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\nCONTENTS<\/p>\n
Epigraph<\/p>\n
1. Nothing That Boy Did<\/p>\n
2. Boots on the Porch<\/p>\n
3. Growing Up Black in Chicago<\/p>\n
4. Emmett in Chicago and \u201cLittle Mississippi\u201d<\/p>\n
5. Pistol-Whipping at Christmas<\/p>\n
6. The Incident<\/p>\n
7. On the Third Day<\/p>\n
8. Mama Made the Earth Tremble<\/p>\n
9. Warring Regiments of Mississippi<\/p>\n
10. Black Monday<\/p>\n
11. People We Don\u2019t Need Around Here Any More<\/p>\n
12. Fixed Opinions<\/p>\n
13. Mississippi Underground<\/p>\n
14. \u201cThere He Is\u201d<\/p>\n
15. Every Last Anglo-Saxon One of You<\/p>\n
16. The Verdict of the World<\/p>\n
17. Protest Politics<\/p>\n
18. Killing Emmett Till<\/p>\n
Epilogue: The Children of Emmett Till<\/p>\n
Acknowledgments<\/p>\n
About Timothy B. Tyson<\/p>\n
Notes<\/p>\n
Bibliography<\/p>\n
Index<\/p>\n
for my brother Vern<\/p>\n
My name is being called on the road to freedom. I can hear the blood of Emmett Till as it calls from the ground. . . .When shall we go? Not tomorrow! Not at high noon! Now!<\/p>\n
REVEREND SAMUEL WELLS, Albany, Georgia, 1962<\/p>\n
1<\/p>\n
N O T H I N G T H AT B OY D I D<\/p>\n
The older woman sipped her coffee. \u201cI have thought and thought<\/p>\n
about everything about Emmett Till, the killing and the trial, telling who did what to who,\u201d she said.1 Back when she was twenty-one and her name was Carolyn Bryant, the French newspaper Aurore dubbed the dark-haired young woman from the Mississippi Delta \u201ca crossroads Marilyn Monroe.\u201d2 News reporters from Detroit to Dakar never failed to sprinkle their stories about l\u2019affaire Till with words like \u201ccomely\u201d and \u201cfetching\u201d to describe her. William Bradford Huie, the Southern journalist and dealer in tales of the Till lynching, called her \u201cone of the prettiest black-haired Irish women I ever saw in my life.\u201d3<\/p>\n
Almost eighty and still handsome, her hair now silver, the former Mrs. Roy Bryant served me a slice of pound cake, hesitated a little, and then murmured, seeming to speak to herself more than to me, \u201cThey\u2019re all dead now anyway.\u201d She placed her cup on the low glass table between us, and I waited.<\/p>\n
For one epic moment half a century earlier, Carolyn Bryant\u2019s face had been familiar across the globe, forever attached to a crime of historic notoriety and symbolic power. The murder of Emmett Till was reported in one of the very first banner headlines of the civil rights era and launched the national coalition that fueled the modern civil rights movement. But she had never opened her door to a journalist or historian, let alone invited one for cake and coffee. Now she looked me in the eyes, trying hard to distinguish between fact and remembrance, and told me a story that I did not know.<\/p>\n
The story I thought I knew began in 1955, fifty years earlier, when Carolyn Bryant was twenty-one and a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago walked into the Bryant\u2019s Grocery and Meat Market in a rural Mississippi Delta hamlet and offended her. Perhaps on a dare, the boy touched or even squeezed her hand when he exchanged money for candy, asked her for a date, and said goodbye when he left the store, tugged along by an older cousin. Few news writers who told the story of the black boy and the backwoods beauty failed to mention the \u201cwolf whistle\u201d that came next: when an angry Carolyn walked out to a car to retrieve the pistol under the seat, Till supposedly whistled at her.<\/p>\n
The world knew this story only because of what happened a few days later: Carolyn\u2019s kinsmen, allegedly just her husband and brother- in-law, kidnapped and killed the boy and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River. That was supposed to be the end of it. Lesson taught. But a young fisherman found Till\u2019s corpse in the water, and a month later the world watched Roy Bryant and J. W. \u201cBig\u201d Milam stand trial for his murder.<\/p>\n
I knew the painful territory well because when I was eleven years old in the small tobacco market town of Oxford, North Carolina, a friend\u2019s father and brothers beat and shot a young black man to death. His name was Henry Marrow, and the events leading up to his death had something in common with Till\u2019s. My father, a white Methodist minister, got mixed up in efforts to bring peace and justice to the community. We moved away that summer. But Oxford burned on in my memory, and I later went back and interviewed the man most responsible for Marrow\u2019s death. He told me, \u201cThat nigger committed suicide, coming in my store and wanting to four-letter-word my daughter-in-law.\u201d I also talked with many of those who had protested the murder by setting fire to the huge tobacco warehouses in downtown Oxford, as well as witnesses to the killing, townspeople, attorneys, and others. Seeking to understand what had happened in my own hometown made me a historian. I researched the case for years, on my way to a PhD in American history, and in 2004 published a book about Marrow\u2019s murder, what it meant for my hometown and my family, and how it revealed the workings of race in<\/p>\n
American history.4 Carolyn Bryant Donham had read the book, which was why she decided to contact me and talk with me about the lynching of Emmett Till.<\/p>\n
