to “the full and equal enjoyment” of “the accommodations of inns,” of “theaters and other places of public amusement,” and of public facilities and “public conveyances” of every type.
The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was the high point—and the end point—of the passage of such laws, however. In that very year, a series of rulings by the United States Supreme Court—very narrow rulings, in tune with the growing laissez-faire attitude of the time and in tune also with the popular feeling that perhaps the government had gone far enough in handing the freedman new rights—began drastically limiting the scope of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments; by the time, two decades later, that the Court had finished, the Amendments’ guarantees had been held to apply only to actions by a state, not by the state’s citizens, whether acting alone or in a group; in 1882, the Court, overturning the conviction of members of a Louisiana mob that had broken up a Negro political rally, in effect held that while a state couldn’t break up a rally, it was legal for a mob to do so, unless there were prohibitions against such an action in the state’s—not the federal government’s—laws. (There were none in Louisiana law.) In 1883, in a ruling that in effect struck the 1875 Civil Rights Act from the statute books, the Court, acting under the same principle, struck down the prohibitions against discrimination by hotels, theaters, restaurants, and other places of business, and by “public conveyances.” One individual civil rights law after another was found unconstitutional, until finally only three—all vague, ambiguous, and essentially unenforceable; mere “fragments of the original legislation,” a Justice Department official was to call them—remained on the national statute books, so that Negroes were left with no federal protection against de facto segregation in the rounds of daily life.
During the many decades that followed, these invalidated laws against segregation were not replaced by other national laws. No civil rights legislation of any type was passed by the federal government after 1875. The national laws were replaced by state laws that allowed segregation—that in fact required segregation. As Richard Kluger wrote in his monumental book Simple Justice, the Supreme Court had “flashed the green light,” and the eleven southern—and several border—states sped through it, passing legislation that made segregation a matter not merely of custom or tradition, but of law. In 1887, the Florida Legislature passed a statute requiring that white and “colored” passengers be separated on railroad trains, Mississippi adopted a similar law in 1888, Texas in 1889, and in 1890 Louisiana followed suit—with an act whose key phrase was to become widely adopted: “all railway companies carrying passengers in this State, shall provide separate but equal accommodations for the white, and colored, races, by providing two or more passenger coaches for each passenger train, or by dividing the passenger coaches by a partition so as to secure separate accommodations.” Any passenger, white or Negro, not obeying the law was subject to a fine of twenty-five dollars and up to twenty days in jail. By 1895, every southern state had, by similar “separate but equal” laws, formally relegated Negroes to the front coaches that were nearest to the soot-belching engines. As Kluger wrote: “The Jim Crow era had begun.”
It spread rapidly, particularly after the Supreme Court in its remarkable 1896 verdict in Plessy v. Ferguson ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment “could not have been intended” to give the Negro equality in social situations but only “before the law”—and that racially separate facilities were therefore legal so long as they were equal, and that social segregation was therefore not discrimination. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the legislatures of the southern states had written into statute books laws that, in Kluger’s words, “officially designated” the black man as “a lower order of being”—laws that stipulated that not only in railway cars and stations, not only in hotels and restaurants but in courtrooms (where, in addition, restrictions were placed on the status of blacks as plaintiffs, witnesses, and jurors), in cemeteries, and in hospitals, in bathrooms and at water fountains, black people and white people would not mix. It was no longer the option of an individual restaurant or hotel owner whether or not to separate his clients by race; under the law, he must separate them. (Interracial dating and marriages were strictly forbidden, of course, and special emphasis was placed on separation in the schools, for what would be the inevitable result of letting white girls mingle all day with black boys but the most dreaded threat of all? Mississippi’s United States Senator Theodore Bilbo spelled it out in 1947 in a self-published book, Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization: better to see civilization “blotted out with the atomic bomb,” he wrote, “than to see it slowly destroyed in the maelstrom of miscegenation, interbreeding, intermarriage, and mongrelization.”)
The place of Negro citizens in the southern states’ political picture had undergone a parallel transformation. Reconstruction legislation had sought to make the newly freed slaves a part of southern political life, but the protection of black voters from fraud, trickery, and the outright brutalities of mob intimidation at a thousand polling places throughout the South required an enormous number of troops. In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes won the presidency with a razor-thin margin provided by the disputed electoral votes of three southern states, and as part of the negotiations under which he received those votes, federal troops were withdrawn from the South, and the vote began to be taken away from the new Negro citizens—so effectively that by 1889, a prominent southern editor would remark that “The Negro as a political force” was no longer a “serious consideration” in the region. In the 1890s, southern states passed laws to keep that status quo. They instituted poll taxes—often retroactive, sometimes to age twenty-one, so that the amounts involved might be prohibitive for poor people; by 1901, every southern state had its poll tax. In 1898, Louisiana passed a “grandfather clause” that made registration automatic for any man whose father or grandfathers had been registered before Reconstruction—meaning most southern white men—and that, through prohibitive property and educational requirements, made registration very difficult for any man whose father or grandfathers had not been registered—meaning most southern black men. By 1901, every southern state had its grandfather clause. The “white primary” was another effective means of evading the Fifteenth Amendment’s wording that the right to vote should not be denied because of race or color by any state. Democratic Parties in the various states declared that the party’s primary elections were not state functions but rather the mechanisms of a private organization for selecting its nominees, and that the parties were therefore allowed to exclude Negroes from membership, and hence from the right to vote in the party’s primaries. So dominant was the Democratic Party in the Old Confederacy that Negroes were therefore excluded completely from the only election that mattered. The combination of these techniques was so effective that in the 1940 elections only about 2 percent of Negroes of voting age in the South, where most black Americans lived, cast votes.
For a moment, in 1944, it had seemed that the situation might change. In a suit brought by a black Texan, Lonnie E. Smith, against election judge S. E. Allwright, who had denied him the right to vote in the Texas Democratic Party’s white primary, a Supreme Court made strikingly more liberal by Roosevelt appointments ruled that “the right to vote in such a primary … is a right secured by the Constitution.” That ruling, coupled with the return of black veterans, led to a dramatic upsurge in Negro registration in the South. By 1948, some 750,000 Negroes, about 15 percent of the estimated five million Negroes of voting age in the South, had made it onto the election rolls; in that year, there were several unexpected victories by liberal state legislators over the conservative opponents who previously would easily have won in Democratic primaries. But black determination spawned white defiance: the wave of repression and violence that included the gouging out of Isaac Woodward’s eyes, the riddling of the two young black couples in Georgia with so many bullets that they were unrecognizable, and countless incidents of physical or economic intimidation to discourage black Americans from trying to register, and to discourage those who had registered from actually going to the polls. The number of new Negro registrations, as John Egerton wrote, “was the warning siren…that caused white supremacists to purge voter lists, raise court challenges, adopt new laws and constitutional amendments—do anything, in short, to prevent the large African-American minority from regaining the power of the franchise.” And, as Egerton notes, these tactics worked; their “success…would be borne out by one overriding fact: in spite of the increase in minority registration, fewer than half a million black Southerners—not even one of every ten of voting age—actually managed to cast ballots” in the 1948 elections. And after 1948, the situation grew worse. Southern legislatures began shoring up the South’s defenses—passing laws that gave registrars new, and arbitrary, powers. The years after 1948 saw the proliferation of “literacy” tests—in which applicants for registration were required to demonstrate their “understanding” or “interpretation” of passages of state laws (or, ironically, of the United States Constitution) or to answer trick questions put to them by registrars whose decisions were purely subjective—and, according to the new laws, were not subject to appeal, so that even college graduates could be arbitrarily disqualified if their skins were dark. These years saw the proliferation of the “voucher” system in a hundred counties like Bullock.
