Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (28 page)

Ruby Hurley was there, too. She was the NAACP’s Southeastern regional secretary. She was intense, she was intelligent, and she was never intimidated, as tough and as forceful a woman as I had ever met. Besides Mama, of course. She seemed fearless to me, never hesitating to move forward in any situation where she might be needed. And, oh, that woman could hold her own in a room full of men, all the while never forgetting that she was a woman. I liked her and I was proud to know her. And I was impressed by the courageous work of all the other NAACP people who were around in those days as well, people like Amzie Moore, head of the NAACP office in Cleveland, Mississippi, and Aaron Henry. These people were heroic, but never seemed to have time to stop and think about how special they were. They just did what they did, it seemed, because they couldn’t help doing it. I would come to understand and appreciate them and their bravery as I learned just what was being put on the line down there in Mississippi, and how it all related to Emmett and to me.

They had tried to set out a case for the federal government. Before we even made it down to Mississippi, the U.S. Justice Department decided that it did not have jurisdiction to enter the murder case against Bryant and Milam. A delegation from the NAACP had met with Warren Olney, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division. This was a high-powered delegation that included Roy Wilkins, the executive secretary; Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP chief counsel; Clarence Mitchell, head of the NAACP’s Washington office; Ruby Hurley; and Medgar Evers.

It was through the regular discussions and strategy sessions in Mound Bayou that I was able to learn why it was important for the NAACP elite to make that plea in Washington. This case was so important in a larger way, as part of the overall struggle for black rights. I learned about things I had never bothered to consider before. Things we had come to take for granted in the North. Things we often failed to respect and utilize. By the time we arrived there in Mississippi in late September, things were hot in the Delta. Emotionally hot. The whole place was on a slow boil, and building. Everyone felt tense and threatened. Blacks were threatened by whites who felt threatened by blacks. There was a vicious cycle of fear and violence. In so many ways, Mississippi was the worst of the Southern states for black folks—more lynchings than anywhere else—and the Delta region was the worst part of Mississippi. Things were intensifying throughout the South in the summer of 1955. There was so much anxiety about the Supreme Court and the way it was ruling against the rule of the
South. In May 1954, the Court had decided that “separate but equal” was not equal at all. And then in May 1955, the Court had ruled that states had to start putting desegregation plans in motion “with all deliberate speed.”

The reaction in Mississippi was immediate and widely reported. Senator James O. Eastland had been heading up the white opposition. That man lent so much support to the White Citizens Councils, which had been such a critical part of the Mississippi civil rights backlash. The Citizens Councils worked to ruin black folks who fought for their basic rights, and they made sure other whites toed the line.

Just days before Emmett arrived in Money, Senator Eastland had made a speech before the Citizens Councils condemning the Supreme Court’s
Brown
decision. “You are not required to obey any court which passes out such a ruling,” he declared. “In fact, you are obligated to defy it.” He had warned Mississippi whites about the possible “death of southern culture and our aspirations as Anglo-Saxon people.” To make matters worse, all this public debate was going on during a state election in Mississippi. All five candidates running for governor of Mississippi during the August primary campaigned against desegregation. It wasn’t just a platform, it seemed like the whole structure of their campaigns. It was the order of the day in Mississippi.

As
The Crisis
reported, this was a costly struggle for black Mississippians. It was costing them their livelihoods, and their lives. White Citizens Councils would take voter registration lists and petitions for desegregation and turn them into “black” lists, and hand them over to landlords and bankers. Black people were fired from their jobs just for trying to register to vote or seeking to enforce the Supreme Court decision. Their home mortgages and their farm loans were called in. People were threatened with eviction, foreclosure, and bankruptcy.

As a result, the NAACP had worked with the Tri-State Bank of Memphis to set up a loan plan to help black people in Southern states who were victims of this kind of awful economic reprisal. According to
The Crisis
, black organizations shifted about three hundred thousand dollars to the Memphis bank, which was made available to save black folks from financial ruin. But there was little the NAACP or Dr. Howard’s forces could do to save blacks from another threat: murder. The tension was rising in the Delta, as widely reported, and summarized by the Southern Poverty Law Center in its publication
Free at Last
.

