Fifties (70 page)

TWENTY-NINE

B
ROWN
V.
BOARD OF
Education
had been the first great step in giving equality to blacks, but nonetheless only one of the three branches of government had acted. And yet the law, it soon became clear, was not merely an abstract concept—it possessed a moral and social weight of its own. So it was that the country, without even knowing it, had passed on to the next phase of the civil-rights struggle: education. The educational process began as a journalistic one. It took place first in the nation’s newspapers and then, even more dramatically, on the nation’s television screens. Those two forces—a powerful surge among American blacks toward greater freedom, mostly inspired by the Brown decision, and a quantum leap in the power of the media—fed each other; each made the other more vital, and the combination created what became known as the Movement. Together, the Movement and the media educated America about civil rights.

In Mississippi, the most reactionary of the Southern states, the resistance to integration was immediate and overwhelming on the part of whites. The moment the Supreme Court ruled in
Brown,
the existing white power structure moved to defy the law. White Citizens’ Councils, often made up of the most respectable people in town, were formed to stop any attempts to integrate the schools. When blacks filed petitions in several Delta towns asking the local school boards to implement the law of the land, the citizens’ councils struck back harshly. Their main weapon was economic power. For example, a local weekly, the
Yazoo City Herald,
printed the names, addresses, and phone numbers of blacks who signed such a petition, in an advertisement taken out by the local citizens’ council. The result was the complete crushing of even this most tentative gesture. The blacks who had held jobs lost them. Their credit was cut off. One grocer who had a little money in the local bank was told to take it elsewhere. Of the fifty-three people who put their names on the list, fifty-one took their names off. Even then many of them did not get their jobs back. They had strayed. There was no forgiveness. It was the same in other Delta towns.

Elsewhere, the white response was open violence. Belzoni was known in the parlance of the day as “a real son of a bitch town.” White people in other Delta towns marveled that in Belzoni “the local peckerwoods would shoot down every nigger in town before they let one, mind you just one, enter a damn white school.” The Rev. George Lee and Gus Courts, officials of the NAACP, had gotten themselves on the local voter registration list, no small achievement in itself. But when they had tried to vote in 1955, they were turned away by Ike Shelton, the sheriff, who refused to accept their poll-tax payments. Lee was a minister, and both he and Courts owned grocery stores. Lee was a man of particular courage. He seemed immune to the threats of the racists, though by local custom, people openly boasted what they would do to him if he continued his uppity ways. In Belzoni, as in many other Mississippi towns, the most violent racists frequently led dual lives: They were men who broke the law even though they were often officers of the law. No one knew this better than Lee. Nonetheless, he proceeded to threaten suit against Shelton unless the sheriff accepted his poll-tax payments in the future. With that he had crossed a critical line. There was a good deal of talk around town that something had to be done to stop him. Late on the night of May 7, 1955, Lee was driving alone in his car when he was killed. There was no autopsy. At first Sheriff Shelton said that Lee had died because he lost control of the car. The fact that
there were powder burns on Lee’s face and shotgun pellets in his car disproved that. Later, other people pieced together what had happened: Lee had been followed by another car, one of whose passengers shot out his right rear tire. As he slowed down, a second car pulled alongside and someone fired twice with a shotgun at point-blank range, blowing half his face away.

With the accident theory disproved, Sheriff Shelton told reporters that it was surely a sexual thing, that he had heard that the Rev. Lee was playing around. The murderer, he said, was surely “some jealous nigger.” No one was arrested. Though the murder seemed directly linked to the civil rights movement, the nation’s press paid no attention. A few weeks later in Brookhaven, a black man named Lamar Smith was shot down in cold blood in the middle of the day in front of the county courthouse. Smith was a registered voter who had just voted in the state’s primary election, and he had encouraged others to vote as well. A white farmer was arrested but not indicted. Again the national press did not cover the story. The traditional covenants of Mississippi seemed more powerful than the new law of the land. 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.

