Voices of Freedom

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R. R. Donnelley 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.

—James Baldwin

PREFACE

TOWARD A MORE PERFECT UNION

I have a good, though complex, friend—Rutledge Adam Waker, black in every sense, South Carolina smart. I have watched him solve Rubik’s Cubes and Boston politics by first sitting and watching and then, seemingly from nowhere, bursting into full and complete action. He has spent thirty years of his life buying land for himself and trying to create affordable housing for the poor, mostly the black poor. He inspires, confuses, and sometimes frightens whites, elevating them with his passion, putting them off with his anger. But he is as likely to take me on, poking fun at the black middle class, attacking our unreadiness for the revolution. He has taught me much about being black in America.

He called me early one bright, crisp fall day and with his peculiar urgency demanded of me, “How much would it cost to rent a helicopter?” He knows I am a pilot. Playing along, certain that he will get to it eventually, I tell him four hundred dollars an hour. There is this game between us in which he will not say why. I must ask. Finally, I can stand it no longer. I concede. “Rudy, what do you need with a helicopter?” I can feel his grin over the phone at his small victory. “To surrender,” he says. He has me now.

“Look at the Japanese, look at the Germans. They lost to America and both surrendered. Look at them now, look at the money America poured onto them. We made a mistake. We should have just surrendered and then America could deal with us.”

I can’t argue with his logic but wonder about the helicopter. “I want to bring it right here to a vacant lot in the South End of Boston”—a formerly poor section now being rapidly gentrified—“call the news media, and announce that we’ve lost and want to come to terms, then climb on board the helicopter and depart.”

I smile at the theatricality of the image. We’d make every prime time news show. He’s right, of course. Black Americans don’t know how to surrender. Surrender is not the stuff of innocence, belief, and idealism. Surrender is not possible when too large a price has been paid. And finally, Americans cannot surrender to themselves.

Rudy’s instinctual ploy reaches deep into the Black American soul. His voice is like so many others that seem to understand our quandary. Voices that tell us stories, tell us of our history, of the pain and joy, voices that guide us through this grand, tragic—and unfinished—American chronicle, the struggle of Black Americans for equity and the continuing challenge to redeem democracy in America.

* * *

This book, Voices of Freedom, is an outgrowth of the “Eyes on the Prize” project centered around a television history of America’s civil rights years. We began work on the project in the late 1970s. The goal for the public television series and print materials was to capture the American civil rights movement in the voices of those who were there, and thereby give younger citizens who had not lived that struggle, or those who never understood, some idea of the raging torrents that had engulfed America in the fifties, sixties, and seventies and that came to be known as the civil rights and black consciousness movements.

The “Eyes” process was to collect the voices of the participants in this history and to have them tell us the stories they carried within them. Because of the difficulty of raising funds and the cost of the effort, we had to divide the project into two phases. In the first, consisting of six one-hour television programs, we covered the years from the mid-1950s (the death of Emmett Till and the trial of his killers) to 1965 (the Selma marches and the passage of the Voting Rights Act). In the second stage, consisting of eight one-hour programs, we began with the movement spreading into the North and covered the emergence of Malcolm X and the years of remedies, rights, and power from the mid-1960s to the 1980s.

Voices of Freedom encompasses both phases of the project. Only a fraction of the material we gathered over the last decade—in interviews done on tape, on film, and over the telephone—could be used in the television series, because the medium imposes such stringent time limitations. It was this realization that led us to review the thousands of pages of interview transcripts and weave them into a book of oral histories.

We are aware of the danger in presenting history that may not have fully settled into clear perspective, but I think the risk is worth it. The times are too urgent to have generations ignorant of strategies tried, the role of leaders, the failures and successes of our recent racial history. Our times seem to be ones of retreat from the dearly won gains of earlier generations. That is why the lessons of these voices are so important.

While the headlines of racial violence are frightening, nothing is more disturbing than to listen to young men and women who appear to have no sense of what brought us to where we are. How can you enter the debate if you fail to consider what has happened?

In the pages you are about to read there is history that has and will define our future as a nation. Because America is what it is, our battle has implications far beyond our shores. And if there are lessons to be gained from these years, one is surely the importance of history to a disenfranchised people. Its importance was assured when it was systematically taken from African-Americans. Looking back, it is clear to me that history is the high ground in the battle for self—and without a sense of self, one’s freedom is forever in the hands of others.

