The Blood of Emmett Till(41)
As the coercion increased, Courts scrawled a note to Evers: “I am reporting a few the Citizen Council putting the preasher on. Mr. V. G. Hargrove, Tchula, Misss. Farmer. Mr. Neely Jackson Tcula Miss. farmer. Mr. Fread Myls Belzoni Miss. merchen, Mr. Will None, planter, Belzoni, Miss., Mr. Willie A Harris, Taxie Cab oner Belzoni Miss. Mr. Gus Couters Belzoni merchen and a lot of others I dount have thire names. All these men have ben ask to get out of the NAACP. And to return thire poll tax or tare up receat. Your truley Gus Courts, 61 First St. Belzoni Miss.”51 Evers filed the letter along with several similar reports. Citizens’ Council members persisted in warning Courts to get out of Belzoni or face the consequences.
About eight o’clock on Friday night, November 25, 1955, a forty-two-year-old black woman named Savannah Luton entered Courts’s grocery store on First Street in Belzoni. “I was busy waiting on customers in my store,” Courts recalled. He greeted Luton from behind the old drink box and cash register. “I was buying a dime’s worth of coal oil and I heard this noise that sounded like firecrackers,” she said later. “I bent down to look out the window and told Mr. Courts, ‘There’s some white folks out here shooting at us.’ He didn’t even know he was shot until then.”
The shotgun had been loaded with unconventionally large buckshot, and two quick blasts splattered the upper edge of the bed of Courts’s pickup truck and sprayed irregular holes across the store’s plate glass window. When Courts touched his side his hand came away covered with blood; the slugs had caught him in his left arm and stomach. Unharmed, Luton rushed out the front door just in time to see a two-toned automobile spraying dust and gravel as it raced away toward downtown Belzoni. There was a white man at the wheel and other people in the car whom Luton couldn’t make out. Running back into the store, she found Courts fallen. He had one hand pressed up against the wound to his side and the other to the wound in his arm. Blood seeped through his fingers and dripped onto the wood floor.52
Friends and family rushed Courts to the hospital—not the local hospital nearby but the Taborian Hospital in Mound Bayou. “When I walked out to get into the car, I told my friend, Ernest White, who came to take me to the hospital, that I wanted to go to Mound Bayou hospital, which is 80 miles away. The sheriff came over in 30 minutes to my store, after I had left for the hospital. He asked my wife where I was. He said he had been over to the hospital, just two blocks away, for 30 minutes waiting for me.” When his wife said he’d gone to Mound Bayou, the officer was not pleased. “I believe they would have finished me off if I had landed up in the Belzoni hospital,” said Courts.53 Sheriff Shelton complained: “They took Courts across two counties, to 80 miles north of here, though we have the best hospital in the world and two of the best doctors.”
“I’ve known for a long time it was coming and I tried to get prepared in my mind for it,” Courts said, “but that’s a hard thing to do. It’s bad when you know you might get shot just walking around in your store.” Although it was more than a year before Courts had full use of his arm again, he recovered from the buckshot. Other wounds proved harder to heal. No one was ever charged in the case. The New York Times ran one tiny story about the murder of Reverend Lee, but no national press reported on what happened to Courts or on the wave of intimidation against black voters all over the state. U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. insisted that under federal law the Justice Department had no authority to prosecute, even though the courts had long since found that the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution created a national citizenship and so empowered the federal government to protect the right of all citizens to vote.54
Like Lee and Courts, a sixty-three-year-old African American cotton farmer named Lamar Smith decided that he would risk everything to help bring the vote to black Mississippians. About two weeks before Milam and Bryant drove to Reverend Wright’s farmhouse to take Emmett Till, Smith went to the courthouse in Brookhaven, Mississippi, to obtain more of the absentee ballots he was distributing to African Americans so that they could vote without being intimidated or attacked.55 It was ten o’clock on Saturday morning and the square was filled with people. At least three white men set upon the unarmed Smith as he crossed the courthouse lawn and beat him mercilessly. Then at least two of them held him while another fired a .38 revolver into his heart and, by one account, fired a second shot into his mouth. Dozens of people stood nearby. The sheriff was close enough to recognize at least one of the killers and to describe the bloodstains on the shirt of another. The FBI investigation stated flatly that his assailants killed Smith “in front of the sheriff.”56
Arrington High’s Eagle Eye newspaper claimed that the dozens of witnesses to the murder were “ordered to shut up their mouths.” He angrily demanded, “Was this man murdered by elected officials?”57 The front page of the Jackson Advocate, a conservative black newspaper, declared that Smith’s murder was “generally regarded as resulting from sentiment created against Negro leaders in the state by the White Citizens’ Councils.”58 Even Brookhaven’s own Judge Tom Brady acknowledged that there had been no trial in the Smith killing because no white man was willing to testify against another in the murder of a black man.59
Not all whites remained silent, however. When the sheriff would not make an arrest, despite personally witnessing the murder, District Attorney E. C. Barlow tried unsuccessfully to persuade the governor to send highway patrol officers to investigate, calling the murder “politically inspired.” The chairman of the all-white local grand jury complained bitterly in a lengthy statement to the newspapers, “Most assuredly somebody has done a good job of trying to cover up the evidence in this case, and trying to prevent the parties guilty, therefore, from being brought to justice.” Even though “there were quite a number of people alleged to have been standing around and near said killing, yet this Grand Jury has been unable to get the evidence, although it was generally known or alleged to be known who the parties were in the shooting.” Claiming to speak on behalf of the whole grand jury, the chairman raged, “We think it impossible for people to be within 20 or 30 feet of a difficulty in which one party is shot, lost his life in broad, open daylight, and nobody knows nothing about it or knows who did it.”60