The Blood of Emmett Till(64)

Other white Mississippians seemed to believe that communist agents were responsible for promoting racial division. “Could there be any doubt that this Mississippi murder—from the weeks or months before young Till made his visit to the South—was communist-inspired, directed and executed?” wrote a woman from Memphis. “Did not some communist agent or agents murder the young Negro after the white men turned him loose?”27 A well-dressed local woman in Sumner told the television cameras, “I’m almost convinced that the very beginning of this was by a communistic front.”28 Rumors also flew that young Till had been found alive in Chicago, Detroit, or New York.29

William Faulkner, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist and Mississippi’s most celebrated son everywhere but in his home state, was of two minds, one drunk and one sober. He understood as few did the deep and global implications of the case. Asked to comment during a sojourn in Rome, he cited the “sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Negro.” In the perilous atomic age, amid the rise of anticolonial struggles, Faulkner said, America’s Cold War competition with the Soviet Union meant that the nation could no longer afford racial atrocities and patent injustices. The Till case was the absolute nadir. “Because if we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive and probably won’t.”30

Faulkner’s eloquent moral resolve apparently dissolved in champagne when a reporter interviewed him in Paris a few months later. Then he declared, “The Till boy got himself into a fix and he almost got what he deserved.” The interviewer asked if the murder would have been justified had Till been an adult. “It depends,” Faulkner replied, “if he had been an adult and had behaved even more offensively. . . . But you don’t murder a child.” Soon afterward Faulkner pled drunkenness and blamed both the champagne and the interviewer. “These are statements which no sober man would make nor, it seemed to me, any sane man believe.” W. E. B. Du Bois, speaking on a radio program in California, challenged Faulkner to a debate at the courthouse in Sumner. Faulkner politely declined.31

Elizabeth Spencer, a white Mississippi novelist a quarter century younger than Faulkner, also found herself in Rome that autumn. When she returned in September 1955 she discovered that white men had lynched Emmett Till near her father’s farm in the Delta. In the expectation that her father—whose racial convictions she had regarded as enlightened—would feel much the same way, Spencer expressed her horror at the crime and the verdict. But her father “refused to discuss it,” she said, “or to hear any discussion of it. He said that we [white people] had to keep things in hand.” Parting ways with her father, her ears “ringing with parental abuse,” Spencer headed for Oxford, Mississippi, then abandoned the state altogether and moved to New York City, resolved “in my bones, in the sick, empty feeling there inside . . . You don’t belong here anymore.” She took with her the manuscript of her third novel, The Voice at the Back Door—a call for justice in Mississippi that would appear to critical acclaim in 1956.32

African American leaders, intent on what would happen next, underlined as Faulkner had the poisonous effect of the Till case on U.S. foreign relations in the context of the Cold War and anticolonial revolutions across the world. Here they spied an opportunity. Whites had murdered African Americans without consequence before this, and surely whites would murder African Americans without consequence after this; for them the urgent issue was how the toll could be slowed, confronted, and eventually stopped. And the international context of Emmett Till’s murder offered them powerful political leverage toward that goal.

During the trial, Cora Patterson, an official in the Chicago branch of the NAACP, noted, “The eyes of the world are on that trial. It’s not going to help the United States’ situation in Europe and Asia if a fair trial is not held.”33 At a labor rally on Seventh Avenue in New York after the acquittals, Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. called the Till murder “a lynching of the Statue of Liberty. No single incident has caused as much damage to the prestige of the United States on foreign shores as what has happened in Mississippi.”34 Channing Tobias, chair of the NAACP’s board, declared, “The jurors who returned this shameful verdict deserve a medal from the Kremlin for meritorious service in Communism’s fight against democracy.”35

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These international dynamics were nothing new. World War II had given black Americans unprecedented power to redeem or repudiate American democracy in the eyes of the world, a fact that A. Philip Randolph employed to great effect in his wartime March on Washington movement.36 The war also crippled European colonialism and gave rise to the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Among the darker-skinned people of the world, the postwar competition between the superpowers was urgent largely in terms of their own anticolonial concerns; therefore the caste system of color in the United States spoke louder than the nation’s ringing rhetoric of democracy. A U.S. State Department report conceded that “the division of opinion on many issues” in the newly created United Nations General Assembly “has sometimes tended to follow a color line, white against non-whites, with Russia seeking to be recognized as the champion of non-whites.”37

“It is not Russia that threatens the United States so much as Mississippi,” the NAACP declared in a 1947 petition to the United Nations. The petition, which decried “the denial of human rights to minorities in the case of citizens of Negro descent in the United States,” created an “international sensation,” as the NAACP’s Walter White put it. The national office, White said, was “flooded with requests for copies of the document” from nations “pleased to have documentary proof that the United States did not practice what it preached about freedom and democracy.”38 This new understanding that international politics might hold the key to full citizenship for African Americans marked “an historic moment in our struggle for equality,” one newspaper editor wrote to W. E. B. Du Bois. “Finally we are beginning to see that America can be answerable to the family of nations for its injustices to the Negro minority.”39