Then just a few weeks after Lamar Smith was murdered, Emmett Till was killed in Tallahatchie County. It was this event that at last galvanized the national press corps, and eventually the nation. Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago who had gone south for the summer; it was his second trip back to his family’s home. His mother, Mamie Bradley, worked for the Air Force as a civilian procurement officer for $3,900 a year and had already been divorced from his father when he had died during World War Two. His father, it would turn out later, much to the embarrassment of some liberal journals who had proclaimed him a war hero, had actually been hanged by his superiors for raping two Italian women and killing a third. Mamie Bradley was a native Mississippian who joined the black migration from the Deep South to the great cities of the North. As Till and his cousin Curtis Jones had prepared to return to the Delta for a visit, she warned her son that the customs were very different in rural Mississippi than in urban Chicago, where Till had grown up. He had better behave himself at all times, she warned, even if he did not feel like it. Till and Jones were staying with Curtis’s great-uncle, an aged sharecropper named Moses Wright, near Money, a hamlet on the edge of the Delta in Tallahatchie County.

Mississippi was a poor state, perennially either forty-seventh or forty-eighth in the union in education and per capita income (“Thank God for Mississippi,” officiais in Alabama and Arkansas allegedly claimed after the results of every census were published), and Tallahatchie, a county that was half Delta and half hill country, was one of the poorest areas in the state. Four fifths of its inhabitants earned under two thousand dollars a year. The educational levels were the third worst in the state. The average white adult had completed only 5.7 years of school, and the average black only 3.9. The largest town was Charleston, one of its two capitals, which had 2,629 people.

Emmett Till was rather short but already possessed the body of a man and weighed 160 pounds. It was said by some who knew him that he was a sharp dresser and perhaps a little cocky. Neither of these qualities seemed criminal back in Chicago, but in Money, Mississippi, they were the kind of things that could easily get a young black in trouble. On Wednesday evening, August 24, 1955, Till and Jones drove in Moses Wright’s 1946 Ford to a little grocery store called Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market. Indistinguishable from a thousand other tiny stores in the Delta whose customers were almost exclusively poor blacks, it sold fatback, snuff, and canned goods. Most of the sales were on credit. Business picked up on Saturday, when the blacks left the plantations and came in to do their meager shopping. The store, which had recently come on hard times because of increased federal food aid to blacks, was run by Roy and Carolyn Bryant, white people so poor that they did not even have their own car.

Even by Mississippi standards, the Bryants’ life was hard. Roy Bryant worked as a trucker with his half brother, J. W. Milam, carting shrimp from the Gulf Coast to Texas, while Carolyn ran the store. The feelings about blacks and white women being what they were, there was a strict rule that Carolyn Bryant was not to be in the store alone at night by herself. Moreover, when her husband was away, she and her children were to stay with in-laws. She was twenty-one years old that summer, a pretty high-school dropout from nearby Indianola. “A crossroads Marilyn Monroe,” the French newspaper
Aurore
called her.

The initial incident is still the subject of some debate. Apparently, on Thursday Till and his cousin were playing with some boys outside the store. According to Jones, at one point Till pulled a photo of a young white girl from his wallet and boasted that she was his girlfriend. It was regarded by the others merely as the boast of a
city slicker to his country cousins. At that point one of the other youths said that there was a white woman inside the store—if Till was so good with white women, why didn’t he go in and talk to her? Emmett Till did. According to some accounts, he whistled at Carolyn Bryant; according to others, he bought two cents’ worth of bubble gum and as he left, he grabbed her, suggesting that they get together and that he had had white women back up north. According to the testimony of Mrs. Bryant herself during the trial (heard with the jury out of the room because it was so inflammatory in nature, it was disallowed by the judge), he grabbed her wrist and then made a lewd suggestion. “Don’t be afraid of me, baby. I been with white girls before,” she quoted him as saying. Then he left. An older black man who was playing checkers outside knew at once that something was desperately wrong, and he told Jones and Till that the woman would come out after them with a pistol and blow Emmett’s brains out. The two quickly jumped in the car and drove away. As they did, Carolyn Bryant came out of the store looking for Emmett Till.