The killing of Henry Marrow occurred in 1970, fifteen years after the Till lynching, but unlike the Till case it never entered national or international awareness, even though many of the same themes were present. Like Till, Marrow had allegedly made a flirtatious remark to a young white woman at her family\u2019s small rural store. In Oxford, though, the town erupted into arson and violence, the fires visible for miles. An all-white jury, acting on what they doubtless perceived to be the values of the white community, acquitted both of the men charged in the case, even though the murder had occurred in public. What happened in Oxford in 1970 was a late-model lynching, in which white men killed a black man in the service of white supremacy. The all-white jury ratified the murder as a gesture of protest against public school integration, which had finally begun in Oxford, and underlying much of the white protest was fear and rage at the prospect of white and black children going to school together, which whites feared would lead to other forms of \u201crace-mixing,\u201d even \u201cmiscegenation.\u201d<\/p>\n
As in the Marrow case, many white people believed Till had violated this race-and-sex taboo and therefore had it coming. Many news reports asserted that Till had erred\u2014in judgment, in behavior, in deed, and perhaps in thought. Without justifying the murder, a number of Southern newspapers argued that the boy was at least partially at fault. The most influential account of the lynching, Huie\u2019s 1956 presumptive tell-all, depicted a black boy who virtually committed suicide with his arrogant responses to his assailants. \u201cBoastful, brash,\u201d Huie described Till. He \u201chad a white girl\u2019s picture in his pocket and boasted of having screwed her,\u201d not just to friends, not just to Carolyn Bryant, but also to his killers: \u201cThat is why they took him out and killed him.\u201d5 The story was told and retold in many ways, but a great many of them, from the virulently defensive accounts of Mississippi and its customs to the self-righteous screeds of Northern critics, noted that Till had been at the wrong place at the wrong time and made the wrong choices.<\/p>\n
Until recently historians did not even have a transcript of the 1955 trial. It went missing soon after the trial ended, turning up briefly in the early 1960s but then destroyed in a basement flood. In September 2004 FBI agents located a faded \u201ccopy of a copy of a copy\u201d in a private home in Biloxi, Mississippi. It took weeks for two clerks to transcribe the entire document, except for one missing page.6 The transcript, finally released in 2007, allows us to compare the later recollections of witnesses and defendants with what they said fifty years earlier. It also reveals that Carolyn Bryant told an even harder- edged story in the courtroom, one that was difficult to square with the gentle woman sitting across from me at the coffee table.<\/p>\n
Half a century earlier, above the witness stand in the Tallahatchie County Courthouse, two ceiling fans slowly churned the cigarette smoke. This was the stage on which the winner of beauty contests at two high schools starred as the fairest flower of Southern womanhood. She testified that Till had grabbed her hand forcefully across the candy counter, letting go only when she snatched it away. He asked her for a date, she said, chased her down the counter, blocked her path, and clutched her narrow waist tightly with both hands.<\/p>\n
She told the court he said, \u201cYou needn\u2019t be afraid of me. [I\u2019ve], well, \u2014\u2014with white women before.\u201d According to the transcript, the delicate young woman refused to utter the verb or even tell the court what letter of the alphabet it started with. She escaped Till\u2019s forceful grasp only with great difficulty, she said.7 A month later one Mississippi newspaper insisted that the case should never have been called the \u201cwolf whistle case.\u201d Instead, said the editors, it should have been called \u201can \u2018attempted rape\u2019 case.\u201d8<\/p>\n
\u201cThen this other nigger came in from the store and got him by the arm,\u201d Carolyn testified. \u201cAnd he told him to come on and let\u2019s go. He had him by the arm and led him out.\u201d Then came an odd note in her tale, a note discordant with the claim of aborted assault: Till stopped in the doorway, \u201cturned around and said, \u2018Goodbye.\u2019 \u201d9<\/p>\n
The defendants sat on the court\u2019s cane-bottom chairs in a room packed with more than two hundred white men and fifty or sixty African Americans who had been crowded into the last two rows and<\/p>\n
the small, segregated black press table. In his closing statement, John W. Whitten, counsel for the defendants, told the all-white, all-male jury, \u201cI\u2019m sure that every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men, despite this [outside] pressure.\u201d10<\/p>\n
Mamie Bradley,I Till\u2019s mother, was responsible for a good deal of that outside pressure on Mississippi\u2019s court system. Her brave decision to hold an open-casket funeral for her battered son touched off news stories across the globe. The resultant international outrage compelled the U.S. State Department to lament \u201cthe real and continuing damage to American foreign policy from such tragedies as the Emmett Till case.\u201d11 Her willingness to travel anywhere to speak about the tragedy helped to fuel a huge protest movement that pulled together the elements of a national civil rights movement, beginning with the political and cultural power of black Chicago. The movement became the most important legacy of the story.12 Her memoir of the case, Death of Innocence, published almost fifty years after her son\u2019s murder, lets us see him as a human being, not merely the victim of one of the most notorious hate crimes in history.13<\/p>\n
