Master of the Senate (142 page)

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.

D
URING 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.

U
P 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.