Читать книгу The Colored Waiting Room - Kevin Shird - Страница 9

Nelson’s recollection of lynchings and violence against African Americans during the days of Jim Crow is still vivid in his mind. “You could know a person one day and then the next, they were gone. Later, you would hear that they were beaten up, kidnapped, or even killed by the Klan,” Nelson said. When Nelson was a young man, racially motivated assaults and killings of black people were a way of life that all African Americans were keenly aware of.

The first encounter Nelson remembers having with racist Jim Crow policies was in Pensacola, Florida, in the Crescent Department Store when he was a young child. Inside the department store were designated public water fountains, one that was labeled “Whites Only” and another that was labeled “Colored Only.” Nelson said that he couldn’t read well when he was a little boy, and so he ran over to the water fountain that was designated for whites only to get some water, because he was thirsty. His mother ran up behind him, slapped him hard, and yelled, “Don’t you ever do that again, do you hear me?”

Nelson didn’t understand why his mother was so infuriated with him. He said, “She was so angry she was turning blue in the face.” As he got older and began to understand the world he was living in, Nelson saw that his mother was trying to keep him out of danger. In those years, something as innocent as that could have gotten a person of color killed in the Deep South.

Not infrequently, black people in the South were killed for the most irrational reasons, and sometimes for no reason at all. Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago who traveled south to visit relatives. On August 28, 1955, he was kidnapped and murdered in Money, Mississippi. The story behind the lynching of Emmett Till is still one of the most recognized and talked about in American history. It was a grotesque crime, and the level of brutality inflicted upon the young teenager helped galvanize the civil rights movement, which was just beginning to gather steam.

“I first learned about Emmett Till when I was in the barbershop one day and one of my customers was talking about the incident. He said that a little boy had been lynched down in Mississippi. A short time later, black and white people all over the country were in an uproar about what happened,” Nelson said.

The murder of Emmett Till was an act of cruel senseless violence, and there were cries from many people across the country for the FBI to step in and take control of the case. But those requests landed on deaf ears. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover made the following statement:

There has been no allegation made that the victim has been subjected to the deprivation of any right or privilege which is secured and protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States.3

Even among many white people, the director’s comments created an uproar, leading to even more support for the civil rights movement. Lynching was an act of terrorism used by people who wanted to instill fear in others. It was a tool to punish and silence those who fought for or sympathized with black Americans and the civil rights movement. The idea that a black boy’s right to live was not secured by the Constitution of the United States was an affront to both common decency and common sense.

In December 2016, President Barack Obama signed the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Reauthorization Act of 2016, which provided for the reopening of unsolved civil rights cases. According to the White House, this new law authorized the Department of Justice and the FBI to support the “full accounting of all victims whose deaths or disappearances were the result of racially motivated crimes” and “hold accountable under federal and state law individuals who were perpetrators of, or accomplices in, unsolved civil rights murders and disappearances.”4

President Obama was applauded by civil rights lawyers and activists alike for his support of and dedication to the bill. The new law was an expansion of a previously signed law of the same name, which was passed in 2007 by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush, a surprise to some because of his Southern roots.

To better understand what led to Emmett Till’s murder, the continuing violence against blacks by whites, and the need to help reconcile this deep division in society, it’s important to look at the historical context.

At the time of Emmett Till’s murder, there was a very strict segregation code in the South, which white Southerners enforced to keep blacks, then called “negroes” or “darkies,” in their place. Under these codes, white women were to be kept away from any interaction with black men. Black men were believed to have a sexual potency and lust, and it was widely feared that any social contact at all would lead to a sullying of the purity of white women. Any violation of this code was met with the threat of severe retaliation, so many black people lived highly segregated, fearful lives, with some feeling helpless to do anything to protest or violate this strict code.

It was in this context that fourteen-year-old Emmett Till came from Chicago to stay with a great uncle in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. In Chicago, he had attended a segregated elementary school, but the world was already changing up north with the Supreme Court’s 1954 verdict in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared that segregated education for blacks was inherently unequal and therefore illegal.5 The atmosphere in Chicago, which had seen a huge influx of black workers from the South during the Great Migration, was more respectful to African Americans than that of Southern states.

As a result, Emmett was not prepared for the degree of segregation he encountered when he arrived in Mississippi. Moreover, Emmett had a propensity for pulling pranks, and he enjoyed pushing against some of the barriers of segregation when he was home in Chicago. In an interview with Smithsonian Magazine, his cousin Simeon Wright recalled that Emmett loved to tell and listen to jokes. In school, he sometimes pulled the fire alarm to get out of class, thinking that was funny. “He really had no sense of danger.”6

As a result, he disregarded the warnings of his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, to take care in the South because of his race.7 She had grown up in the rural South and, like Nelson’s mother, she was aware of the risks there, particularly for black men. She told him to “be very careful” and to even “humble himself to the extent of getting down on his knees.”8 But soon after his arrival, Emmett nonetheless was, in effect, on a collision course with the practices of white segregationists, which resulted in his death.

