The Blood of Emmett Till(31)
At each of the annual rallies the RCNL’s Committee on Voting and Registration held workshops as part of its drive to educate and register new black voters. In many areas of Mississippi sheriffs refused to accept poll taxes from African Americans, effectively barring them from registering to vote. Courthouse clerks turned others away for no reason more compelling than their own objection to black voting. For those rare places where voting tests were reasonably administered, the RCNL conducted classes on the Mississippi state constitution so that aspiring black voters might pass. The number of registered African Americans slowly increased to a twentieth-century record of twenty-two thousand in 1954.49
The RCNL’s voter registration campaign took place against a growing white resolve to protect “the Southern way of life” from black self-assertion and federal intrusion. Even though their economic system relied at least as much on government subsidies as it did the world cotton market, Mississippi planters feared that the river of federal money would rise with strings attached. From the very instant that African Americans in the North entered FDR’s New Deal coalition, white supremacist leaders preached gloom and doom for Mississippi race relations. Persuaded that FDR’s coalition of liberals, African Americans, and labor unions imperiled “the white democracy of the South,” white diehards in Dixie launched a movement to defend segregation and preserve their political power, whether that meant a bloody battle for control of the Democratic Party or abandonment of the party of their fathers altogether. “A few far-sighted Southern Democrats realized in 1936 that the great Democratic River was beginning to split into two forks,” wrote Judge Brady in 1948 as he joined the Dixiecrat armies.
Education and voting were divisive years before the Brown decision. In 1942 the editor of the Meridian Star rejected the idea of federal aid for education because “camouflaged education help” would bring Mississippi “one step closer to the intertwined evils of Hitlerized, totalitarian rule and social equality.” Two years later a former governor of Mississippi, Mike Connor, lashed out at the Smith v. Allwright decision, which struck down the “white primary.” New Dealers, said Connor, had embraced “un-American and undemocratic philosophies of government” in an effort “to change the very form of government from a republic to an absolute, totalitarian state of communism or national socialism, which would destroy at home everything our armed forces abroad are fighting to preserve.” The national Democratic Party had fallen so low that it would “traffic with northern Negroes to place the black heel of Negro domination on our necks.” During the 1946 election the notorious senator Theodore Bilbo explained why it was crucial to stop blacks from voting, citing folk wisdom that would endure among whites well into the 1960s: “If you let a few register and vote this year, next year there will be twice as many, and the first thing you know the whole thing will be out of hand.” Bilbo offered to give county registrars, who administered the voting tests, “at least a hundred questions no nigger can answer.” For good measure he added his favorite admonition: “The proper time to manage the nigger vote is the night before the election.”50
And the warring regiments of Mississippi persisted in this slow trench warfare for many years before nine white men in black judicial robes dropped the bomb on public school segregation.
10
BLACK MONDAY
On May 21, 1954, four days after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Judge Brady wrote the second of two fervent letters to Representative Walter Sillers Jr. urging a political response. He envisioned a new political formation that would “cut across all factors, political groups, and embody leaders in every clique.” He continued, “All white men in every walk of life must be mustered out. It must be made their fight. If the Southern states do not unify in thought and action, the NAACP will emerge victorious.”1
Brady had attended New Jersey’s Lawrenceville preparatory academy and graduated from Yale University in 1927. He took his JD in 1930 from the University of Mississippi, where he taught sociology for two years, and was vice president of the state bar association.2 Ever since, he had practiced law and then donned judge’s robes in the small town of Brookhaven. In time he would serve on the Mississippi Supreme Court.3
A week after writing his letters to Sillers, Brady took the podium at a meeting of the Sons of the American Revolution in Greenwood, Mississippi, and delivered a fevered speech entitled “Black Monday.” Its central themes were the legal fallacies and political perils in Brown. The Court’s decision rested upon “Communistic” sociological arguments and the Fourteenth Amendment, he argued. The former were pernicious and irrelevant, but the amendment’s assurance of federal citizenship guaranteed in its equal protection and due process clauses “was filled with dynamite.” Federal troops and carpetbagger legislatures had imposed the unlawful Fourteenth Amendment after the War Between the States, but it had “never been of any moral force in the South.” The illegitimate ruling in Brown ignored more than half a century of legal precedent. The NAACP and the international communist conspiracy were the driving political forces behind the decision.4 Brady recalled that after the speech “several men came up and said, ‘Judge, you ought to write that in a book.’ I told several men in public office that I was going to wait until June and if nothing was done about the problem, I was going to publish it. Nothing was done, so I put it out.”5