Obviously, new, stronger, federal voting legislation was needed, and no fewer than thirteen separate voting bills were brought to the floor in the two houses of Congress between 1946 and 1954, but every one was blocked. So when in 1955 courageous Negroes attempted to invoke the law to obtain the right to vote supposedly guaranteed them as citizens of the great Republic, they found, as Aaron Sellers and his friends had found, that there was no law to help them.
As a result, the surge in Negro voter registration in the South that had followed the Allwright decision slowed to a trickle. The figure was 750,000 in 1948; it would not reach a million until 1952. By that year, the number of blacks of voting age in the South had risen to just under six million, so only one out of every six eligible southern Negroes—about 16 percent—was registered in that year, in contrast to 60 percent of southern whites. And the million figure was misleading. So effective was the intimidation, economic and physical, practiced by whites to keep registered Negroes from going to the polls that in 1952, the estimated number of black votes actually cast in the eleven southern states was not a million but, at most, 600,000. Only one out of every ten Negroes eligible to vote in those states actually voted. More than three quarters of a century after the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment that had been intended to make America’s black citizens truly part of America’s political system, they were still not part of it; they were still that system’s outcasts—democracy’s outcasts.
THE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of black Americans who marched off to the Second World War had gone into battle in defense of America’s shining principles, so many of which—all of which, in the last analysis—rested on the declarations that “all men are created equal” and that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” and that it is to “secure these rights” that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” And then these veterans came home, many with medals, many with wounds, to be reminded not of America’s promises, but of America’s practices.
Many of those coming home to the North rode through white neighborhoods in which they couldn’t live, to housing projects, bleak and bare, that were a constant reminder of their status in society, the projects that James Baldwin said they hated “almost as much as they hated the policeman.” And when they went looking for jobs, they learned anew that, war or not, there were so very many jobs for which they could not apply. And for those coming home to the eleven states of the South, in which, in 1946, two-thirds of black Americans still lived, there were additional reminders. If they came home by bus, there were the seats in front in which they couldn’t sit. When the bus pulled into a terminal or a diner parking lot for a rest stop, there were the water fountains at which they couldn’t drink, and the bathrooms they couldn’t use: the fountains and bathrooms labeled “Whites,” as opposed to “Colored”—the label whites had given them. If they wanted something to eat and went to the diner, there was the window out back at which they would be handed their sandwich, for only men whose skins were white were served inside. When they reached their hometowns, some of them, their awareness sharpened by their travels and experiences in the war, saw with a new understanding the paved streets and sidewalks in the white neighborhoods and the unpaved streets, unbordered by sidewalks, in the black neighborhoods. They saw, alongside these streets, the ditches running filthy with a stream of raw sewage because there was no sewage system in their part of town. If they took their girlfriend, or their wife, to a movie, for their first date after their long-awaited return, they had to climb, as they had had to climb before they left for war, to the balcony because the orchestra below was reserved for whites, and the screen itself was often a reminder—for so few of the faces of the stars upon the screen were black, and the demeanor of black actors in the movies made the couples in the balcony cringe. If they wanted to take their girls or their wives for a hamburger and a soda, or for dinner, there were so many places to which they couldn’t take them. Their little brothers and sisters, who hugged them so tightly when they saw them again, were taller now than they remembered them, but the returning veterans still had to watch them trudge to school, trudge miles sometimes in the heat and the dust, because the school board wouldn’t pay to transport them, while the buses carrying the white children sped past them. They had to watch them trudge home in the evening—tired girls and boys. And the men returning home knew what the schools were like, for they had attended the same schools, and they found that the schools hadn’t changed. The ramshackle shanties that were Negro schools had raw, unfinished walls through which the wind whistled in winter as it did through the planks of the outhouse you used instead of a bathroom. Raw pine plank tables served as “desks,” desks so rough it was hard to write on them because school boards wouldn’t pay even for the sandpapering of desks in Negro schools. And the veterans could see new white schools—so shiny, so clean. Did any of the veterans ask their brothers or sisters, Do you still say the oath to the flag in the mornings?—the oath that pledged allegiance to the country that brought liberty and justice to all.
If they wanted the opportunity, supposedly given them by the G.I. Bill, to go to college, black veterans often found that there were too many of them—that with the doors of white colleges closed to them, there was no place left for them at black colleges. The big southern state universities taught whites—they wouldn’t teach them. And for every one of them who went beyond college, who earned the graduate degree that made him a lawyer or a doctor, there were many who wanted to go beyond college but who couldn’t, because in southern graduate schools there were almost no places at all for them. If they wanted to vote, to exercise the most basic right of citizens, they found that nothing had changed there either; there were still the literacy tests that were a humiliation even if the white registrar condescended to pass you. Did they think, some of them at least, about America’s promises to its people—and about the faithlessness with which America was keeping its promises to those of its people whose skins were black? Did others try not to think about that—because they couldn’t bear to?
These hundreds of thousands of black veterans had fought to make the world safe for democracy, not Jim Crow, and upon their return, they determined, many of them, to do something about what they found, to secure in their own country the freedoms for which they had fought overseas.
Among these Negro veterans, there was, in addition, anew sense of possibility, a sense that, as Egerton puts it, “things would be different—they had to be.” Many joined an organization dedicated to making things different: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; by the end of 1946, the NAACP had more than a thousand branches, with a membership totaling nearly half a million. In the courts, in the years after the war, the effort to challenge school segregation in the South was steadily widening, and victories were coming faster and faster—many of them won by a black lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, whose triumphs were beginning to turn him into a legend—and with each victory the feeling grew stronger that the argument should not be merely that separate facilities be equal, but that facilities should not be separate: that the lawyers should push the courts to declare illegal the very separation of the races itself. The momentum for faster change was sweeping before it those Negroes who had argued for moderation. “A lot of the black communities around the country had the bit between their teeth by then,” said one of the leading black civil rights attorneys, William Hastie. “It would have been futile to try damming the tide of human emotion that had been let loose.”