Finally, I must take responsibility for a decision. We are in a time of linguistic transition, and the term “black” is increasingly being replaced by “African-American.” And that is the term we used when it seemed appropriate. However, for most of the period of these interviews most persons used the word “black,” and the convention of the period, as it is now, was to lowercase the word. We have followed that. However, I feel strongly that when “black” specifically identifies the racial group, as in Black American, it should be capitalized, just as we capitalize Irish-American or Italian-American. This may be an inelegant solution, but we trust that the reader will appreciate our dilemma.

HENRY HAMPTON

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Going from interviews on tape to the book you now hold in your hands was an unusually challenging task. It required a sensitive, intelligent, and dedicated team of people.

While this book belongs to none of us and to all of us, surely there are two people without whom it would not exist. Sarah Flynn has committed most of her waking hours for an entire year to the herculean task of wading into the transcripts, reading, researching, and editing them into storylines with which we all could work. In a world where egos are not always small, Sarah kept her eyes on the task of doing what was right for the book. If there was a choice of sleeping or finishing, Sarah stayed awake and worked. This book is as much hers as anyone else’s. It is impossible to credit Robert Lavelle adequately for his contribution. He had the original idea and carefully kept it alive as we moved from notion to manuscript. He served as Blackside’s project director, hiring all the other members of the team, reviewing our work, monitoring the schedule and the budget, and jumping in to research, write, edit, cajole, and support as needed. He was our visionary, cheerleader, and taskmaster. But mostly, when all the rest of us flagged, he was the one to keep us going.

Bennett Singer helped remarkably with this project (while somehow simultaneously working on the films), and he did so with tremendous skill. Whenever work needed doing, from interviewing, editing, researching, or writing, to racing to the airport with an overnight package, Bennett completed the task at hand with a professionalism far in excess of his years.

Suzette Malveaux came for a few weeks and, luckily for us, stayed a year. Our key researcher, she organized the research staff, tracked down facts, figures, photographs, names, addresses, and dates—and she did so tirelessly. She also coordinated the transcribing of telephone interviews. Throughout the development of the manuscript, she supplied us with the benefit of her boundless enthusiasm and sincerity.

Other key members of the team include Derrick Evans, who helped us with research and helped also to compile the list of books for further reading, and Samantha Langbaum, who graciously provided much-needed general assistance, helping with research, transcribing interviews, and being available to do whatever needed doing.

Judy Richardson has worked on the project since the late 1970s. She conducted many of the interviews from 1979 through 1989. She also reviewed the manuscript and offered her strong opinions. She wanted us never to lose sight that it was the African-American spirit that drives this history. And while all of us felt and knew it, Judy made certain. We remain in her debt.

Those who logged or transcribed the interviews were Christian Du Lac, Cathy Hinton, Maia Harris, Sharon Epperson, Sandy Martin, Kim McClain, Patrick Keenan, Leah Mahan, Ken Jacobson, and Mary Tabor. Debra Rose Mecca also did a good deal of the transcribing and evidenced an abundance of grace under pressure.

The interviews on which this book is based were conducted by members of several “Eyes on the Prize” production teams. The interviewers were Prudence Arndt, Orlando Bagwell, Sheila Bernard, Carroll Blue, Callie Crossley, Howard Dammond, James A. DeVinney, Steve Fayer, Paul Good, Henry Hampton, Maia Harris, Barbara Howard, Henry Johnson, Kirk Johnson, Laurie Kahn-Leavitt, Madison Davis Lacy, Robert Lavelle, Susan Levene, Suzette Malveaux, Louis Massiah, Sam Pollard, Judy Richardson, Terry Rockefeller, Dale Rosen, Jackie Shearer, Bennett Singer, Romas Slezas, Llewellyn Smith, Paul Stekler, Judith Vecchione, and Noland Walker.

Bantam has been a wonderful publisher with which to undertake this project. The company not only believed in us enough to contract for this book, it supported us throughout the process. We are indebted to Henry Ferris, who acquired the book, Ann Harris, who edited it with remarkable intelligence, insight, and patience, Don Weisberg, who showed such great enthusiasm for the project, and all of the others at Bantam who have helped us. We’d also like to thank Peggy Leith Anderson, a thoughtful and gifted copy editor, and Marilyn Rash of Editorial Inc., who coordinated the final production stage of the manuscript.

Our literary agent (and friend) Doe Coover offered us her professional assistance and personal encouragement.

We particularly thank the people whom you are about to meet for sharing their experiences with us. The interviewees showed a remarkable generosity, even to their adversaries, in recounting their history.

We’ve been lucky enough to have several academic advisers for this book: Darlene Clark Hine (Michigan State University), David Garrow (City University of New York), Steven F. Lawson (University of South Florida), Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (Morgan State University), and James Turner (Cornell University) all provided invaluable advice. In addition, Michael Thelwell of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, teacher and movement participant, read the manuscript with a gifted storyteller’s eye and offered much-needed encouragement, insight, and eloquent analysis.

In such a project there are many special people, but we must give special recognition to four: Vincent Harding, Ruth Batson, Thomas Layton, and Jack Mendelsohn have provided extraordinary support, for which we can only say thank you.

All of these wise and talented men and women helped us enormously, and we have listened carefully to their criticisms and followed many of their suggestions. However, with so many advisers and colleagues working on the project, we feel it is especially important to point out that while we are grateful for everyone’s assistance, final responsibility for Voices of Freedom rests with the authors.

* * *

It is impossible to complete these acknowledgments without giving due credit to all of the funders, advisers, and production staffs of the fourteen programs that make up the television series “Eyes on the Prize.” They are listed in the back of this book, and without them Voices of Freedom would not be as rich or as comprehensive.

Working tirelessly on the films, many of the producers took time to review chapters and advise the authors, and their contributions were invaluable. Since they had often just returned from location, they brought fresh insight and nuance that might otherwise have been missed.

The funders of “Eyes on the Prize” ranged from the foundations and corporations that provided millions of dollars to contributors such as the students and faculty at Newton South High School in Newton, Massachusetts, who granted us a most inspiring twenty-five dollars. All of these men, women, and children who so often found creative ways to gain support for the project should feel proud, knowing that without their efforts our work would not have been possible.

It has been twelve years since this project began to occupy our professional lives, and it has been an extraordinary experience, primarily because of the people involved. If we have one regret at this writing, it is simply that we cannot bring you all together for one grand and glorious “Thank you.”

HENRY HAMPTON

STEVE FAYER

PROJECT NOTES

This book is based on an archive of some one thousand interviews conducted for the television series “Eyes on the Prize.” The series and all of the related materials were produced by Blackside, Inc., an independent multimedia production company based in Boston. It is important to note that Voices of Freedom is an event-driven oral history, which is to say, our interviewers did not gather life histories of movement participants; instead, people were asked to tell us what they saw, heard, did, or felt at specific moments in history. As much as possible, we have tried to let the voices speak for themselves, believing, as Studs Terkel has said, that “in their rememberings are their truths. The precise fact or the precise date is of small consequence.” Where the precise fact or date is in the judgment of the authors significant or helpful, we have edited around erroneous statements, balanced them with information elsewhere in the text, asked the interviewee for a correction, or footnoted the data.

This is not a comprehensive history of America’s civil rights years. It is a collection of stories, told by many of the participants themselves. In no way was the civil rights movement confined to these episodes. Rather, the stories told here illuminate one or more themes of the continuing struggle for freedom. Further, this is not a book of facts, dates, and places. Voting records, patterns of migration, legislative or judicial actions and reactions—all are alluded to here, but at the heart of this book are the experiences of people who fought for civil rights for African-Americans. For more comprehensive and factually specific accounts of the civil rights movement, the reader is encouraged to see “For Further Reading” at the end of the book.

In each chapter, we introduce the interviewees by describing who they were in relation to the story being told (not who they became in subsequent years). Likewise, during our interviewing process, we asked participants to take themselves back to the time of the event—and as much as possible not to reflect on it with the benefit of hindsight. But we are aware that all oral history is by nature revisionist history, and that hindsight may have changed participants’ perspectives.

We have given the names of interviewees as they are now most commonly known (or as they requested us to list them) and have expanded on this format only when we thought it would assist the reader, for example, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael).

We edited the interviews with caution and respect. Primarily, we worked with large passages of interview material, arranging the excerpts according to the intent of often long and rambling conversations. When we edited by stringing sentences and phrases together to make a particularly long discussion shorter and more coherent, we sent the edited transcript to the interviewee for review and approval. Relevant transcripts of the telephone conversation excerpts were sent to interviewees as well. Occasionally they made changes, always minor, and even those requesting changes were the exception.

For the record, the authors do not always agree with all the voices in the book. To borrow a legal term, the authors include “testimony against interest,” allowing people from both sides of the battle line to speak whenever possible (and whenever they would consent to an interview) and letting readers draw their own conclusions.

While we aspire to fairness, we do not pretend neutrality. In such a struggle, with such stories, that would be impossible.

ROBERT LAVELLE

Vice President, Publishing

Blackside, Inc.

PROLOGUE

When the First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in 1774, it established as one of its goals “to wholly discontinue the slave trade.” But during the next decade the leaders among the “free Persons” in the United States had a change of heart. When codifying the laws of the new nation in 1787, the framers of the Constitution did not abolish slavery; instead, they wrote slavery into the law, declaring that each slave, for purposes of taxation and representation, would count as three-fifths of a person.

Eighty years later, after the Civil War, America was offered another opportunity to live up to its ideals. “Forty acres and a mule” was the cry from Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens. He and Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts sought the seizure of slaveholders’ property and redistribution of the land to the slaves as compensation for generations of unjust treatment. They sought a true reconstruction of the South. But again, America backed away from the moment. There was no radical redistribution of the wealth created by slavery and there was no compensation to the slaves. The Reconstruction years, which began at the end of the Civil War, witnessed a temporary realignment of political forces, in which black citizens were able to vote and were elected to local and national offices. But by 1877, the North proved incapable of stopping southern white resistance and pulled out its troops. Reconstruction, which had already proven weak in many areas of the Deep South, collapsed. In the 1890s, poll taxes and literacy tests succeeded in disenfranchising all but a handful of southern blacks. America had once again walked away from an opportunity to achieve justice. In place of slavery came “Jim Crow” laws that governed almost every aspect of life for Black Americans living below the Mason-Dixon line. The insidious Jim Crow caricature of the Negro became a powerful barrier to legal and social equality.

This book is about another moment in American history when the country was forced to decide whether it would live up to its principles. In it you will hear the voices of people who pushed the country to change, and the voices of those who resisted.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a case known as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in 1954 overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal” in the area of education, which had forced segregation of the races in schools for generations. With that decision was set in motion social change that would alter countless lives. The decision came to an America that had been profoundly transformed by World War II, and to a black citizenry changed both by the war itself and by their veterans returning from service.

Of the 16 million Americans who served in the segregated armed forces during the years 1941–1945, more than 1 million were black. Those veterans, and their dreams, would have a profound influence on the awakening of black people to the potential within themselves to effect change in American society.

James Hicks was among the black officers who served in World War II. In the United States he became one of the black press’s leading journalists.

JAMES HICKS

I think that when black veterans of World War II returned home, they were really an influence on their communities. They were activists and they had been trained, and of course when they said, “No more of this Jim Crow” or what have you, the people, that is the black people, picked it up.

I think there was extreme resentment among the black veterans when they came back, because they felt, “I paid my dues over there and I’m not going to take this anymore over here.”

After serving three years in the army, including fifteen months of combat duty in the South Pacific, one black soldier was taking a bus home to North Carolina from his camp in Georgia. The year was 1946 and Isaac Woodward was the veteran who, on the way through South Carolina, made the “mistake” of taking too long to return to the bus from a rest stop. The bus driver called the local police and after a severe beating. Woodward was left blinded. His case was widely publicized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and presented to President Harry Truman as evidence of the need for civil rights legislation.

The NAACP, founded in 1909 by a biracial group of activists, among them W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, and Oswald Garrison Villard, had evolved during the first half of the century into an institutional defender of the rights of Black Americans. In the 1940s, Constance Baker Motley was an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

CONSTANCE BAKER MOTLEY

The issue of segregation loomed large during the war and the war effort. Here we were as a nation involved in a war to make the world safe for democracy, and one of the embarrassing features was that blacks were segregated in our armed forces, and they resented it. And here we were trying to represent ourselves as a democratic nation. The NAACP’s membership almost doubled during that period from membership applications from black servicemen who recognized that the NAACP was the only organization they could turn to for assistance with what they believed to be a very pressing problem for them. And that is that they received disproportionately harsher sentences than white servicemen for any crime which they committed. They felt this was a tremendous grievance that something had to be done about. When I first went to work at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, in the summer of 1944, we had court-martial records stacked to the ceiling that had to be reviewed and appeals taken to military review boards in Washington, so our legal efforts were concentrated in the area of trying to get these servicemen’s sentences reduced, if not the conviction reversed.

After World War II, as a result of the activity of black servicemen, really, the whole attitude in the country about the race relations problem changed. I think people became more aware that something had to be done about the fact that black servicemen were overseas dying for this country, and when they would be coming home, they would be coming home to a situation that said, in effect, You’re a second-class citizen. You can’t go to school with white children, or your children can’t. You can’t stay in a hotel or eat in a restaurant because you’re black. And I think that gave the momentum, particularly in the black community, for what became the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

The NAACP’s strategy for attacking segregation through the Legal Defense Fund was revitalized and extended after World War II. It had been in the making prior to the war but was abandoned during the war, when all the attention was focused on black servicemen. Eventually, it led to the Supreme Court’s decision in the Brown case in 1954.

Black veterans were not the only people who realized how the war had dramatized the need for social change. Harry Ashmore served in the army in Europe during World War II and returned to his native South to take a job as editor of the Charlotte (North Carolina) News. He was to become one of the few white southern newspapermen to openly support the civil rights movement.

HARRY ASHMORE

When I was growing up in South Carolina, it was predominantly an agrarian region. Most people still lived on the land, and most of the people who lived in the towns were dependent on the land. But all that was changing and changing very rapidly. People were leaving the land and, of course, agriculture was being mechanized. The first great technological revolution was in the fields, and that was displacing blacks and whites. They were coming to the cities in the South and they were going on beyond, in a great flood. They were going to the North and to the West Coast, where there had been few blacks before. The whole great out-migration was beginning.

Political patterns were changing and the pressure, although not then directly against segregation as such, was beginning in other significant ways, such as the demand for the vote, for service on juries, and all those civil rights that had been denied, either by legal means or by custom, in the South. And it seemed to me quite early that we had to yield on those, that those had to go first.

Most people were not recognizing the depth of this. They were still whistling, they were pretending there’s nothing really going on, the black people are satisfied with what they’ve got, the system’s working, just a few outside agitators are coming in, stirring things up. It wasn’t so much a matter of conscious race prejudice, though that was a big element of it, but another big part of it was the status quo. This was the only thing they knew, they had never known anything else. This is the way it had always been. This is the way they thought it was supposed to be.

Then came along what I have always thought was the most significant of the changes, and that was the court cases brought by the NAACP—the cases that began in systematically attacking voting, jury service, that sort of thing—which began taking these things one at a time, getting into federal court, where obviously they couldn’t stand a constitutional test, and then taking these cases all the way up.

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded in 1942, was another interracial organization demanding change for Black Americans. Bayard Rustin, who had worked with labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, accepted a position as CORE’s first field secretary.

BAYARD RUSTIN

I think the beginning of this period from 1954 has its roots in the returning soldiers after 1945. There was a great feeling on the part of many of these youngsters that they had been away, that they had fought in the war—that they were not getting what they should have. Already, black and white soldiers coming home from the war were sitting anywhere they wanted in the buses and they were being thrown in jail. There was a great feeling that the A. Philip Randolph movement to stop discrimination in the armed forces had been helpful but it was not enough. There was a building up of militancy, not so much by going into the streets as by a feeling of “We are not going to put up with this anymore.” What was lacking was that they did not have the Supreme Court backing them. But when the Supreme Court came out with the Brown decision in ’54, things began rapidly to move. Some of us had been sitting down in the front of these buses for years, but nothing had happened. What made ’54 so unusual was that the Supreme Court in the Brown decision established black people as being citizens with all the rights of all other citizens. Once that happened, then it was very easy for that militancy, which had been building up, to express itself in the Montgomery bus boycott of ’55–’56.

The Brown decision marked a turning point in America’s race relations. But the opposing and parallel forces that led to Brown and that carried the implementation of that decision into virtually every corner of American life were the forces found in the American people, white and black, North and South. For many Americans in the 1950s, particularly Black Americans, the conflict between those forces came into clear focus in a small town in the Mississippi Delta in August 1955.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Preface

Prologue

Epigraph

Emmett Till, 1955
“I Wanted the Whole World to See”
The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955–1956
“Like a Revival Starting”
The Little Rock Crisis, 1957–1958
“I Had Cracked the Wall”
Student Sit-ins in Nashville, 1960
“A Badge of Honor”
Freedom Rides, 1961
“Sticks and Bricks”
Albany, Georgia, 1961–1962
“The Mother Lode”
James Meredith Enters Ole Miss, 1962
“Things Would Never Be the Same”
Birmingham, 1963
“Something Has Got to Change”
Organizing in Mississippi, 1961–1963
“The Reality of What We Were Doing Hit Me”
The March on Washington, 1963
“They Voted with Their Feet”
The Sixteenth Street Church Bombing, 1963
“You Realized How Intense the Opposition Was”
Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964
“Representation and the Right to Participate”
Selma, 1965
“Troopers, Advance”
Malcolm X (1925–1965)
“Our Own Black Shining Prince!”
The Lowndes County Freedom
Organization, 1965–1966
“Vote for the Panther, Then Go Home”
The Meredith March, 1966
“Hit Them Now”
Chicago, 1966
“Chicago Was a Symbol”
Muhammad Ali, 1964–1967
“I Am the Greatest”
King and Vietnam, 1965–1967
“His Philosophy Made It Impossible Not to Take a Stand”
Birth of the Black Panthers, 1966–1967
“We Wanted Control”
Detroit, 1967
“Inside of Most Black People There Was a Time Bomb”
The Election of Carl Stokes, 1967
“We Had to Be Organized”
Howard University, 1967–1968
“You Saw the Silhouette of Her Afro”
King’s Last Crusade, 1967–1968
“We’ve Got Some Difficult Days Ahead”
Resurrection City, 1968
“The End of a Major Battle”
Ocean Hill–Brownsville, 1967–1968
“Everything Became More Political”
The Black Panthers, 1968–1969
“How Serious and Deadly the Game”
Attica and Prisoners’ Rights, 1971
“There’s Always Time to Die”
The Gary Convention, 1972
“Unity Without Uniformity”
Busing in Boston, 1974–1976
“As if Some Alien Was Coming into the School”
Atlanta and Affirmative Action, 1973–1980
“The Politics of Inclusion”

Epilogue: From Miami to America’s Future

Project Notes

Acknowledgments

For Further Reading

“Eyes on the Prize” Project Staff and Funders

www.vintage-books.co.uk

EMMETT TILL, 1955

“I WANTED THE WHOLE WORLD TO SEE”

On the witness stand in Sumner, Mississippi, Mose Wright, sixty-four, points to the men accused of abducting and murdering his grandnephew, Emmett Till.

On August 20, 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago’s South Side, almost missed the train that would carry him to a summer visit with relatives in the Mississippi Delta. Emmett, nicknamed Bo, was supposed to meet his seventeen-year-old cousin, Curtis Jones, at LaSalle Street station. Young Till didn’t show up at LaSalle Street, but with only seconds to spare, out of breath and stammering with excitement, he boarded the train at Englewood, more than seven miles away.

In the forty years since World War I began, Chicago’s black population had grown from some forty thousand to half a million. Many blacks had moved up from the South, seeking jobs and a better way of life. Of those, 75 percent hailed from Mississippi. Emmett Till was part of the emigrant community and was closing the circle that summer, traveling back to his family’s home place.

Money, Mississippi, was a dusty crossroads, population fifty-five, with the Tallahatchie River at its back door. Emmett’s mother had warned the boy to mind his manners with whites down there. No one expected a fourteen-year-old to be in mortal danger, but anyone black had to be careful. More than five hundred black people had been lynched in the state since these statistics were first compiled in 1882. Thousands more racially motivated murders were never officially reported. Now, in the summer of 1955, the death toll was beginning to build again, particularly in the Delta, the northwest corner of the state, where Money was located.

In some Delta counties, blacks constituted 80 percent of the population, and the outnumbered whites were bent on intimidating any blacks who wanted access to a better education or to the ballot box. Three months before Emmett’s trip, the Reverend George Lee from the Delta town of Belzoni was killed by a shotgun blast to the face. Local authorities ruled his death a traffic accident. Lee had been the first black to register to vote in the county.

On August 13, just a week before Emmett’s arrival, Lamar Smith, a black man who had voted in the state’s Democratic primary earlier in the month, was shot to death at high noon in front of the courthouse in Brookhaven. Again, there were no arrests.

For almost seventy years, the U.S. Supreme Court had supported southern insistence on second-class citizenship for blacks. With the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, the Court signaled that it was changing its position regarding the legality of segregating black and white schoolchildren. Reaction in the South was swift, particularly in Mississippi. Leaders of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan exhorted their followers to resist the “mongrelization” of the white race. White Citizens’ Councils were formed to exert political and economic pressure on black activists and their white sympathizers. Segregationists James O. Eastland and John Stennis, Mississippi’s two U.S. senators, worked to further consolidate the white monopoly of political power. Governor J. P. Coleman stated flatly that Negroes weren’t fit to vote. Ten years after the end of World War II, many whites in the Delta felt that Mississippi was now in another war to protect its way of life.

Emmett arrived in Mississippi with his cousin Curtis Jones on August 21, 1955.

CURTIS JONES

We was going to Money, Mississippi, to have a good time. I’d never picked cotton before and I was looking forward to that. I had told my mother that I could pick two hundred pounds, and she told me I couldn’t. Emmett Till was fourteen years old, had just graduated out of the grammar school.

My grandfather in Mississippi was a preacher. He had a church and he had a little raggedy ’41 Ford, if I’m not mistaken. And he took all of us to church that day, including my grandmother, my three uncles, myself, my cousin Emmett, and my cousin Willa Parker. While he was in the pulpit preaching, we get the car and drive to Money. Anyway, we went into this store to buy some candy. Before Emmett went in, he had shown the boys round his age some picture of some white kids that he had graduated from school with, female and male. He told the boys who had gathered round this store—there must have been maybe ten to twelve youngsters there—that one of the girls was his girlfriend. So one of the local boys said, “Hey, there’s a white girl in that store there. I bet you won’t go in there and talk to her.” So Emmett went in there. When he was leaving out the store, after buying some candy, he told her, “Bye, baby.”

I was sitting out there playing checkers with this older man. Next thing I know, one of the boys came up to me and said, “Say, man, you got a crazy cousin. He just went in there and said ‘Bye, baby’ to that white woman.” This man I was playing checkers with jumped straight up and said, “Boy, you better get out of here. That lady’ll come out of that store and blow your brains off.”

It was kind of funny to us. We hopped in the car and drove back to the church. My grandfather was just about completing his sermon.

The next day we was telling some youngsters what had happened, but they had heard about it. One girl was telling us that we better get out of there ’cause when that lady’s husband come back gonna be big trouble. We didn’t tell our grandfather. If we had told our grandfather, I’m sure he would have gotten us out of there. That was Wednesday. So that Thursday passed, nothing happened. Friday passed, nothing happened. Saturday, nothing happened. So we forgot about it.

Saturday night we went to town. The closest town was Greenwood. We must have stayed there till approximately three o’clock that morning. We returned and—my grandfather didn’t have but three rooms, the kitchen and two bedrooms—it must have been about three-thirty, I was awakened by a group of men in the house. I didn’t wake completely, youngsters, they sleep hard, you know. When they came, my grandfather answered the door and they asked him did he have three boys in there from Chicago? And he stated yes. He said I got my two grandsons and a nephew. So they told him get the one who did the talking. My grandmother was scared to death. She was trying to protect Bo. They told her get back in bed. One of the guys struck her with a shotgun side of the head. When I woke up the next morning, I thought it was a dream.

I went to the porch and my grandfather was sitting on the porch. I asked him, “Poppa, did they bring Bo back?” He said, “No.” He said, “I hope they didn’t kill that boy.” And that’s when I got kind of scared.

I asked him, “Ain’t you going to call the police?” He said, “No, I can’t call the police. They told me that if I call the sheriff they was going to kill everybody in this house.” So I told him, I say, “I’ll call.”

That happened Sunday.

When Curtis Jones called the sheriff that Sunday, he also placed a call to his mother, Willie Mae Jones, back in Chicago. She in turn got in touch with Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, a thirty-three-year-old schoolteacher.

MAMIE TILL BRADLEY MOBLEY

Willie Mae was hysterical. I could barely get any sense out of her. But I finally pieced out that Emmett had been taken from her father’s house. I said, “Mama, Willie Mae said someone had taken Emmett from Poppa Mose’s house.” Well, Mother comprehended the situation immediately. And that of course alerted me that there was real danger.

By Wednesday we knew it was beyond the shadow of a doubt—the thing had really come fallin’ in place. We knew about the men who had taken Emmett. We knew the alleged crime. We knew that something was highly amiss that Emmett hadn’t turned up by then. He had an uncanny sense of direction, and I don’t care where you took him, he could get back home. And he hadn’t called. We knew the situation was serious, and we just couldn’t name it—that he had been killed. You just couldn’t put it into words, but deep down in our hearts we were fearing that.

Based on information that Mose Wright and Crosby Smith gave the sheriff, two men were arrested for kidnapping—Roy Bryant, husband of the woman in the store, and his half brother, J. W. Milam. That Wednesday, Emmett Till’s body was discovered in the Tallahatchie River. A cotton gin fan was tied to his neck with barbed wire. Milam and Bryant now faced murder charges.

CURTIS JONES

Wednesday I was over at some relatives’ house. We was out there picking cotton. One of my uncles drove up there in that 1941 Ford. He said, “Curtis, they found Bo.” I say, “Is he alive?” He said, “No, he’s dead.”

MAMIE TILL BRADLEY MOBLEY

I understand the order came from the sheriff’s office to bury that body just as soon as you can. And they didn’t even allow it to go to a funeral parlor and be dressed. He was in a pine box. Well, we got busy. We called the governor, we called the sheriff, we called Crosby, my mother’s brother. We called everybody we thought would be able to stop the burial of that body. I wanted that body. I demanded that body because my thoughts were, I had to see it, to make sure, because I’d be wondering even now who was buried in Mississippi. I had to know that was Emmett. Between Crosby and the sheriff in Mississippi who went with him and the undertaker here who contacted the undertaker there, we were able to stop the burial.

After the body arrived I knew that I had to look and see and make sure it was Emmett. That was when I decided that I wanted the whole world to see what I had seen. There was no way I could describe what was in that box. No way. And I just wanted the world to see.

The boy’s body was so mutilated that Mose Wright had been able to identify Emmett only by the ring on his finger. The black press was outraged. Jet magazine ran a photograph of the corpse that Mamie Till Bradley had resolved all the world should see. Her son’s face was swollen and disfigured. He had been beaten severely. One eye was gouged out, and one side of his forehead was crushed. A bullet was lodged in his skull.

The Chicago Defender, one of the country’s largest national black weeklies, gave the Till case and the open-casket funeral prominent coverage. The story of the lynching also received unusual attention in the national white media, with newsreel and television cameras on the scene in the Delta.

Medgar Evers, the first field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Mississippi, traveled to the Delta for the trial of Bryant and Milam. Myrlie Evers worked with her husband at the NAACP office in Jackson, the state capital.

MYRLIE EVERS

The Emmett Till case was one that shook the foundations of Mississippi, both black and white. With the white community because of the fact that it had become nationally publicized, with us blacks because it said that even a child was not safe from racism, bigotry, and death.

Medgar was the field secretary for the NAACP. He and Amzie Moore and others had the responsibility of going into these areas, wherever there might have been problems, and investigating these cases. I can recall so well that Medgar cried when he found that this had happened to Emmett Till. Cried out of frustration and anger. I myself felt anger, frustration, almost a hopelessness at that time, that things were going to continue to happen.

Medgar and Amzie Moore and a few others dressed as share-croppers to go on the plantations and ask people about the accused murderers. What had happened? They made contact with the local officials. They got the press out. It was a very dangerous job. Medgar was also responsible not only for finding witnesses, but helping them get out of town. I remember one very distinct case where he used a casket, put a person in a casket in conjunction with a mortuary, and got the person out of the state, across the border to Tennessee.

Charles Diggs of Detroit, one of the first black congressmen since Reconstruction, traveled from his district in Michigan to attend the murder trial, which began in Sumner, Mississippi, on September 19.

CHARLES DIGGS

When I read about the Emmett Till case, I became immediately interested. First of all, because it was Mississippi, the bottom line for archsegregationists in the United States. Secondly, because it was the home state of my father and grandfather and all the people on the Diggs side of the family. And thirdly, I thought, being a pioneer member of Congress, that I had a special security there that could serve the purpose well.

I think the picture in the Jet magazine of the Till boy, showing his mutilation, after he was removed out of the river, I think that was probably one of the greatest media products in the last forty or fifty years, because that picture stimulated a lot of interest and a lot of anger on the part of blacks all over the country. And the fact that the Till boy was just a child also added to this matter.

Simeon Booker’s coverage of the case for Jet magazine began as soon as news of the kidnapping broke.

SIMEON BOOKER

The unusual thing was, it was the first time the daily—meaning white—media took an interest in something like this. I remember one of the jokes among our press corps down there was that, hell, they’d go lookin’ for Till’s body, they would find bodies of a lotta other blacks who’d just been thrown in the river. Because that was the custom, that was the procedure.

Well, after it broke in Chicago and when the boy’s mother demanded that the body be brought back, they had thousands that viewed that body, and that really brought it to the international circuit.

When Diggs went down to that trial those blacks had never seen a black congressman. In fact, many of them never knew there was a black congressman, because they didn’t have any communication, have any black newspapers down there, they didn’t have any radio or anything that gave them information about what was going on outside of Mississippi.

The National News Association, a black wire service, sent reporter James Hicks to cover the trial. Like the other black reporters, Hicks stayed in Mound Bayou, an all-black town about twelve miles from Sumner. There he met Dr. T.R.M. Howard, a physician who earlier that summer had organized a voting rights rally attended by thousands of black people.

JAMES HICKS

Dr. Howard, I’ll never forget him. He was a prominent man. Having made his money down there, they, the white folks, looked at him as, I think, the nearest thing “like us.” So that when the trouble came they looked to him. They said, “Quiet them down over there.” It turned out he wasn’t in the mood to quiet them down. He said, “Well, you’re not doing right.”

I asked him, “Are they going to arrest these men? When are they going to sentence them? You think they’ll get the chair?” And he said, “Chair, are you kidding?” He said, “I can tell you this. A white man in Mississippi will get no more of a sentence for killing a black person as he would for killing a deer out of season.”

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