Linking the deaths of Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin: meaningful or misleading?

For some pundits and commentators, the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida has evoked memories of the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi a half-century ago.

Emmett Till’s murder in 1955 shot to national attention when his mother dramatically decided that her son’s funeral should be open casket. Three days after he was taken by two men from his uncle’s home in the middle of the night, Till’s bloated naked body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, a seventy-pound cotton-gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. He had been shot in the head, his nose broken and one eye gouged out. The local sheriff wanted to bury the decomposing body immediately, but Till’s mother insisted the corpse be shipped home to Chicago. To let “the world see what they did to my boy,” Mamie Till delayed burial four days so that some fifty thousand mourners could view the body. She also permitted Jet magazine to share photographs of the corpse with its millions of readers.

In a Jackson, Mississippi, dateline for The Cleveland Call and Post, Marty Richardson reported what occurred on the Tuesday following the funeral:

In what is perhaps the shortest time on record in this state in a case where the victim was a Negro, two white men were indicted on Tuesday for the lynch-slaying of 14-year-old Emmett Till last Sunday. . . . The unprecedentedly swift indictments followed a wave of national outrage which reached a climax Sunday when funeral services were held for the boy in Chicago, his home. He had been in Mississippi visiting relatives.

The Till trial would not have happened but for acts of personal heroism, as Murray Kempton captured in The New York Post in recounting the testimony of one key witness:

Mose Wright, making a formation no white man in his county really believed he would dare to make, stood on his tiptoes to the full limit of his sixty-four years and his five feet three inches yesterday, pointed his black, workworn fingers straight at the huge and stormy head of J. W. Milam and swore that this was the man who dragged fourteen-year-old Emmett Louis Till out of his cottonfield cabin the night the boy was murdered. . . . If it had not been for him, we would not have had this trial.

In “Justice in Sumner,” his account of the trial for The Nation, Dan Wakefield wrote that many of the local residents wondered why everyone was making “a mountain out of a molehill;” they considered the trial a “threat to the racial traditions of the South, and storekeepers set out jars on their counters for contributions to aid the defense of the accused murderers.”

The weeklong trial ended when the all-white jury took one hour and seven minutes to decide that the two men charged with murdering Till were not guilty. Two subsequent grand juries failed to indict the men for kidnapping. Journalist William Bradford Huie later paid the two defendants between $3,600 and $4,000 for their account of the crime. Protected by double jeopardy, they confessed to the kidnapping and murder in a chilling account published in Look magazine in January 1956.

On her MSNBC talk show Tulane professor Melissa Harris-Perry recalled the murder of Emmett Till when she discussed the shooting of Trayvon Martin:

When we hear Trayvon Martin’s screams we are reminded that we have been here before . . . In the summer of 1955 the entire nation bore witness thanks to one devastated mother who offered up her personal and private grief for public and political scrutiny and launched a movement. Mamie Till Mobley allowed Jet magazine to publish the photos of the brutalized body of her son Emmett Till. He was tortured and killed by a group of Southern vigilantes for allegedly whistling at a white woman, which is no more a crime than walking home in the rain with a bag of candy. Her courageous choice sparked an activist response that would ultimately give life to the contemporary civil rights movement. I thought of her this week as I watched tens of thousands of hooded supporters rally around the parents of Trayvon Martin in Florida and in New York’s Union Square.

Earlier last week in the Washington Post, columnist Eugene Robinson cautioned about linking the two cases:

Some commentators have sought to liken Martin’s killing to the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, an unspeakable crime that helped galvanize the civil rights movement. To make a facile comparison is a disservice to history—and to the memory of both young men. It is ridiculous to imply that nothing has changed.

When Till was killed in Mississippi at 14—accused of flirting with a white woman—this was a different country. State-sanctioned terrorism and assassination were official policy throughout the South. Today, the laws and institutions that enforced Jim Crow repression have long since been dismantled. Mississippi, of all places, has more black elected officials than any other state. An African American family lives in the White House.

Black America was never a monolith, but over the past five decades it has become much more diverse — economically, socially, culturally. If you stood on a street corner and chose five black men at random, you might meet a doctor who lives in the high-priced suburbs, an immigrant from Ethiopia who drives a cab, a young aspiring filmmaker with flowing dreadlocks, an unemployed dropout trying to hustle his next meal and a midlevel government worker struggling to put his kids through college.