The tide was not rising only among blacks. Widespread though racism remained among white Americans, the war had made more of them aware of—and uneasy about—their country’s broken promises. And their understanding had been given an intellectual underpinning: Gunnar Myrdal’s monumental An American Dilemma, published near the end of the war, which documented the pervasiveness of white racism in America and disproved the clichés about the innate inferiority of Negroes on which that racism was based, and which made readers grasp the terrible gulf between America’s behavior and the ideals on which America had been founded; and whose scathing import—that America had blamed the black man for what it had done to him—was working its way, gradually but steadily, into America’s consciousness. And in 1947 their understanding had been personified in a popular hero, a hero with dark black skin, gleaming white teeth, and a flaming will; even if you were white, when you saw the bat held high and then whipping through the ball, when you saw the speed on the base paths, and when you saw the dignity with which Jack Roosevelt Robinson held himself in the face of the curses and the scorn and the runners coming into second base with their spikes high, you had to think at least a little about America’s shattered promises. The Brooklyn Dodgers were in the National League, but three months later, rooting for the Washington Senators of the American League became less of an unalloyed joy for Richard Russell; if he wanted to watch the Senators play the Cleveland Indians, he had to watch a black man on the same field as whites: Larry Doby had joined Jackie in the big leagues. In 1950, Jackie Robinson would be on the cover of Life magazine—the first black on Life’s cover in all its seven hundred issues. Race was becoming, faster and faster, an open topic of discussion in America; there was, in Egerton’s words, “a spreading sense of outrage that discrimination based solely on skin color was locking people out of jobs, housing….” During the years since V-J Day, support for civil rights, for the end of Jim Crow, had been rising all across the North, the demand quickening. A tide of opinion for equality and social justice had been rising—rising slowly, but rising. And the tide had been swelled by a hard pragmatic consideration: Negroes in the North had much less difficulty in voting than those in the South, and, led by the newly militant, better-educated, black veterans, more of them were doing so, particularly in the big northern states whose electoral votes were crucial in political calculations.
During the first seven years of the postwar era, moreover, there had been a President in the White House who had been determined to harness that tide, a President who not only reiterated the requests of his predecessor, twice passed by the House but twice rejected by the Senate, for the creation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission and for the abolition of the poll tax, but who had also proposed, in 1946 and 1947 and 1948, what Franklin Roosevelt had not—after commissioning the study that would be called, in a phrase out of the Declaration of Independence, “To Secure These Rights,” this President whose “very stomach turned over” at the beating of Negro veterans, asked Congress to secure those rights by making lynching a federal crime, banning discrimination in schools, hotels, restaurants, and theaters, and passing legislation protecting the Negroes’ right to vote.
But the tide had risen before, and had been blocked before, by the Senate, and now, as it rose again, the Senate blocked it again: with the defeat, in 1946 and again in 1947 and 1948, of the anti-lynching legislation and the anti-poll tax legislation and the anti-discrimination legislation, the tide broke helplessly against the dam that had stood athwart it for so long. And in the 1949 civil rights battle in which Lyndon Johnson had delivered his “We of the South” maiden speech which Richard Russell had called “one of the ablest I have ever heard,” the dam had been made even stronger and higher than before by Russell’s strengthening of the rules against cloture. And after that southern victory, when in 1950 and in 1951 and 1952, civil rights legislation had been proposed in the Senate, it had seldom even reached the floor.
DURING THE YEARS SINCE 1952, despite the presence in the White House of a new President whose lack of enthusiasm for civil rights made the Executive Branch almost as high a barrier to the cause as the legislative, the rising tide had for a time apparently found another channel through which it could flow toward justice. All during the early 1950s, four separate school desegregation cases, which had been lumped together under the title Brown v. Board of Education, had been rising, slowly but steadily, through the federal court system toward the highest court. That court was scheduled to begin hearing arguments on the Brown case on December 7, 1953, and that morning, when the trolleys pulled up on Constitution Avenue and congressional employees stepped off and walked toward their offices in the Capitol, they noticed, through the winter-bare trees, in front of the smaller white marble temple of the Supreme Court Building to their left, a long line of men and women waiting for admittance to the Court’s session that day. Most of them wore hats against the thirty-degree cold, and almost all of the faces under the hats were black. Some of those men and women had been in line all night. “I have a feeling that the Supreme Court is going to end segregation,” one of them explained to a reporter.
For three days that December, the Supreme Court heard arguments on Brown, and five months later, on May 17, 1954, the Court ruled that separation of races in schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s pledge of equal protection of the law, “that in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate but equal facilities are inherently unequal…. To separate them [Negro children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority…that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” The Court’s Chief Justice understood as Lyndon Johnson understood the importance of unanimity, and Earl Warren had obtained it—even from Justice Stanley F. Reed of border-state Kentucky. Reed, who had been the last holdout, was looking down from the bench at Thurgood Marshall, who had led the fight in Brown, when Warren uttered the words, “So say we all.” Reed “was looking me right straight in the face, because he wanted to see my reaction when I realized he hadn’t dissented,” the great black attorney would recall. The two men exchanged nods, barely perceptible. But there were tears on the Justice’s face. All across the United States black men and women knelt to give thanks to God.
THEIR THANKS WERE PREMATURE. In education as in voting, determination spawned defiance. Against the Court’s decision, the Old Confederacy rose in rage.
With the hooded Ku Klux Klan somewhat in disrepute because of its reputation for redneck violence, a new organization, the White Citizens Councils, sprang up, with a membership that included prominent citizens—the pillars of scores of southern communities—and with a philosophy that ostensibly repudiated violence and secrecy in favor of a new “reasonableness” (although its leaders’ “reasonableness” was somewhat undercut by their rhetoric, which had an unfortunate tendency to slip back into a more-familiar mode; in a Council-published book that sold widely throughout the South, the movement’s intellectual leader, Tom P. Brady, a Yale-educated Mississippi circuit court judge, denounced the Court’s refusal to recognize the physiological differences that made Negroes unsuitable for education—“The Supreme Court refuses to recognize that it cannot by a mandate shrink the size of a Negro’s skull which is one-eighth of an inch thicker than a white man’s”—as well as its lack of appreciation of all the white man had done for the Negro. “The American Negro,” he wrote, “was divorced from Africa and saved from savagery. In spite of his basic inferiority he was forced to do that which he would not do for himself. He was compelled to lay aside cannibalism, his barbaric savage custom. He was transported from aboriginal ignorance and superstition. He was given a language…. His soul was quickened. He was introduced to God! The veneer had been rubbed on, but the inside is fundamentally the same…. You can dress a chimpanzee, housebreak him and teach him to use a knife and fork, but it will take countless generations of evolutionary development, if ever, before you can convince him that a caterpillar or a cockroach is not a delicacy”). The first White Citizens Council was formed, in Indianola, Mississippi, two months after the Brown decision; within months, hundreds of chapters, with tens of thousands of members, had sprung up all across the South.
