The BrownDecision 29crowd 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.’ Mississippi teenager Anne Moody recalled
that she had always 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.’ Along with the black press, young, white southern reporters
from northern newspapers helped make Emmett’s murder a wake-up call
in the civil rights era. Having fought against Nazi anti-Semitism during
World War II, they were determined to use the Till case to end the grip that
racial prejudice had on the mind of the white South.
For the first time, white men were charged with murdering a black man
in Mississippi. The trial was a sham, however, because there was no invest-
igation. Emmett’s great-uncle, a 64-year-old sharecropper named Moses
‘Preacher’ Wright, fingered the abductors in a tense courtroom, but the sher-
iff speculated that Emmett was alive and well in Detroit. In his summation,
the defense attorney expressed well-founded confidence that the all-white
jury would close ranks with the accused: ‘I’m sure every last Anglo-Saxon
one of you has the courage to free these men.’ The jury dismissed the charges
after an hour of drinking soda pop. Immediately after the trial, the defen-
dants lit victory cigars, kissed their wives, and mugged for the cameras.
Angry blacks carried guns, joined the local NAACP, and boycotted the Bryant
store until it folded, but black fury could not stop more lynchings. Fearing
for his life, Wright fled to Chicago.
The racial onslaught largely intimidated the black community and para-
lyzed white moderates and liberals who either fell silent or beseeched blacks
to return to their place. Many southern towns surrendered to mob violence
in excluding blacks from public education. Far from cracking down on
such lawlessness, many local officials either winked at or aided it directly.
When Autherine Lucyenrolled at the University of Alabama in February
1956, a mob waving Confederate flags pelted ‘the nigger whore’ with rotten
eggs and shouted ‘kill her, kill her.’ University officials expelled Lucy after
she blamed them for not keeping order. When black children entered white
schools in Clinton, Tennessee, and Clay and Sturgis, Kentucky, mobs calling
for ‘nigger blood’ retreated only when confronted with machine guns, bayo-
nets, and tanks. A bomb destroyed a new elementary school in Nashville,
Tennessee, which had one black student out of four hundred. In Mansfield,
Texas, a mob hung a black dummy above the school entrance and waved
placards that read ‘2$ A DOZEN FOR NIGGER EARS.’ Governor Al Shivers
sent the Texas Rangers to keep blacks from enrolling in the white high
school. Though such actions clearly violated Brown, the White House
Lucy, Autherine(1929– ):
Graduate student who
was expelled by the Uni-
versity of Alabama when
mob violence erupted.