Those men would have nothing in common, really, except one thing: For each of them, walking down the wrong street at the wrong time could be a fatal mistake.

John Blake closes “Trayvon’s Death: Echoes of Emmett Till?” a report on the CNN website, by noting Rosa Parks’s response when she was asked why she didn't give up her seat on the bus in December 1955 when she was threatened with arrest if she refused. She said she thought about Emmett Till and couldn’t go back anymore. Will the death of Trayvon Martin inspire the same kind of resolve?

Also of interest:

• Read Murray Kempton’s report on the Emmett Till trial in The New York Post, January 22, 1956, excerpted on The Library of America Reporting Civil Rights minisite
• Read more about the Emmett Till case on the PBS documentary The Murder of Emmett Till website
• William Bradford Huie recalls when Till’s murderers confessed their crimes to him in an interview
• Rosa Parks keeps her seat and launches the Civil Rights Movement, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• Watch Melissa Harris-Perry on Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till

Related LOA works: Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1941-1963 (includes articles about the Till murder by Marty Richardson, Murray Kempton, Dan Wakefield, and William Bradford Huie’s account of his interview with the two murderers)

William Tucker remembers “Freedom Summer” – Mississippi 1964

Guest blog post by William Tucker, former New York Times reporter and author of the book, Terrestrial Energy, and the play, Freedom Summer

In June 1964 I had just graduated from college and taken my first job as a reporter for a small-town New England newspaper. It was exciting to see my name in print every day for the first time but there were events unfolding out in the world that loomed larger. I remember arguing with my editor about whether a New York City policeman could have avoided shooting a 15-year-old boy, the incident that led to the Harlem riots that July.

As the loneliness of a small town set in, I began spending more and more time visiting friends in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One day I walked past a church and saw a sign, “Volunteers Still Needed for Voter Registration in Mississippi.” The orientation in Oxford, Ohio, the previous month had received a big write-up in Life magazine and I had recognized one of my classmates among the volunteers. Although I had never been terribly involved in Civil Rights, I suddenly asked myself, “Why not me?” It was one of those youthful moments that can change your life forever.

Soon I was in Washington for a two-day orientation. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner had disappeared on June 21 and their bodies had still not been found. There was a palpable tension in the air. It felt like preparing for a war zone. Bob Moses, the heroic volunteer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who had pioneered voter registration in Mississippi in 1961, came up for the orientation and tried to rationalize our fears. “There are towns in the state where there’s very little violence,” he told us. “Then there are towns where the authorities seem to be able to turn the violence on and off. Finally there are towns where nobody seems to have control of the violence. McComb is the worst.” Moses had entered McComb all by himself three years before.

He then informed us there would be no interracial dating and no beards or long hair. Michael Schwerner had had a beard and the locals had referred to him contemptuously as “goatee” before he disappeared. We didn’t want to provoke. One Harvard graduate student, slight and balding, objected. He didn’t want to shave his beard. He launched into a long philosophical oration on how we shouldn’t be compromising ourselves and Moses–a Harvard graduate himself–answered in equally lofty terms. I remember feeling the calm of a college classroom settle over the discussion. It made it easier to face what was ahead.

Driving into Mississippi days later, we couldn’t help but notice the number of trucks driving around with no license plates and a shotgun hanging in the back window. The whole state had an air of lawlessness. Not wanting to cause my parents too much anxiety, I opted for Holly Springs, one of the less violent towns. A Freedom House had been set up in an abandoned house right across from Rust College, a prominent black institution. We were the clearinghouse for books donated from the north and much of the work involved driving carloads of books across the state to Freedom Schools (new illegal schools specially created to teach math and reading to black children).

Sir Alan Parker’s 1988 film Mississippi Burning portrays black Mississippians of that summer as a sullen, dispirited crowd sitting on porches warily eyeing strangers, more reminiscent of South Africa under Apartheid than what we encountered. The local youngsters we met were a spirited bunch, the boys voluble and ambitious, the girls verbal and sassy. As I sat in Freedom House the first night still feeling a little disoriented, one high school girl said to me, “I’m going to keep talking to you until I get a smile and a good conversation.” No college girlfriend of mine had ever been that forthright.

