Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody’s slavery.
—W. E. B. DU BOIS
Myrlie knew of only a few times when her strong, fearless husband broke down in sobs that made his whole body shake. One was when James Evers Sr. died in the “Negro ward” of a Decatur hospital that was more of a warehouse for the dying than a place where medicine was performed. Another was after the lynching of Emmett Till. Both incidents were part and parcel of the Mississippi way.
James’s father, Mike Evers, was born a slave in 1845, and he lived until he was 113 years old, well into the twentieth century. James was born just seventeen years after the Civil War. Slavery was no distant memory for Black families in the 1940s and 1950s. James and Jessie had survived bouts of economic want, and threats against them and their family. Their youngest daughter, Mary Ruth, died of cancer in 1951, while Medgar and Charles were still in college. James had survived sixty-three years of being a Negro in Mississippi, which was achievement enough.
He had a stroke in 1954, and despite never trusting hospitals, James desperately needed one. Charles and Medgar carried their father to Decatur’s segregated Newton County Hospital, where he was taken to the stuffy, poorly equipped basement wing that Negro patients were consigned to. He languished there for hours while the meager hospital staff assigned to the “colored wing” were distracted by events taking place outside.
“My Daddy was dying slowly in the basement of that hospital,” Medgar explained years later. “At one point, I just had to walk outside so I wouldn’t burst.”
“On that very night, a Negro had fought with a white man in Union, and a white mob had shot the Negro in the leg,” Medgar recalled. “The police brought the Negro to the hospital, but the mob was outside . . . armed with pistols and rifles,” yelling for the Black man to be handed over, surely for the rope. Despite Charles’s and Medgar’s increasingly angry pleas, the hospital staff, amid the chaos, were not about to move their father to an upstairs bed or even to the emergency ward where he might get the care he needed. Instead, the injured man was brought into the “colored” wing, and what medical staff the hospital was willing to spare to treat Black patients oscillated between treating his gunshot wounds and watching the door. There were no resources spared for James Evers, in those crucial first hours after his stroke.
Medgar, stricken with grief, frustration, and a growing rage, walked out into the middle of the melee outside the hospital. “I just stood there, and everything was too much for me,” he said. “It seemed that this world would never change. It was that way for my Daddy, it was that way for me, and it looked as though it would be that way for my children. I was so mad I just stood there trembling and tears rolled down my cheeks.”1
James Evers languished in that basement for a week and died there, on August 29, 1954. Jessie Evers, who had brought two sets of children into the world via two husbands and molded them into one family, would die four years later.
Months before James died, Medgar had argued with his father over his announcement that he intended to apply to the law school at Ole Miss. His application sought to take advantage of the landmark Brown v. the Board of Education case, which sought to reverse the indignity of Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” doctrine. The case, combining five lawsuits by Black litigants dating back to 1950 in South Carolina, then Virginia, Delaware, Washington, D.C., and Kansas, had wound its way for years through the courts until the cases were combined and elevated to the Supreme Court in 1952. The combined case was argued by the NAACP’s premier young lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, producing two years of deadlocks among the justices including the chief justice, Fred Vinson, who had wanted to uphold Plessy.
Medgar was tired of waiting. He had been an active NAACP member since his college days and had been named in January 1954 as an officer in the new Mississippi statewide NAACP charter, with his name published in the Jackson Advocate along with the other organization leaders.2 He’d been putting hundreds of miles on his Oldsmobile, opening chapter offices in Mound Bayou and other Delta towns, often with Myrlie alongside him as his ad hoc secretary, while also leading boycotts with T. R. M. Howard’s Regional Council of Negro Leadership. In January he’d met with James “J. P.” Coleman, Mississippi’s attorney general, to be interviewed for his law school application on behalf of the State College Board. He was accompanied by an NAACP lawyer from New Orleans.
Coleman asked Medgar why he wanted to attend Ole Miss. Medgar said he wanted the best law school education he could get in the state. He batted down Coleman’s suggestion that it was the NAACP who had put the notion of applying to the law school in Medgar’s head and that it wasn’t his own idea. Coleman quizzed Medgar on why he didn’t prefer to pursue a business degree instead and on where Medgar intended to live as a law student. Medgar’s answer dripped with the dry wit that could thrill and annoy his wife. “I plan to live on campus in a dormitory, eat in the dining hall, and use the library,” he said. “But I assure you, I bathe regularly, I wear clean clothes, and none of the brown on my skin will rub off.”3
When he told his father about the meeting not long before the elder Evers’s death, the answer he got disappointed him. His father saw no point in trying to break into the state’s impenetrable white citadel. Medgar walked out of his house that day; a rare rebuke of the man who had shaped his own audaciousness.4 James and Jessie Evers weren’t the only ones who disagreed with Medgar’s plan. Myrlie knew all too well what white Mississippians would be willing to do to keep their universities white.
