Eyes on the Prize

by Juan Williams

  When the people started coming into the courtroom, they filled up the white section, then the blacks filled up what was left. When Congressman Diggs came down, the room was filled. He couldn’t get in.

  Congressman Diggs gave me his card to give to the judge. I went straight up and started for the judge’s bench. He hadn’t come in yet but on the way up to the bench I was stopped by one of the veterans who had been deputized. He said, “Where you going, nigger?” And I said, “I’m going to see the judge.” I pulled open my coat pocket which had Diggs’ card in it. “I was going to hand it to the judge … you give it to him then.” He called another deputy over and said, “This nigger said there’s a nigger outside who says he’s a congressman …” So this guy said, “A nigger congressman?” “That’s what this nigger said, ha! ha! ha!”

  I said to myself, “My God!” I had never seen anything like this in my life. The deputy went to the sheriff, who said, “I’ll bring him in here, but I’m going to sit him at you niggers’ table.” And when he brought Congressman Diggs in, that’s where he sat.

  When Mose Wright was called to testify, he was asked if he could identify anybody in the courtroom that had come to his house that night and got Emmett Till … We had been told by some people in our motel that “the stuff is going to hit the fan when Mose Wright stands up and identifies J. W. Milam and the other fellow.” So when the question was put to him, he looked around and said in his broken language, “Thar he.” There was terrific tension in the courtroom, but nothing happened. I mean, no outbreak came. I think that was because of the judge. The judge was pounding his gavel and saying “order, order.”

  Emmett’s mother identified the body pulled from the Tallahatchie River as her son.

  After they testified, the witnesses were hurried out of town by sympathetic observers. Congressman Diggs took Willie Reed; other blacks escorted the Bradleys. Mississippi’s NAACP field secretary, Medgar Evers, and reporter James Hicks worked together to get Mose Wright out of the state shortly after he testified.

  The two defendants never took the stand. The defense consisted of half a dozen character witnesses. At the end of the five-day trial, John C. Whitten, one of the five defense attorneys, made his simple pitch to the all-white, all-male jurors: “Your fathers will turn over in their graves if [Milam and Bryant are found guilty] and I’m sure that every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men in the face of that [outside] pressure.”

  The prosecutor, District Attorney Gerald Chatham, countered that the killing was a “cowardly act—it was a brutal, unnecessary killing of a human being.”

  The jury deliberated a little more than an hour. It was September 23, 1955, the 166th anniversary of the signing of the Bill of Rights. When the jurors returned to the court at 5:43 P.M., Judge Curtis Swango asked for the verdict.

  “Not guilty,” said J. W. Shaw, the jury foreman. Later, Shaw would assert, “I feel the state failed to prove the identity of the body.”

  Reaction was swift. Blacks staged major rallies in Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, New York, Youngstown, and Los Angeles. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP told a crowd in Harlem, “Mississippi has decided to maintain white supremacy by murdering children. The killer of the boy felt free to lynch because there is in the entire state no restraining influence of decency, not in the state capital, among the daily newspapers, the clergy, not among any segment of the so-called lettered citizens.”

  Dr. Archibald J. Carey, a former delegate to the United Nations, said the “shattering damage done to our nation’s prestige in world affairs by the Mississippi jury rates each of them as America’s public enemy number one.”

  Around the country, major white dailies editorialized bitterly against the verdict. Some compared events in Mississippi to the Holocaust of Nazi Germany; one writer called Till America’s Anne Frank. The uproar was fueled further when a grand jury refused to indict Milam and Bryant on separate charges of kidnapping.

  Through the extensive press coverage, all America saw the injustice that had taken place. But black Americans, particularly in the South, saw something else as well—something that in retrospect is easily overlooked. They saw black people stand in a court of law and testify against white people.

  The all-white jury deliberated less than seventy-five minutes before issuing its “not guilty” verdict.

  When asked to identify the men who had abducted his nephew, Mose Wright turned to the accused. “Thar he,” he said as he pointed to each man.

  Other witnesses at the trial included Willie Reed (second from left, standing next to his father, Walter), Mamie Bradley (next to the Reeds), and Amanda Bradley (far right). Also shown are Congressman Charles Diggs (second from right) and Dr. T. R. M. Howard (third from right).

  A Dixie White’s View

  On September 24, 1955, the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, ran this story by Lew Sadler.

  Sadler was a white radio announcer in Mississippi when the Till trial took place. He broadcast on-the-spot coverage when Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam were indicted and arraigned.

  Say Dixie Whites Are Not Bad Folks

  By Lew Sadler

  Greenwood, Mississippi — During the middle of the week, a reporter who said he was with your paper stopped by the station here to talk to me. He said he had heard my “on the spot” report over the air from Sumner, Miss., the day Milam and Bryant were taken to Sumner for arraignment.

  I was busy on the mike at the time and didn’t have much opportunity to talk to him. He did take two photos of me at the mike, and before I had a few off-minutes he was gone.

