Fifties (72 page)

The prosecutor, Gerald Chatham, told the court in summation there had been no need to kill Till. “The most he needed was a whipping if he had done anything wrong.” In his summation John Whitten, one of the defense lawyers, told the jury: “Your ancestors will turn over in their graves [if Milam and Bryant] are found guilty 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 jury deliberated sixty-seven minutes and then set them free. “Well,” said Clarence Strider to reporters. “I hope the Chicago niggers and the NAACP are happy.” It would have been a quicker decision, said the foreman, if we hadn’t stopped to drink a bottle of pop. Later it was said that the jury deliberately prolonged its decision at the request of sheriff-elect Harry Dogan, in order to make it look better to outsiders.

The trial was over. Milam and Bryant stood acquitted in Mississippi and convicted by most of the nation. Their white neighbors, who had stood by them during the trial, now turned on them almost immediately afterward, when the two men took money from Huie and bought themselves new cars. They were told in effect to get out of town. Milam was refused a loan by the Bank of Tallahatchie the next year, which limited his ability to rent land. The Money store was one of three owned by the Milam-Bryant family, and soon after the trial it was boycotted by blacks in the area. Within fifteen months all three stores were closed.

If Milam’s and Bryant’s trial was over, a different and larger trial had just begun. John Popham left Sumner as stunned as the local residents at the size and power of the national press there. Other events in the past had drawn a large press corps, but this was something different, Popham thought, in the talent and professionalism of the journalists. With as many racial incidents taking place throughout the South as there were, and with more surely about to happen as blacks pressed for greater freedom and whites resisted, Popham had a sense that the pace of life and the pace of change in the region was beginning to accelerate. In much of the past eight years he had worked alone, but he thought that would now be the case less and less. Something new was being created, the civil rights beat it was called, for this new and aggressive young press corps.

THIRTY

M
OSES WRIGHT HAD NOT
slept at home since the kidnapping of Emmett Till. In fact, he never even went back to his sharecropper’s shack in Money. Right after the trial, he gave away his dog, drove his car to the train station, left it there, and boarded a train to Chicago. He no longer wanted to be a terrified, celebrity witness; instead, he became one more anonymous figure among millions of other blacks who were part of one of the greatest but least reported migrations in American history. If the dramatic and historic process of ending legal segregation was by journalistic definitions a major story, the migration of poor rural blacks from the rural South to the urban North, which was taking place at the same time, was not. Journalists, as the noted
New York Times
columnist James Reston once noted, do a better job covering revolution than they do evolution. Most of the reporters from the
North who came south to cover this story arrived by airplane in whatever Southern city was momentarily under siege, rented a car, and sped off to the center of conflict. They did not, by and large, travel by bus or train; but if they had, they might have noticed another story: At the Memphis bus and train stations every day, large families of poor blacks clustered, often two or three generations huddling together. They were dressed in their best, but their poverty was plainly visible. They carried everything they owned, lugging their belongings in cardboard suitcases or wrapped in bundles of old newspapers and tied together by string; they carried food in shoe boxes. They behaved tentatively, as if they did not belong and were vulnerable to whatever authority was in charge. They went north largely without possessions and yet they left behind almost nothing.

This mass journey, which had begun at the time of World War One, marked the beginning of the end of a kind of domestic American colonialism. The other great industrial powers, like Britain and France and Holland, had established their exploitive economic system in distance places inhabited by people of color. America prided itself that it was not a colonial power, but, if fact, our colonialism was unofficial, practiced upon powerless black people who lived within our borders. When Britain and France ended their colonial rules in the middle of this century, they merely cut all ties to the regions they had exploited. In America, the exploited were American citizens living on American soil, mostly in the South. Thus a great migration began from the rural South—the colonial region—to the great metropolitan centers of the North, which they saw as a new homeland. But they came north with terrible disadvantages; most particularly, they had been denied the education that would allow them to make an easy transition to a more prosperous life.

They were going to Chicago, Detroit, Toledo, and Cleveland, where the work force had previously always been made up of immigrants—Slavs and Germans and Italians. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European immigrants had poured into America at an annual rate greater than the entire black population of the North. But when the supply of Europeans finally dried up, America’s great employers turned quickly to the blacks in the South. The migration had been going on for some four decades, accelerating greatly during World War One, when the war virtually stopped immigration. World War Two saw the next big surge as white workers left in the hundreds of thousands to fight overseas. During the thirties and forties, the political and economic establishment of the South fought back desperately to hold on to its cheap black labor
and there was an all-out effort to stop the flow North, which meant arresting, if need be, those representatives of the Northern factories who were there trying to enlist workers.

For much of the century the
Chicago Defender
was their voice. A black weekly, founded by Robert S. Abbott in 1905, it had been the driving force behind the early part of the black migration. Until then Southern blacks had had no form of public communication save word of mouth, but the
Defender
changed that. Below the Mason-Dixon line it had been regarded by whites as a subversive publication, for it printed the news, banned from Southern papers, about lynchings and murders, and it also printed help-wanted ads. If blacks joined the migration and came north, pledged Abbott, “they could get the wrinkle out of their bellies and live like men.”

Abbott and others like him believed that in the South a black man was not treated as a human but as a mere economic possession. In Chicago during World War One, he liked to report, black men just off the train went to employment shops, where the jobs paid $2 and $2.50 a day. Why, the minimum wage in the packing houses in 1918 was 27 cents an hour, soon to go to 40 cents. That was a high wage for men who were accustomed to long hours of back-breaking work for subsistence wages. A black man working on a cotton plantation might make that in a month, and even then there was a chance that his boss would somehow manage
not
to pay him and to show, through the magic of white Southern bookkeeping, that the black employee in fact owed the boss money.