Mrs. Bryant told her sister-in-law, Juanita Milam, J. W.’s wife, what had happened. The women, fearing the consequences might turn violent, at first decided not to tell their husbands. Roy Bryant did not get home from his shrimp run until about 5
A.M.
Friday. By then it was clear within the small universe of rural Tallahatchie that this was a major incident. The blacks were talking about it among themselves. Some relatives were already telling Till to get out of town as quickly as he could, that he was not safe. When Roy Bryant got to the store on Friday afternoon, a black outlined what had happened. In almost any other region of the country the incident would have passed quickly; but in the deep South a deadly serious code had been violated. Bryant would have been regarded as a lesser man had he not stood up for his woman and his own kind; the shame would be his.

Bryant and Milam were not men to cross anyway. Milam, who was six feet two inches and weighed 235 pounds, was nicknamed Big. A highly decorated veteran of World War Two, he was considered even meaner and more dangerous than Bryant. Everyone locally tried hard not to cross the two. Because he had no car, Roy Bryant told Milam that he would need his help. Could Milam come by with the pickup truck later? At first Milam balked. Saturday, he said, was the only day he could sleep late. Then Bryant told him what had happened. Milam was enraged. He said he would be by early on Sunday morning. He drove home, pondered what had happened, and decided not to go to bed. He packed his .45 Colt automatic
pistol, drove by Bryant’s house, and woke him. Bryant got his pistol, and off they went to Preacher Wright’s house. There they demanded that Wright give up “the boy from Chicago.” One of the two men, Wright later testified, asked him how old he was. Wright said he was sixty-four. “If you cause any trouble,” the white man responded, “you’ll never live to be sixty-five.”

There is a relatively clear picture of what happened next, thanks not only to several black witnesses who, despite the threats against them, came forward to testify, but also because remarkably enough, Bryant and Milam later sold their version of the story to a somewhat roguish journalist named William Bradford Huie. Huie, who was considered more talented than respectable by many of his peers (whom he regularly scooped), represented
Look
magazine. And for the sum of about four thousand dollars, the two men, who had never taken the stand at their own trial, told the inside story of what had happened that fateful night.

Huie, who specialized in such eccentric journalism, was from Alabama. Shrewd, iconoclastic, he was proud of the fact that he was not, as he liked to point out, a liberal. He was looking for a story, not a cause. He had gone to Sumner after the trial, hoping to speak to a few of the defense attorneys and thereby piece together what had actually happened. He and the white Mississippi defense team had played cat and mouse for a while and shared more than a few drinks. One of the defense attorneys, John Whitten, said that he didn’t know if the two men committed the crime. His partner, J. J. Breland, was more outspoken. Both men, he told Huie, were nothing but rednecks and peckerwoods. Bryant, he said, was a “scrappin’ pine-knot with nuthin’.” As for Milam, Breland said, “We’ve sued Milam a couple of times for debt. He’s bootlegged all his life. He comes from a big, mean, overbearing family. Got a chip on his shoulder. That’s how he got that battlefield promotion in Europe; he likes to kill folks. [But] hell, we’ve got to have our Milams to fight our wars and keep the niggahs in line.” The lawyers had cooperated, Breland told Huie, because they wanted the rest of the country to know that integration was not going to work: “The whites own all the property in Tallahatchie County. We don’t need the niggers no more. And there ain’t gonna be no integration. There ain’t gonna be no nigger votin’.
And the sooner everybody in this country realizes it, the better.
”

With that, the lawyers gave Huie access to the two men and told Milam and Bryant to tell Huie what had happened. Huie explained to them that because they had been acquitted, they could never be tried again. They were free men and his project would in no way
change that. Then he suggested that he write an article based on their version of the events. Because the article would surely libel them—it would portray them as murderers—Huie said he would agree to make them a libel settlement in advance of four thousand dollars. This was not a payoff for their story, he emphasized. But just in case a film was made and the film libeled them as well, he made sure that they signed away the rights for would-be film libel, too. This was one of the most intriguing examples of checkbook journalism on record, and many people were appalled. “Others,” Huie noted, “find this sort of thing distasteful and I have not found it particularly pleasing.” Nevertheless, Huie hung around and talked with the two men over four nights, boasting to his editors, “I am capable of drinking out of the same jug with Milam and letting him drink first.” Almost a decade later he would use the same method to get the cooperation of the two men who killed three young civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi.