The Blood of Emmett Till(32)

Brady stretched his oration to ninety-seven pages by adding a generous slathering of white supremacist clichés disguised as scientific facts and paranoiac ravings dressed up as patriotic tub-thumping. Like most similar fare, its driving engine was the gnawing terror of “miscegenation” between black men and white women. The speech and its pumped-up sequel inspired the founding of the Associated Citizens’ Councils, which published the speech in July as a booklet titled Black Monday: Segregation or Amalgamation. America Has Its Choice.6 Florence Mars, a Mississippi native who attended the trial of Emmett Till’s murderers, called it “a remarkable document, not only because of its large impact in the fight against complying with the decision but also because [among white Mississippians] its views on race were widely accepted at face value for years.”7 Its circulation throughout the Deep South arguably made it the most influential political statement of the white South in the wake of Brown, particularly since it became the founding handbook and doctrinal scripture of the Citizens’ Council movement.8

The imagined beastly lust of black men for white women seized Brady’s pornographic political imagination, and the unsullied Southern white woman became the most important symbol of white male superiority.9 “The loveliest and purest of God’s creatures, the nearest thing to an angelic being that treads this celestial ball is a well-bred, cultured Southern white woman or her blue-eyed, golden-haired little girl,” he wrote. “The maintenance of peaceful and harmonious relationships, which have been conducive to the well-being of both the White and Negro races of the South, has been possible because of the inviolability of Southern womanhood.”10

To that very day, insisted Brady, the hope of black citizens lay in an America ruled by an unchallenged white supremacy. “The date that the Dutch ship landed on the sandy beach of Jamestown was the greatest day in the history of the American negro.”11 Their white benefactors forced the African slaves “to lay aside cannibalism” and their other “barbaric savage customs.” The enslavers gave the enslaved a language, moral standards, and a chance at Christian salvation, although the African American had never absorbed any of them fully enough to transcend his primitive nature. “The veneer has been rubbed on, but the inside is fundamentally the same. His culture is superficial and acquired, not substantial and innate.”12 Brady declared, “You can dress a chimpanzee, housebreak him, and teach him to use a knife and fork, but it will take countless generations of evolutionary development if ever before you can convince him that a caterpillar or a cockroach is not a delicacy.” The chimpanzees were not alone in their uncivilized shortcomings. “Likewise the social, political, economic and religious preferences of the negro remain close to the caterpillar and the cockroach.”13

The evils of “amalgamation” with this inferior race justified extreme authoritarian measures in defense of white supremacy. Brady’s prescription included the abolition of public schools, if necessary; the intimidation of rebellious African Americans by economic reprisals; and the institution of special courts to try and punish “all undesirables, perjurers, subversives, saboteurs and traitors.”14 Not to fight the Supreme Court’s usurpation of the Constitution “is morally wrong and the man who fails to condemn it and do all that he can to see that it is reversed is not a patriotic American.”15 It was not the first or last time an elected Southern official in the grip of racist outrage painted breaking the law as patriotism, but the Cold War gave Brady a new set of brushes. He cast the broader cause as “stopping and destroying the Communist and Socialist movements in this country.” Race agitation was a tool of the “Red Conspiracy,” a means to an end “in the overall effort to socialize and Communize our Government.”16

Some years afterward Robert “Tut” Patterson, at thirty-two the first executive secretary of the Citizens’ Council, told Judge Brady that his decision to devote the rest of his days to fighting desegregation came after he read Black Monday. A cotton planter and cattle rancher from Holly Ridge, Mississippi, Patterson penned a protest letter that helped inspire the founding of the Citizens’ Council. “I, for one, would gladly lay down my life to prevent mongrelization,” he wrote. “There is no greater cause.” He felt that those who shared his point of view faced formidable adversaries but would triumph in the end. “If every Southerner who feels as I do, and they are in the vast majority, will make this vow, we will defeat this Communistic disease that is being thrust upon us.”17

The author of Black Monday had watched integration coming for a long time, but the menace grew closer with every passing year. On June 5, 1950, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Sweatt v. Painter that the University of Texas Law School had to admit African Americans because no separate law school the state might build would equal the state university’s law school in prestige and opportunity. On the same day the Court ruled in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents that the University of Oklahoma Law School could not simply segregate black students inside the same law school.18 Representative William Colmer of Mississippi replied, “It means there will be an ever increasing intermingling of Negroes and whites in public places. It is the forerunner of a final decision by the Court at a not too distant date, denying segregation in all public institutions, both State and Federal.”19

Mississippi’s white political elite had anticipated the Brown decision in 1954. That spring the state legislature put forward an “equalization” program for teachers’ salaries, bus transportation, and school buildings but delayed the program’s launch until after a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court; any ruling along the lines of Brown would kill it. The school budget normally accounted for a two-year period, but in 1954–55 the immediate funding applied for only that year; the way forward would become clear with the Court’s decision, they reasoned. At this late date, in other words, they offered to comply with the 1896 “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson if the Court would be so kind as to avoid ruling against them in Brown. That they could in no way afford to equalize black and white schools without an unthinkable tax hike was beside the point.20