While the World Watched (8 page)

Then the Reverend Oliver described his eyewitness account of the bombing: “On the morning of the bombing I stood across the street from the church behind carbine bearing policemen and watched as the covered bodies were placed into waiting ambulances. Policemen drove a small crowd off the street. I got on a nearby porch. Women seeing the covered bodies being brought from the church cried and screamed without restraint. I could not bring my mind to believe what my eyes saw. It still seems like a tale from some distant land where people know nothing about freedom and democracy.”
[21]

* * *

I was unusually quiet at school on Monday morning, September 16. When I got there, I laid my head down on my desk. Numb. Confused. Mourning my friends.

Normally I loved school and proved an active, talkative student. But empty desks reminded me again that my friends were dead.

“What’s wrong?” a student in the seat in front of me asked.

“I feel bad,” I told him. “I don’t want to be here.”

The student turned around and looked me square in the face.

“I heard about the bombing yesterday, and about the deaths of your friends.”

I yearned to hear some words of comfort or consolation from him—from anyone. But that day I received no words of solace, no soothing verbal balm from my schoolmate. He simply said, “Well, frankly, Carolyn, I think you’re making more out of this than you should.”

I walked through that long school day like a zombie.

Chapter 8

The World Was Silent

* * *

When you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, and even kill your black brothers and sisters . . . when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people . . . when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
“Letter from Birmingham Jail
”
[22]

When I was seven years old, I saw an image on the cover of a magazine that has remained etched in my mind ever since. It was a 1955 edition of
Jet
magazine, a publication primarily designed for black readers, and the photograph on the front showed a dead boy’s mutilated head, face, and neck—up close.

I had never seen anything like it before. My heart raced as I thought about each of my four brothers. At fourteen, the boy on the cover wasn’t much older than they were, but lying in that coffin, beaten beyond recognition, Emmett Till looked more like a monster than a human being. I stared at the photograph for a long time.

His face was severely swollen. His eyes (what was left of them) looked strange, alien. His misshapen head and discolored skin made him look scary. I found out that Emmett, a youth from Chicago, had traveled to Mississippi to visit relatives in Tallahatchie County. Emmett and some friends had stopped at a market owned by a white man, Roy Bryant, and Emmett had made some boyish and tasteless remarks to Bryant’s wife, a clerk at the store. Bryant got angry when he heard about it, and he recruited his half brother, J. W. Milam, to go with him to pay Till a middle-of-the-night visit.

On August 28, 1955, the two men kidnapped Emmett from his bed, drove him to an isolated area, beat and tortured the boy, and shot him in the head. They tied his lifeless body to an old, heavy, factory fan and dumped him in the Tallahatchie River.

Several days later, some boys fishing in the river saw the body and called the police. Officials from the state of Mississippi, where the boy had been murdered, did not even bother to clean up the body of Emmett Till. Debris, dirt, grass, and twigs from the river still stuck to his clothes. They simply stuffed the dead, waterlogged body into a box and nailed it shut. On top of the coffin, they scratched a note: “Do not open.” Perhaps they thought the boy’s mother would have a quiet funeral and leave the coffin unopened. But she didn’t. Outraged over the violent, brutal murder of her son, she ordered the undertakers to leave Emmett’s body just as she had received it and to hold an open-casket funeral. She wanted the world to see how her son had suffered and the abuses white murderers had inflicted upon him. Reporters flooded the funeral and made photographs of the dead boy’s grotesque face. They published the images in magazines for the whole world to see.

Young Emmett Till might as well have been a dog struck by a car on the highway, its carcass left on the roadside to rot and decay, then picked up and shipped in a box back to its owner. What did this horrifying event say to me, even as a child? That black life is irrelevant, insignificant, worthless. The loss of black life is of no consequence.

Police arrested Bryant and Milam, and the two men faced a trial by jury. It took only sixty-seven minutes for the all-white male jury to find the murderers not guilty. “[We] wouldn’t have taken [that] long,” one juror admitted, “if [we] hadn’t stopped to drink pop.”
[23]
When they heard the verdict, Bryant and Milam smiled, lit up cigars, kissed their wives, and posed for photographers.
[24]

Not long after, Bryant and Milam sold their eyewitness confessional story to
Look
magazine for four thousand dollars. They told Alabama journalist William Bradford Huie exactly how they had killed Emmett Till and what they had done with his body.
[25]
In the article, “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” Huie quotes Bryant as saying, “That big .45 jumped in Big Milam’s hand. The youth [Emmett] turned to catch that big, expanding bullet at his right ear. He dropped.”

Bryant and Milam also admitted to pistol-whipping and beating the youth and then rolling him “into 20 feet of water.” Huie ended the
Look
article with these haunting words: “The majority—by no means all, but the majority—of the white people in Mississippi 1) either approve of Big Milam’s action or else 2) they don’t disapprove enough to risk giving their ‘enemies’ the satisfaction of a conviction.”
[26]

Such was the plight of black Americans in the United States South at that time. Two white men bragged about killing Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy. Some white men even glorified the killing of black people. And the American people, for the most part, showed no outrage whenever these things happened. They responded with no horror or shock. Just silence. They seemed to accept what had become an everyday occurrence. Usually no one was charged, no one was arrested, no one was punished.

In many ways the article stirred up more emotion across the United States than the murder had. In letters to
Look
’s editors, people wrote,

I want to cancel my subscription to your magazine at once. I will not have my home contaminated with . . . filthy, dishonest articles. (Mrs. W. R. Prevost, Utica, Mississippi)

To publish this story, of which no one is proud, but which was certainly justified, smacks loudly of circulation hunting. Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam did what had to be done, and their courage in taking the course they did is to be commended. To have followed any other course would have been unrealistic, cowardly, and not in the best interest of their family or country. (Richard Lauchli, Collinsville, Illinois)

Some people did respond with outrage at the injustice against Emmett Till. One person wrote,

If this case is not reopened and the guilty punished, I shall laugh at the word “justice.” (William T. Bates, Folsom, Pennsylvania)
[27]

But other than a few letters to the editor, not much was being done to right this wrong—or prevent it from happening again.