“I did not want him to apply,” she said. “The NAACP did . . . others did. [But] I saw him being used as a guinea pig. I used that term once with him, and I recall the look that Medgar gave me. . . . He was infuriated with me.”5
Myrlie saw Medgar’s determination to try for Ole Miss as a rejection of his family, which now included two small children. “I was so fearful of Medgar losing his life. [Trying to enroll at a white university] was a very, very brave thing to do back then. He had already received threats from more minor things that he had done” to help Black sharecroppers in the Delta, “and I was not ready to say goodbye to my husband.”
Despite the doubts from his family, and his grief over burying his father, Medgar pressed on, asking Alcorn to send his transcripts to the University of Mississippi, and even getting the requisite recommendation from a white citizen: Jim Tims, an Ole Miss alum and Decatur’s postmaster.6
On May 17, 1954, Earl Warren, the new Chief Justice, appointed by President Eisenhower after Vinson’s sudden death from a heart attack, delivered the unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring that “separate but equal” was dead.
White Southerners erupted. The Clarion-Ledger in an editorial declared May 17 “a black day of tragedy for the South, and for both races.” The Jackson Daily News said that “human blood may stain Southern soil in many places because of this decision, but the dark red stains of that blood will be on the marble steps of the United States Supreme Court building.”7 Congressman John Bell Williams, a future governor of the state, called May 18, 1954, “Black Monday,” and Sen. James O. Eastland proclaimed that Mississippi would never abide by the ruling and submit to the mixing of the races in its schools.
Gov. Hugh Lawson White formed a Legal Education Advisory Committee to find ways to, in the words of the Ledger, “dodge the ruling,” even inviting some ninety Black leaders, whom he deemed to be “good Negroes,” to meet with him and the board to seek their cooperation in maintaining separate schools, which the governor and other white elites insisted was a majority view among Black Mississippians. The governor even offered to improve Negro schools to make them “truly equal,” in return for Black leaders pledging to oppose integration.8 The group, including NAACP head Dr. E. J. Stringer, summarily declined the governor’s offer and fully supported the Brown ruling and integration.
On July 18, the Ledger reported that “segregation problems on the university level [had] skipped Mississippi so far, with one exception: Medgar Evers of Mound Bayou, an NAACP director, has applied for entrance to the University of Mississippi.”9 Medgar was now officially a public name, with all the risks that entailed.
Within months, Governor White and the Democratic state legislature called a special session to pass a state constitutional amendment that white voters ratified later that year, allowing the state government to dissolve any school district that accepted integration. The amendment also added teeth to Mississippi’s already monstrous voter suppression laws, requiring that voters show “good moral character” as well as interpret arcane passages from the state’s 1890 constitution, subjectively decided by each county registrar, all of whom were white. Several counties required voters to re-register, forcing many of the few already-registered Black voters off the rolls.10
In Sunflower County, Robert Boyd “Tut” Patterson gathered a group of fellow white bankers, business owners, and planters to create the first Association of Citizens Councils of Mississippi (ACCM), which used its collective economic power to keep segregation in place by punishing Blacks who stepped outside the Mississippi social code by registering to vote, joining the NAACP, or attending meetings about changing the status quo. The Citizens’ Councils attempted to distance themselves from the “rednecks” in the Klan, but their hostility to change, and tendency to keep a minute account of the activities of Blacks who “stepped out of line,” had its own brutal calculation.
Medgar’s determination to enter Ole Miss Law School stalled amid that rancor.
By fall, Attorney General Coleman recommended that the Mississippi State Board of Education reject Medgar’s law school application. Instead, they returned it, saying it lacked a second reference from a white citizen who’d known Medgar for ten years.
Medgar’s instinct was to sue, especially with the Brown victories in hand. Dr. Howard and Thurgood Marshall had other plans. Soon, on Marshall’s recommendation, Medgar was offered the job of statewide field secretary for the NAACP, a new position the organization created for him. Medgar accepted, letting his law school dream go for the time being.
Myrlie was thrilled—and horrified. The job offer meant leaving Mound Bayou, and the bugs and the heat of the Delta, and moving to the state capital of Jackson. It also meant ratcheting up Medgar’s visibility and the risks to his life.
At their dinner table, after the babies were put to bed, Myrlie protested. “I told him about my fear for his life, for the lives of our children and myself. He shared just a little about his fear, but I remember Medgar telling me, ‘I’ll always be there for you.’ And I said to him, ‘What about your body if it’s not?’” Her question was met with silence. “He got up and walked away from the table . . . walked out of the room. And when he came back in, he was different. I didn’t understand what had happened. And he told me, ‘Myrlie . . . this is something I have to do.’ I said, ‘What about me? What about our children?’ And he said, ‘This is why I have to do it.’ It took me a long time to understand that. I gave in, of course, because I wanted our marriage to last. I wanted it to be a comfortable marriage, as comfortable as marriages can be.”