And with education as with voting, defiance was made law—formally written into statute books. Southern school boards, state legislatures, attorneys general and governors wrote laws and regulations designed to frustrate the Supreme Court ruling and keep white children safe from contamination by black children.
These laws and regulations accomplished their purpose. Although the border states moved at once to comply with the Court’s ruling—by the fall of 1954, classes were widely integrated in Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia and Missouri; the next year, Kentucky began to comply—when, in May, 1955, a year after its first ruling, the Supreme Court decreed that its ruling should be implemented “with all deliberate speed,” integration was still limited to the border states. And the reaction to that decree was the passage by southern legislatures of still more laws designed to frustrate it. Afraid that federal courts might attempt to accomplish integration by ordering the transfer of students to other schools, the South Carolina State Legislature in 1955 authorized local school boards to reassign transferred pupils to their original schools. The new law also stated that if a school accepted a pupil who had not been assigned by the school board—even if that pupil had been transferred there under a federal court order—the school board was authorized to deny state funds to that school. And South Carolina legislators boasted that if a federal court ruled unconstitutional this method of circumventing the Supreme Court decision, they would simply pass another law, authorizing the school board to close the school—or as many schools as it wished. A board could close all its schools, the Legislature explained. White parents would then have the option of sending their children to school in another—unintegrated—district. And if a suit was then instituted to force integration inthat district, that district’s board could then close its schools. As one writer put it, “A separate suit might therefore be required for every school district in the state.” And of course, whites could always set up a private school of their own. Since blacks couldn’t afford to follow suit, the end result of the integration suits would be that blacks would have no schools at all. In other southern states, there were even broader pieces of legislation. Georgia amended its state constitution so that it no longer required the state to maintain a public school system.
If laws were not sufficient to accomplish the purpose, other methods—“economic pressures”—were employed. In August, 1955, fifty-three Negroes petitioned the school board in Yazoo City, Mississippi, to allow their children to attend white schools. The local White Citizens Council published the names of the petition’s signers, in a full-page ad in the Yazoo City Herald. One of the fifty-three was fired from his job. Another, who had spent twenty years building up a plumbing business, found that no white customer would hire him, and he lost his business. The day he had to close down, he tried to buy a loaf of bread in a store, and the storekeeper told him he had just tripled the price. Another signer, a grocer, found that his wholesalers would no longer supply him. A banker told him the bank didn’t want his money, and ordered him to close his account. A woman who had signed tried to buy food, but when she got to the counter, the clerk refused to accept her money, and she had to return the food to the shelves. Soon there were only two names left on the petition, and the Yazoo City schools remained segregated. And there were more subtle methods. When a similar petition was filed in Jackson, Mississippi, Citizens Council leaders met in a Jackson hotel room, telephoned for room service, and let the Negro waiters who brought the food overhear them as they said that the petition’s signers were going to be investigated by a grand jury. “That was the end of the petition,” a Council leader said. “No fuss and fury. We’re not trying to raise hell. We just want separate but equal schools.”
This combination of methods was effective. When schools opened in September, 1955, three of the eleven former Confederate states had made token efforts at desegregation, so small as to be meaningless: a few hundred black children were going to school with white children in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Texas. The other eight states had made no gesture at all; the total number of black children in integrated schools in those states was zero. And officials in those states were pledging that that was going to be the number in years to come—in all years to come.
Obviously the best counterweight to this resistance would be the passage of federal civil rights legislation, national laws that would override states’ laws. Understanding that the highest obstacle to the passage of such legislation was Senate Rule 22, with its cloture provisions, liberals had tried to loosen that rule at the beginning of each new Congress—in 1947 and 1949 and 1951—only to see it made tighter instead. They had tried again in January, 1953. Thanks to the new Eisenhower-generated Republican majority in both houses of Congress, the southerners were no longer committee chairmen, and the liberals believed they had a chance at last. But the wink was given, and was answered by the nod: the vote in 1953 against liberalization of Rule 22 had been 70 to 21.
January, 1955, of course, was the month in which the Senate liberals, their ranks strengthened with new recruits, believed they had an even better opportunity—and it was the month in which, if they did have one, it was thrown away when Douglas and Lehman acceded (in the concession which Douglas soon realized was “a bad mistake”) to Hubert Humphrey’s request that they “give Johnson a chance.” And with the filibuster still as firm as ever, there was no chance at all for the passage of civil rights legislation in the Senate in 1953 or 1954 or 1955. During those years, sixty-one separate civil rights bills were introduced in the Senate. Not one made it to the floor. The tide, whipped forward now by the wind of hope, had at last reached the top of the judicial branch. In some respects, as will be seen, it was rising within the executive branch. On Capitol Hill, however, it dashed as helplessly as ever against Congress, and particularly the Senate. Thanks to Lyndon Johnson, the senatorial dam had been breached on other liberal issues—housing and the minimum wage, for example. But on civil rights it was, thanks in part to Johnson, still standing, as strong as ever. The black Americans who had been denied justice for so long were being denied justice still. Their condition was still, in 1955, the great contradiction between the Republic’s professed ideals, the ideals embedded in its Constitution, and the reality of the actual conditions in which sixteen million of its citizens still lived.
DURING THE SECOND HALF OF 1955—those months during which Lyndon Johnson was down on his ranch recuperating from his heart attack—dispatches had come to him which had made him aware that during the Senate’s 1956 session, the fight in the north wing of the Capitol was going to be joined again. Liberals, ashamed of their meek surrender, were determined to redeem themselves. “In view of my error … I felt a special need to strengthen the fight,” Douglas was to say, to go “much further than our past attempts.” He directed his staff to draw up the most comprehensive civil rights bill ever to be presented to Congress, “encompassing a whole battery of proposals, from voting rights to an effective FEPC law.”
During the Summer of 1955, moreover, there had been encounters on the battlefield itself—in the Deep South, hundreds of miles below Washington, where Negroes’ rising determination to fight for their rights had been met by white fury at their effrontery.
Most of these encounters had been lonely skirmishes, and most had been defeats. In Mississippi alone there had been four. Belzoni was known to Negroes as “a real son of a bitch town,” but nonetheless the Reverend George W. Lee had somehow gotten on the voter registration rolls not only himself but some thirty other Negroes. The sheriff responded by refusing to accept their poll tax payments, and ordering Lee to “get the niggers to take their names off the book.” And when Lee refused to do that, a car pulled alongside as he was driving home one day, and a shotgun was fired at him at point-blank range. “When I saw his body in the casket—I will not be able to forget how the whole lower half of his face had been shot away,” Ruby Hurley, who opened the first permanent NAACP office in the Deep South, was to say. All through that summer, the NAACP tried to force the sheriff (that same sheriff who had refused the poll tax payments) to investigate the murder—without success. He would not even examine the lead shotgun pellets in Lee’s face; they could, he said “have been fillings from his teeth.” The next event occurred in August, in another little Mississippi town: Brookhaven. It took place in broad daylight, in Courthouse Square, bustling with about fifty Saturday shoppers. Three white men approached Lamar Smith, who during World War II had enlisted in the Army at the age of forty-nine, and who now, having returned from the war to build up a profitable farm, had enlisted in another battle: “He was determined,” an admirer would say, “that his people would have a say in local government.” The three men warned Smith to stop encouraging blacks to register. When he refused, one of the men drew a .38 caliber revolver and shot him dead in the full view of bystanders. The three white men were arrested, but not one of the people who had been in the Square was willing to testify against them, and a grand jury returned no indictments. Then, in November, in “son of a bitch” Belzoni, a sixty-five-year-old Negro grocer, Gus Courts, who had been helping the Reverend Lee’s registration efforts and had refused to stop even after he saw Lee’s half-destroyed face in the casket, and even after the White Citizens Council had instituted a boycott against his store, was shot and seriously wounded by a gunman who fired from a car through the store’s plate-glass window. “I’ve known for a long time it was coming, and I’d tried to get prepared in my mind for it,” Courts said. “But that’s a hard thing to do…. It’s bad when you know you might get shot just walking around in your store.” The sheriff made only the most cursory investigation, the FBI interviewed the victim—once; the agents never returned—and showed no interest even in examining the shotgun pellets extracted from Courts’ stomach; when a surgeon offered them to the agents, he was told to “keep them”; Attorney General Herbert Brownell said that under existing federal law, the Justice Department had no authority to prosecute—and no one was prosecuted. Three shootings, one in broad daylight before a crowd of onlookers, and no one had been brought to court, much less convicted. And making the murders grimmer still was the fact that, outside the South, they were ignored. The New York Times, for example, ran exactly one article about the Lee murder—three paragraphs long. About the Smith murder, and the Courts shooting, it ran no articles at all. As David Halberstam was to write about one of the shootings, in a paragraph that was applicable to all: “The nation’s press paid no attention…. This was what Mississippi white men had always done, and therefore it was not news. Blacks in Mississippi seemed not only outside the legal protection of the police, but also outside the moral protection of the press.”
But during the summer of 1955, there had been a fourth encounter, and while this, too, had been a defeat, it had been a defeat with a difference—a crucial difference.
In August, 1955, while a fourteen-year-old Negro boy from Chicago, Emmett Till, was visiting his mother’s hometown, a hamlet named “Money” in the Mississippi Delta, he was playing one day with several local black teenagers outside a little country grocery store when he pulled from his wallet a picture of a white girl, and boasted that she was his girlfriend back in Chicago. The other boys scoffed at his claim, and one of them said, “Hey, there’s a white girl [actually twenty-one-year-old Carolyn Bryant, who owned the grocery store with her husband, Roy] in that store there,” and dared him to go in and talk to her. Emmett did, while buying two cents’ worth of bubble gum. According to one account, he said, “How about a date, baby?” According to another, he said, “Bye, baby,” as he was leaving, and gave a “wolf whistle.” Talking “fresh” to a white woman was a violation of one of segregation’s most basic rules, and whatever Emmett Till said, or whether or not he whistled, he was certainly, under those rules, guilty of that offense.
So he had to be punished. That night, Roy Bryant and his half brother, J. W. Milam, a violent man with a fearsome temper, known as “Big” Milam because he was six feet two and weighed 235 pounds, armed themselves with .45 Colt automatic pistols, drove in a pickup truck to the home of Till’s uncle and aunt, Mose and Elizabeth Wright, where Till was staying, and, holding their pistols and shining a flashlight in Mose Wright’s eyes, took Till away. They drove him to a two-room toolhouse, and beat him with their pistols, so hard that a black youth and his aunt who lived near the toolhouse heard the thuds of steel striking flesh and bone. At first, Till tried to be brave, but this only infuriated them, and they beat him until finally he was crying and screaming; the other youth made out some words: “Mama, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy.” One of his eyes was gouged out. Then Bryant and Milam ordered him to climb back into the truck, and drove to a cotton gin, where they had noticed a large exhaust fan, weighing about seventy pounds, that had been abandoned for scrap. They made him lift the fan onto the truck. They drove to the Tallahatchie River, parking about thirty feet from its steep banks. They forced Till to unload the fan and carry it to the very edge of the bank, and then to strip. When he was naked, he was beaten again with the pistols, so hard that one side of his forehead was crushed in. Then Milan shot him in the other temple. The two men tied the fan around his neck with barbed wire to weight the body down, and rolled it off the bank into the river.
The Wrights telephoned Till’s mother to tell her that her son had been taken away, and that they didn’t know what had happened to him. She contacted the Chicago police, who began telephoning sheriffs in the counties around Money. Accompanied by Mrs. Wright’s brother, Greenwood Sheriff George Smith went immediately to the Tallahatchie; “We went by custom when something like that happened,” the brother later explained. “That’s usually what they done to them.” The body was not found until three days later, however, when its legs, unweighted by the fan, popped up above water. It was badly decomposed, the face bloated, but not all the damage had been done by water. Only one side of the skull was intact; the other side had been crushed; one eye was dangling out of its socket, the tongue was swollen to many times its normal size. A policeman said it was the most badly beaten face he had ever seen. It was all but unrecognizable; Mose Wright was able to identify it primarily because Emmett’s initialed ring was on one of the fingers.
UP TO THIS POINT, the episode was, tragically, no different from hundreds, thousands, that had occurred in the South, and that were still, in 1955, occurring in the South, without any more than cursory attention being paid to them outside the South—if, indeed, any attention was paid to them at all. After all, there were three other racially motivated murders—at least three—in Mississippi that year, and the national press had barely covered them. But this episode, unlike the others, was now to catch the attention of the nation, and, indeed, of the world.
It did so because the victim was not from the South but from Chicago, and because when the local southern sheriff wanted Emmett Till’s body buried (quickly, with the casket closed) in Money, the boy’s mother refused and insisted that it be returned to Chicago and opened so that she could be certain that the body inside was her son—and because when she saw what had been done to her son, she insisted that the casket remain open for three days before the funeral was held, so that “the world can see what they did to my boy.” (“Have you ever sent a loved son on vacation and had him returned to you in a pine box, so horribly battered and waterlogged that someone needs to tell you this sickening sight is your son—lynched?” Mamie Till Bradley was to say.) The church in Chicago’s great South Side black ghetto in which the casket lay held seventeen hundred people, but it wasn’t big enough. Thousands upon thousands of black men and women lined up in the street outside and filed past it. Men’s faces changed as they saw what was inside, women fainted, some women flinging up their arms in horror, covering their faces as if to shield themselves from the sight. Ruby Hurley, down in Mississippi, had not been able to forget the Reverend Lee’s face, but very few people from the North had seen it. Thousands of people saw Emmett Till’s face, and, The Nation reported, Chicago’s black community “is aroused as it has not been over any similar act in recent history,” and then the black magazine Jet, with a national circulation, ran a photograph of the face, and when Roy Wilkins of the NAACP spoke to a rally in Harlem to protest what the NAACP called the “jungle fury in Mississippi,” ten thousand people jammed a street to hear him, and rallies were held in black communities all across the North, not only in Chicago and New York but in Youngstown, and Baltimore, and Cleveland and Detroit and Los Angeles, and the “Wolf Whistle Murder Case” was in big headlines in scores of black newspapers. And then articles began to appear in newspapers whose circulation was not mainly among Negroes, and while these stories were for the most part confined to inside pages, there were also editorials. For many reasons—the fact that Till was little more than a child; the brutality, documented in a photograph, of the murder; the public funeral not in a town in Mississippi but in one of the great cities of the North—the case became a cause célèbre. “Here,” David Halberstam was to write, “was what the Northern press had been waiting for: a rare glimpse beneath the Deep South’s genteel surface, at how the white power structure kept the blacks in line—using the rawest violence, if necessary.”
Most of all, perhaps, the murder of Emmett Till caught the attention of the world because, unlike most similar murder cases in the South, in this one there was a witness who was willing to testify.
When the two half brothers, Roy Bryant and Big Milam, had come that night to Mose Wright’s home, an unpainted cabin behind a cotton field, holding pistols and shining flashlights into his eyes and demanding that he produce “the boy who done the talkin’ in Money,” they had warned the sharecropper, a small man, five feet three inches in height and very skinny, against making any trouble. He had pleaded with them not to take his nephew, saying that the boy had acted badly because he was from Chicago—“He was raised up yonder. He didn’t know what he was doing. Don’t take him”—and his wife had offered to “pay you gentlemen for the damages,” and then, after Milam had said, “You niggers go back to sleep,” and was about to march Emmett off to the truck, one of the men had asked Wright, “How old are you?” and when he said that he was sixty-four, the man had said, “If you cause any trouble, you’ll never live to be sixty-five.” After the body was found, Wright was told bluntly that if he testified he would be killed, but when the Tallahatchie County District Attorney asked him if he would testify, he said he would—which meant that, even in Mississippi, there was going to have to be a trial.
The fact that there was a trial was, of course, unusual, but both the District Attorney, Gerald Chatham, and the judge, Curtis M. Swango, were unusual public officials in Mississippi, and Chatham pursued the case, and Swango presided over it, with exemplary fairness. In other respects, however, the trial was memorable for the vividness with which it furnished documentation of the totality of segregation in the South. Although 63 percent of the residents of Tallahatchie County were Negro, there were no Negro jurors; there couldn’t be: only registered voters (“qualified electors”) were eligible to serve on juries, and not a single Negro in Tallahatchie was a qualified elector; the county clerk, and registrar of voters, had won re-election year after year by promising white voters “to keep vigilance over your registration books.” The courtroom in the town of Sumner was, of course, completely segregated, and most of the spectators were white; it was only after all the white people who wanted to observe the trial had been seated that blacks were allowed to fill in the back rows behind them. The segregation extended to the press table. Fifty to sixty reporters, many of them from the big cities of the North, had shown up to cover the trial, and the white reporters were seated at the press table up front. Some of the reporters, however, were black, from northern black newspapers. Tallahatchie’s sheriff, Clarence Strider, a huge man, at 270 pounds bigger even than Milam, whose own sharecroppers lived in tiny shacks on whose roofs were painted giant letters spelling out “S-T-R-I-D-E-R,” declared that “There ain’t gonna be no nigger reporters in my courtroom,” and when Judge Swango overruled him, Strider sat them at two bridge tables far off to one side; entering the courtroom one afternoon, he greeted them with a loud “Hello, niggers.” A black congressman from Detroit, Charles C. Diggs Jr., came down for the trial, and when he arrived at the courtroom, all the seats allotted to blacks were already filled. When a Negro newspaperman from New York tried to explain who Diggs was, Strider and his deputies could scarcely believe their ears. “This nigger said there’s a nigger outside who says he’s a congressman,” one deputy said incredulously. “A nigger congressman?” another deputy said in disbelief. After the judge had ordered Diggs admitted, Strider said, “I’ll bring him in here, but I’m gonna sit him at you niggers’ table.” Also memorable was the atmosphere in the steaming-hot courtroom in which everyone—spectators, attorneys, jury—seemed to be drinking bottles of beer or Coke. “It was just like a circus,” Ruby Hurley was to say. “The defendants were sitting up there eating ice-cream cones and playing with their children in court just like they were out at a picnic.” Racist jokes made the rounds of the white spectators: Wasn’t it just like that little nigger to try and steal a gin fan when it was more than he could carry?
But nothing was as memorable as Mose Wright. The whites of Tallahatchie had been sure Mose wouldn’t testify. Bryant and Milam had told him he would be killed if he testified, and as soon as the two men had driven off with Emmett that night, the elderly little sharecropper had put his wife on a train to Chicago, and every day since she had arrived there, she had written him begging him to join her, to leave Mississippi, to not testify. And since only he could identify the two men who had taken Emmett, without his testimony there was no case.
And then the district attorney called Wright to the witness stand, and he came to the stand—in an act of heroism difficult even to contemplate.
The sharecropper looked very small as he sat there, dressed in a white shirt and dark tie, on the stand, just a few feet away from Roy Bryant and the massive Big Milam, so small that, to the journalist Murray Kempton, he was “a black pygmy standing up to a white ox.” And then the district attorney asked if he could identify the two men who had taken Emmett Till away, and the “pygmy” stood up. He stood on his tiptoes, held his right arm out very straight, and spoke, in broken English, two words that were, nonetheless, adequate for the purpose. Pointing at Milam, he said: “Thar he.”
