The Blood of Emmett Till(65)

Many elements of the federal government appeared to agree with the substance of the NAACP’s assertions. “We cannot escape the fact that our civil rights record has become an issue in world politics,” President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights declared in 1947. “The world’s press and radio are full of it. . . . Those with competing philosophies have stressed—and are shamelessly distorting—our shortcomings.”40 Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote in 1952, “Racial discrimination in the United States remains a source of constant embarrassment to this Government in the day-to-day conduct of its foreign relations.” The U.S. Justice Department filed a series of briefs in the cases leading up to the Brown v. Board of Education decision that supported the NAACP’s position in exactly those global terms. “Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills,” Attorney General Brownell wrote to the Supreme Court, “and it raises doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.”41 On May 17, 1954, so-called Black Monday, the Voice of America instantly heralded the Brown decision across the planet in thirty-five languages.42 Fifteen months later the Till case blew apart much of the goodwill that Brown had won for the United States around the globe.43

Newspapers in countries across the world called the acquittals “scandalous,” “monstrous,” “abominable,” and worse.44 Eleanor Roosevelt published an editorial entitled “I Think the Till Jury Will Have an Uneasy Conscience,” in which she noted that “the colored peoples of the world, who far outnumber us,” had fixed their attention on the Till trial and that the United States had “again played into the hands of the Communists and strengthened their propaganda in Africa and Asia.”45 She did not exaggerate. In fact, outrage over the verdict in Ghana represented a legitimate threat to U.S. goals in Africa.46 Carl Rowan, a successful black journalist for Time magazine, was in New Delhi in the mid-1950s on a speaking tour sponsored by the State Department to highlight white Americans’ growing acceptance of African Americans. He had to “face hundreds of questions over the weeks about white people in America murdering a fourteen-year-old boy named Emmett Till because he allegedly whistled at a white woman.”47 The State Department reported that “in Communist pamphleteering” in the Middle East the Till case was highlighted as “?‘typical’ of repressive measures against minority groups in the United States, with special focus on the feature that the courts condoned this act.”48

In 1956 the U.S. Information Agency surveyed European disdain for American race relations and found the Till case the “prevalent” concern, though it would soon be weighed alongside mob violence at the University of Alabama and in Little Rock.49 “Since the Emmett Till case in Mississippi last fall,” the American Embassy in Brussels reported to the State Department, “the Belgian Press has directed increasing attention to problems of racial relations in the United States. The press of all shades of political opinion and political leaders with whom the Embassy has talked have been astonished at and strongly condemned the racial prejudice evident in such recent cases.”50 The Italian communist press hammered readers with the Till case day after day, and the Vatican’s official mouthpiece, L’Osservatore Romano, found it deplorable that “a crime against an adolescent victim remains unpunished.”51 A memorandum from the American Embassy in Copenhagen to the secretary of state described “the real and continuing damage to American prestige from such tragedies as the Emmett Till case.” Sweden’s Le Democrate responded to the verdict with an editorial, “A Disgusting Parody of Justice in the State of Mississippi.”52 Das Freie Volk in Düsseldorf declared, “The life of a Negro in Mississippi is not worth a whistle.”53

In 1956 the State Department reported that the “Till affairs drew greater attention in France than they did in the United States.”54 Feeling the sting of world opinion about French colonial rule in Algeria, France welcomed evidence of American hypocrisy on race. The conservative Paris daily Figaro printed an editorial three days after the acquittals with the banner headline “Shame on the Sumner Jury,” urging Americans to “look into their own actions.” The conditions under which black people live in America, observed the centrist paper Le Monde, should “incite more reserve and modesty on the part of those who decry the ‘colonialism’ of others.”55 A mass meeting in Paris adopted a resolution addressed to the U.S. ambassador calling the lynching and acquittals “an insult to the conscience of the civilized world.”56

The New York Post’s editorial board perhaps said it best: “Like other great episodes in the battle for equality and justice, this trial has rocked the world, and nothing can ever be quite the same again—even in Mississippi.”57 Beyond the commonly understood borders of race, nation, and freedom, the Till case laid bare the contradictions at the heart of America’s history and forced this most powerful nation to take stock of itself—if nothing else, to assess its loudly self-proclaimed standing among the world’s peoples. Many believed America itself had killed Emmett Till. Its allies were concerned, its enemies gleeful. The Magnolia State’s own native son, Richard Wright, issued an astute assessment of the case’s implications from his self-exile in Paris: “The world will judge the judges of Mississippi.”58