Our main task was beating the back roads and crossing wide cotton fields to find tenant shacks where families of as many as a dozen lived with well water and a dirt floor. Often a portrait of John F. Kennedy hung on the wall. We would try to persuade the man and woman of the house to come down to the courthouse to register to vote or, at least, to sign our petition for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which aimed to challenge the white segregationist Mississippi delegation at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City in August. It wasn’t easy. People were frankly afraid. As they told us again and again, “You’re going to go back up north in September but we still have to live down here.” Tenant farmers risked being evicted. Medgar Evers had been shot on his doorstep only a year before and Herbert Lee, an early SNCC organizer, had been murdered in broad daylight by a member of the Mississippi State Legislature in 1961. No convictions ever followed.

Our slow efforts yielded some success, however, and by mid-August there was a daily progression of African Americans to the courthouse to register. Few met the requirements of being able to “read and interpret three passages from the Mississippi state constitution to the satisfaction of the recording officer,” but when Congress adopted the Voting Rights Act in 1965 the dam broke. Today Mississippi has more African American elected officials than any other state.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about the project was meeting the ambitious young African Americans who felt the world changing around them and who were ready for the challenge. An unknown sector of American society was being revealed to us. Our prime example: Roy DeBerry, a bright, sweet-natured 15-year-old who helped write a play about the death of Medgar Evers and played the lead. I remember sitting with him one day when he exclaimed, “There’s nothing more I love than reading a good book. I could stay up all night reading a good book.” The director of our Freedom School got him into Brandeis and he ended up on the cover of Anthony Lukas’s book, Don’t Shoot, We Are Your Children!, after leading a college student rebellion. He stayed with his purpose, however, and later became county executive of Hinds County, the most populous county in Mississippi. When my son visited Holly Springs in 2004 on a hitchhiking tour across the country, he found Roy’s younger brother Andre was the mayor.

There were successes and there were failures. Although we were making progress with voting, we could see it was just a beginning. The poverty was overwhelming. I remember just before I left having a heart-to-heart talk with an older woman, confessing to each other our own racial misapprehensions. Finally she said, “There’s just one thing I still don’t understand. How come the colored people have been working so hard all these years and still have nothing to show for it.” I don’t know whether I’ve yet found an answer.

To recapture the history and spirit of the times I’ve recently written a play, Freedom Summer. It was performed last year at several schools and libraries in Rockland Country, New York, and the Brecht Forum in Greenwich Village will be hosting three performances this weekend. It’s my hope that the fiftieth anniversary of Freedom Summer in 2014 may lead to it reaching a wider audience. Both the African Americans and young white members of the cast say it is an era that should not be forgotten and they are eager to tell the story to a new generation. I feel the same way.

William Tucker’s play Freedom Summer will be performed Friday, Feb 17 at 7:30 PM, Saturday, Feb 18 at 7:30 PM, and Sunday, Feb 19 at 2:00 PM at the Brecht Forum in New York City. Reserve tickets here.

Also of interest:

• View photographs from Freedom Summer (including some of Holly Springs, MI) on the Civil Rights Movement Veterans website
• “The Summer of our Discontent” by Bruce Watson in American Heritage
• Charles Sherrod and Fannie Lou Hamer at the Democratic National Convention, August 1964, a previous Reader’s Almanac post 
• Remembering Fred Shuttlesworth, civil rights pioneer who made history on street corners, a previous Reader's Almanac post

Related LOA works: Reporting Civil Rights: Part Two: American Journalism 1963-1973

Remembering Fred Shuttlesworth, civil rights pioneer who made history on street corners

Fred Shuttlesworth, an icon of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, died last week at 89. With Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy, Shuttlesworth was one of the “Big Three” who planned and led the protests and demonstrations that led to the landmark Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

While both were founding members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, Shuttlesworth and King came from quite different backgrounds, as The New York Times obituary notes:

Dr. King was a polished product of Atlanta’s black middle class. A graduate of Morehouse College, he held a Ph.D. in systematic theology from Boston University. Fred Shuttlesworth was a child of poor black Alabama whose ministerial degree was from an unaccredited black school. (He later earned a master’s degree in education from Alabama State College.)