Reverend George Lee had been a minister in nearby Belzoni. There were twice as many blacks as whites in Belzoni, but not one single black person was permitted to vote. Reverend Lee organized an NAACP chapter in Belzoni and began registering people to vote. He refused to give up,
refused to back down when whites came to talk. Then in May, somebody fired a shotgun at Reverend Lee while he was driving his car. The sheriff ruled the cause of Reverend Lee’s death an auto accident. The sheriff ignored all the lead pellets that were found in Reverend Lee’s face. He said they were probably only dental fillings.

Lamar Smith was a farmer and World War II veteran, who had been pretty successful in the local community in Brookhaven, another Delta town. He urged blacks to register to vote, and even passed out campaign literature against a white candidate he didn’t think was good for black people. In August, just two weeks before Emmett’s visit, Lamar Smith was passing out leaflets on the courthouse lawn in Brookhaven. Several white men approached him. Lamar Smith was gunned down in broad daylight in front of so many witnesses who didn’t see a thing.

Dr. Howard said these men were friends of his. He was outraged by their murders and the lack of justice. He knew he also was on a hit list. But you’d never know it to look at how he conducted himself. He had a ready smile and an oversized appetite for life. But, then, there were the bodyguards. On the day we arrived, as soon as we had turned onto his property, we were stopped by an armed guard. There were others around the grounds, I understood. And the guards were only part of it.
Ebony
writer Clotye Murdock had a little trouble bringing her suitcase through the front door. The door wouldn’t open wide enough. She realized just why, when she looked behind the door and saw a small arsenal at the ready. I guess all the guards and all that firepower should have made us feel more secure. In fact, it was just a reminder to me of how much danger there was all around us.

Dr. Howard left nothing to chance. Like his decision once to place flowers in the back of the car that would shuttle people back and forth between Mound Bayou and Sumner during the trial. That was so no one could see who was in the car. He was known to take the long way around through Louisiana on his own car trips from one Mississippi spot to another, so as to spend less time on the roads of his own state, less time exposed to an increasing threat. Then there was the time he had to be driven home from Natchez by Audley Mackel, Jr., son of the head of the NAACP in that town. There were threats in the air. So, on that trip, Dr. Howard was driven back to Mound Bayou in the back of a hearse.

Everyone might have felt a little more at ease staying in Mound Bayou, staying among our own, but not all of the local people felt comfortable having us there. On the one hand, they felt a great deal of pride in Dr. Howard. But there also was a great deal of anxiety. They knew white folks weren’t playing. They knew what the murder trial in Sumner was going to
mean for them once it was all over. They might have their own mayor, their own police chief, but there were still ways that white folks could mess with them. Officials reportedly had thrown out Mound Bayou ballots in the last election. There was concern that things could get a whole lot worse than that. There were a number of black folks throughout the Delta who probably wished we had never come down there. As bad as things were, there were some people who had adjusted. They knew how to make out and figured they were better off that way. They figured there would be much worse in store for them once we all left, left them on their own, with nobody watching. They figured they’d be left to pay the price. So, there were some black folks down there who wanted to stay as far away from this whole thing as possible, figuring they’d be better off throwing their lot in with white folks.

This was the vacation spot Emmett had reached when he stepped off that train, the outsider from Chicago. He might not have been a civil rights organizer or involved in any of the activities that had gotten white folks so worked up. But his killing was part of a pattern. One thing connected to the next thing and the thing just before it. White folks were desperate. They felt they had to send a signal. White power would be protected at all costs, and the value of black life was cheap. Emmett’s murder was the latest example of how brazen it had gotten. They called it “a reign of terror.”

