The Blood of Emmett Till(66)
17
PROTEST POLITICS
None of the hopeful organizers of the protests on September 25, 1955, could have forecast the scope of their success. Four thousand church and United Auto Workers members packed Detroit’s Bethel AME Zion, designed to accommodate 2,500; fifty thousand more lined an eight-block radius around nearby Scott Methodist Church. Representative Charles Diggs addressed between six and ten thousand people in that city, describing the “sheer perjury and fantastic twisting of the facts” at the trial in Sumner. Diggs charged that Mississippi represented “a shameful and primitive symbol of disregard for the essential dignity of all persons which must be destroyed before it destroys all that democracy is to represent.”1 Reverend C. L. Franklin, one of the most admired black preachers of his generation, showed up waving a wad of cash and urging the crowd to give generously to support the struggle. Ushers carried bags and baskets brimming with cash.2 Churches, labor unions, and other organizations presented substantial checks. One source reported that the Diggs rally alone contributed $14,064.88 to the coffers of the NAACP, a princely sum in 1955.3
NAACP branches in scores of communities collaborated with more than a dozen labor unions, coordinated by the national office of the NAACP and the United Packinghouse Workers of America. The national convention of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers swelled the crowd in Cleveland on September 25.4 In Kansas City preachers and meatpackers gathered at Ward AME Church at 22nd Street and Prospect.5
The protest at Metropolitan Church in Chicago drew ten thousand to hear Mamie Bradley, the journalist Simeon Booker, and Willoughby Abner, president of the NAACP’s Chicago branch and an official for the United Auto Workers.6 Mamie must have quickly hopped a plane after her appearance in Chicago in order to take the stage with Roy Wilkins and A. Philip Randolph in Harlem. After gathering at churches, labor halls, and campuses across New York City, tens of thousands made their way to a big outdoor stage in Harlem to hear Randolph declare that “only the righteous revolt” of citizens throughout the country could halt “this wave of terrorism” in the South. He called for a March on Washington to protest President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s failure to protect African Americans in the South. Mamie told the crowd, “What I saw at the trial was a shame before God and man.”7 An internal report of the UPWA estimated that “50,000 people turned out in New York City to hear A. Philip Randolph, president of the AFL Sleeping Car Porters, blast the whitewash of the brutal crime.”8 The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the NAACP, and the Jewish Labor Committee, “representing 500,000 workers in the AFL,” along with a number of progressive churches and other groups, sponsored the huge rally.9
The Mississippi underground that located nearly all the African American witnesses for the murder trial of Milam and Bryant was well represented on the stump during the September 25 national rallies. Dr. T. R. M. Howard gave a two-hour speech to a crowd of more than 2,500 at Sharp Street Methodist Church in Baltimore, calling for the investigation of negligent FBI agents in the South and irritating the hell out of Director J. Edgar Hoover. “It’s getting to be a strange thing,” said Howard, “that the FBI can never seem to work out who is responsible for killings of Negroes in the South.”10 In Detroit, Howard’s old friend Medgar Evers also blasted the treatment of blacks in Mississippi, detailing the murders of George Lee and Lamar Smith. Ruby Hurley, who had worn a red bandana and work clothes to sneak onto the Delta plantations with Evers and Amzie Moore in search of witnesses, spoke alongside Thurgood Marshall at an “overflow rally” in Holy Rosary Church’s school auditorium in Brooklyn.11
A combined total of well over 100,000 attended rallies that day in Chicago, New York, Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, New Rochelle, Newark, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and many other cities and towns across the country.12
This was not the cramped, fearful McCarthy era, nor did it reflect what one Democrat called the Eisenhower administration’s languid gaze “down the green fairways of indifference.”13 Something new was afoot. In cities all across America citizens found Mississippi guilty as charged. The response was a gathering of activists in the North—labor unionists, religious progressives, stalwarts of the Old Left, and ordinary citizens—that would join activists in the South to transform the Southern civil rights movement into a national coalition. The quickly emerging movement was so large that no one person or organization could manage it. Not since the Scottsboro trials of the 1930s had the country seen anything like it.14 The killing of that boy who “did the talking” had become much more than just another lynching in the South. For some, including Mamie Bradley, it was an Archimedean lever with which to move the world.
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After September 25 churches, labor unions, NAACP branches, and other organizations gathered strength for a second wave of protests the following week. The largest church in Detroit, Greater King Solomon Baptist Church at 14th and Marquette, held a twenty-four-hour service on September 29 to motivate support for rallies on October 1 and 2.15 Twelve pastors and Mamie Bradley addressed the four thousand gathered there. “Mrs. Bradley said she had recovered from the sorrow she felt at her son’s death,” reported the Chicago Tribune, “and ‘Now I’m angry—just plain angry.’ She urged a united front in the fight for civil rights.”16 The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the Urban League, the United Steelworkers, the UPWA, and the NAACP organized mobilization meetings in Chicago, New York, Milwaukee, and Buffalo, and across the country built momentum for the massive national protests. When the day came, the headline in the Chicago Defender proclaimed, “100,000 Across Nation Protest Till Lynching.”17