\u2022 \u2022 \u2022<\/p>\n
As I sat drinking her coffee and eating her pound cake, Carolyn Bryant Donham handed me a copy of the trial transcript and the manuscript of her unpublished memoir, \u201cMore than a Wolf Whistle: The Story of Carolyn Bryant Donham.\u201d I promised to deliver our interview and these documents to the appropriate archive, where future scholars would be able to use them. In her memoir she recounts the story she told at the trial using imagery from the classic Southern racist horror movie of the \u201cBlack Beast\u201d rapist.14 But about her testimony that Till had grabbed her around the waist and uttered obscenities, she now told me, \u201cThat part\u2019s not true.\u201d<\/p>\n
A son of the South and the son of a minister, I have sat in countless such living rooms that had been cleaned for guests, Sunday clothes on, an unspoken deference running young to old, men to women, and, very often, dark skin to light. As a historian I have collected a lot of oral histories in the South and across all manner of social lines.<\/p>\n
Manners matter a great deal, and the personal questions that oral history requires are sometimes delicate. I was comfortable with the setting but rattled by her revelation, and I struggled to phrase my next question. If that part was not true, I asked, what did happen that evening decades earlier?<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to tell you,\u201d she said. \u201cHonestly, I just don\u2019t remember. It was fifty years ago. You tell these stories for so long that they seem true, but that part is not true.\u201d Historians have long known about the complex reliability of oral history\u2014of virtually all historical sources, for that matter\u2014and the malleability of human memory, and her confession was in part a reflection of that. What does it mean when you remember something that you know never happened? She had pondered that question for many years, but never aloud in public or in an interview. When she finally told me the story of her life and starkly different and much larger tales of Emmett Till\u2019s death, it was the first time in half a century that she had uttered his name outside her family.<\/p>\n
Not long afterward I had lunch in Jackson, Mississippi, with Jerry Mitchell, the brilliant journalist at the Clarion-Ledger whose sleuthing has solved several cold case civil rights\u2013era murders. I talked with him about my efforts to write about the Till case, and he shared some thoughts of his own. A few days after our lunch a manila envelope with a Mississippi return address brought hard proof that \u201cthat part,\u201d as Carolyn had called the alleged assault, had never been true.<\/p>\n
Mitchell had sent me copies of the handwritten notes of what Carolyn Bryant told her attorney on the day after Roy and J.W. were arrested in 1955. In this earliest recorded version of events, she charged only that Till had \u201cinsulted\u201d her, not grabbed her, and certainly not attempted to rape her. The documents prove that there was a time when she did seem to know what had happened, and a time soon afterward when she became the mouthpiece of a monstrous lie.15<\/p>\n
Now, half a century later, Carolyn offered up another truth, an unyielding truth about which her tragic counterpart, Mamie, was also adamant: \u201cNothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.\u201d<\/p>\n
I. Mamie Carthan became Mamie Till after her marriage to Louis Till in 1940, which ended with his death in 1945. Mamie Till became Mamie Mallory after a brief remarriage in 1946. Her name changed to Bradley after another marriage in 1951. She was Mamie Bradley during most of the years covered by this book. She married one last time in 1957, becoming Mamie Till-Mobley, under which name she published her 2004 memoir. To avoid confusion, and also to depict her as a human being rather than an icon, I generally refer to her by her first name. No disrespect is intended. The same is true of Emmett Till and Carolyn Bryant.<\/p>\n
2<\/p>\n
B O O T S O N T H E P O R C H<\/p>\n
It was probably the gunshot-thud of boots on the porch that pulled<\/p>\n
Reverend Moses Wright out of a deep sleep about two in the morning on Sunday, August 28, 1955.1 Wright was a sixty-four-year-old sharecropper, short and wiry with thick hands and a hawksbill nose. An ordained minister in the Church of God in Christ, Wright sometimes preached at the concrete-block church tucked into a cedar thicket just a half mile away; most people called him \u201cPreacher.\u201d Twenty-five white-tufted acres of cotton, almost ready for harvest, stretched out behind his unpainted clapboard house in a pitch-black corner of the Mississippi Delta called East Money.2 He had lived his entire life in the Delta, and he had never had any trouble with white people before.<\/p>\n
The old but well-built house would be called a \u201cshack\u201d in a certain stripe of sympathetic news story, but it was the nicest tenant house on the G. C. Frederick Plantation. Mr. Frederick respected Reverend Wright and let his family occupy the low-slung four-bedroom house where he had lived himself before he built the main house. Its tin roof sloped toward the persimmon and cedar trees that lined the dusty road out front. A pleasant screened-in porch ran its entire face. From the porch two front doors opened directly into two front bedrooms; there were two smaller bedrooms stacked behind those.3<\/p>\n