Abbott caught the feeling of rage that many blacks felt about their lives, and the stories he printed, from a large number of correspondents throughout the South, told of the almost daily violent racial incidents. The word
Negro
was not used in the paper, because it was too close to the pejorative
nigger;
instead, in his pages a black man was a
race man.
Critical to his success was his skill in distributing the paper through a vast network of black Pullman car porters. There were periodic attempts on the part of local Southern officials to suppress it, and much of its circulation in rural areas was accomplished clandestinely. When Abbott visited his home in Georgia, he always went in disguise, lest he be arrested. In many parts of the South it was dangerous even to be found with a copy of the paper in one’s possession: “A colored man caught with a copy in his possession,” wrote Carl Sandburg in the
Chicago Daily News,
“was suspected of having ‘Northern fever’ and other so-called disloyalties.” Its circulation grew parallel to the migration: in early 1916, the circulation was 33,000; by 1919, it was 130,000. Abbott’s biographer
Roi Ottley thought the numbers were even higher, that by 1919 it was 230,000. It was estimated that two thirds of the readers lived outside Chicago, most of them in the rural South.

The more that white Southerners tried to suppress the
Defender,
the greater its legitimacy grew with blacks: They reasoned, and not wrongly, that what the white man feared so much and wanted to stop must contain the truth. The most important thing that Abbott did was to articulate the case for the migration from the South to the North. To Abbott, it was like the great biblical flight out of Egypt, and Ottley called it nothing less than “a religious pilgrimage.” The Great Northern Drive, Abbott called it. “Come North where there is more humanity, some justice, and fairness,” he wrote. The voyage was terrifying. Southern blacks were hardly prepared for the urban condition. They left the South, the
Defender
wrote in 1918, “with trembling and fear. They were going—they didn’t know where—among strange people, with strange customs. The people [the white Southerners] who claimed to know best how to treat them painted frightful pictures of what would befall the migrators if they left the land of cotton and sugar cane.”

As the migration gathered force, local Southern towns tried to stop it by arresting work-force recruiters. But the migration was too powerful a force for local police to stop: a work-force agent need only walk down the street of a small Southern town, never turn his head, and yet say in a low tone, “Anybody who wants to go to Chicago, see me.” That was it. They had lived close to the land, but Southern blacks were hardly rooted in any material sense; they had no homes and possessions to sell, few cars to get rid of in those days. All they had to do was pack a few belongings, some clothes, a photograph or two, and slip onto a late-night Illinois Central train to Chicago when no one was looking. So they went: first a few adventurous individuals, then whole families, church groups, sometimes it seemed, whole towns. Thanks to Abbott’s negotiations with the railroads, there were better rates on the trains for large groups. One member of a family usually had gone ahead, and when others arrived later, they at least had a room waiting. The pioneer member of each family usually knew of work.

Chicago the great railhead, became, more than any other city in the country, the beacon for black Americans during the first half of the century: It had not only steel mills and other heavy metal shops, but it had the great meat-packing houses. Often there were grisly work conditions; factories were poorly lit, too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. During World War Two, there
had been a desperate need for labor and labor agents continued to scour the South, handing out free railroad and bus tickets to prospective black employees. But it was after World War Two that the migration began to accelerate even faster. There were a number of forces contributing to the change. Some of it was the reluctance of black workers to go back to a colonial agrarian economy after serving in the Army, or perhaps black people sensed that the repeated election of Franklin Roosevelt meant they had a right to greater freedoms. But the greatest impetus was a technological innovation that ended Southern resistance overnight. In fact, the very Southerners who had fought the migration hardest suddenly wanted only to speed it up. The reason was the invention of the mechanical cotton picker.

The list of technological and scientific changes that transformed America in those years is an extraordinary one—the coming of network television to almost every single home in the country changed America’s politics, its leisure habits, and its racial attitudes; the arrival of air-conditioning opened up Southern and Southwestern regions; the early computers were transforming business and the military; the coming of jet planes revolutionized transportation. But perhaps no invention had so profound an effect on the future of American life and was written about so little as the mechanical cotton picker.

As with many inventions, many people worked on it over a long period of time and there was no single inventor. But the inventor of record is John Daniel Rust. As
Fortune
magazine noted, if Rust was not the first man to invent a cotton picker, his early prototypes were so much better than anything that had gone before that “he was the first one to show the world that the idea would work.” For more than a century, a machine to separate cotton from the boll without destroying the cotton had eluded inventors. In the end, that breakthrough was Rust’s. He was a wonderfully eccentric genius, with more than a touch of the older Henry Ford to him; he was one of those uniquely American dreamers, and for much of his career he seemed more a dreamer than an inventor.

John Rust was born in Texas in 1892, the son of a poor farmer who had fought in the Civil War. One of his jobs as a boy was to help pick the cotton on his farm; it was, he confided to his brother, Mack, the worst job in the world. He was always a tinkerer, though almost never a successful one. As
Fortune
magazine once noted of him, “at an early age he built an unworkable steam engine, later an unworkable airplane with a clockwork motor, patiently went on to invent a
cotton chopper (to thin out cotton plants) and a suction device that would not only catch boll weevils but harvest cotton bolls. None of these things quite worked out either.” But none of his early failures stopped him.

Rust spent his youth drifting: He worked as a migrant hand, and he took classes from correspondence schools on mechanical drawing and engineering. Gradually, the engine-driven cotton picker became his obsession; he knew from his own experience that there was a desperate need for one. He knew some eight hundred patents had been taken out on cotton pickers since the Civil War, none of them successful. If anything, that simply made his pursuit even more dogged. Like others, he conceived of a long spindle with teeth that would, while spinning, hit the boll and tear the cotton out. The problem was how to get the cotton off the spindle. It got caught in the machine’s teeth and remained stuck there.