The stage was set on August 24, 1955, when Emmett stood with his cousins and their friends outside a country grocery store in Money, Mississippi. As if to flout the current strict segregation standards of the South, he bragged that he had a girlfriend back in Chicago who was white. His companions, born and raised in Mississippi, didn’t believe him, and they dared him to ask the white woman behind the counter in the store, Carolyn Bryant, for a date. He didn’t ask her for a date, but he did go into the store and buy candy. It was later alleged that as he left, he said, “Bye, baby” to her, even that he put his arms around her.

Simeon Wright, who was present that day, reported in a Smithsonian Magazine interview that Emmett was in the store for less than a minute and didn’t say anything to the woman or touch her. Wright said that in the span of time Emmett was in the store, there was no time for him to do so, and that because Bryant was behind the counter, Emmett certainly didn’t put his arms around her, as she later claimed. Then, as Wright and Emmett left the store together, Carolyn Bryant came out and headed to her car, and all parties agree that Emmett did whistle at her. According to Wright, Emmett was trying to impress his companions, telling them: “You guys might be afraid to do something like this, but not me.” He had no idea how dangerous that was, until he saw the nervous reaction of his cousin and friends.9

But later, Bryant elaborated on this brief exchange, claiming that he had “grabbed her, made lewd advances, and then wolf-whistled at her as he sauntered out.”10 Much later, in 2017, Bryant admitted she had lied, exaggerating what happened that fateful day to make it seem that Emmett had far overstepped the expected boundaries of relations between whites and blacks. But at the time, no one thought to question her story. If a white woman claimed an African American boy was being disrespectful to her, who was anyone to believe otherwise? No matter what a black man or boy might say to counter her claims, no one in the South would believe them.

When Roy Bryant, Carolyn’s husband and the store’s proprietor, returned from a business trip on August 27 and his wife told him the lie of what Emmett had done to her, he called upon his brother-in-law, J. W. Milam, to help him set things straight. Early in the morning of August 28, 1955, they went to the home of Emmett’s great uncle, Mose Wright. Holding a gun to show Wright they meant business, they demanded to see Emmett, and despite Wright’s pleas, they pulled Emmett out of bed and led him to their car. Though it’s not certain exactly what happened, they likely drove the terrified teenager around in their car and then took him to a tool shed behind Milam’s residence, where they beat him so severely that his face was barely recognizable, and shot him in the head. Then, they drove him to the Tallahatchie River, presumably already dead or dying, and threw him in the water.

Three days later, Emmett’s disfigured corpse was recovered, but his face was so smashed in that Simeon Wright could only identify his body by an initialed ring he wore. After that, events moved quickly, turning what might have seemed like just another murder of a black boy into a rallying cry for the civil rights movement.

Though authorities wanted to bury Emmett’s body quickly, his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, asked the authorities to send it back to Chicago. His remains were so horrifically mutilated that she opted to have a funeral with an open casket covered by a glass top, so that she could show the world what the murderers had done to her young son. Though the service was only initially written about in Jet, a weekly magazine geared toward an African American audience, the accompanying photo of Emmett’s corpse was so shocking that soon the mainstream media wrote about the story as well, and as they say, the rest is history. The outrage was so great that it inspired civil rights leaders to use it as a rallying cry.

Meanwhile, the Southern wheels of justice rolled on as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened—and, really, nothing had. At the trial, in a segregated courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, only a few witnesses described Emmett Till going into the store, and Wright identified the defendants as the men who took Emmett away. But the all-white jury rendered a not-guilty verdict in less than an hour because “the state had failed to prove the identity of the body.”11

In fact, after the two killers were acquitted and no longer subject to double jeopardy, they even justified the killing in an interview with Look magazine as an honor killing in defense of white supremacy in the South. As Milam stated in the interview, in which neither he nor Bryant showed any remorse, he had “intended only to beat the teen,” presumably to gain his submission to and acceptance of the way things were in the South. But then the pair decided to kill him, because “he showed no fear—and refused to grovel.”12

In 1956, J. W. Milam told Time magazine that Emmett Till was hopeless, and that he “liked niggas in their place . . . I know how to work ’em.” In this case, Emmett had decided on not showing the expected deference, so Milam had decided, “it was time a few people got put on notice.” The racist stated, “As long as I live, and can do anything about it, niggas are gonna stay in their place.”13