The Blood of Emmett Till(38)

Those who organized Mississippi’s effort to block blacks from voting did so without shame. The day before the murder of Emmett Till, Thomas Tubb announced that no African American would ever be allowed to vote in Clay County, where he made his home, “but we intend to handle it in a sensible, orderly manner.” Blacks “are better off” not voting, Tubb continued, than being “given a whipping like some of these country boys plan to do.”9 Ten days later Tubb insisted he knew of “no widespread or systematic effort to deny Negroes the voting right,” but a day after that denial he appointed a statewide committee “to study ways of cutting down the numbers of Negro voters.”10

Mississippi had the highest percentage of African Americans in the country and the lowest percentage registered to vote. In the thirteen counties with a population more than 50 percent African American, black people cast a combined total of fourteen votes. In five of those counties, not one African American was a registered voter; three listed one registered African American who never actually voted. In the seven counties with a population more than 60 percent black, African Americans cast a combined total of two votes in 1954.11 Even so, on April 22, 1954, the Mississippi legislature passed a constitutional amendment explicitly designed to keep black people from the polls: it required citizens wishing to vote to submit a written explanation of the state constitution to the registrar, who would determine whether the interpretation was “reasonable.”12 Seven months later, as the first Brown decision rocked the state, Mississippi voters ratified the amendment by a five-to-one margin.13 The Associated Citizens’ Councils of Mississippi, determined to block African American voting at all costs, declared that it was “impossible to estimate the value of this amendment to future peace and domestic tranquility in this state.”14

To reduce the number of black ballots, the Citizens’ Councils had relied mainly on economic pressure, but the message could arrive in considerably starker terms. On July 30, 1955, Caleb Lide, one of the tiny handful of registered voters in Crawford, received an unsigned letter threatening, “Last warning. If you are tired of living, vote and die.”15

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Despite Belzoni’s tough side, Reverend Lee’s hard work and spiritual depth helped him achieve a good life there. A gifted and fiery preacher, Lee eventually became pastor at three small churches.16 “Unlike his brethren,” wrote the renowned black journalist Simeon Booker, “he preached well beyond the range of Bible and Heaven and the Glory Road.”17 He saw nothing eternal about the Jim Crow social order, and apparently his convictions were infectious. In 1936, when he was thirty-two, he married a steady, quiet twenty-one-year-old named Rose. He and Rose ran a brisk printing business out of the rear of the small grocery store they operated in their house at 230 Hayden Street, in the heart of Belzoni’s black community, and Reverend Lee became a leader in the community. “He had a thinking ability better than most of the others,” his wife recalled, “so they came to him.”18

In the early 1950s Dr. T. R. M. Howard recruited Lee as vice president of the Regional Council on Negro Leadership. Lee’s eloquent speeches at RCNL rallies became legend. In one much-lauded address to ten thousand black citizens gathered in Mound Bayou he said, “Pray not for your mom and pop. They’ve gone to heaven. Pray that you can make it through this hell.”19 Booker called Lee “a tan-skinned, stumpy spellbinder” and found his oratory irresistible: “Backslapping the Delta farmers and giving each a sample of his fiery civil rights message, Lee electrified crowds with his down-home dialogue and his sense of political timing.”20 Many of Lee’s listeners came to regard him as the most militant preacher in the Delta.21

In 1952 and 1953, with the help of Medgar Evers, Lee and his friend Gus Courts, a grocer, organized the Belzoni branch of the NAACP. Courts became the first branch president, and Lee was soon the first black citizen registered to vote in Humphreys County since the end of Reconstruction.22 They held a number of voter registration meetings, for which Lee printed leaflets. According to Courts and Roy Wilkins, the national NAACP executive director, they managed to register roughly four hundred African Americans. When Sheriff Ike Shelton refused to accept poll tax payments from African Americans and ordered Lee to “get the niggers to take their names off the [registration] book,” Lee and Courts threatened to sue him.23

This affront brought down the wrath of the Citizens’ Council, which launched a campaign of intimidation and reprisal that soon forced virtually all black voters to remove their names from the registration rolls. By May 7 the number of African American voters in the county fell to ninety-two.24 Local white wholesalers refused to sell Courts wares for his store or to extend him credit. If he didn’t take his name off the registration list, they told him, he would lose his lease. No doubt frustrated that economic reprisals were not working, Citizens’ Council leaders next assured Lee that if the two men would simply remove their names and cease their registration efforts the Council would protect him and Courts from harm.25

The implicit threat was something to weigh soberly. White men had recently beaten two black ministers who had advocated the ballot for African Americans at Starkville and Tupelo.26 In Belzoni the NAACP’s adversaries responded to the successful voter registration drive by smashing the windshields of eighteen parked cars on a single street in the black community and shattering the windows of a number of black-owned businesses. The vandals left a note that promised, “You niggers paying poll tax, this is just a token of what will happen to you.”27 On an evening in the spring of 1955 a mob of white men swarmed Elks’ Rest, a local African American social hall, smashed up the place, destroyed equipment, tore up the checkbook, and left this note: “You niggers think you will vote but it will never happen. This is to show you what will happen if you try.”28