Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (35 page)

It seemed like a very good arrangement and I could move forward with peace of mind, not worrying about whether I was being used. There would be so many appearances over the coming weeks. It was important to me to be able to share my message with the huge crowds.

It had been awkward at first, being in the spotlight. My family had always had such a quiet, normal existence, and I had been so happy to lead an ordinary life. I didn’t ask for everything that was happening to me. Lord knows, I didn’t ask for any of it. But I acted on what I was given. There were decisions I had made without really thinking much about them at all. It had been as if something was working through me, guiding me through a mission I never would have recognized before. I had made a choice to share my loss with the public, to share my pain in a way that would energize and motivate people to take action.

This activity came with a price. Behind every public exposure, there was a flurry of telephone calls, letters. Thousands of letters. Some were very unkind, some even worse. It just brought on a whole lot of trauma, really. I kept going, because it was important. I felt that. But there was something else, something very personal about this public experience. I needed it. In so many ways I could never have explained back then, I needed to continue talking. I needed it so very much. I don’t know what I would have done if I had been all alone during this period or if I had tried right away to go back to the normal life I had always thought I would live. I doubt that I could have survived it all. There was just too much sorrow for one person to endure, too much pain for one person to absorb, too much anger for one person to express. So the crowds helped me get through it. They listened as I talked about Emmett and his trip and the brutal murder and the horrible injustice that I had suffered, that black people were suffering every day in so many ways. We connected. I talked, they listened. But, in a way, it was a dialogue. Just by being there, they were saying something to me. Something very important. They were saying that people cared about what had happened. That’s what I needed to know, especially after spending a week at the Sumner trial, where it didn’t seem that people cared at all. I am so thankful for the crowds that turned out to listen to me, and to communicate with me in the process. Indeed, they helped me find a reason to keep going. Talking helped me sort through the horror. The more I talked about it, the more relief I felt, relief
from the agony. Something deep inside me was just boiling up, and if I hadn’t been able to talk about it, I would have exploded. I was getting it out. I was grieving by talking. In the process, I was finding my voice and finding some meaning. It was cathartic.

Papa Mose had lived in Mississippi all of his life and had never really wanted to live anywhere else. There had been a good crop that year. He had expected to pick about thirty bales of cotton. But now, with the help of Dr. Howard and Medgar Evers, he would leave. Aunt Lizzy had been begging him to do it, to join her in Chicago. The time had come, and he wouldn’t wait, couldn’t wait, until the end of the year to settle up. That’s how families had always done it before they left Mississippi for a better life up North. Wait until the end of the year, settle up, move in December or January. But Papa Mose was leaving even that behind, settling as best he could right then and there. He had survived the most difficult experience of his life, sold all his farm animals, given away his dog, Dallas, told his brother to pick up that forty-six Ford, the one with the stripped first gear, just pick it up at the train station, sell it. He would come back only one more time, in November, for the grand jury in Greenwood, the one that would consider indicting Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam for kidnapping.

Amanda Bradley had to flee to her mother’s house. Even there, she was not safe. A white mob came looking for her and she saved herself by hiding under her mother’s bed. The mob left, but not before warning Mandy’s mother that if they found her, she would never testify at another trial. She made sure they weren’t going to find her. She made her way to Mound Bayou and to Dr. Howard, who arranged to get her on a train to Chicago. She would have liked to have been able to settle up with Leslie Milam before she had to leave, before Milam evicted her husband, who stayed behind for a while. They had been sharecropping on the Sheridan Plantation for three years and had never done better than break even, she told the
Chicago Defender
. In fact, the year before, they wound up owing eleven dollars to Leslie Milam after it was all said and done. At least, according to his calculations. It was going to be hard in Chicago, but at least there was some hope. At least she was alive and could try to do better than just breaking even.

Willie Reed made a run for it. With only the clothes he was wearing, an extra pair of pants, and a coat, he traveled by foot about six miles to the special meeting place that had been set up. He was picked up and driven to Mound Bayou, where Dr. Howard arranged for his safe transit, too. Medgar Evers drove Willie and Congressman Diggs to Memphis, where they boarded a plane to Chicago. Willie would join his mother and other
relatives. His grandfather Add Reed planned to stay in Mississippi, Willie told the
Defender
. His grandfather, like Uncle Crosby, was not afraid. There was only a small amount of relief for Willie when he arrived and was greeted by an uncle who would take him to his new home. His whole world had been set on edge and it was hard for him to feel at ease. He was still distracted by what he had left behind.

Willie and his uncle probably should have noticed the two men. After all, the men kind of stood out in that neighborhood. But they didn’t notice, not until they were noticed.

As Willie and his uncle made their way up the steps, they heard the voice. “Willie? Willie Reed?”

It was a moment of terror for Willie and his uncle. The people back in Mississippi had promised to get him out of danger. They had flown him all the way to Chicago to guarantee that he would not be harmed. They had promised he would be protected. When Willie and his uncle turned to see who was speaking, they were greeted by two plainclothes Chicago officers. The police would be assigned to protect Willie for the next couple of months.

For Willie, the relief would not last long, though. Soon, he was rushed to Michael Reese Hospital. He had suffered a nervous breakdown.

I also collapsed. The pressure had been incredible. I felt like I had been carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders and it was pure adrenaline that had helped me carry that weight. But it simply got to be too much for me. I was exhausted and had to be put under a doctor’s care.

So many lives were changed by what happened there in Tallahatchie County. In fact, the whole county went through changes. Nearly a quarter of the entire population had left by the end of the 1950s. But there was something else that was transforming.

I’m no historian. But you don’t have to be a historian to tell about the history you have lived. You just need a long memory. There are things that happened to me a long time ago that I will never forget. There are things that happened
because
of the things that happened to me that I will always consider.