“J. W. Milam leaned forward, crooking a cigaret in a hand that seemed as large as Mose Wright’s whole chest, and his eyes were coals of hatred,” Kempton wrote. “Mose Wright took all their blast straight in his face, and then, for good measure, turned and pointed that still unshaking finger at the man sitting next to Milam, and said: ‘And thar’s Mr. Bryant.’”
With those words, Kempton wrote, Wright “sat down hard against the chair-back with a lurch that told better than anything else the cost in strength to him of the thing he had done.” And that was not the only courageous thing that the sixty-four-year-old sharecropper did on that witness stand. The district attorney, although he was on Wright’s side, nonetheless addressed him without any prenom of respect, but only as “Uncle Mose.” The manner of the defense attorney Sidney Carlton, one of the town’s five lawyers, all of whom were representing Bryant and Milam pro bono, was, in Kempton’s words, “that of an overseer with a field hand”; he “roared at Wright as though he were the defendant,” and “every time Carlton raised his voice like the lash of a whip, J. W. Milam would permit himself a cold smile.” And then, as Kempton wrote, “Mose Wright did the bravest thing a Delta Negro can do; he stopped saying ‘sir.’ Every time Carlton came back to the attack, Mose Wright pushed himself back against his chair and said ‘That’s right,’ and the absence of the ‘sir’ was almost like a spit in the eye.” Two other local black witnesses were to testify: the nineteen-year-old-youth who had heard the screams and thuds from the barn, and his aunt; their testimony was only peripheral, since they never saw Till; they had to be compelled to testify; the youth was so terrified that on the stand he could speak only in a whisper. And Emmett Till’s mother testified. She had to—because the defense was claiming that the body was not really her son’s, a contention bolstered by Sheriff Strider, who, in a somewhat unusual move for a law enforcement officer, testified for the defense. When Mamie Till Bradley, thirty-four years old, neatly dressed, a $3,900-a-year procurement clerk for the Air Force, entered the courtroom, theMemphis Commercial Appeal reported, “an expression of almost painful dislike swept across” the white spectators’ faces. She was very calm as she recalled that she had tried to warn her son that he had to act “humble” in the South, that he had “to be very careful of how he spoke, and to say, ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, ma’am,’ and not to hesitate to humble yourself if you had to get down on your knees,” but that because Emmett had been raised in Chicago, he “didn’t know how” to act that way. She lost her composure only once; when the district attorney held up before her a photograph of her dead son so she could identify it; then she took off her glasses and held a handkerchief to her eyes for a few seconds. But despite the testimony of these other witnesses, it was Mose Wright’s testimony thatmade the case possible. His half hour on the stand, Kempton wrote, was “the hardest half hour in the hardest life possible for a human being in these United States.” But at the end of it, “against Carlton’s voice and Milam’s eyes and the incredulity of an all-white jury he sat alone and refused to bow.” It was as a result of his courage that two white men were on trial for killing a Negro, a trial in which, whatever the result, “there is a kind of majesty. And we owe that sight to Mose Wright, who was condemned to bow all his life, and had enough left to raise his head and look the enemy in those terrible eyes when he was sixty-four.”
The result, of course, was the traditional result. Judge Swango had not allowed the jury to hear what the journalist I. F. Stone called “Mrs. Bryant’s sexy whopper,” that Till had grabbed her around the waist, made “unprintable” suggestions to her, and boasted, “I’ve been with white women before.” But that didn’t matter. After defense attorney Carlton had told the jury that if they found Bryant and Milam guilty, “your ancestors will turn over in their graves, and I’m sure every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men in the face of that [outside] pressure,” the jurors proved that they did indeed have that kind of courage: the verdict, after the jury had been out of the courtroom for an hour and seven minutes, was “not guilty”; the foreman told reporters that it wouldn’t have taken that long “if we hadn’t stopped to drink pop.” In fact, it hadn’t taken that long; jurors were to say later that they had delayed coming back into the courtroom to “make it look good.” (The foreman was later asked what he thought of Mrs. Bradley’s testimony. “If she tried a little harder, she might have got out a tear,” he said.)
But although the verdict in the trial was simply one more in the long line of defeats for justice in the South, in a larger sense the Emmett Till trial was not a defeat. For the trial, and the verdict, had been brought to the attention of the world. Fifty or sixty print reporters had covered it, and outside on the courtroom lawn there was, if not a forest, at least a small grove of tripods, supporting television cameras. “For the first time,” the Delta Democrat-Times noted, “a number of small local stations [in Mississippi and Louisiana] are staffing a news event.” The interviews shot by some of the cameras reached more than local audiences. Planes chartered by the three major television networks set down every day of the trial in a field about seven miles away to pick up film, and while network television coverage was not extensive, there was coverage.
This coverage had an effect on blacks in the South. “We’ve got more phone calls from our listeners thanking us for having a man on the scene than anything we’ve ever done,” said a radio reporter from a black station in New Orleans. The Till trial brought home to them with a new vividness the peril in which they lived. “Emmett Till’s murder” instilled in Anne Moody, a fourteen-year-old black girl from Alabama, “the fear of being killed just because I was black.” It was the senselessness of the murder of the fourteen-year-old boy that she couldn’t get out of her mind, she was to say. “I didn’t know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period was enough, I thought.” “The Emmett Till case shook the foundations of Mississippi, because it said even a child was not safe from racism and bigotry and death,” recalls Myrlie Evers. It made southern blacks more willing to fight for their rights. Myrlie’s husband, Medgar, “cried…over this particular vicious killing,” Mrs. Evers says. “He cried out of the frustration and anger of wanting to physically strike out and hurt. Medgar made it his mission to see that word of it was spread as widely and accurately as possible. Publicizing the crime and the subsequent defeat of justice became a major NAACP effort.” She says that the case helped provide a “frame of reference for us to move on to do more things, positively, to eliminate this from happening ever again…. Sometimes it takes those kinds of things to help a people become stronger and to eliminate the fear that they have to speak out and do something.” Emmett’s mother came back to Mississippi, and spoke, and when she spoke, the audiences were large and emotional, and when she asked for contributions to help her publicize her son’s death, “Everyone poured out their hearts to her, went into their pockets when people had only two or three pennies, and gave…some way to say that we bleed for you, we hurt for you, we are so sorry about what happened to Emmett.” The tide was rising even in the Deep South.
And not just in the Deep South. By the 1950s, millions of American Negroes had never lived in the South, and while they may have been intellectually aware of conditions there, of what segregation was like, they did not really know those conditions. James Hicks of the leading black newspaper in New York City, the Amsterdam News, had “covered the courts in many areas of this country, but the Till case was unbelievable. I mean, I just didn’t get the sense of being in a courtroom…. When the people started coming into the courtroom, they filled up the white section, then the black filled up what was left.” This, of course, was simply the normal court routine in the South, but now reporters like Hicks made northern blacks see it. And they responded. A new wave of mass meetings swept across black communities in the North, and the response came not only in cheers but in cash. Before the Till trial, the NAACP had been deeply in debt because of its legal expenses in the Brown trials. Now contributions to its “fight fund,” the war chest to help victims of racial attack, soared to record levels.