IN SEPTEMBER 1954, THE SAME MONTH MEDGAR’S APPLICATION TO Ole Miss was officially closed—and three days after his daughter Reena was born11—thirty NAACP members in Walthall, Mississippi, were hauled before a grand jury for signing a petition to desegregate their local schools. Others who signed similar positions had faced home foreclosures or had their personal or business records seized. The harassment campaigns included firings and threatening phone calls.12 Soon, the allegedly peaceful White Citizens’ Councils fueled a fresh surge of Klan violence.
The goal of seemingly every public policy in the South, and especially in Mississippi, as Medgar described it in his first report as NAACP field secretary in December 1954, was to keep “the Negro in his place . . . keep him out of white schools . . . keep the ballot out of his reach . . . [and] keep him dependent” 13 even though Black Mississippians comprised the majority in a number of counties, particularly in the Delta. The report noted that Mound Bayou had “19,000 whites and 46,000 Negroes, and of course Bolivar County,” where Mound Bayou sat, “has one of the strongest [White Citizens’] councils in the Delta.” 14
These Black majorities throughout the state played almost no civic role. In 1950, 68 percent of Leflore county’s population was Black—with 43 percent working in the plantation system—yet of the 18,000 Blacks who were theoretically eligible to vote, just 297 were registered. Sunflower County—home to the notoriously racist Senator Eastland; and where another T. R. M. Howard acolyte, Fannie Lou Hamer, would be evicted from the plantation where she lived and did backbreaking work picking cotton, then jailed and beaten for trying to register to vote—had only 114 registered Black voters in 1950 out of 8,949 eligible. Sunflower County was 68 percent Black, with a full two-thirds of Black residents working on the plantations, with a median yearly income of just $744.
This system clung stubbornly to the economic facts of the slave era and was maintained via brute force, combined with a strict caste system that imprisoned white and Black Mississippians alike. Mississippi had four kinds of people: Blacks, who were trapped at the bottom of the caste system, no matter their income or education; the wealthy white planter and professional class, including state and federal politicians; the white shopkeepers and clerks who served white customers in the tidy shops in towns like Jackson and Natchez; and the “peckerwoods.”15
The “peckerwoods” included not just the feed- and food-store owners who served Black customers but also the state’s sheriff departments that were riddled with the night riders of the Klan. They typically got their hands dirty in the brutality and lynching that upended any sense of basic safety Black men, women, and children might feel. This enabled the upper echelons of white Southern society to maintain control of the workers who fed their way of life and what they saw as the “peaceful coexistence of the races” in the genteel South.
Southern segregationists saw everything as a threat to that order, from Jackie Robinson’s 1947 integration of Major League Baseball to Black troops like the Tuskegee Airmen showing their mettle in war and coming home changed by their experiences. The planter class in the South and, by extension, the economically stricken white men and women they recruited to their cause, needed segregation to survive. And they vowed to maintain it by any means necessary. Nothing short of the continued existence of the white race was at stake, as far as they were concerned. By 1955, the ACCM had sixty thousand members operating in 253 councils throughout Mississippi.16
WHEN MEDGAR GOT THE CALL TO TRAVEL TO NEW YORK CITY TO discuss the field secretary offer, Myrlie seized on the opportunity to spend a few days with M’dear. Mildred had moved to nearby Yazoo City with her second husband, Lee Mack Sanders, after his discharge from the Marines.17 In those two days, the two women talked more and more deeply than they ever had, and relished spending time together without Mama Beasley’s intervention. Their conversations stretched long into the nights as Darrell and infant Reena slept, and Myrlie later wrote that she learned more about her mother than she’d ever known. M’dear’s stories brought into sharp relief the ravages and dangers of being a Black girl and woman in a society built on the bedrock of slavery, a world in which the men in your life—your father, your brothers, and your husband—had no power to protect you from the whims of predatory white men, from violence or rape, or from daily humiliation.
Myrlie quoted Charles Silberman, who wrote in Crisis in Black and White that in 1890, the year the racist, Reconstruction-ending Mississippi constitution was written, “the policy of crushing out the manhood of the Negro citizens is to be carried on to success.”18 Indeed, no Black man in the South was meant to be a man at all in the construction of white society. To fail to submit to the whims of any white man, woman, or child was to risk death. The lot of so many Negro men, particularly the Delta during and after enslavement, was to watch their woman outearn them as servants in white people’s homes, while they—often toiling beside their children—eked out a living in the fields that couldn’t even support their families or give them a purposeful role in their lives. In talking with M’dear, who had strongly supported Medgar’s decision to apply to Ole Miss, even as Myrlie and everyone else seemed to object, she came to understand why her mother so admired Medgar, and why she did, too.
