The Blood of Emmett Till(37)
Virtually every black activist in the state had heard the rumor of the Citizens’ Council “death list.” Arrington High, who put out a small newspaper in Jackson called Eagle Eye: The Women’s Voice, wrote on August 20, 1955, a week before the murder of Emmett Till, “Citizens’ Council members in Leflore County, ‘Eagle Eye’ alleges, met last Thursday and prepared a list of Negro men to be murdered.” High noted that his source “happens to be a peckerwood.” According to High, the “Citizens’ Council has ordered that no law enforcement body in ignorant Mississippi will protect any Negro who stands upon his constitutional rights.” He also directly addressed the white men threatening him: “To white hoodlums who are now parading around the premises of Arrington W. High, editor and publisher of ‘The Eagle Eye,’ at 1006 Maple St., Jackson, Miss.—this is protected by armed guard.”67 Frederick Sullens, editor of the Jackson Daily News, predicted, “If a decision is made to send Negroes to school with white children, there will be bloodshed. The stains of that bloodshed will be on the Supreme Court steps.”68
It was in this context that a Chicago teenager walked into Bryant’s Grocery and had his fateful encounter with Carolyn Bryant. After Till’s murder defense attorney J. J. Breland told William Bradford Huie, “There ain’t gonna be no integration. There ain’t gonna be no nigger voting.” He saw the murder as part of a larger struggle: “If any more pressure is put on us, the Tallahatchie River won’t hold all the niggers that’ll be thrown in it.”69
11
PEOPLE WE DON’T NEED AROUND HERE ANY MORE
Indifference to black lives did not begin in the twenty-first century. Nor was Mississippi entirely a foreign country to the rest of America in the 1950s. It simply did not matter to most white Americans what happened to black Mississippians; they did not know and did not want to know, and routine terrorism did not dent that indifference until the Emmett Till case. In the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, for example, one Delta legislator declared that “a few killings would be the best thing for the state.” A few judicious murders now, he suggested, “would save a lot of bloodshed later on.”1 In a speech in Greenville the president of the Mississippi Bar Association included “the gun and the torch” among the three main ways to defend segregation.2 NAACP activists in Mississippi endured scores of acts of intimidation. Whites opposed to school integration and black voting would “put the hit man on you,” Aaron Henry recalled of that era. “I could call a roll of the people who died.”3 Reverend George Lee of Belzoni, Mississippi, would be one of the first on any such roll.
In the South’s calculation it took only “one drop” of black blood to make a person black. So George Lee, born in 1902 to a white father and a black mother, was black. All Lee knew about his father was that he was a white man who lived in the Delta. Lee’s stepfather was abusive, and his mother died when he was a little boy; her sister took the boy in, and he graduated from high school, a rarity at the time.
While still a teenager Lee took off for the port city of New Orleans, two hundred miles south. He worked on the docks unloading banana boats from Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Martinique, the Windward Islands, and the Ivory Coast. In the evenings he took courses in typesetting, hoping to learn a trade that would reward his strong mind rather than employ his strong back. Deep inside, however, even before he left Mississippi, Lee had felt the tug of the Holy Spirit to become a minister. By moving to New Orleans he had “evaded” the call for several years, he later said, but he finally gave in to the Lord. In the 1930s he returned to Mississippi to accept a pulpit in Belzoni, the seat of Humphreys County.4
Belzoni was home to four or five thousand people, two-thirds of them black, nearly all of whom lived in stark poverty. Among Mississippi’s network of civil rights activists, “Bloody Belzoni” had a reputation as “a real son of a bitch town” where white lawmen policed the color line relentlessly. Whites told a journalist after the Brown decision that “the local peckerwoods” in Belzoni “would shoot down every nigger in town before they would let one, mind you, just one enter a damn white school.”5 The white manager of the local Coca-Cola bottling plant told a reporter for the New Republic, “If my daughter starts going to school with nigras now, by the time she gets to college she won’t think anything of dating one of ’em.” Like interracial dating, black voting was also a self-evident abomination: “This town is seventy percent nigra; if the nigra voted, there’d be nigra candidates in office.”6
Although in 1944 the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled the “white primary” unconstitutional, white Democrats in Mississippi continued to insist that aspiring black voters could be barred from the Democratic primary as though it were a private club. “I don’t believe that the Negro should be allowed to vote in Democratic primaries,” said Thomas Tubb, the chair of the state Democratic Executive Committee. “The white man founded Mississippi and it ought to remain that way.”7 One banner headline in the Jackson Daily News declared, “Candidates Say Delta Negroes Aren’t Democrats,” which expressed the editors’ most presentable public argument against black voting.8 This was a plain violation of both the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and a U.S. Supreme Court decision that had been in effect for more than a decade. But the government of the United States failed to see that the national honor was at stake in the white South’s open denial of citizens’ voting rights. Only the NAACP and small groups of activists objected. Most Americans, North and South, kept silent.