The accounts of what happened in the Wright home that morning vary slightly, but the interviews given to reporters soon after the event seem to be the most reliable. \u201cPreacher! Preacher!\u201d someone bellowed<\/p>\n
from inside the screened porch. It was a white man\u2019s voice. Wright sat up in bed. \u201cThis is Mr. Bryant,\u201d said another white man. \u201cWe want to talk to the boy. We\u2019re here to talk to you about that boy from Chicago, the one that done the talking up at Money.\u201d4 Wright thought about grabbing his shotgun from the closet; instead he pulled on his overalls and work boots and prepared to step outside.5<\/p>\n
Still asleep were his three sons, Simeon, Robert, and Maurice; his wife, Elizabeth; and three boys from Chicago visiting for the summer: his two grandsons, Curtis Jones and Wheeler Parker Jr.; and his nephew Emmett, whom they all called \u201cBobo.\u201d Somehow Wright had gotten wind of a story involving Bobo at Bryant\u2019s Grocery and Meat Market in Money. At first Wright had feared trouble might come of it, but the vague details seemed trifling and convinced him that repercussions were unlikely.6 Otherwise he would have put his niece\u2019s boy on the next train home. Now that he had angry white men at his door, he decided to stall, hoping that Bobo would scamper out the back door and hide. Then Wright would tell the men that the boy had taken the train for Chicago on Saturday morning. \u201cWho is it?\u201d he called out.7<\/p>\n
In the darkness Wright heard rather than saw Elizabeth head quickly for the two back rooms to wake the boys. Simeon slept in one of the blue metal beds with his beloved cousin Bobo.8 Robert slept in another bed in the same room. Curtis stayed by himself in the other back room. In the second front bedroom the two sixteen-year-olds, Wheeler and Maurice, shared a bed. Eight people in mortal danger.9<\/p>\n
Elizabeth later told reporters, \u201cWe knew they were out to mob the boy.\u201d There was neither time nor necessity to talk about what to do. Her only recourse was obvious: \u201cWhen I heard the men at the door, I ran to Emmett\u2019s room and tried to wake him so I could get him out the back door and into the cotton fields.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wright slowly stepped out of his bedroom and onto the porch, closing the door behind him. In front of him stood a familiar white man, six feet two inches and weighing 250 pounds. \u201cThat man was Milam,\u201d the minister said later. \u201cI could see his bald head. I would know him again anywhere. I would know him if I met him in<\/p>\n
Texas.\u201d10 In his left hand the imposing Milam carried a heavy five-cell flashlight. He hefted a U.S. Army .45 automatic in his right.11<\/p>\n
Wright did not recognize the rugged-looking man, six feet tall and perhaps 190 pounds, who had identified himself as \u201cMr. Bryant\u201d and stood just behind Milam, though his small grocery store was not three miles distant.12 Wright could see that he, too, carried a U.S. Army .45. When both men pushed past him into the house, he could smell them; at that point they had been drinking for hours.13<\/p>\n
Standing by the door just inside the screened porch, a third man turned his head to one side and down low, \u201clike he didn\u2019t want me to see him, and I didn\u2019t see him to recognize him,\u201d the preacher said.14<\/p>\n
Wright assumed the third man was black because he stayed in the shadows, silent: \u201cHe acted like a colored man.\u201d15 This was likely one of the black men who worked for Milam. Or, if Wright\u2019s intuition was mistaken, it might have been a family friend of the Milam-Bryant family, Elmer Kimbell or Hubert Clark, or their brother-in-law Melvin Campbell.16<\/p>\n
Echoing Bryant, Milam said, \u201cWe want to see the boy from Chicago.\u201d17<\/p>\n
Wright slowly and deliberately opened the other bedroom door, the one leading into the front guest room where the two sixteen-year-olds slept. The small room quickly became crowded and thick with the odors of whiskey and sweat; faces, guns, and furnishings were caught in the shaky and sparse illumination of Milam\u2019s flashlight. \u201cThe house was as dark as a thousand midnights,\u201d Wheeler Parker recalled. \u201cYou couldn\u2019t see. It was like a nightmare. I mean\u2014I mean someone come stand over you with a pistol in one hand and a flashlight, and you\u2019re sixteen years old, it\u2019s a terrifying experience.\u201d18<\/p>\n
Milam and Bryant told Wright to turn on some lights, but Wright only mumbled something about the lights being broken.19 The wash of the flashlight swept from Maurice to Wheeler and back to Wright. The white men moved on. \u201cThey asked where the boy from Chicago was,\u201d recalled Maurice.20<\/p>\n
\u201cWe marched around through two rooms,\u201d Wright recounted. Milam and Bryant, clearly impatient, may have suspected Wright was stalling. Elizabeth had moved quickly to wake Emmett, but he moved<\/p>\n
far too slowly. \u201cThey were already in the front door before I could shake him awake,\u201d she said.21<\/p>\n