The Times quotes Diane McWhorter, author of Carry Me Home, her Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the civil rights struggle in Birmingham in 1963:

Among the youthful “elders” of the movement, [Shuttlesworth] was Martin Luther King’s most effective and insistent foil: blunt where King was soothing, driven where King was leisurely, and most important, confrontational where King was conciliatory—meaning, critically, that he was more upsetting than King in the eyes of the white public.

In “Tear Gas and Hymns,” his account of the siege of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, during the violent days of the May 1961 Freedom Rides, Murray Kempton describes Shuttlesworth as “the merriest agitator of them all.” The Guardian’s obituary relates a revealing incident from the same period:

When the riders were beaten up in Anniston, Alabama, Shuttlesworth, on his own initiative, organized a convoy of 15 cars to rescue them. Later, when the riders were surrounded by a mob of about 1,000 armed white people, Shuttlesworth escorted another civil rights leader, James Farmer, to the church. "He was either insane or the most courageous man I have ever met," Farmer said later. "Shuttlesworth just walked through them, as cool as a cucumber. I think they were intimidated by his boldness."

In January 1963 Shuttlesworth invited King to come to Birmingham and make the city the center of the next stage of the civil rights struggle. While King prepared for the offensive by touring the country and giving twenty-eight speeches in sixteen cities, Shuttlesworth engineered the strategy, studying city laws and march routes. The demonstrations began in March but the climax came in May, when the organizers recruited schoolchildren to participate. On the first day that the children marched, school buses ferried some 959 children off to detention areas. The next day Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor deployed police dogs and fire hoses on the young protesters. Images of children being tossed in the air by torrents of water were broadcast nationwide. In Eyes on the Prize Juan Williams quotes David Vann, an attorney and eyewitness to these events, as saying that when Connor’s troops attacked the children “in the twinkling of an eye the whole black community consolidated . . . behind Dr. King.”

Shuttlesworth himself was hosed and knocked against a wall with such force that he was hospitalized for several days. When Connor heard this, according to Claude Sitton’s report in The New York Times, he exclaimed, “I waited a week to see Shuttlesworth get hit with a hose. I’m sorry I missed it.” Told that Shuttlesworth had been taken away in an ambulance, Connor replied, “I wish they’d carried him away in a hearse.”

Shuttlesworth was never daunted. An NPR memorial quotes historian Horace Huntley: “He would lead demonstrations, and he would call Bull Connor and say, ‘Bull, I will be on such and such corner; if you want to be part of history, be there.’”

Previous Reader’s Almanac posts of interest:

• Rosa Parks keeps her seat and launches the Civil Rights Movement
• James Baldwin on hearing Martin Luther King preach in Montgomery
• Charles Sherrod and Fannie Lou Hamer at the Democratic National Convention, August 1964

Related LOA works: Reporting Civil Rights: Part One: American Journalism 1941–1963 (includes Murray Kempton on the 1961 Freedom Rides and many articles on Birmingham in 1963)

How Sam Hose’s lynching became an awakening for W.E.B. Du Bois

Lawrence Goldstone opens his new book, Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903, by retelling the harrowing story of the lynching of Sam Hose. A young black laborer on a farm outside Atlanta, Hose got into a dispute with his employer and killed him in self-defense. During the ensuing ten-day manhunt, the rival Atlanta newspapers excited their readers by competing on lurid details. As days went by, rape, infanticide, and other “unnatural acts” were added to descriptions of the crime.

When Hose was finally apprehended, the surrounding hysteria led to excursion trains being arranged to transport hundreds of Georgians from Atlanta to the site of his execution. On Sunday, April 23, 1899, the day after his capture, Hose was brought before an estimated crowd of two thousand in the town square of Newman, Georgia. There he was stripped; his ears, fingers, and genitals cut off; his face skinned, and his body burned on a pyre. Souvenir hunters fought over his organs and bones.

Goldstone presents the lynching as emblematic of what had happened to the country in the thirty years since the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were passed: “The descent of the United States into enforced segregation, into a nation where human beings could be tortured and horribly murdered without trial, is a story profoundly tragic and profoundly American.”

