The Blood of Emmett Till(27)
This kind of perverted logic, though Milam referred directly to Brown, had also motivated the bloody overthrow of Reconstruction in Mississippi in 1875, which was the last time the Magnolia State had outmatched the level of racial conflict in the state in the mid-1950s. It drove the violent massacre and coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, which served as a model for the Atlanta “Race Riot” of 1906. It sparked massive mob violence against the black community in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908, which helped inspire W. E. B. Du Bois and his white and black allies to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People the following year. It set off the slaughter in Elaine, Arkansas, in 1919; and the fiery pogroms in East St. Louis in 1917, in which perhaps 200 blacks died; and Tulsa in 1922, in which as many as 300 blacks died and 10,000 were left homeless. The logic expressed by Judge Brady and J. W. Milam was all too familiar to nearly every American with dark skin.3
Like Judge Brady, J. J. Breland, one of Milam’s attorneys and a Citizens’ Council official, exported the blame for the lynching northward. Breland told Huie that Milam and Bryant “wouldn’t have killed [Till] except for Black Monday. The Supreme Court is responsible for the murder of Emmett Till.”4 If that was indeed Milam’s thought, it wasn’t original to him, any more than it was to Breland. Southern white leaders liked to pretend that they were shocked, shocked, by the Court’s heretical ambush. For anyone who had been paying attention, however, the Court’s decision in Brown was not a surprise. White politicians howled as though Chief Justice Earl Warren had ordered the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, but the armies of segregation had seen this attack coming. “Rather than a backlash against the unthinkable,” writes the historian Jason Morgan Ward, “the segregationist movement was a coordinated assault against the foreseeable.”5
The contours of the renewed battle had been visible before World War II. As early as 1941 Mississippi’s former lieutenant governor E. D. Schneider defended the white primary and the poll tax at an African American agricultural fair in Clarksdale, promising that black people would never vote in Mississippi. The black crowd booed him loudly. Then a black newspaper editor stood and told the assembly that, in fact, black Mississippians would vote, and soon. And if necessary, he continued, blood would be shed in Mississippi as well as abroad to secure democracy. The following year a member of the Yazoo–Mississippi Delta Levee Board warned, “We are going in the future to get quite close to the time when the darkey will be protected by Federal law in his vote in the South, and we all know what that will mean in Mississippi.”6 As the Magnolia State’s own Richard Wright wrote that same year, “When one of us is born, he enters one of the warring regiments of the South.”7
Mississippi emerged as the leader of the 1948 States’ Rights Democratic Party, better known as the Dixiecrats. Led by Mississippi’s governor Fielding Wright and South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrats broke with President Harry Truman, the Democratic standard-bearer, over his support for civil rights legislation, an antilynching bill, measures to end the poll tax, and the establishment of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission. The Dixiecrat revolt of 1948 captured the electoral votes of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina and presaged the rise of a two-party South.8 Judge Brady was already a fuming Dixiecrat, calling for a new party “into whose ranks all true conservative Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, will be welcomed” to battle “the radical elements of this country who call themselves liberals.” Senator James Eastland of Mississippi termed the Dixiecrat revolt “the opening phases of a fight” for conservative principles and white supremacy, and “a movement that will never die.”9
Despite its rhetorical confidence, the segregationist movement was haunted by a disquieting sense that it no longer possessed the political high ground. Walter Sillers Jr., a Delta cotton planter who served in the Mississippi State House from 1916 to 1966, wrote to Senator Eastland as early as 1950 that the African Americans were “well ahead of us” in the battle over civil rights: “They are holding meetings every week throughout the whole Delta counties and are well organized, and should an emergency arise they know exactly where to go and what to do, while our people are disorganized and would scatter like a covey of flushed quail.”10 If Sillers overestimated the level of preparation among black Mississippians, he was right about their intentions.
One of the key figures in the African American resistance to Mississippi’s racial caste system was a World War II veteran named Amzie Moore. Nothing about Moore’s early life made it easy for him to imagine a world beyond white domination. He was born in 1912 on a cotton farm in rural Mississippi. His grandfather died at 104, dividing the land among his seven children, who promptly lost it all in the Great Depression. Amzie’s mother passed away when he was still a boy, “so my father came and picked up the two smaller children and at about fourteen I was on my own.” The abandoned youth lived hand to mouth, depending on various relatives and teachers, and was often hungry. He nevertheless graduated from high school in 1929, a rarity among his generation of African Americans in Mississippi. In 1935 the heavyset, round-shouldered Moore got a job as a janitor with the U.S. Postal Service and moved to nearby Cleveland, Mississippi. For a black man of his time this was an excellent job, and he kept it for more than thirty years. He also scrambled to make money as an entrepreneur.11