Nor was the tide rising only among blacks. Large, influential newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post and Times-Herald had sent reporters to cover the trial, but while it was still going on, coverage was mostly on inside pages, as if the State of Mississippi, by bringing the killers to trial, had done what was needed, and as if the trial was not major news because conviction was a foregone conclusion. An editorial in the Times before the trial had said, “The fact remains that the Tallahatchie County grand jury, made up of white men, took this step against other white men for a crime against a Negro….[This] prompt action…indicates that the people of contemporary Mississippi are against this form of murder as against other forms of murder.” When justice failed, however, the story wasn’t inside anymore, but on the front page, in the Washington paper under a big banner headline, “TWO ACQUITTED IN BOY’S KILLING.” The acquittal was on front pages everywhere, and not only in America, as if, as one account of the case put it, “both the wolf whistle and the resounding ‘not guilty’ were heard around the world.” “Scandalous,” Le Figaro said of the verdict; “The life of a Negro in Mississippi is not worth a whistle,” said Das Frei Volk in Düsseldorf.
White indignation rose, and with it, a white sense of responsibility. There had really been two verdicts, not one, rendered at Sumner, I. F. Stone wrote. One was the “not guilty” against Bryant and Milam. “The other, unspoken, unintended, unconscious but indelible, was a verdict against the rest of us and our country…. The murder and the trial could only have happened in a sick countryside. Where else would a mother be treated with such elementary lack of respect or compassion?” Stone urged Negroes to fight, to “rouse themselves to make their indignation felt in some dramatic way.” The “American Negro,” he wrote, “needs a Gandhi to lead him, and we need the Negro to lead us—into a better, more just, world.” And the feeling expressed by Stone and Kempton was beginning to spread beyond the audience traditionally commanded by the Stones and Kemptons. Commonweal, the magazine of liberal Roman Catholics, said that the “moral disease” responsible for Till’s murder was not confined to Mississippi. “The same disease…created the Northern ghetto in which he lived, [and] the southern shack from which he was taken to his death,” Commonweal said. “The illness that ultimately killed him confines Negroes to inferior homes, schools and jobs” in the North as well. And at least some northern whites took the point. Now the rallies in the North demanding anti-lynching legislation and other civil rights legislation—demanding justice—were held not just among blacks, but among Jewish organizations and labor organizations; a resolution adopted by the Jewish Labor Committee, which represented half a million members of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, denounced “this evil, bigoted act.” As David Halberstam was to write, “The Till case marked a critical junction for the national media.” The Brown decision had created “for the first time” a “national agenda on civil rights. The national media was going to cover … the entire South.” And now, with the nation ready at last to read about the South, the Till case had provided reading material more dramatic than school desegregation lawsuits. “The educational process had begun”; the Emmett Till trial “became the first great media event of the civil rights movement. The nation was ready; indeed, it wanted to read what happened.” Some Mississippians still thought the episode was a joke. Two years after the trial, when John Bartlow Martin visited Sumner while researching a book on school desegregation, the head of the local Citizens Council pointed to the Tallahatchie River, and, chuckling, said, “You wouldn’t come all the way down to Mississippi and not see Emmett Till’s River.” But their laughter showed that they didn’t understand. At a recess during the trial, reporters had heard a white spectator say, nodding in the direction of the Tallahatchie, “That river’s full of niggers,” and they had reported the statement, had made America hear it. They had felt the depth of what the Times called the “controlled hostility” in Mississippi, and they had made America feel it; wrote Dan Wakefield of The Nation, “You lie in bed at night listening to the hounds baying, and during the day you see more men wearing guns than you ordinarily do outside your television screen. I am not ashamed to confess that I was afraid.” Congressman Diggs was to call Mose Wright’s unflinching “Thar he” inside that sweltering, hate-filled courtroom an “historic” two words, and they were historic, because thanks to Wright, there had been a trial. The brutality and injustice of white treatment of Negroes in the South was several centuries old, but now the entire nation—the entire world—had been able to read about it for itself.
AND THEN it could see it for itself.
In December, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, a quiet, dignified black seamstress, Rosa Parks, refused to move to the back of a bus to make room for a white passenger, and was arrested for violating the Alabama bus segregation laws. A meeting in the church of Mrs. Parks’ pastor, a twenty-six-year-old black preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. who, as Taylor Branch has written, “looked and acted much older than his years,” called for a boycott of the buses on the following Monday morning, but since many of Montgomery’s blacks would have no alternative means of getting to their jobs except to walk for miles, no one was really sure the boycott would work. On Monday morning, the Reverend King’s wife, Coretta, was looking anxiously out her window to see the first morning bus, which was usually jammed with Negro maids on their way to work. Then she saw it. It was empty. “So was the next bus, and the next,” Branch reported. “In spite of the bitter cold, their fear of white people, and their desperate need for wages, Montgomery’s Negroes were staying off the buses.” That morning, there was another startling development. At the courthouse where Mrs. Parks was being tried—she would be fined fourteen dollars—the only spectators expected were the usual few relatives of the accused. Instead, when the door to the courtroom was opened, five hundred black Americans were standing in the corridor and spilling back down the stairs out onto the street. That evening, Martin Luther King Jr. was drafted as the first president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, and he made his first speech to the group. And with his first sentence, “We are here in a general sense, because first and foremost—we are American citizens—and we are determined to apply our citizenship to the fullness of its means,” there was a murmur of assent, and when he said, “And you know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron heel of oppression,” there was a sudden, rising cheer, and when he cried, “If we are wrong—the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, God almighty is wrong! … If we are wrong—justice is a lie,” a mighty leader was born. And the Montgomery Negroes made the boycott stick; at last southern Negroes had found a weapon—nonviolence—with which to challenge white supremacy, and had found the courage to use it. And again, as in the Till case, their courage, like Mose Wright’s courage, furthered the “educational process.” The bus boycott was in a big city, not an isolated hamlet, and it went on not for a week as the Till trial had, but for months. Television coverage increased. With the fuel from the Montgomery bus boycott added to the national fire started by the Till case, the furor in the North was not going away.
WHICH MEANT THAT IN JANUARY, 1956, Lyndon Johnson, returning to Washington after his heart attack, was going to have to make a decision, a decision that was to bring to the surface, within a character filled with deep contradictions, perhaps the deepest contradictions of all.