The Blood of Emmett Till(30)

Soon after he graduated from Alcorn, Medgar renewed an acquaintance with T. R. M. Howard and became a sales representative for Howard’s Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company. He and his bride moved to Mound Bayou, the historic all-black community in the Delta. His new job required he drive the lonely roads of the Delta, and he became sharply aware of the harsh lives of Mississippi’s black sharecropping families. “He saw whole families there picking cotton, living like slaves,” Charles recounted. The Evers brothers came to believe that black Mississippians’ suffering was the result of economic exploitation, the threat of physical violence from whites, and the denial of their right to the ballot. “Medgar vowed to improve these people’s lives,” said his brother.34

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Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard was the tall, light-skinned head of surgery at Mound Bayou’s Taborian Hospital, whose all-black staff served the black community. No civil rights advocate in the state of Mississippi could match Howard’s charisma, charm, and wealth. In addition to his plantation he owned a housing construction firm, a beer garden and restaurant, some livestock, and an insurance firm. He could afford servants and chauffeurs; pheasants, quail, and hunting dogs; and a fleet of fine automobiles, as well as a Thompson submachine gun and a number of other weapons. These were simple acknowledgments of his having achieved stature and influence in a society that demanded he never wield it. “One look,” wrote Myrlie Evers, “told you he was a leader: kind, affluent, and intelligent, that rare Negro in Mississippi who had somehow beaten the system.”35

Howard recruited Amzie Moore and a few others to go into business with him. According to Moore’s canceled checks, he invested $1,000 in the Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company in 1951, when Howard founded the company. Within a couple of months Moore was appointed to Magnolia Mutual’s board of directors, along with Aaron Henry. Soon Medgar Evers joined them.36 As ever among Mississippi’s black leaders, economics and politics were not far apart.

On the morning of December 28, 1951, Howard, Moore, and Henry, among others, founded the Delta Council of Negro Leadership, soon renamed the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), “to guide our people in their civic responsibilities regarding education, registration and voting, law enforcement, tax-paying, the preservation of property, the value of saving, and to guide us in all things which will make us stable, qualified, conscientious citizens, which will lead to first class citizenship for Negroes in the Mississippi Delta and the State of Mississippi.” Moore became the first vice chairman and Howard the founding president. Henry called the RCNL a kind of “homegrown NAACP.”37

The RCNL’s focus on what Moore called “the changing of the economic standpoint,” however, differentiated it from the NAACP, which downplayed economic development in favor of civil rights.38 The RCNL billed itself as an organization “for the common good of all citizens in the Delta area and state, regardless of race or creed.”39 It was trying to present to its white neighbors a more acceptable face than the “radical” NAACP.40 Though in the early days of the RCNL economic development was the first concern, civic questions—voting, police brutality, and the indignities of segregation—quickly emerged. Moore later claimed the RCNL ultimately had 100,000 members from forty counties in Mississippi alone; these included numerous professional people, “principals of schools, people of the Department of Agriculture, teachers.”41

Evers soon became the RCNL’s program director, playing a key role in the 1952 campaign targeting restroom facilities in service stations. African Americans in Mississippi knew the dangers and indignities that confronted blacks on the highways of the South. Most white-owned establishments along the highway marked their public restrooms “White only” and offered no facilities for blacks. So African American women, children, and men had to take to the roadside woods and thickets to relieve themselves or wait uncomfortably until they got where they were going. If that were not enough, Mississippi state troopers were well known to treat black motorists with a lack of courtesy that often extended to outright brutality. Therefore the first crusade of the RCNL was for equality on the public roads and featured the slogan “Don’t Buy Gas Where You Can’t Use the Restroom.”42 Evers and Howard paid a black printer in Jackson to produce tens of thousands of bumper stickers emblazoned with the phrase, and, according to his brother, Evers “gave out that bumper sticker to hundreds of Negroes statewide—whoever would take one.”43 “As time went by,” Myrlie wrote later, “Medgar and I would see little bumper stickers with those words on the usually beat up automobiles of Delta Negroes.” Here was a portent of all that was to come.44

The RCNL’s crusade mobilized large numbers of African Americans, who declined to buy gasoline from service stations that offered them no facilities. Though technically the protest fit neatly inside the “separate but equal” system of Southern segregation, African Americans’ self-assertion violated the social arrangements that segregation was fashioned to teach and defend. Victory represented a crack in the old order: most white-owned service stations soon chose to provide segregated restrooms, and many even posted signs announcing “Clean Rest Room for Colored.”45

As impressive as these victories must have seemed to blacks in the Delta in the early 1950s, the RCNL’s stupendous rallies in Mound Bayou were its trademark. Under a massive circus tent on Howard’s plantation, thousands of African Americans gathered to hear national speakers and enjoy renowned musical artists. Literally tons of ribs and chicken were served. At the RCNL’s first annual conference in 1952, Representative William Dawson from Chicago became the first black congressman to speak in Mississippi since Reconstruction, addressing a crowd of seven thousand. The great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson appeared alongside him.46 At the RCNL’s third annual meeting, in 1954, only ten days before his historic victory in Brown, Thurgood Marshall spoke to roughly eight thousand attendees, accompanied by eight school bands and the sixty-piece marching band from Tennessee A&I State University, which led the “Great Freedom Parade” down Main Street while Howard and Marshall waved from a convertible. That evening’s panel discussion in the big tent was “The Negro in an Integrated Society.”47 In 1955 Ebony featured a photograph of the circus tent with thirteen thousand assembled beneath it to hear the newly elected black congressional representative Charles Diggs from Detroit.48