The Blood of Emmett Till(29)

When the U.S. Army issued an honorable discharge to Corporal Amzie Moore on January 17, 1946, at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, he had a four-hour bus ride to consider how he would spend the rest of his days.25 He planned to settle down and make a life for himself, but he was angry at the contradiction of fighting for human freedom with a Jim Crow army. He wondered whether there was any truth in what he had been instructed to tell the black troops about the postwar era.26 When he arrived in Cleveland, he got his answer: whites there had organized a “home guard,” ostensibly “to protect the [white] families against Negro soldiers returning home.” Over the next few months a number of black veterans in the town were killed. “I think the purpose of the killing was to frighten other Negroes,” Moore attested. “It certainly had its psychological effect.”27

Moore remained determined to see his wartime propaganda about democracy move the country beyond empty rhetoric. With this in mind he set out to build a statewide network of African American activists to pursue the right to vote. Nothing else would be possible without it, he believed, and anyone who could count could see that black votes in the Delta would change things.28 By late August 1955 Moore was a successful businessman running a gas station, beauty parlor, and grocery store. He was also the president of the Cleveland, Mississippi, branch of the NAACP, which had over five hundred members, and was an established force among black civil rights workers in the South.

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According to Moore, it was shortly after J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant kidnapped Emmett Till that Moses Wright first called him. Like Reverend Wright, Moore’s first response was hope: “I thought to myself, well, he’s probably around Greenwood there somewhere. I never thought anybody was going to lynch him. [A few days later], I got another call.” By that time the teenage fisherman had come across Emmett’s body in the currents of the Tallahatchie. Now harder choices needed to be made.

Moore set out for Money even though friends told him, “?‘You’d better not go, they watching out for you, they’re going to kill you.’ But I went over there. And then when I got to Money nobody would tell me where Mr. Wright lived. He lived out from Money, but nobody would, they claimed they didn’t know where he was. So I left and come back.” This was far from the end of Moore’s involvement in the case, however.29 Over the previous twenty-four hours decisions had been made and events set on a course that would sweep up Mississippi and Chicago, and eventually the United States and the world.

The Till case affected everyone in Moore’s activist network in Mississippi, many of whom were also World War II veterans unwilling to accept the old ways after a costly global crusade, ostensibly for universal democracy. They became what the historian John Dittmer calls “the shock troops of the modern civil rights movement.”30 Many became NAACP leaders, especially after the Brown decisions of 1954 and 1955 shone a spotlight on school desegregation and lifted up new leaders who rejected the “separate but equal” framework. Moore’s network included Medgar Evers; E. J. Stringer, a Columbus dentist who would be elected president of the state conference of NAACP branches in 1954; Aaron Henry, a druggist from Clarksdale who would become an important civil rights leader; the voting rights advocates Reverend George Lee and Gus Courts; and Dr. T. R. M. Howard, a charismatic and daring physician from Mound Bayou.31

Few were more involved than the intelligent, serious-minded Medgar Evers. His military service in the thick of the European theater during World War II had given him gravity beyond his years. “He went to the army and fought for this country and came out and we wasn’t enjoying the freedom we fought for,” his brother Charles observed. For Medgar voting was the central litmus test of democracy, especially in Mississippi. “Our only hope is to control the vote,” he said.

In 1946 Medgar and Charles and four friends registered to vote at the courthouse in Decatur, Mississippi. When they returned to cast their ballots in the Democratic primary on July 2, however, a small white mob blocked the courthouse steps. “When we got into [the clerk’s] office, some 15 or 20 white men surged in behind us,” Medgar recalled. Menaced with guns as they were leaving, they went home, got their own guns, and returned to the courthouse. Leaving their weapons in the car, the Evers brothers and their companions tried to walk in again, but once more the way was blocked. “We stood on the courthouse steps, eyeballing each other,” Charles recalled. Finally Medgar decided to avoid what seemed inevitable bloodshed and said, “Let’s go, we’ll get them next time.” “More than any other single thing,” Charles claimed, “that day in Decatur made Medgar and me civil rights activists.”32

Medgar’s first order of business was to use his GI Bill benefits to attend college. He enrolled at Alcorn State College that fall of 1946. Muscular and athletic, he played running back on Alcorn’s football team. He also served as editor of the Greater Alcorn Herald and was elected president of the junior class. Evers worked hard, made good grades, labored over his vocabulary, and became a faithful reader of newspapers. He met and married Myrlie Beasley from Vicksburg, a brilliant and beautiful young woman who would become a full partner in his civil rights work. According to a friend, he also joined a monthly interracial discussion group on world affairs at all-white Millsaps College. He developed a keen admiration for Jomo Kenyatta, leader of the Kenyan anticolonial struggle against the British; in fact, in 1953 Medgar and Myrlie christened their son Darrell Kenyatta Evers. Kenyatta led an armed revolution, and Medgar’s admiration suggests that he was willing to consider any means necessary to overthrow white supremacy in Mississippi. For African Americans in the South the means of effecting change were always limited and fraught with risks, but most were at least considered, their consequences carefully weighed. The historian Charles Payne writes that Medgar “thought long and hard about the idea of Negroes engaging in guerrilla warfare in the Delta” but ultimately could not square it with his religious beliefs.33