“My two days alone with my mother . . . taught me something about myself and Medgar,” Myrlie wrote. “For the first time really, I was able to admit openly my pride and admiration for some of the things he had done; things I had opposed because they frightened me. I had begun to understand how important it was for Medgar to have my approval and backing—important not just for him but for myself. . . . Even more important, I had at least the beginnings of an understanding of the conflict within myself that had kept us apart. Largely through these long talks with my mother I had begun to understand that it was the very qualities that I most admired in Medgar that frightened me. I had grown up in a family that never discussed race, that never complained about discrimination. Until I met Medgar, I had never heard a Negro challenge segregation. Now I was married to a man who did, openly and publicly.”19 Medgar, in his determination to challenge the status quo, was in every sense a man. And Myrlie loved and admired him for it. Much like his late father, he was a Black man who refused to bow.
When Myrlie left Yazoo City, M’dear cried, something she didn’t normally do when they parted. Two days later, Myrlie was at work at the insurance office in Mound Bayou when a coworker called her to the phone. Her stepfather was on the other end of the line, and he had devastating news. M’dear—Mildred Washington Beasley Sanders—had died of heart failure. She was just thirty-eight years old.20 Her death, so soon after Medgar had lost his own father, brought Medgar and Myrlie closer still.
After M’dear’s funeral, the Everses packed up their belongings and their children and began the move to Jackson. They would not be done with Mound Bayou, though, because death was not done with the Mississippi Delta.
AMOS BROWN WAS FOURTEEN YEARS OLD AND LIVING IN JACKSON when, on May 7, 1955, he learned about a killing. “I heard everybody around the Farish Street Historic District . . . talking about how these evil white men of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Council ambushed a Black Baptist preacher named Rev. George Washington Lee on a Saturday night when he was on his way home from his grocery store in Belzoni, Mississippi,” said Brown, who later became a civil rights activist and a pastor himself.
Reverend Lee, who with his wife ran a small grocery store and printing press, was the cofounder, with a fellow grocer named Gus Courts, of the Belzoni chapter of the NAACP and a vice president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. Through those organizations he had helped to register nearly all the eligible Black voters in Belzoni. The month before his murder he spoke at the RCNL’s annual meeting in Mound Bayou, to a crowd that reportedly numbered seven thousand, and he “electrified” the crowd, reported Jet.21 And though the coroner ruled that the left side of his jaw had been shot clean off by “number 3 buckshot” from a shotgun, and an FBI investigation found that a car likely pulled up beside his and a gunman opened fire, the local sheriff suggested Lee might have died of a heart attack while driving and wrecked his car; and that the metal shrapnel inside his jaw might have been his fillings becoming dislodged in the crash.22 No one was arrested.
Lee’s funeral attracted some two thousand mourners, all of whom risked their lives by attending. Lee’s widow, Rosebud, made the momentous decision to leave his casket open, so the horror of what the Klan had done to her husband could be seen. This was the first such open-casket burial resulting from a lynching that is known in the civil rights movement. And it was one of Medgar’s first investigations as field secretary, which he conducted alongside Ruby Hurley, the NAACP’s southeastern regional director.
Later that summer, on August 13, three white men shot and killed sixty-three-year-old voting advocate Lamar “Ditney” Smith, a World War II veteran, on the steps of the Brookhaven courthouse in front of dozens of witnesses, including local sheriffs.23 “There in Lincoln County, named for Abraham Lincoln,” Brown said. “He was on his way to where? To the courthouse, to deliver some absentee ballots. And at 10:00 A.M. in the morning . . . broad open daylight,” he was shot dead. “What was his crime? He just wanted to be enfranchised. He just wanted to exercise his constitutional right to vote.”24 A frenzy was growing among white Mississippians to stop the train of integration at whatever bloody cost. “That year, 1955, was a year of terror,” 25 Brown said. (Gus Courts would be shot outside his grocery store that November. He was treated at the hospital in Mound Bayou and survived, and soon left Mississippi for Chicago.)
One week after Smith’s murder, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till stepped into this toxic, boiling atmosphere, when he got off the train from Chicago and set foot on the soil of Money, Mississippi. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans fled Mississippi for Chicago between World War I and the years after World War II, and more than 6 million left the South during those years. A one-way train ticket to Chicago cost $11.10, and though the neighborhoods and schools were segregated there, Blacks could exist in a way that was unlike their experience in Mississippi.26
Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till (later Till-Mobley), was born in Tallahatchie County but later said: “Chicago was a land of promise, and they thought that milk and honey was everywhere. . . . [There was] a lot of excitement leaving the South, leaving the cotton fields. You could hold your head up in Chicago.” The city became a refuge from the violence and racial terror for everyone from Ida B. Wells to Richard Wright. The cord pulled both ways, though—and young Emmett, an only child, had come back South a number of times to spend time with the young cousins who were close to his age.