There was no justice for me in Mississippi. Nothing about that trial was even remotely related to justice. I had a door slammed in my face. To add insult to injury, there were Southern papers and Southern politicians who had the nerve to suggest that things would have been different if we had kept our mouths shut. If only I hadn’t let the world see Emmett the way they had sent him home to me. If only the NAACP hadn’t demanded justice in a little country courthouse down there in Mississippi. If it hadn’t been for us, there could have been a different outcome in the murder trial
of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam. So, it was our fault, the “outside agitators.” But what did they base that opinion on? You didn’t have to look that far to find other cases where whites had gotten clean away with murder. In fact, the same week the Sumner jury acquitted Bryant and Milam, a grand jury in Brookhaven failed to indict any of the three white men accused of murdering Lamar Smith in broad daylight. No witnesses would come forward.

I never felt that I had done the wrong thing by exposing what was going on down there. And I never will. It was the outside agitators who revealed to the world, not only the injustice I had suffered, but also the unfairness blacks were suffering every single day of the year. Even so, it would take time for me to realize everything that had happened down there in Sumner, Mississippi. Those lawyers, J. J. Breland and John Whitten and the rest, hadn’t really defended Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam so much as they had defended a way of life. Tallahatchie County was like so many other places in the Delta. The places they had always been. Tallahatchie County had a population of eleven thousand whites and nineteen thousand blacks. Almost twice as many blacks as whites, but not a single black person in that entire county was registered to vote. It was only through intimidation that white folks were able to hold on to their power and all that their power brought them. That must have been clear to somebody like Sheriff H. C. Strider. I can’t imagine that he ever would have come into office if the black majority down there had just been allowed to vote. So, the last thing people like Breland and Whitten wanted was to have the spotlight shine on their dirty little secret, to have anyone coming in from the outside telling them they couldn’t do the only thing they were used to doing: stay in power.

That’s not to say that racism wasn’t a factor. The murder of my son, after all, was a hate crime. And the acquittal of Bryant and Milam had as much to do with racism as anything. That point would be made crystal clear in an unpublished master’s thesis produced in 1963 by Hugh Stephen Whitaker at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Whitaker was sixteen years old at the time of the murder trial. As a white Tallahatchie County resident, he was able to talk to a lot of the key people involved in the trial, including jurors, defense attorneys, and Special Prosecutor Robert Smith. What Whitaker found might shock some people, but it wouldn’t surprise those of us—the black reporters and civil rights workers and witnesses—who sat in that courtroom and felt the heat.

Whitaker would write that the defense team felt they had won the case once the jury was selected. They had relied on Strider and the newly elected sheriff, Harry Dogan, who would replace Strider. These men
helped the defense lawyers screen prospective jurors, since these men knew just about everybody in the county. As a result, the defense team knew more about the jury than the prosecutors did. The jurors weren’t really affected at all by the pretrial publicity, according to Whitaker. And, even though the jurors had been instructed by the judge not to talk about the case with anyone, there were wide rumors around Sumner that they were contacted by members of the White Citizens Councils to vote “the right way.” Still, even this did not have an effect on them. In fact, the evidence didn’t move the jurors one way or the other. According to Whitaker’s interviews, they were unaffected by the evidence, by their peers, by the pressure of the press and the “outside agitators.” It was like they lived in a cocoon, insulated by their own racism. They had heard Carolyn Bryant’s fantastic account long before she gave it in court, long before that testimony made it around town on the rumor mill. Whitaker would write that the jurors didn’t doubt that Bryant and Milam had killed Emmett. They didn’t doubt that at all. The jurors heard one thing that was important to them, and that was a white woman’s claim that a black boy had insulted her. That was all they needed to hear. It was all they needed to know. In the end, according to Whitaker, it was all they would consider in making up their minds.

So it looks like the jury would have voted the same way even if the NAACP and I hadn’t made all that noise in the days and weeks leading up to the trial. The outcome would have been no different even if I had chosen to stay quiet, as thousands of other black people had done when their loved ones were lynched. But there would have been one very important difference if I had not done anything, or said anything about Emmett’s murder: No one else would have known about it, and no one else would have been moved to action because of it.

I had to consider all of that, as I went through the lineup of speaking appearances arranged by the NAACP that October. I was on the cusp of my thirty-fourth birthday, on the brink of being reborn. I had been so naive for so much of my life. I had lost my darling son and my own innocence all at the same time. But I hadn’t been alone. The entire country had been forced to open its eyes, too.

Emmett represented so many things to so many people. To Bryant and Milam, he had represented everything they had refused to recognize in black people. He was confident and self-assured, and he carried himself with a certain dignity they felt they had to beat down, beat back, beat to a bloody pulp. To little black children who gazed upon the images of my son in the pages
of Jet
magazine, Emmett was the face of a harsh reality that left no place to hide. To all black people, he was a reminder of the common
problem we faced in this country, whether we lived in the North or the South. He was a unifying symbol. And his name would be spoken at so many rallies and fund-raisers and even in congressional hearings.

We were in the television age now, and the media had seen the light. Many of the reporters who covered that travesty in Mississippi had been awakened to the great social and legal injustices confronting us. These were hard things to forget. And injustice would be a recurring theme playing out in the months and years to come. Those people down there in Mississippi thought that they could stage-manage a trial, and force people to accept their warped version of reality. They thought wrong. Those lawyers down in Mississippi figured they had stopped the NAACP in its tracks. They miscalculated. They might have won a battle, but they were about to lose the war.

Things would never be the same again. No one could plead ignorance. Everyone had to take responsibility for what our society had become. Anybody who did anything to make it happen. Anybody who did nothing to stop it from happening. There could no longer be any innocent bystanders. For an entire nation, the murder of Emmett Till marked the death of innocence.