The Blood of Emmett Till(40)
On May 22 the NAACP sponsored a memorial rally that packed the Elks’ Rest in Belzoni with a crowd estimated at more than a thousand. Wilkins came from New York to speak for the national organization, and Howard told the audience, “There are still some Negroes left in Mississippi who would sell their grandmamas for half a dollar, but Rev. Lee was not one of them.” McCoy challenged the local lawmen who had watched them file into the hall: “Sheriff Shelton is sitting outside that door right now, he and his boys. Come back from his fishing just so he could watch this meeting. I say he might better be investigating the murder of the Rev. Lee than watching this meeting or taking his little tin bucket with some bait in it and going fishing. The sheriff says that the Rev. Lee’s death is one of the most puzzling cases he’s ever come across. The only puzzling thing about it is why the sheriff doesn’t arrest the men who did it.”45
Except, of course, that it wasn’t the least bit puzzling.
Had District Attorney Sanders prosecuted Joe David Watson Sr. for shooting into the home of a black sharecropper, George Lee might not have been killed. By failing to act, Sanders practically green-lighted the murder, which he also declined to prosecute. The message to the community was clear: anyone pushing for black voting rights could be killed with impunity. According to a 1956 FBI memo, Sanders acknowledged that the bureau’s investigation of the case “conclusively demonstrates that criminal action was responsible for Lee’s death,” but he maintained that the identity of the assailants was not “sufficiently established by usable evidence to warrant presentation to the grand jury.” To proceed was pointless, he told FBI agents, because a Humphreys County grand jury “probably would not bring an indictment, even if given positive evidence.” Besides, race relations in Belzoni had settled down after the murder, and to reopen the case would only stir things up. The Justice Department declined to file civil rights charges, claiming that there was insufficient evidence that the murder bore any relation to voting rights. FBI agents returned to Watson his .20-gauge and shells.46
? ? ?
The morning after Lee’s murder was Sunday, Mother’s Day, but Gus Courts’s grocery store was open. After losing his closest friend, it must have felt like a kick in the stomach to see Percy Ford of the Belzoni Citizens’ Council leaning over the counter.
“They got your partner last night,” Ford reportedly said.
“Yes, you did,” Courts replied accusingly.
“If you don’t go down and get your name off the register, you are going to be next. There is nothing to be done about Lee because you can’t prove who did it.” Ford then spoke even more bluntly: “Courts, they are going to get rid of you. I don’t know how and I don’t want to know how.”
The sixty-five-year-old grocer told Ford that he would as soon die a free man as live a coward. In any case, Courts said, he did not intend to take his name off the books. It had taken too much effort to get it there in the first place.
The Citizens’ Council was as good as its word. Courts’s landlord soon raised his rent so high he was forced to move his store. Planters refused to hire any of the day laborers he hauled in at harvest time with his bus and truck service. Two wholesale grocers canceled his credit. Courts paid cash for two weeks, after which the wholesalers refused to sell him any more merchandise. He had to drive the hour and a half to Jackson himself to buy provisions.47
In Humphreys County the Council gave lists of registered African Americans to local white businesses. If an employer or prospective employer found a black person’s name on the list, Evers explained, “he’d say, ‘we can’t employ you until you get your name off this list.’?” With this method they knocked registration down to about ninety names, and against this harder core of black voters the Council brought other types of pressure. Evers observed that Sunflower County had lost all 114 black voters due to these methods, and Montgomery County lost all 26. Asked if those numbers represented the goals of the Citizens’ Council, Robert Patterson claimed, “We aren’t against anyone voting who is qualified under our new registration law.”48
By the first day of August, the day before the 1955 Democratic primary, only twenty-two African American voters remained on the books in Humphreys County, most of them terrified. “I was notified that very next morning that the first Negro who put his foot on the courthouse lawn would be killed,” Courts recounted. Nearly all of the black voters still on the books met in Courts’s store later that day to talk over what they should do. “I told them that we would go down to vote, if they were willing to go. They said they were, and we went down to vote.”
Courts continued, “After we had gotten to the registrar’s office, we were handed a sheet of paper which contained 10 questions. They told us we could not have the ballots until we had answered the questions.” The first question asked if they were members of the Democratic Party. “The next question was, ‘Do you want your children to go to school with the white children?’ The next question was, ‘Are you a member or do you support the NAACP?’?” The registrar refused to accept any of their votes. Not one black ballot was counted in Humphreys County in 1955.49
Subsequently Courts and four of his comrades wrote and sent a petition to Governor Hugh White asserting that their voting rights were being denied and their lives threatened and asking for protection of both their ballots and their bodies. They sent a copy to the U.S. Department of Justice. The response was chilling. “Now, the Governor sent that petition back to Belzoni to the White Citizens’ Council,” Courts explained. Percy Ford showed the original petition to all five signatories, one by one. “You signed this petition and sent it to the governor,” Courts remembered Ford telling him. “Now you see how much protection you have gotten from the Governor.”50