Medgar and his family shared those Chicago ties. He had spent each of his college summers working in Chicago, where one of his half brothers, Eugene Graham, lived. Medgar and Charles went back and forth to the city nearly every year of their young lives. James and Jessie had raised their children with the Chicago Defender in their home, and they encouraged their children to read its depictions of Black people as full of dignity and promise rather than shame. Medgar and Myrlie had solidified their bond in Chicago, the summer before they were married.
When Medgar heard that a boy from that city, where Black boys could breathe free, was missing, he rose to action. He, Amzie Moore, and Aaron Henry, his compatriots from the gas station boycotts, along with Ruby Hurley, donned overalls to disguise themselves as field hands, as he had so often done during his investigations, and headed deep into the Delta, to the Grover C. Frederick Farm, where Emmett’s great uncle, sharecropper Moses “Mose” Wright, who local folks called “Preacher,” lived with his wife, Elizabeth, and their youngest son, near the tiny, whistle-stop town of Money.
Emmett and his sixteen-year-old cousin Wheeler Parker had taken the train with Wright from Chicago to nearby Greenwood on the weekend of August 20 after a family funeral. After a few days in Wright’s three-room house, with his great-aunt and -uncle, his cousin, and Wright’s twelve-year-old son, Simeon, he and a jovial group of seven boys and one girl went to Roy Bryant’s grocery and meat market to buy candy and Coca-Colas after a long day helping Uncle Preacher pick cotton in the scorching Delta heat. At one point, Emmett bopped into the shop on his own to buy bubble gum. When he emerged, he allegedly threw a casual “wolf whistle” at the store owner’s wife, Carolyn, a claim that would prove impossible to verify, but that had deadly consequences.
What Medgar and his team, and later the FBI, learned was that over the next four days an amateur manhunt ended with a posse arriving at Wright’s small home after 2:00 A.M., on August 28. They demanded that the sixty-three-year-old walk them through the pitch-dark house and produce the boy “who did the talking.” Wright pleaded with them to just “give him a whipping instead,” and his wife, Elizabeth, begged them to leave the child alone. He wasn’t from here. He didn’t understand the Mississippi way. The group of kidnappers included several white and three Black men, one of whom stood guard by the door. The last time Mose Wright saw Emmett alive, four white men led by J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant forced the child into the back of a pickup truck, with two Black men riding in back with him.27 The truck disappeared into the night.
As days turned into weeks and word got out about the missing Chicago boy, Dr. Howard said there would be “hell to pay in Mississippi” if Till wasn’t found unharmed, and he called for an FBI investigation.28 Mrs. Till traveled to Mississippi and stayed in Dr. Howard’s Mound Bayou home where community leaders gathered around her. Just three weeks had passed since Lamar Smith’s murder, and Black Mississippians were exhausted and on edge. Simeon Wright later recalled in a 2011 oral history, “I lay there that night, and every car that I would hear, I thought it was J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant bringing Emmett back.”29
According to an FBI probe conducted fifty-one years after the events, the group took the terrified boy back to Bryant’s store, where another of Milam’s brothers, Leslie, lived in an adjoining apartment, and then to a barn on Milam’s farm, located on the Shurden plantation near Glendora, where they beat him, shot him,30 and, according to what one of the Black men later told local folks in a story passed to the other Black man’s son, that they finally put the boy out of his misery by putting a drill through the top of his head. Then they threw him off a Glendora bridge, breaking part of the bridge railing in the process.31
A fisherman found Emmett’s bloated body in the nearby Tallahatchie River on August 31. This child, whose mother had escaped the death grip of forever-enslaved Mississippi, had been dragged from his uncle’s home, beaten, and tortured, leaving one eye on his once sweet and pudgy face bulging from its socket and his head misshapen like a bloated lump of clay. His killers had weighted his body by strapping an industrial fan to his mutilated corpse with barbed wire. All of this was for allegedly “sassing” a white woman. The only way authorities identified the monstrous corpse as Emmett Till was by the ring on one of his fingers, which Simeon, who had been sharing the bed with him, pointed out for the police.32
The ring, which Emmett never took off, had belonged to his father, who had fought in World War II as part of the Italian campaign and died there at just twenty-three years old.
Lynching had become all but commonplace in the former Confederate states, and especially in Mississippi, but the brutal execution of a child from the North appeared to crack a seam in the nation’s quiet acceptance of an apartheid system operating openly in the United States, a country that had shed blood to liberate Europe from Nazism, only to countenance an American version of the same ideology at home.
Especially once there were photographs.