 M
onday, September 19 was the first day set for the trial, and I was feeling opening-day stress. There had been so much pretrial publicity, so much tension created by the publicity. There had been that war of words that had ended in a stalemate. Even though Sumner was not far from where I had been born and even though Uncle Crosby lived there, this place did not seem anything like home to me. At home, there was love. In Sumner, in the late summer, there was nothing but white-hot hatred.

There had never been anything like this in Sumner, a town that was supposed to be “A Good Place to Raise a Boy,” as the motto boasted. The total population was fewer than six hundred people. As we got close to the trial, there were reports that there would be more than a thousand observers in town during that week. Somewhere between seventy and a hundred of those people would be from the press. It seemed like there were reporters and photographers and camera people and sound people everywhere you looked. It was reported that this trial drew more coverage than the sensational Bruno Hauptmann trial with journalists coming from as far away as London. Many future media stars were covering the trial. Television’s John Chancellor was there. Murray Kempton of the
New York Post
would write impassioned columns. John Popham of
The New York Times
also was there, and so was David Halberstam. I’ve read what he has written about the trial, which he would later refer to as “the first great media event of the civil rights movement.” A black writer and scholar, Clenora Hudson-Weems, would make a very interesting point about that many years later. She talked with me, she talked with Rayfield, she talked with other family members, as she put together a report on Emmett’s
murder and the trial for her dissertation and book. She commented on the irony she saw in one of those Christmas photos of Emmett, the one of him leaning on the television set. It was his television set and he leaned on it like he owned it. That photo would come to define him for everyone. It would become so important in telling his story, starting at his funeral, where it had been on display in his casket. How ironic, she noted, that the photo seemed to foreshadow something with such profound historical significance: the role that the media—especially television—would play in covering the civil rights struggle, a struggle that would intensify with the coverage of the murder trial. Something was starting right there in Tallahatchie County, and the world would be watching. Intently.

With all the media glare that focused on tiny Sumner during the five days of the trial, no one would cover this event with the same energy, the same passion as the twelve or so black reporters and photographers who came into town like troops landing behind enemy lines.
Ebony, Jet
, and the
Defender
sent teams to cover the trial. Writers like Simeon Booker of
Jet
, Clotye Murdock of
Ebony
, L. Alex Wilson and Moses Newson of the
Tri-State Defender
, the Chicago paper’s Southern arm. They would all go way out on a limb in pursuit of the absolute truth. And then there was James Hicks of the
Baltimore Afro-American
, who always seemed to be working three or four stories at once. That man was relentless in probing, pushing, prodding, to the point of putting his own life on the line. There were black photographers like David Jackson of
Ebony
and
Jet
, who would come face-to-face with a gun-toting white band. And there was Ernest Withers, who shot for the
Defender
, and who would risk a judge’s contempt to capture the single most significant photograph of the entire trial. Everywhere I turned in the close-knit group that surrounded us during our stay, I saw heroes and I was inspired by them. I also was strengthened and encouraged by them.

Much of what I learned about what was really going on down there in Sumner—not just what I could observe for myself in court or on the way to court, but the behind-the-scenes maneuvering—much of that I learned from so many reports and stories that were written. And I made a point of reading everything I could get my hands on: the news reports, the journals, the books. There would be comprehensive works on Emmett’s murder and the trial produced by people like Clenora Hudson-Weems, Stephen J. Whitfield, and Christopher Metress over the years. I read them all. But the black reporters who covered that trial would provide a unique source of information about what went on. They were an amazing and courageous group of people who took great risks to uncover the facts about what had happened to my son in Mississippi. And not just for the
sake of getting their stories, either. It was as if they wanted to find the truth for the sake of truth itself, for the sake of justice. The black reporters, in their conversations, in comparing notes, in the strategy sessions so many people would participate in each night, would show that they were not only fine journalists, but, along with Dr. Howard, and Medgar Evers, and Ruby Hurley, they also were advocates. In a very important way, these journalists would help to alter the course of events as the trial progressed.