Now the two white men stood over the blue metal bedstead where the fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago lay with his cousin. \u201cAre you the one who did the smart talking up at Money?\u201d Milam demanded.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah,\u201d said Emmett. \u201cWell, that was my sister-in-law and I won\u2019t stand for it. And don\u2019t<\/p>\n
say \u2018Yeah\u2019 to me or I\u2019ll blow your head off. Get your clothes on.\u201d Milam told Simeon to close his eyes and go back to sleep, while Emmett pulled on a white T-shirt, charcoal gray pants, and black loafers.22<\/p>\n
Elizabeth offered them money if they would leave the boy alone. Curtis thought Bryant might have accepted if he had been there without his burly half-brother, but Milam yelled, \u201cWoman, you get back in the bed, and I want to hear them springs squeak.\u201d With unimaginable poise Wright quietly explained that the boy had suffered from polio as a child and had never been quite right. He meant no harm, but he just didn\u2019t have good sense. \u201cWhy not give the boy a good whipping and leave it at that? He\u2019s only fourteen and he\u2019s from up North.\u201d23<\/p>\n
Milam turned to Wright and asked, \u201cHow old are you, Preacher?\u201d Wright answered that he was sixty-four. \u201cYou make any trouble,\u201d<\/p>\n
said Milam, \u201cand you\u2019ll never live to be sixty-five.\u201d24<\/p>\n
Milam and Bryant hauled the sleepy child out the front door toward a vehicle waiting beyond the trees in the moonless Mississippi night. Wright could hear the doors being opened, though no interior light came on; then he thought he heard a voice ask \u201cIs this the boy?\u201d and another voice answer \u201cYes.\u201d He and others later speculated that Carolyn Bryant had been in the vehicle and had identified Emmett, thereby becoming an accessory to murder. But besides being dark it was hard to hear the low voices through the trees, and Wright told reporters at the time, \u201cI don\u2019t know if it was a lady\u2019s voice or not.\u201d The vehicle pulled away without its headlights on, and nobody in the house could tell whether it was a truck or a sedan.<\/p>\n
After he heard the tires crackling through the gravel, Wright stepped out into the yard alone and stared toward Money for a long<\/p>\n
time.25<\/p>\n
3<\/p>\n
G R O W I N G U P B L AC K I N C H I C AG O<\/p>\n
It was Reverend Wright who started the three Chicago boys, Emmett,<\/p>\n
Curtis, and Wheeler, thinking about going to Mississippi that summer of 1955, only a few days after Emmett turned fourteen. A former parishioner, Robert Jones, who was the father-in-law of Wright\u2019s daughter, Willie Mae, had passed away in Chicago, and the family asked Wright to conduct the funeral. While he was up north it was decided that he would bring Wheeler and Emmett back to Mississippi with him and that Curtis would join them soon afterward.1<\/p>\n
The image of Wright in Chicago is one of the more pleasing in this hard story. While he was in town he rode the elevated train, toured the enormous Merchandise Mart and the downtown Loop, and gazed out from atop the 462-foot Tribune Tower, which featured stones from the Great Pyramid, the Alamo, and the Great Wall of China, among other famous constructions. He enjoyed the sights but was hardly dumbstruck. The city had its glories, he acknowledged, but he boasted of the simple pleasures of rural life in the Delta. Four rivers\u2014the Yazoo, the Sunflower, the Yalobusha, and the Tallahatchie\u2014passed near his Mississippi home, and there were seven deep lakes. This surely offered the best fishing in the world.2 His stories enchanted Emmett. \u201cFor a free-spirited boy who lived to be outdoors,\u201d Emmett\u2019s mother, Mamie, said, \u201cthere was so much possibility, so much adventure in the Mississippi his great-uncle described.\u201d Although Mamie originally refused to let him go south, she soon relented under<\/p>\n
a barrage of pressure from Emmett, who recruited support from the extended family.3<\/p>\n
One stock theme in stories of Emmett Till is that, being from the North, he died in Mississippi because he just didn\u2019t know any better. How was a boy from Chicago supposed to know anything about segregation or the battle lines laid down by white supremacy? It is tempting to paint him, as his mother did, as innocent of the perilous boundaries of race; her reasons for doing so made sense at the time, even though being fourteen and abducted at gunpoint by adults would seem evidence enough of his innocence. But it defies the imagination that a fourteen-year-old from 1950s Chicago could really be ignorant of the consequences of the color of his skin.<\/p>\n
Race worked in different ways in Chicago than it did in Mississippi, but there were similarities. After Emmett was murdered one newspaper writer, Carl Hirsch, had the clarity of mind to note, \u201cThe Negro children who live here on Chicago\u2019s South Side or any Northern ghetto are no strangers to the Jim Crow and the racist violence. . . . Twenty minutes from the Till home is Trumbull Park Homes, where for two years a racist mob has besieged 29 Negro families in a government housing project ( help with nursing paper writing from experts with MSN & DNP degrees).\u201d Emmett attended a segregated, all-black school in a community \u201cpadlocked as a ghetto by white supremacy.\u201d Hirsch pointed out, \u201cPeople everywhere are joining to fight because of the way Emmett Till died\u2014but also because of the way he was forced to live.\u201d4<\/p>\n