Emmett’s body, which Mississippi officials had tried to quietly bury in a local Black cemetery was instead placed on a train to Chicago at Mamie Till’s insistence. The local sheriff had sought to hide the vicious truth of what a Southern lynching looked like by boxing the remains and nailing the makeshift wooden coffin shut. Mrs. Till would have none of it.
From the moment she met her son’s remains as they arrived at the train station on Twelfth Street on September 2, Mamie Till was not alone. With Dr. Howard’s help, two Black journalists, Moses Newson of the Black weekly newspaper the Tri-State Defender, and Simeon Booker of Jet magazine, were there to chronicle her agony. Booker’s photographer, David Jackson was with Mrs. Till on the platform and accompanied her and Emmett’s body to A. A. Rayner Funeral Home, where he captured the explicit photographs of Emmett’s mutilation that would shock the conscience of the world.
Mamie channeled Rosebud Lee in insisting that the remains of her once-beautiful boy be on display in an open casket, so that the whole world had to reckon with what the State of Mississippi had done to him, through the hands of those soulless men. For three days, beginning September 3, 1955, nearly fifty thousand people jammed the streets in front of A. A. Rayner Funeral Home, where Till’s mangled body was displayed under a Plexiglas cover. It was said that nearly one in five of those who passed through the building for the viewing required medical intervention, as women fainted and staggered onto chairs outside.33
All two thousand seats inside Roberts Temple were filled and thousands more gathered outside the church to listen to the September 6 funeral on loudspeakers. Bishop Louis Ford used his eulogy to call on President Eisenhower to “go into the Southern states and tell the people there . . . that unless the Negro gets full freedom in America, it is impossible for us to be leaders in the rest of the world.” 34 He announced that the burial would not take place for two days so that Emmett Till’s body could lie in state for forty-eight hours. By the time he was finally laid to rest, some one hundred thousand mourners had viewed the body.
Milam and Bryant were indicted by a Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, grand jury the day after the funeral. The charges, murder and kidnapping, could yield the death penalty in Mississippi.
Medgar began the painstaking work of convincing terrorized Blacks in the Delta not only to come forward and tell what they knew but also to testify in the upcoming trial. Few Blacks in the Delta dared to speak of the Till lynching above a whisper. The fear was palpable. Medgar displayed a public patience and calm that belied his stress. Myrlie remembers that when they were at home, when her husband didn’t need to be an NAACP leader or to file a report to the leadership in New York, the tears came. “It was just devastating,” Myrlie said. “I can’t tell you how emotional all of that time was, because it was constant. . . . It was very seldom when there was a quiet and peaceful time. Quite honestly, I don’t know how he lived through it without having a heart attack.”
Medgar pressed ahead, including working to attract maximum press attention to the case. The NAACP’s New York–based PR director, Henry Moon, had asked Medgar and the head of the Greenwood NAACP chapter for help in guiding reporters from the New York Post, the New York Times, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Associated Press, and the Baltimore Afro American, who were traveling to Mississippi to cover the case. Medgar wrote to him, “Do not ever think that I am too busy to give information to those persons who are going to, some way or the other, help our cause down here.” 35 He also pressed the national NAACP to get more involved. Under its founding president, Walter White, who had passed away just that March, the organization had been pressing for federal antilynching legislation for a generation. Charles felt that Roy Wilkins, elevated to lead the national organization after White, was too slow to respond to the Till case, but Medgar remained patient with him, as did the other national NAACP leaders.36
THE TRIAL OF J. W. MILAM AND ROY BRYANT IN THE KIDNAPPING and murder of Emmett Till began on September 19, 1955. Four days before, David Jackson’s blockbuster photos of Emmett Till’s mutilated body and the story of the funeral had run in Jet magazine, searing the images of the fourteen-year-old’s lynching into the souls of Black folk nationwide.
Yet the atmosphere inside the Mississippi courtroom was jovial. Local white families piled into the courthouse wearing their Sunday best, some bringing their children with them, ice cream cones in hand and picnic baskets in tow. Local reporters hailed Carolyn Bryant’s looks, dubbing her the “crossroads Marylin Monroe.” Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam were treated like celebrities, too, with pithy pieces written about Milam’s love for cigars and Bryant’s imposing height. They posed for pictures with their wives, all smiles and confidence. Knowing that in Mississippi, there was almost zero risk that the all-white male jury would convict them.
Black Mississippians who dared to attend the trial were relegated to the back of the courtroom, and to the fear and sorrow of foreseeing the likely outcome of the trial. Black journalists, and even African American congressman Charles Diggs of Michigan, who had become the state’s first Black congressman in 1954, were shunted off to a card table in the rear section. When Tallahatchie sheriff Clarence Strider strode into the courtroom each day, big-bellied, foul-mouthed, and in every way befitting the image of a Jim Crow, Dixie lawman, he’d brush by the “Black table” and greet the African American journalists with “Hello, niggers!” And with a stated goal of “sending a message to outsiders,” all five practicing attorneys in Sumner, the Tallahatchie County seat, agreed to represent Milam and Bryant free of charge, and local white businesses raised $10,000 to fund the defense.
