The Blood of Emmett Till(39)

By May 7, 1955, Lee had received countless death threats by phone and mail, including from one anonymous caller who said, “Nigger, you’re number one on a list of people we don’t need around here any more.” That night Lee drove downtown to pick up a suit from the dry cleaner’s for church the next day. It was after eleven, but relationships were informal among the town’s black merchants and Lee knew that his friend, who lived in the same building where he kept his dry cleaning shop, would not mind pulling a clean suit out of the back room.29

Heading home, Lee drove past Peck Ray, a local handyman, and Joe David Watson Sr., a gravel hauler. Both men belonged to the local Citizens’ Council. Watson had been arrested recently for shooting into a black sharecropper’s home, but District Attorney Stanny Sanders had chosen not to try the case. According to records from the FBI investigation conducted later, witnesses said “they saw two men leave a downtown street corner where they had been standing, enter Ray’s green, two-toned Mercury convertible, drive away and return shortly afterward. Several witnesses saw a convertible fitting that description following Lee with only its parking lights on.”30

As Lee neared his home in a black neighborhood, the convertible pulled up behind him. Witnesses thought one of the passengers in the car looked like Sheriff Ike Shelton.31 The first shot flattened one of Lee’s tires. Then the Mercury pulled up alongside Lee’s car, and a .20-gauge shotgun blast blew away his lower left jaw. Lee’s car careened into a nearby frame house, collapsing the porch and knocking a huge hole in the front wall. Blood pouring from his head, Lee staggered from the wreckage. A passing black taxi driver saw him collapse and whisked him off to Humphreys County Memorial Hospital, but Lee died in the backseat. A coroner’s jury found that he died from blood loss from wounds caused by about two dozen number-three buckshot.32 Yet the Jackson Clarion-Ledger’s headline the following day was “Negro Leader Dies in Odd Accident.” The FBI report on the case noted, “Sheriff I. J. Shelton made public statements that the metal fragments in Lee’s jaw were most likely fillings from his teeth.” This was a little over three months before the murder of Emmett Till.33

Less than an hour after the midnight shotgun blasts took Lee’s life, operators for Belzoni’s telephone system reportedly began telling black customers that all of the town’s long-distance lines were in use. So Lee’s friends sped north to Mound Bayou to inform Dr. Howard, who called Representative Charles Diggs in Michigan, who called the White House. Others raced to Jackson to tell Medgar Evers and A. H. McCoy, the president of the state conference of NAACP branches. Evers assembled all the known facts for the national press. “It was clearly a political assassination,” recalled Roy Wilkins at the national office, “but the local lawmen practically pretended that nothing had happened.”34 In his annual report for the Mississippi state office Evers was blunt: “[Lee’s] independent business, print shop and grocery, made it difficult to squeeze him economically, so their only alternative was to kill him.”35

McCoy called Ruby Hurley, the NAACP southeastern district director, who was on assignment in Panama City, Florida. She caught the first morning plane to Jackson, where she met Evers, who drove her south to Belzoni. Hurley noticed that Evers was unusually defiant and carried a gun. “Medgar was brand-new then and had some ideas we had to change,” she said, adding that he was “anything but nonviolent.” Seeing an unmarked sheriff’s car on their trail, Hurley decided to keep quiet about it: “I was afraid he might stop and ask the man what he was following us for.” In Belzoni they found the black community braced with rage and terror: many residents feared what might happen next, while others openly advocated revenge.36

Hurley persuaded Wilkins to have the national office match a $500 reward offered by the RCNL for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderers.37 Word came to Evers and Hurley that a man named Alex Hudson and a young female schoolteacher had witnessed Lee’s murder from a porch directly across the street. Hudson had fled to the home of relatives in East St. Louis the very next day.38 The schoolteacher “moved suddenly from her home during the night and has not been heard from since,” an NAACP investigator reported.39

While the Mississippi and New York offices of the NAACP sought evidence, Lee’s family made funeral arrangements. They originally planned to hold the services in the sanctuary of Greengrove Baptist Church, a few blocks from the Lee home; however, it became clear that the church would hold only a fraction of the two thousand mourners. So deacons moved the pews onto the church lawn, while the funeral home director had his men place the casket on the back of a large flatbed truck, which they parked against the rear wall of the brick church, where they built a rough altar and a podium for the speakers.40

Rage as well as sorrow gripped the huge crowd as Reverend W. M. Walton opened the proceedings.41 The service was interrupted several times by shouts of “He was murdered!” The mood was angry, even vindictive; Richard West, active in the RCNL and a staunch member of the Greenwood NAACP, attended the funeral carrying a .38 revolver; his wife packed a .32, and his mother carried a switchblade.42 T. R. M. Howard addressed the crowd, declaring, “We are not afraid. We are not fearful. . . . Some of us here may join him, but we will join him as courageous warriors and not as cringing cowards.” Rose Lee had ordered her husband’s casket to be open in order to refute the sheriff’s claim that he had died in an “automobile accident.” Foreshadowing the photographs that would define the Till case, pictures in Jet and various black newspapers showed Lee’s left jaw all but blasted away and the hundreds and hundreds of mourners.43 After the funeral NAACP members went back to Belzoni to hold voter registration classes.44