  Now, did [he] really want to hear what I had to say, or [was he] just curious about something? Would you like to have something to run with those photos if you use them? …

  All right, why are the people of the South … Mississippi in particular, being prosecuted because of all this trouble? Didn’t our sheriff have the two suspects in custody long before the Till boy’s body, if it was his body, was found?

  Does that look as if our law was slanted?

  It has been said by someone far more intelligent than I that “The Southern Negro is sitting in the white man’s wagon, and the white man is having to do the driving.”

  That is no secret to any white or colored person here in the South. So it’s easy to see that they’re on our backs, and we’re not complaining. But why do the people of the North insist that we hold them on our laps?

  My wife was raised by a Negro woman, as have so many other ladies of the South. That still is the case. You can drive by our parks and yards and see how many white children are cared for by, not white nurses, but colored women.

  I’ve seen many times the mother come home from work, and the kids would hold on to the Negro woman’s legs letting themselves be dragged to the sidewalk and on into the car before letting go, because they didn’t want her to leave. Does that look like we are allergic to Negroes?

  The owner of this station has a brother who owns a station in Natchez, Miss., and when something needs to be done here he will send for James, a Negro who works for the Natchez station, to come here, nearly 200 miles to do it, rather than pull in someone else. Doesn’t that sound like we are loyal to a good Negro?

  When we need a baby sitter at home, we have a Negro woman come in, rather than a white girl. We do not lock up the baby’s bank either. Does that sound like we do not trust the Negroes?

  A person does not have to drive very far through town to see Negro and white children playing together. Does that sound like we do not want our children playing and mixing with Negroes?

  There are Negroes living in the town, as well as white people living in the colored section. So does that sound like we are trying to segregate the colored or whites?

  I could give you many individual cases of many varieties of the help we have given the Negroes, including last winter when I gave James, the boy I was telling you about before from Natchez, my only pair of leather gloves. (By the way I’ve never ha
d an extra $3 to get another pair.)

  So please, as a favor to the South, while you are getting the news try to dig just a little deeper and you may come up with something that will enlighten the North to the fact that we of the South have a “good-neighbor” policy of our own.

  The only line we draw is at the door of our schools. Poll the Negroes of the South and you’ll find the Southern Negro feels the same. As I said before … they’re on our backs, and we aren’t complaining, but why do you insist they be in our lap too?

  Emmett Till and the Younger Generation

  In her autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi, writer and civil rights activist Anne Moody recalled learning of Emmett Till’s death when she was a young girl. She did housekeeping for a white woman after school, and her mother warned her not to let on to Mrs. Burke that she had heard about the Till killing. “Just do your work like you don’t know nothing,” her mother said. In this excerpt, Moody describes a scene at her former employer’s home.

  When they had finished and gone into the living room as usual to watch TV, Mrs. Burke called me to eat. I took a clean plate out of the cabinet and sat down. Just as I was putting the first forkful of food in my mouth, Mrs. Burke entered the kitchen.

  “Essie, did you hear about that fourteen-year-old boy who was killed in Greenwood?” she asked me, sitting down in one of the chairs opposite me.

  “No, I didn’t hear that,” I answered, almost choking on the food.

  “Do you know why he was killed?” she asked and I didn’t answer.

  “He was killed because he got out of his place with a white woman. A boy from Mississippi would have known better than that. This boy was from Chicago. Negroes up North have no respect for people. They think they can get away with anything. He just came to Mississippi and put a whole lot of notions in the boys’ heads here and stirred up a lot of trouble,” she said passionately.

  “How old are you, Essie?” she asked me after a pause.

  “Fourteen. I will soon be fifteen though,” I said.

  “See, that boy was just fourteen too. It’s a shame he had to die so soon.” She was so red in the face, she looked as if she was on fire.

  When she left the kitchen I sat there with my mouth open and my food untouched. I couldn’t have eaten now if I were starving. “Just do your work like you don’t know nothing” ran through my mind again and I began washing dishes.

  I went home shaking like a leaf on a tree. For the first time out of all her trying, Mrs. Burke had made me feel like rotten garbage. Many times she had tried to instill fear within me and subdue me and had given up. But when she talked about Emmett Till there was something in her voice that sent chills and fear all over me.

  Before Emmett Till’s murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell and the Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me—the fear of being killed just because I was black. This was the worst of my fears. I knew once I got food, the fear of starving to death would leave. I also was told that if I were a good girl, I wouldn’t have to fear the Devil or hell. But I didn’t know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period was enough, I thought.

  Mose Wright returned to Mississippi to testify against Milam and Bryant on kidnapping charges before a second grand jury. That done, Wright never went back. He gave away his prize hunting dog, abandoned his old car at the train station, and took the Illinois Central’s colored car to Chicago.

  Black leaders called for a “refugee fund” to help blacks leave the South, a black “March on Dixie,” and a boycott of goods produced in Mississippi.

  The southern papers reacted defensively to the onslaught of denunciations. The Delta Democrat Times of Greenville, Mississippi, editorialized that “to blame two million Mississippians for the irresponsible act of two is about as illogical as one can become.” They wrote that the prosecution’s case was weak and that a guilty verdict would not have stood up in any appeals court in the nation.