Dr. Howard housed Mrs. Till at his home in Mound Bayou and escorted her to court each day in the armed caravan he used for protection from the Klan.37 Howard’s stately three-story brick house buzzed daily with NAACP and RCNP activists, ministers, and the witnesses Medgar urged to come forward, as well as the pool of reporters who descended on Mississippi to cover the trial, and for whom Medgar had provided guidance and coordination. Never again, Medgar vowed, would a person like Willie Tingle or Emmett Till just evaporate into the air, leaving a mound of bloody clothes with never a mention in the community or the press.
The prosecution called twelve witnesses, including the undertaker who prepared Till’s body and the two men who discovered the corpse and fished it out of the river. Despite his personal fear and intense pressure to remain silent, sixty-four-year-old Mose Wright bravely testified about what happened the night the men raided his home and took Emmett, whom the family called “Bobo,” away. Mrs. Till-Mobely also testified, as did three “surprise” witnesses Medgar, Ruby Hurley, and their NAACP team had coaxed to come forward. They were: a Black field hand named Willie Reed, who testified that he heard screams coming from Milam’s barn; a Black woman named Amanda Bradley, who said she saw four men near Milam’s barn on the night of the murder; and Willie Reed’s grandfather Add Reed, who testified that he heard “whipping and hollering” coming from inside the barn.38 After their testimony, Medgar worked to get them quickly out of town. Mose Wright was especially relieved to follow his wife and son, Simeon, after receiving from Medgar Evers that precious $11 ticket to Chicago.
Not everyone who knew the details of the murder testified.
Johnny B. Thomas was not much older than Emmett Till was at the time of the Milam and Bryant trial, and he would grow up to be not just an NAACP man, but the mayor of Glendora, near the place where Emmett Till was killed. He insists that his father took part in Till’s murder despite the elder man’s denials. Black men back then wouldn’t have had much choice, unless they wanted their children to be next. Often whites didn’t want to do the beating and get “nigger blood all over themselves,” so just as would be done to Fannie Lou Hamer for attempting to register to vote, they forced Black men to deliver the blows. Thomas said his father and the other man who assisted Milam and Bryant in the kidnapping and murder both disappeared from town, conveniently, until the trial was over. He saw his father just a few times a year after that.39
When it was the defense’s turn, Carolyn Bryant swore under oath that Emmett made “ugly remarks” before “whistling” at her. Her story would change over time. Sheriff Strider testified that he figured the body pulled from the Tallahatchie River had been there too long to be Till’s. He’d even told a newspaper before the trial, absurdly, that he believed Till was still alive.40 A local undertaker testified that the body presumed to be Till was unrecognizable, so it couldn’t be proven that it was him. The defense also presented character witnesses for Bryant and Milam, who was a World War II veteran.
When the all-white male jury acquitted both men after just ninety minutes of deliberation on September 23, with the predetermined outcome delayed only “to drink pop,” the outrage was electric, and global. Protests erupted in Chicago and across the country. Dr. Howard railed that “a white man in Mississippi will get no more of a sentence for killing a black person as he would for killing a deer out of season.” One international newspaper pronounced that “the life of a Negro in Mississippi” was “not worth a whistle.” 41
After the verdict, Dr. Howard loudly demanded that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI launch its own federal investigation, noting, “It’s getting to be a strange thing that the FBI can never seem to work out who is responsible for the killings of Negroes in the South.” Hoover responded in an open letter accusing Howard of launching “intemperate and baseless charges” against the bureau.42 Howard was not about to stay quiet though—with Mamie Till-Mobley, he set out on an NAACP-backed speaking tour. Thousands gathered to hear them talk about Emmett and the seemingly unending violence against Blacks in Mississippi, aided and abetted by authorities.
The combustible situation led Mississippi authorities to believe they needed to convict Milam and Bryant of something, if for no other reason than to cool the national temperature and rescue some semblance of Mississippi’s reputation. In November, a second grand jury was empaneled in nearby Leflore County, where Mose Wright’s house was, this time to consider solely a charge of kidnapping. Nothing would come of it.