There was at least one way that Chicago was actually more segregated than Mississippi. A demographic map of the city in 1950 shows twenty-one distinct ethnic neighborhoods: German, Irish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Czech and Slovak, Scottish, Polish, Chinese, Greek, Yugoslavian, Russian, Mexican, French, and Hungarian, among others.5 These ethnic groups divided Chicago according to an unwritten treaty, which clearly stated that Germans, for instance, would live on the North Side, Irish on the South Side, Jews on the West Side, Bohemians and Poles on the Near Southwest Side and Near Northwest Side, and African Americans in the South Side\u2019s \u201cBlack Belt.\u201d All of these groups had gangs that regarded their<\/p>\n
neighborhood as a place to be defended against encroachments by outsiders. And the most visible outsiders were African Americans.<\/p>\n
Black youngsters who walked through neighborhoods other than their own did so at their peril. Those searching for places to play, in parks and other public facilities, were especially vulnerable. These were lessons that black children growing up on the South Side learned with their ABCs.6<\/p>\n
\u2022 \u2022 \u2022<\/p>\n
Like many of his contemporaries, Emmett loved baseball. \u201cHe was a nice guy,\u201d said thirteen-year-old Leroy Abbott, a teammate on the Junior Rockets, their neighborhood baseball team. \u201cAnd a good pitcher\u2014a lot of stuff on the ball.\u201d7 With the White Sox and the Cubs both in Chicago, it may seem odd that Emmett rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers, but for a young black baseball enthusiast they were hard to resist. Brooklyn had not only broken the color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson in 1947 but had also signed the catcher Roy Campanella the next year and in 1949 acquired Don Newcombe, Emmett\u2019s hero. Newcombe soon became the first black pitcher to start a World Series game and the first to win twenty games in a season.8<\/p>\n
One night when Emmett was about twelve, Mamie sent him to the store to buy a loaf of bread. He was ordinarily reliable about such things, but on the way home he saw some boys playing baseball in the park. He walked over to the backstop and talked his way into the game. He planned to stay for a short time and then go home with the bread; his mother might not even notice, he told himself. But his passion for the game overcame him; he must have become absorbed in the smell of the grass and the crack of the bat, the solid slap of the ball into leather and the powdery dust of the base paths. \u201cSo, I guess he just put down the bread and got in that game,\u201d his mother recalled. \u201cAnd that\u2019s exactly where I found Bo\u2014Bo and that loaf of bread. Of course, by that time, the bread kind of looked like the kids had been using it for second base.\u201d9<\/p>\n
Emmett was a lovable, playful, and somewhat mischievous child but essentially well-behaved. He spent his early years in Argo, less<\/p>\n
than an hour\u2019s train ride from his eventual home in Chicago, and was unusually close to his mother and other family members. But he grew up in one of the toughest and most segregated cities in America, knowing as virtually every African American in Chicago knew that in Trumbull Park black fathers kept loaded firearms in their home for good reason. Emmett did not have to go to Mississippi to learn that white folks could take offense even at the presence of a black child, let alone one who violated local customs.<\/p>\n
\u2022 \u2022 \u2022<\/p>\n
The City of New Orleans was the southbound train of the Illinois Central Railway that would carry Emmett to Mississippi in August 1955. The Illinois Central connected Chicago to Mississippi not merely by its daily arrivals and departures but also by tragedy, hope, and the steel rails of history. Over the six decades from 1910 to 1970 some six million black Southerners departed Dixie for promised lands all over America. Chicago, the poet Carl Sandburg wrote, became a \u201creceiving station and port of refuge\u201d for more than half a million of them, vast numbers of whom hailed from Mississippi. \u201cThe world of Mississippi and the world of Chicago were intertwined and interdependent,\u201d writes the historian Isabel Wilkerson, \u201cand what happened in one did not easily escape notice of the other from afar.\u201d Straight up the line of the northbound Illinois Central the carloads of pilgrims from the Delta would rumble, the floors littered with so many empty pasteboard boxes that had been lovingly packed with food from back home that people called it \u201cthe chicken bone express.\u201d These migrants brought with them musical, culinary, religious, and community traditions that became a part of Chicago; in fact, the narrow isthmus on the South Side where African Americans were confined was often referred to as \u201cNorth Mississippi.\u201d10 What they found there, however, was not the Promised Land. Though Chicago offered a welcome breath of free air, the newcomers also faced a relentless battle with the white working class over neighborhood borders and public space.<\/p>\n