  The murder of Emmett Till had a powerful impact on a new generation of blacks. It was this generation, those who were adolescents when Till was killed, that would soon demand justice and freedom in a way unknown in America before.

  The Montgomery Advertiser in Montgomery, Alabama, picked up the Till story and gave it prominent display. Three months later, the black population of Montgomery began an historic boycott of their municipal bus system.

  Mose Wright did not go down in the history books as a leader of the civil rights movement. But his individual act of courage, like the acts of so many unknown citizens, was just as important to the movement as the charismatic leadership of people like Martin Luther King, Jr.

  For some time after her son’s murder, Mamie Bradley traveled and lectured throughout the country, calling herself a “nobody” and her dead son a “little nobody who shook up the world.” She spoke for millions of blacks who had moved north trying to forget the indignities of the South. Speaking in Cleveland, Mrs. Bradley said, “Two months ago I had a nice apartment in Chicago. I had a good job. I had a son. When something happened to the Negroes in the South I said, ‘That’s their business, not mine.’ Now I know how wrong I was. The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all.”

  Chapter Three

  We’re Not Moving To The Back, Mr. Blake

  The Montgomery Bus Boycott

  Ain’t gonna ride them buses no more, Ain’t gonna ride no more. Why don’t all the white folk know That I ain’t gonna ride no more.

  Sung by Montgomery boycotters, 1955

  During the height of the thirteen-month Montgomery bus boycott, the Montgomery Improvement Association held mass meetings twice each week.

  In the 1950s, racial segregation in the South was a pervasive way of life. Bigotry extended beyond the economic and educational spheres into the smallest details of everyday living. Separate restaurant and entertainment facilities for blacks and whites were the norm, and state laws openly outlawed racial integration. A black person could not so much as drink from a public water fountain unless it was specifically marked for “coloreds” only.

  The city buses were a microcosm of this segregated society. Black passengers, after paying their fares at the front of the bus, had to leave it and re-enter through the back door. They were allowed to sit only in the rear, and had to give up their seats whenever a white rider was left standing.

  Many forms of discrimination were felt privately, by individuals. But thousands of blacks and whites rode the buses together daily—and their close proximity there only made their separateness that much more distinct. Day by day blacks stood together in the rear of crowded buses while the agents of their indignity sat comfortably right in front of them.

  Indignity suffered alone is debilitating; indignity shared can transform itself into power. Perhaps it was not just by chance that the public buses became one of the first arenas in the organized fight against segregation.

  Thousands of blacks and whites rode these segregated buses daily.

  In 1953, the black community in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, successfully petitioned the city council to pass an ordinance allowing blacks to be seated on a first-come, first-served basis on city buses. Blacks would still have to begin their seating at the back of the bus while whites would sit up front, but no seats were to be actually reserved for whites. The white bus drivers, however, ignored the ordinance, continuing to save seats for whites. In an effort to demand compliance with the new ordinance, the black community staged a one-day boycott of the buses. But by day’s end, the Louisiana attorney general declared the new ordinance illegal and ruled that the drivers did not have to change the seating practices on the buses. The strike ended unsuccessfully.

  Three months later, led by the Reverend T. J. Jemison and other community leaders, blacks in Baton Rouge launched a second bus boycott. The action lasted only about one week, yet it induced city officials to offer a compromise: first-come,
first-served seating as stipulated in the nullified ordinance, but with two side seats up front reserved for whites and one long seat in back set aside for blacks. The compromise was accepted by Rev. Jemison and the other boycott leaders.

  This boycott marked one of the first times a community of blacks had organized a sustained, direct action against segregation and won. In light of the subsequent triumphs of the civil rights movement, the Baton Rouge victory was a small one. But the work of Rev. Jemison and the other boycott organizers in Baton Rouge had far-reaching implications for the movement that was just beginning to take root. Although the success in Baton Rouge was overshadowed by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision on school desegregation, the lessons learned in Louisiana were not lost. They were soon put to use some 400 miles away in Montgomery, Alabama, where perhaps the most significant boycott of the civil rights movement was about to begin.

  The white residents of Montgomery considered themselves progressive in matters of race relations. News of the brutal murder of Emmett Till and the resulting trial received substantial coverage in Montgomery, but many white residents felt that Sumner, Mississippi was a rural backwater compared to their urban environment.

  Montgomery’s public bus system, like that in Baton Rouge, was racially segregated. Although Montgomery’s black riders accounted for more than seventy-five percent of all passengers, they were regularly forced to surrender their seats to whites. The policy of the Montgomery City Lines bus company was written in keeping with city and state ordinances on segregation. Drivers were to designate the front part of the bus for whites and the rear section for blacks in proportion to the number of blacks and whites on the bus at any given moment. As more whites came onto the bus, the driver moved an imaginary color line further back. Blacks sitting directly behind the whites-only section would be told to get up and move further into the bus. The official policy was that if there were no seats available for blacks to move back to as additional white passengers got on, blacks were not required to give up their seats.