As it turned out, Emmett Till’s father, Louis Till, had indeed died in Europe during World War II, just not in combat. The elder Till had been accused along with a fellow Black private in the Transportation Corps, Fred A. McMurray, of the rape of two Italian women and the shooting death of a third. The men were tried by Army officers in a military court-martial, based on the testimony of the surviving women, who initially identified a different number of attackers, and a third soldier, who was subsequently released. Both men insisted on their innocence to the end. They were hanged on July 2, 1945, five months after their convictions and ten years before Louis Till’s only son would be lynched. Mamie Till, who had never been told the circumstances of her husband’s death, learned of his decade-old execution along with the world, when his sealed military file was suddenly leaked to the press by Mississippi’s two segregationist Democratic senators, James Eastland and John C. Stennis, just as the Leflore County grand jury was set to convene.43
Milam and Bryant soon discovered they could brag about the killing, safe from double jeopardy, to the national magazine Look for $4,000. The piece ran in January 1956. They could not, however, continue doing business with Black Mississippians. Not long after the trial, a boycott against Bryant’s store forced its closure; he eventually found work as a welder, which left him legally blind. Milam, who owned no land, tried his hand at plantation work, renting a large parcel in Sunflower County. But since no Black sharecroppers would work for him, the business failed, and he wound up taking menial plantation work himself, and ultimately wound up on the welfare rolls. The men soon moved their families to Texas, only to eventually return, with Bryant facing trouble with the law for food stamp fraud.
The Till case prompted a wave of activism that soon rumbled across the South. Young Mississippians were incensed by the violence, and Medgar became their natural organizer. “When I picked up that Jet magazine . . . and saw that mutilated head of Emmett Till, I was naturally horrified,” said Brown. “I was angry. I was upset. But Mr. Evers said, ‘Amos, let’s be smart. I know how you feel, but let’s do the right thing. Let’s organize a Youth Council of the NAACP so that you and your young friends will learn how to fight this evil of racism and injustice in a strategic, smart way.” Under Medgar’s tutelage, Brown organized the first NAACP Youth Council in Mississippi that fall, in September 1955, the same month Milam and Bryant were acquitted. The Youth Councils would become the bedrock of the civil rights movement in Mississippi, and its primary source of young activists.
On November 27, twenty-six-year-old Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., fresh from earning his divinity doctorate at Boston University, hosted Dr. Howard and Mrs. Till-Mobley at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where he had begun his first full-time pastorship a year before. The young pastor called for every member of the church to join the NAACP and to become a registered voter.44 Rosa Parks, already an NAACP activist, was there that night, and she later said the Emmett Till case gave her the strength to remain in her front seat in the bus, which launched the Montgomery bus boycott that made King a national figure. Eight years later, King and his associates fixed the date of the March on Washington on the anniversary of Till’s slaying—August 28, 1963.
Till’s slaying haunted Medgar for the rest of his life. He wrote to the governor of Illinois, William Stratton, on March 20, 1957, detailing a string of murders of Black men and boys in Mississippi, and calling the lynching of Emmett Till “the most infamous crime committed against Negroes.”45 The young Republican governor had been the first white man to call for an FBI investigation into the Till lynching. Medgar would refer to the killing often, in letters and in speeches, as well as the killings of Reverend Lee and Lamar Smith, to illustrate the reign of terror being waged against Blacks in Mississippi.
The Citizens’ Councils were at the heart of that ruthless, relentless campaign to stamp out the hunger of Black Mississippians to live in a free, modern world. A 2006 FBI investigation revealed that ACCM members visited every juror in the Milam and Bryant trial to ensure that they came up with the “right” verdict.46 In the immediate aftermath of the trial, banks and plantation owners, all controlled by council leaders, launched an all-out economic assault on anyone who tried to bring Till’s killers to justice and on anyone connected to the NAACP. The banks targeted NAACP leaders with foreclosures on their homes and businesses, including Amzie Moore, Dr. Howard, and Charles Evers, prompting Medgar to send a string of letters to national NAACP leadership, including to Gloster Current, the national executive director, urging financial assistance for the men.47
By the end of 1955, Charles Evers’s restaurant and cab service were facing canceled loans, and he was no longer deejaying at the Jackson radio station where he mixed calls for NAACP membership between songs. Council leaders forced the station’s owner to fire him. Charles finally gave up on Mississippi and joined the great migration to Chicago.48
Till’s slaying changed Mound Bayou, too. By December, Dr. Howard, whose name was included on a Klan “kill list” alongside Medgar’s and the already assassinated Reverend Lee,49 packed up his wife and their adopted son, sold most of his Mound Bayou property, and joined the Mississippi exodus on a one-way train to Chicago. By then, Medgar and Myrlie were working out of the statewide field office they’d opened in Jackson, with Myrlie serving as Medgar’s secretary in an office of two, while Mama acted as babysitter at home. At work, they kept things strictly professional. “We were . . . a very good team when it came to working together,” Myrlie said. “He addressed me as Mrs. Evers, I addressed him as Mr. Evers at work.”50 Despite her ongoing fears, and the ongoing horrors of Mississippi, she felt a certain excitement about this new taste of city life.