The first wave of the Great Migration, from 1910 to 1930, doubled the number of African Americans in Chicago, placing them in competition for jobs and space with earlier generations of migrants, most of them from central and southern Europe. Herded into the South Side, quickly overwhelming its capacity, the descendants of enslaved Southerners overflowed the ghetto\u2019s narrow confines. Housing shortages pushed them over invisible racial boundaries into formerly all-white neighborhoods, where they confronted threats and violence. One 1919 study of race relations in Chicago called these upheavals \u201ca kind of guerilla warfare.\u201d Between July 1917 and March 1921 authorities recorded fifty-eight bombings of buildings bought or rented by African Americans in formerly all-white sections of the city.11<\/p>\n
On Sunday, July 27, 1919, a black seventeen-year-old named Eugene Williams drifted across one of those invisible boundaries and set off a small race war. As he and his friends swam at a segregated beach on Lake Michigan, their wooden raft floated into \u201cwhite\u201d water. A white man threw rocks at them, hitting Williams in the head, causing him to sink and drown. Rather than arrest the assailant, white police officers hauled off a black bystander who objected to their inaction. Soon carloads of white gunmen raced through the African American neighborhoods, spraying bullets. Black snipers returned fire. Mobs of both races roamed the streets, stoning, beating, and stabbing their victims. The riot raged for five days in that notorious Red Summer of 1919; police shot down seven African Americans, white mobs killed sixteen more, and black mobs killed fifteen whites. Thousands became homeless as a result of arson, and more than five hundred citizens, two-thirds of them black, were seriously injured.12<\/p>\n
The politics of \u201cthe New Negro\u201d were in evidence even before the upheavals but were far more prominent in Chicago afterward, in a direct response to the race riots.13 Though mourning the deaths, African Americans in Chicago were proud that they had risen up to defend their lives and communities. Added to that, pride in the patriotic sacrifices and military achievements of black soldiers in World War I met a new determination to make America itself safe for democracy.14 W. E. B. Du Bois, who had urged African Americans at<\/p>\n
the outset of the war to lay aside their special grievances and support the war effort wholeheartedly, wrote:<\/p>\n
We return.<\/p>\n
We return from fighting.<\/p>\n
We return fighting.<\/p>\n
Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the<\/p>\n
reason why.15<\/p>\n
Du Bois\u2019s Crisis magazine, which had a circulation of 385,000 in 1915, sold 560,000 copies in the first six months of 1917.16 Marcus Garvey\u2019s Universal Negro Improvement Association had awakened the spirit of black pride and self-assertion on a scale unprecedented, and the charismatic Jamaican black nationalist\u2019s movement swelled across the country, including a flourishing UNIA chapter in Chicago.17<\/p>\n
African American parents began to buy dark-skinned dolls for their children and to sing what in 1919 became known as the \u201cNegro National Anthem,\u201d penned years earlier by the NAACP\u2019s James Weldon Johnson:<\/p>\n
Lift every voice and sing<\/p>\n
Till earth and heaven ring<\/p>\n
Ring with the harmonies of liberty. . . .<\/p>\n
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun<\/p>\n
Let us march on until victory is won.<\/p>\n
The circulation of \u201crace\u201d publications skyrocketed.18 The Chicago Defender\u2019s rose from 10,000 to 93,000 in the war years alone, making it the largest-circulation black newspaper in America. The Defender shipped two-thirds of its issues outside Chicago, most of them to Mississippi.19 \u201cOn our porches we read the Chicago Defender,\u201d recalled Mississippian Helen O\u2019Neal-McCrary, \u201cthe only news that black people in Clarksdale could read and believe.\u201d20<\/p>\n
\u201cI did not understand the restrictive soreness imposed by segregation,\u201d wrote a summertime visitor from Mississippi, \u201cuntil I got off that train and breathed the freer air of Chicago.\u201d21 If he had stayed longer, however, this temporary migrant might have grown<\/p>\n
disillusioned. In the decades after the bloody conflict of 1919, the color line in Chicago was even more sharply drawn. The South Side became almost totally black and the North Side almost entirely white. The Chicago where Emmett Till grew up became one of the most racially divided of all American cities and would remain so into the twenty-first century.22<\/p>\n
By the 1940s Chicago led the nation in the use of racial covenants on real estate; these restrictions on who could buy property and where they could buy it covered roughly half of the city\u2019s neighborhoods. Realtors generally refused to show homes to buyers except in neighborhoods occupied by people of their own race. Many African Americans, regardless of their means, could not get a mortgage and became ensnared in a vicious contract-based buying system that routinely ended up bankrupting them. Federal Housing Authority mortgage insurance policies strengthened Chicago\u2019s racial boundaries by denying mortgage insurance and home improvement loans to any home on a \u201cwhite\u201d street after even one black family moved in. Later the Chicago activist Saul Alinsky sardonically defined integration as \u201cthe period of time between the arrival of the first black and the departure of the last white.\u201d23<\/p>\n
