The Blood of Emmett Till(35)

McCoy was barely in office before the death threats began. The Jackson Daily News warned that if the NAACP persisted in pushing school integration petitions, “bloodshed” would be inevitable. After the NAACP filed its local school petition in Jackson, Ellis Wright, president of the local Citizens’ Council, snapped, “We now tell the NAACP people they have started something they will never finish.” McCoy took the U.S. Supreme Court at its word, however. He replied, “We just gave them the courtesy title of petitions. They were more in the nature of ultimatums.” If violence erupted, he assured the newspaper’s readers, black blood would not run down the streets alone: “Some white blood will flow, too.”46

The editors of the Jackson Daily News warned in a front-page editorial that McCoy had crossed a line with his defiant remarks and that “self-respecting, law-abiding, peace-loving, hardworking Negroes” would not “follow [McCoy] in an attempt to force Negro children into white schools.” They could not possibly want these radical measures. It was therefore up to this respectable class of African Americans to “openly repudiate McCoy, put a padlock in his mouth and [make] a summary end to his activities that will, if left unchecked, inevitably lead to bloodshed. . . . If not suppressed by his own race, he will become a white man’s problem.”47

The Citizens’ Councils primly disavowed the violence and the kind of threats that had worn down Stringer. Judge Brady even claimed that the Councils “were the deterrent, the one deterrent, that kept [out] the organization of mobs and the operation of lynch laws in Mississippi.”48 Their day-to-day language, however, was the language of battle. Their flyers openly reflected intimidation and threats. The national office of the NAACP granted that perhaps the Citizens’ Council did not itself order or commit acts of terrorism, violence, and murder, but it did create “the atmosphere in which it was possible for the Chicago boy, Emmett Till, to be murdered and for the perpetrators of the crime to escape justice.” The power of the Council surely encouraged terrorists to believe they could act without fear of punishment.49

Tut Patterson knew that white terrorism was endemic to the segregationist cause but dismissed occasional violence as the irresponsible errors of “certain crackpots, fanatics and misguided patriots,” for which the Citizens’ Council movement could hardly be blamed.50 In fact, the Councils claimed, their organization actually existed in large measure to avoid the clashes that the NAACP’s extremism made almost inevitable. Despite the official line, however, violence often followed when the local Council’s efforts to coerce or intimidate civil rights advocates did not have the desired effect. The Council’s relationship to violence went deeper than that, however. One of the founders and financiers of the Citizens’ Council movement said of the Till murder that it was “a shame that [Milam and Bryant] hadn’t slit open [Till’s] stomach so that his body would not have risen in the river.”51 Eight years after the murder, when a Council member murdered NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, three bank presidents in Greenwood headed the White Citizens Legal Fund that financed the defense of the killer. Stated the Council, “We do not condone the murder of Medgar Evers and, of course, we have no idea of the guilt or innocence of the accused but we feel he is entitled to a fair trial.”52 This reciprocal arrangement was transparent. When one small town debated swimming pool desegregation in the mid-1950s, a patrician Citizens’ Council member suggested, “I figure any time one of them gets near the pool, we can let some redneck take care of him for us.”53

Phillip Abbott Luce, a white scholar who infiltrated the Citizens’ Council in Mississippi soon after the lynching of Emmett Till, reported that he’d been told “the Council can do anything the Klan can do if it has to.”54 Only a few days before Till’s murder, Ruby Hurley wrote to Gloster Current, the NAACP’s national director of branches, to inform him that in the Mississippi Delta “the situation is at the point of explosion, particularly in the western part of the state, which includes the Delta.” Hurley cited the “inflammatory editorials and columns” in the Jackson Daily News. “The White Citizens’ Councils are becoming more brazen in their intimidation tactics—telephone calls, sending of hearses as was done to Jasper Mims of our Yazoo City Branch, threatening letters through the mails, circulation of the scurrilous literature enclosed etc. etc.” She noted, too, the popularity of Judge Brady’s Black Monday and the murder of a voting rights activist on the Brookhaven Courthouse lawn. “Reports from Cleveland”—Amzie Moore’s hometown—“are bad.” One of the FBI agents sent to investigate a murder in Belzoni was a close friend of Citizens’ Council officials in a nearby county, she lamented. The last sentence in her report, filed only days before the murder of Emmett Till, was this: “Something must be done to protect our people.”55

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Despite the terror of the mid-1950s, both the RCNL and the NAACP in Mississippi had some cause for modest optimism: the RCNL’s campaigns had won small victories, and their rallies attracted thousands, and NAACP membership grew steadily. Several thousand African Americans added their names to the voting rolls, swelling their number to the highest tally since the violent overthrow of Reconstruction eighty years earlier. Lawsuits and the NAACP’s long march through the nation’s courts persuaded two Mississippi governors in succession to begin to equalize teachers’ salaries and build new black schools. In 1953, a year before Brown, the state senate refused to pass a proposed constitutional amendment that would have allowed the legislature to abolish public schools should the U.S. Supreme Court mandate school desegregation. In this volatile atmosphere Brown emboldened the Mississippi NAACP to strike hard at school segregation and to demand voting rights. The white response would plunge Mississippi into violent racial battles unmatched since the bloody 1870s.