The Blood of Emmett Till(28)

To Moore the color line in Mississippi seemed so stark and inexorable as to seem the very will of the Creator. “For a long time,” he remembered, “I had the idea that a man with white skin was superior because it appeared to me that he had everything. And I figured if God would justify the white man having everything, that God had put him in a position to be the best.”12 He told an interviewer, “I just thought [whites] were good enough, that God loved them enough, to give them all these things that they had. And that, evidently, there had to be something wrong with me.”13

Moore’s deeply internalized sense of white supremacy never precluded his devoted hope that Mississippi blacks would one day rise to economic self-sufficiency and equal citizenship. When the freedom movement began to stir, Moore heard it as a call to arms. His “first knowledge of the freedom movement” came in 1940, when he joined several thousand African Americans to talk about agricultural modernization, school equality, and economic development. “Some 10,000 living in the Delta section in Mississippi gathered for a mass meeting,” one of his colleagues recollected in a letter written twenty-five years later. “At that time we were pulling for the ‘separate but equal’ philosophy. Schools were separate but not equal.” Speakers came from Tuskegee Institute, Alcorn College, and Washington, D.C.14 Moore remembered the meeting at Delta State College as “our first awakening” and “the beginning of the change.”15

Like the African Americans who planned the meeting at Delta State, Moore defined racial uplift as entrepreneurial success: it wasn’t just the nearest weapon to hand; it was among the most powerful. The year after the meeting Moore became the first African American around Cleveland to get a Federal Housing Authority loan: “I started out buying lots, building my first house in 1941, giving it bathroom facilities and everything there, gas, all the conveniences because I had to convince myself that I had the capability to do it.”16 He built his own brick house at 614 South Chrisman Street, in the middle of Cleveland’s teeming “Low End” black business district. “Amzie,” recalled Charles McLaurin, one of the many young civil rights workers Moore influenced, “was middle-class.”17

World War II interrupted Moore’s ascent in 1942, when he was drafted at age thirty. He was quickly introduced to the rude truth that a middle-class black man from Cleveland, Mississippi, was to the vast majority of his fellow Americans always first and foremost just a black man. “I really didn’t know what segregation was like before I went into the Army,” he recalled. At bases all over the country he experienced the segregation and mistreatment of black soldiers.18 And he resisted with some success. Matthew Skidmore, who served with him in segregated units, including at Walterboro Army Airfield in South Carolina, wrote a letter to Moore in 1955 after he saw a photograph of his old comrade doing civil rights work in Mississippi: “Reading Ebony Magazine, I saw your picture and why it was there. Remember how we fought racial prejudice, especially in South Carolina? Remember how we won?”19 In another letter his old friend reminded Moore of various episodes in their battles against white supremacy—“the theater incident” and “the busses.” He wrote: “Remember we couldn’t use the facilities of that Tropical Club on the base? Maybe you don’t, but all that was corrected. Perhaps you don’t remember, but the mayor promised that the white people in his little town would be courteous and respectful.”20

What Moore remembered more clearly were the endless slights, insults, and even killings that occurred during his time in the service: “Everywhere we went, we were faced with this evil thing—segregation. If we were here fighting for the four freedoms that Roosevelt and Churchill talked about, then certainly we felt that the American soldier should be free first.”21 Unlike mustered white soldiers, black soldiers encountered the fight for democracy well before they shipped overseas. Moore found the ironies and idiocies of his racial predicaments nearly unendurable. “Here I am being shipped overseas, and I’ve been segregated from this man whom I might have to save or he save my life. I didn’t fail to tell it.”22

Ironically the military authorities selected Moore to sell his African American compatriots on their stake in the outcome of the war. Stationed with the Tenth Air Force in Myitkyina, Burma, Moore traveled throughout South Asia speaking about democracy and the war. “We had to counteract this Japanese propaganda by giving lectures to our soldiers. That was my job. We were promised that after the war was over, things would be different, that men would have a chance to be free. Somehow or other, some of us didn’t believe it.”23 Whether or not Corporal Moore managed to convince any of the black troops, or even himself, that the war for democracy included them, too, his travels all over the United States and in Mexico, South Asia, China, Japan, and Egypt enlarged his perspective on the freedom struggle in Mississippi. “I think what God really did with me, in this particular thing, was put me on a ship and send me around the world. And let me live in different environments and be in contact with different people and to really and truly find out what was behind it.”

When his unit was shipped from California to India, this descendant of slaves found himself walking one day beside the Great Temple in Calcutta. When he saw the ancient splendor and “people dying in the streets and people walking by them like they aren’t even there,” he believed that the wisdom that built that venerable civilization had “turned backwards” and the old regime had collapsed. “You can’t set up an aristocracy and expect it to float,” he ruminated. For every social order that goes up, Moore became convinced, “there’s a coming down, and like the great wheel of time every spoke comes on over and then it goes down in the dirt.” In that moment his mind turned to America—and no doubt to Mississippi. “We will have to get along with each other in this country because that’s the only way you can survive another hundred or two or three hundred years.”24