Various \u201cneighborhood improvement associations\u201d and street gangs fought to keep their neighborhoods all-white; racially motivated residential bombings were one preferred method in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1949 a mob of two thousand whites attacked a small apartment building in Park Manor, a white neighborhood on the South Side, after a black couple had purchased the building. Violence flared again in 1951, when five thousand whites spent several days firebombing and looting a building in suburban Cicero after the owners rented a single unit to a black family. The governor of Illinois dispatched the Illinois National Guard to quell the riot, which injured nineteen people. In 1954 the Chicago Housing Authority acknowledged that \u201cbombings are a nightly occurrence\u201d where African American families had moved into neighborhoods that white people regarded as their own.24<\/p>\n
In 1948 the Chicago Urban League reported that 375,000 black residents of the South Side lived in an area that could legally<\/p>\n
accommodate 110,000. The overpopulation led to abysmal sanitary and health conditions, and many of the buildings were firetraps. Overcrowding pushed hard against the racial boundaries that encircled the African American areas; between 1946 and 1953 six episodes of riots involving between one thousand and ten thousand people followed efforts of black citizens to move into areas such as Cicero, Englewood, and Park Manor.25 In neighborhood after neighborhood a familiar drama played out along the hard lines of Chicago segregation. An aspiring black family seeking to escape the ghetto agreed to pay an inflated price for a home on a previously all- white block. Alarmed white residents would quickly sell their homes, allowing landlords to gobble them up at bargain prices. The landlords would then subdivide the apartments and houses into kitchenettes and rent them to blacks, substantially increasing the combined rental income for the building. Neglecting repairs and maintenance, the landlords\u2014the entire local real estate industry, really\u2014created the same ghetto conditions that the African American pioneers had fled at the start in the first act of this three-act tragedy. \u201cIn Chicago\u2019s \u2018bungalow belt,\u2019 where a large number of European ethnic working- class families owned their own homes,\u201d observes the historian and cultural critic Craig Werner, \u201cthe first signs of the depressing pattern understandably generated fierce resistance. The result was what one historian called \u2018chronic urban guerilla warfare.\u2019 \u201d26<\/p>\n
The worst and longest-running of the Chicago housing conflicts lasted from August 4, 1953, until well into the fall of 1955.27 It began when Donald and Betty Howard and their two children moved into Trumbull Park Homes, a 462-unit development in South Deering near the steel mills. The project ( help with nursing paper writing from experts with MSN & DNP degrees) had been kept all-white since opening in 1939; the light-skinned Betty Howard got in because the Chicago Housing Authority misidentified her during the requisite interview. By August 9 a mob of two thousand angry whites was throwing bricks and firebombs and Donald Howard was guarding his family\u2019s apartment with a rifle. The white vigilantes used fireworks to harass and intimidate the Howards at night. Though police cars shuttled the family in and out of Trumbull Park, once the Howards were in their home the officers did little to ensure their safety, simply yielding the<\/p>\n
streets to the mob. On August 10 the white mob stoned thirty passing black motorists and attacked a city bus carrying African Americans, nearly tipping it over before police intervened. Throughout it all Mayor Martin Kennelly said nothing about the ongoing violence.<\/p>\n
As the number of African American families moving into Trumbull Park increased to ten, the so-called South Deering Improvement Association kept the riots rolling and organized economic reprisals against any neighborhood stores that served African American customers. The city parks became particular battlegrounds; when black youths tried to use a baseball diamond in the neighborhood, the Chicago Police Department had to dispatch four hundred officers to protect them. In protest Willoughby Abner, a trade unionist who was president of the Chicago NAACP, organized a baseball \u201cplay-in\u201d at South Deering\u2019s main park; the United Packinghouse Workers of America, an interracial but increasingly black union devoted to civil rights, provided support as Abner mobilized the NAACP and sued the city for inaction. Still conditions in South Deering did not change appreciably; in late 1954 Chicago\u2019s Federal Housing Administration director called Trumbull Park \u201ca running sore in our civic life.\u201d28<\/p>\n
——————–<\/p>\n
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http:\/\/ebooknews.simonandschuster.com\/front\/9781476714868
\nhttp:\/\/ebooknews.simonandschuster.com\/front\/9781476714868
\nCONTENTS<\/p>\n
Epigraph<\/p>\n
1. Nothing That Boy Did<\/p>\n
2. Boots on the Porch<\/p>\n
3. Growing Up Black in Chicago<\/p>\n
4. Emmett in Chicago and \u201cLittle Mississippi\u201d<\/p>\n
5. Pistol-Whipping at Christmas<\/p>\n
6. The Incident<\/p>\n
7. On the Third Day<\/p>\n
8. Mama Made the Earth Tremble<\/p>\n
9. Warring Regiments of Mississippi<\/p>\n
10. Black Monday<\/p>\n
11. People We Don\u2019t Need Around Here Any More<\/p>\n
12. Fixed Opinions<\/p>\n
13. Mississippi Underground<\/p>\n
14. \u201cThere He Is\u201d<\/p>\n
15. Every Last Anglo-Saxon One of You<\/p>\n
16. The Verdict of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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