For W.E.B. Du Bois the lynching was an awakening. Having arrived at Atlanta University two years before, the pleasantries of his studies were shattered, as he recounts in Dusk of Dawn:

At the very time when my studies were most successful, there cut across this plan which I had as a scientist, a red ray which could not be ignored. I remember when it first, as it were, startled me to my feet: a poor Negro in central Georgia, Sam Hose, had killed his landlord’s wife. I wrote out a careful and reasoned statement concerning the evident facts and started down to the Atlanta Constitution office, carrying in my pocket a letter of introduction to Joel Chandler Harris [journalist and author of the Uncle Remus stories]. I did not get there. On the way news met me: Sam Hose had been lynched, and they said that his knuckles were on exhibition at a grocery store farther down on Mitchell Street, along which I was walking. I turned back to the University. I began to turn aside from my work. I did not meet Joel Chandler Harris nor the editor of the Constitution.

Two considerations thereafter broke in upon my work and eventually disrupted it: first, one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved; and secondly, there was no such definite demand for scientific work of the sort that I was doing. . . .

Du Bois then began writing and lobbying against legislation that would disenfranchise Georgia blacks. His articles that year in The Atlantic Monthly and The Independent were the first of many to appear in national magazines over the next five decades.

Also of interest:

• “Lynch Law in Georgia,” the 1899 investigative report by Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Louis P. Le Vin on this and nine other lynchings in Georgia at the time
• In 2009 The University of Georgia Press published What Virtue There Is in Fire: Cultural Memory and the Lynching of Sam Hose, a detailed historical account by Edwin T. Arnold

Related LOA works: W.E.B. Du Bois: Writings (includes Dusk of Dawn)

Charles Sherrod and Fannie Lou Hamer at the Democratic National Convention, August 1964

The 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City was supposed to be a simple and straightforward coronation of Lyndon Johnson as the presidential candidate. However, it opened on August 22 with nationally televised hearings before the Credentials Committee of delegates from the rogue Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) demanding to be seated. The MFDP was challenging the legitimacy of the state’s official delegation, because the Mississippi Democratic Party excluded blacks from membership and because its platform called for a rejection of civil rights and a repudiation of the national Democratic platform. The dramatic testimony by MFDP delegates like Fannie Lou Hamer (Hulu video below, prefaced by an ad), a sharecropper who described being beaten and shot at simply for trying to register to vote, so galvanized the country and upset the administration that President Johnson interrupted televised coverage of the hearings by calling a presidential press conference.

As field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the organizations behind the creation of MFDP, Charles Sherrod was an eyewitness to the tense negotiations at the convention between MFDP and such national Democratic leaders as Walter Mondale and Hubert Humphrey. The MFDP’s proposed compromise of “proportional representation” was rejected and countered with a compromise offering non-voting seats to two members of the MFDP delegation. A heated debate ensued with many influential leaders, including Martin Luther King, recommending the compromise. Sherrod explains the MFDP’s final decision in “Mississippi at Atlantic City,” an excerpt from Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1963-1973:

Our society is famous for its buck-passing, white-washing tactics. That is one reason the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party could not accept the administration’s compromise. It was made to look like something and it was nothing. It was made to pacify the blacks in this country. It did not work. We refused to adopt a “victory.” We could have accepted the compromise, called it a victory and gone back to Mississippi, carried on the shoulders of millions of Negroes across the country as their champions. But we love the ideas of our country; they mean more than a moment of victory. We are what we are—hungry, beaten, unvictorious, jobless, homeless, but thankful to have the strength to fight. This is honesty, and we refuse to compromise here. It would have been a lie to accept that particular compromise. It would have said to blacks across the nation and the world that we share the power, and that is a lie!

Forty-six years later, in his January 2010 keynote address at “Fifty Years after the Sit-ins,” a conference at the University of Virginia School of Law, Charles Sherrod—husband of former U.S. Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod—recollects Emmett Till, working on a chain gang, fear, and passing the torch. Joan Walsh recently posted an appreciation of Charles Sherrod’s civil rights career on Salon.

Related LOA works: Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1941–1963; Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1963–1973 (includes Sherrod's "Mississippi at Atlantic City" and two profiles of Fannie Lou Hamer)