The Blood of Emmett Till(72)
J.W. ordered the black men to clean the floor of the shed thoroughly of blood and to spread cotton seed to cover it. After stripping the body, J.W., Roy, and Campbell put it in the truck bed and covered it with a tarpaulin. Either Clark or Kimbell borrowed Leslie Milam’s car and took the black men to bury the bloody clothing. J.W., Roy, and Campbell, perhaps taking barbed wire from the shed and a heavy gin fan from a nearby building, drove ten miles across the county line to the Tallahatchie River, lashed the fan around his neck with the wire, and rolled the body into deep water.8
A young black man and his father reported walking past J.W.’s store in Glendora that Sunday morning and seeing J.W.’s new truck parked next to the building. A tarpaulin covered the bed, but blood had pooled on the ground. Johnson and Collins stood guard, one with his foot on the tarp and the other standing by the truck. The young man recalled that when J.W. came out of the store and his father commented on the blood, J.W. replied that he had killed a deer. When the father pointed out that it was not deer season, J.W. pulled him over to the truck, yanked back the tarpaulin, and said, “This is what happens to smart niggers.” Speechless, the father turned, grabbed his son by the shoulder, pulled him toward home, and never told his son what he had seen, whether an enormous amount of blood or the corpse itself. One of the main routes from Leslie Milam’s farm to the Tallahatchie River runs through Glendora, and the men might have stopped at the store on their way to dump Emmett’s body.9
These are the facts. But we are obliged to go beyond the facts of the lynching and grapple with its meaning. If we refuse to look beneath the surface, we can simply blame some Southern white peckerwoods and a bottle of corn whiskey. We can lay the responsibility for Emmett Till’s terrible fate on the redneck monsters of the South and congratulate ourselves for not being one of them. We can also place, and over the decades many of us have placed, some percentage of the blame on Emmett, who should have known better, should have watched himself, policed his thoughts and deeds, gone more quietly through the Delta that summer. Had he only done so, he would have found his way back to Chicago unharmed. That we blame the murderous pack is not the problem; even the idea that we can blame the black boy is not so much the problem, though it carries with it several absurdities. The problem is why we blame them. We blame them to avoid seeing that the lynching of Emmett Till was caused by the nature and history of America itself and by a social system that has changed over the decades, but not as much as we pretend.
In “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. writes that his worst enemies are not the members of Citizens’ Councils or the Ku Klux Klan but “the white moderate” who claims to support the goals of the movement but deplores its methods of protest and deprecates its timetable for change: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”10
When we blame those who brought about the brutal murder of Emmett Till, we have to count President Eisenhower, who did not consider the national honor at stake when white Southerners prevented African Americans from voting; who would not enforce the edicts of the highest court in the land, telling Chief Justice Earl Warren, “All [opponents of desegregation] are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in schools alongside some big, overgrown Negroes.”11 We must count Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr., who demurred that the federal government had no jurisdiction in the political assassinations of George Lee and Lamar Smith that summer, thus not only preventing African Americans from voting but also enabling Milam and Bryant to feel confident that they could murder a fourteen-year-old boy with impunity. Brownell, a creature of politics, likewise refused to intervene in the Till case. We must count the politicians who ran for office in Mississippi thumping the podium for segregation and whipping crowds into a frenzy about the terrifying prospects of school desegregation and black voting. This goes double for the Citizens’ Councils, which deliberately created an environment in which they knew white terrorism was inevitable. We must count the jurors and the editors who provided cover for Milam, Bryant, and the rest. Above all, we have to count the millions of citizens of all colors and in all regions who knew about the rampant racial injustice in America and did nothing to end it. The black novelist Chester Himes wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Post the day he heard the news of Milam’s and Bryant’s acquittals: “The real horror comes when your dead brain must face the fact that we as a nation don’t want it to stop. If we wanted to, we would.”12
Emmett Till’s death was an extreme example of the logic of America’s national racial caste system. To look beneath the surface of these facts is to ask ourselves what our relationship is today to the legacies of that caste system—legacies that still end the lives of young African Americans for no reason other than the color of their American skin and the content of our national character. Recall that Faulkner, asked to comment on the Till case when he was sober, responded, “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.”13 Ask yourself whether America’s predicament is really so different now.
EPILOGUE
THE CHILDREN OF EMMETT TILL
Emmett Till is dead. I don’t know why he can’t just stay dead.