From legal and political standpoints, what happened to Emmett Till was all but swept under the rug for almost fifty years. Finally, on May 10, 2004, the Justice Department reopened the investigation into the murder of Emmett Till, and his body was exhumed, identified, and examined. By then, however, the men who had confessed to his murder had died of cancer—Milam in 1980 and Bryant in 1990.

Incidents like the Emmett Till murder were not limited to Mississippi; acts of racial injustice and violence were happening all over the South. The bombings in Birmingham began the year I was born, 1948. An old steel-producing city—often called the “Pittsburgh of the South”—Birmingham was crisscrossed with made-up racial lines. White families lived on one side of such a line; black families lived on the other side. Until 1948, no one had dared to cross the line. But a few years after World War II, several black families bought houses in a whites-only Birmingham community, and the racial lines became blurred. Some white people—primarily members of the Ku Klux Klan—responded with violence. In an attempt to reestablish the lines that separated black and white communities and to intimidate black residents who crossed over into white neighborhoods, they bombed black homes, businesses, and churches.

Schools weren’t immune to the intimidation either. I was nine years old when I sat in front of my family’s television set on September 24, 1957, and watched the evening news after President Eisenhower ordered the Arkansas National Guard to escort nine black students into the all-white Little Rock Central High School. I saw crowds of angry, shouting white people—men and women—carrying signs and chanting, “Keep our school white! No n—s in our school!” Their hateful expressions terrified me.

The United States Army’s 101st Airborne Division paratroopers accompanied the students while an Army helicopter flew overhead. Then another 350 armed paratroopers circled the school building to protect the black students from violence. The students, dubbed the “Little Rock Nine,” made it to class that day—and finished out the entire school year. The following year, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus closed all the high schools. The school board reopened the schools in the fall of 1959.

As I watched the initial forced desegregation, though, several thoughts ran through my mind:
Why are these white people so angry? Why won’t they allow black children in their school?
The images on TV frightened me and caused me to ask myself,
Could I do what these black students are doing? Would I have the courage to be one of the first black students in the South to enter an all-white school? Would I be brave enough to stand in the middle of angry white protesters and parents who didn’t want me going to their children’s school?

I also wondered why white adults would treat black children so cruelly. It was one thing for black and white
adults
to clash, to fight against each other. But I was surprised to see white adults doing battle against
children
. Even at that age, I knew black children had no power to fight white adults or even to protect themselves from them. I was certain the children would be the ones to suffer in that matchup.

Five years later, on September 30, 1962, I followed another act of school-related terrorism when black student James Meredith enrolled at the University of Mississippi. Despite the school integration law that had been passed in 1954 as a result of the
Brown v. Board of Education
decision, the university refused Meredith’s enrollment, and Governor Ross Barnett tried to block his admission. President John F. Kennedy sent federal marshals to ensure Meredith’s right to enroll and to protect him on the campus.

I was fourteen years old when the University of Mississippi confrontation took place. I knew that one day in the near future I, too, would be going to college. My parents and grandparents put a high value on education. Going to college was not an option for me; it was an expectation. Anyway, I was smart, and I looked forward to a college education.

I had seen plenty of discrimination by that point in my life, but I still didn’t understand it.
Have people made up their minds that it doesn’t matter what the courts decide? Are white people going to maintain the status quo—segregation—regardless of the Supreme Court’s ruling?
If that is true,
I wondered,
then what do the courts matter—even the United States Supreme Court? What difference does it make what decisions they come to, what laws they pass? Would white people forever be allowed to circumvent the Court’s decisions? Would this cycle of segregation repeat itself every time a black person tried to enroll in a white school?
I feared that black children and youth would always be met with the same kind of artillery and white opposition—just for wanting to get a solid education.

I didn’t understand it, and I had no answers to my many questions. And in our household, we just didn’t talk about what was happening all around us or why it was happening.

* * *

The bombings and terrorism in Birmingham intensified in the early 1960s.
New York Times
columnist and Pulitzer Prize–winner Harrison Salisbury came to my city to investigate the stories of racial violence; he wanted to find out if the rumors were really true. He found his answer.

He wrote that Birmingham was a smoldering volcano of racial tension, “a community of fear.”
[28]
He accused Birmingham of horrible racial cruelties: “Every channel of communication, every medium of mutual interest, every reasoned approach, every inch of middle ground has been fragmented by the emotional dynamite of racism, reinforced by the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police and many branches of the state’s apparatus.”
[29]

At that time in Alabama, white people lived in their own world, and black people lived in theirs. Black and white did not mix. And neither black nor white understood each other’s private worlds.

Birmingham’s white society did not like outsiders coming into their city and taking a look around. White Birmingham saw itself as having no problems—in its view, things were moving along just fine. It was true that when the Freedom Riders rode into town, white men beat them up. That was seen as the way of life around here. Most people didn’t view it as anything unusual.

But Mr. Salisbury dared to show us the way outsiders saw our city. He saw the lack of respect white people accorded black people; the exclusiveness of white society; the injustices, mistreatments, and cruelties shown to blacks. What seemed perfectly normal to white Birmingham residents proved a genuine contradiction of our nation’s democratic ideals to outsiders such as Salisbury.

From Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

While confined here in the Birmingham City Jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine goodwill and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statements in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.