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CONTENTS
Epigraph
1. Nothing That Boy Did
2. Boots on the Porch
3. Growing Up Black in Chicago
4. Emmett in Chicago and “Little Mississippi”
5. Pistol-Whipping at Christmas
6. The Incident
7. On the Third Day
8. Mama Made the Earth Tremble
9. Warring Regiments of Mississippi
10. Black Monday
11. People We Don’t Need Around Here Any More
12. Fixed Opinions
13. Mississippi Underground
14. “There He Is”
15. Every Last Anglo-Saxon One of You
16. The Verdict of the World
17. Protest Politics
18. Killing Emmett Till
Epilogue: The Children of Emmett Till
Acknowledgments
About Timothy B. Tyson
Notes
Bibliography
Index
for my brother Vern
My name is being called on the road to freedom. I can hear the blood of Emmett Till as it calls from the ground. . . .When shall we go? Not tomorrow! Not at high noon! Now!
REVEREND SAMUEL WELLS, Albany, Georgia, 1962
1
N O T H I N G T H AT B OY D I D
The older woman sipped her coffee. “I have thought and thought
about everything about Emmett Till, the killing and the trial, telling who did what to who,” she said.1 Back when she was twenty-one and her name was Carolyn Bryant, the French newspaper Aurore dubbed the dark-haired young woman from the Mississippi Delta “a crossroads Marilyn Monroe.”2 News reporters from Detroit to Dakar never failed to sprinkle their stories about l’affaire Till with words like “comely” and “fetching” to describe her. William Bradford Huie, the Southern journalist and dealer in tales of the Till lynching, called her “one of the prettiest black-haired Irish women I ever saw in my life.”3
Almost eighty and still handsome, her hair now silver, the former Mrs. Roy Bryant served me a slice of pound cake, hesitated a little, and then murmured, seeming to speak to herself more than to me, “They’re all dead now anyway.” She placed her cup on the low glass table between us, and I waited.
For one epic moment half a century earlier, Carolyn Bryant’s face had been familiar across the globe, forever attached to a crime of historic notoriety and symbolic power. The murder of Emmett Till was reported in one of the very first banner headlines of the civil rights era and launched the national coalition that fueled the modern civil rights movement. But she had never opened her door to a journalist or historian, let alone invited one for cake and coffee. Now she looked me in the eyes, trying hard to distinguish between fact and remembrance, and told me a story that I did not know.
The story I thought I knew began in 1955, fifty years earlier, when Carolyn Bryant was twenty-one and a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago walked into the Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in a rural Mississippi Delta hamlet and offended her. Perhaps on a dare, the boy touched or even squeezed her hand when he exchanged money for candy, asked her for a date, and said goodbye when he left the store, tugged along by an older cousin. Few news writers who told the story of the black boy and the backwoods beauty failed to mention the “wolf whistle” that came next: when an angry Carolyn walked out to a car to retrieve the pistol under the seat, Till supposedly whistled at her.
The world knew this story only because of what happened a few days later: Carolyn’s kinsmen, allegedly just her husband and brother- in-law, kidnapped and killed the boy and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River. That was supposed to be the end of it. Lesson taught. But a young fisherman found Till’s corpse in the water, and a month later the world watched Roy Bryant and J. W. “Big” Milam stand trial for his murder.
I knew the painful territory well because when I was eleven years old in the small tobacco market town of Oxford, North Carolina, a friend’s father and brothers beat and shot a young black man to death. His name was Henry Marrow, and the events leading up to his death had something in common with Till’s. My father, a white Methodist minister, got mixed up in efforts to bring peace and justice to the community. We moved away that summer. But Oxford burned on in my memory, and I later went back and interviewed the man most responsible for Marrow’s death. He told me, “That nigger committed suicide, coming in my store and wanting to four-letter-word my daughter-in-law.” I also talked with many of those who had protested the murder by setting fire to the huge tobacco warehouses in downtown Oxford, as well as witnesses to the killing, townspeople, attorneys, and others. Seeking to understand what had happened in my own hometown made me a historian. I researched the case for years, on my way to a PhD in American history, and in 2004 published a book about Marrow’s murder, what it meant for my hometown and my family, and how it revealed the workings of race in
American history.4 Carolyn Bryant Donham had read the book, which was why she decided to contact me and talk with me about the lynching of Emmett Till.
The killing of Henry Marrow occurred in 1970, fifteen years after the Till lynching, but unlike the Till case it never entered national or international awareness, even though many of the same themes were present. Like Till, Marrow had allegedly made a flirtatious remark to a young white woman at her family’s small rural store. In Oxford, though, the town erupted into arson and violence, the fires visible for miles. An all-white jury, acting on what they doubtless perceived to be the values of the white community, acquitted both of the men charged in the case, even though the murder had occurred in public. What happened in Oxford in 1970 was a late-model lynching, in which white men killed a black man in the service of white supremacy. The all-white jury ratified the murder as a gesture of protest against public school integration, which had finally begun in Oxford, and underlying much of the white protest was fear and rage at the prospect of white and black children going to school together, which whites feared would lead to other forms of “race-mixing,” even “miscegenation.”
As in the Marrow case, many white people believed Till had violated this race-and-sex taboo and therefore had it coming. Many news reports asserted that Till had erred—in judgment, in behavior, in deed, and perhaps in thought. Without justifying the murder, a number of Southern newspapers argued that the boy was at least partially at fault. The most influential account of the lynching, Huie’s 1956 presumptive tell-all, depicted a black boy who virtually committed suicide with his arrogant responses to his assailants. “Boastful, brash,” Huie described Till. He “had a white girl’s picture in his pocket and boasted of having screwed her,” not just to friends, not just to Carolyn Bryant, but also to his killers: “That is why they took him out and killed him.”5 The story was told and retold in many ways, but a great many of them, from the virulently defensive accounts of Mississippi and its customs to the self-righteous screeds of Northern critics, noted that Till had been at the wrong place at the wrong time and made the wrong choices.
Until recently historians did not even have a transcript of the 1955 trial. It went missing soon after the trial ended, turning up briefly in the early 1960s but then destroyed in a basement flood. In September 2004 FBI agents located a faded “copy of a copy of a copy” in a private home in Biloxi, Mississippi. It took weeks for two clerks to transcribe the entire document, except for one missing page.6 The transcript, finally released in 2007, allows us to compare the later recollections of witnesses and defendants with what they said fifty years earlier. It also reveals that Carolyn Bryant told an even harder- edged story in the courtroom, one that was difficult to square with the gentle woman sitting across from me at the coffee table.
Half a century earlier, above the witness stand in the Tallahatchie County Courthouse, two ceiling fans slowly churned the cigarette smoke. This was the stage on which the winner of beauty contests at two high schools starred as the fairest flower of Southern womanhood. She testified that Till had grabbed her hand forcefully across the candy counter, letting go only when she snatched it away. He asked her for a date, she said, chased her down the counter, blocked her path, and clutched her narrow waist tightly with both hands.
She told the court he said, “You needn’t be afraid of me. [I’ve], well, ——with white women before.” According to the transcript, the delicate young woman refused to utter the verb or even tell the court what letter of the alphabet it started with. She escaped Till’s forceful grasp only with great difficulty, she said.7 A month later one Mississippi newspaper insisted that the case should never have been called the “wolf whistle case.” Instead, said the editors, it should have been called “an ‘attempted rape’ case.”8
“Then this other nigger came in from the store and got him by the arm,” Carolyn testified. “And he told him to come on and let’s go. He had him by the arm and led him out.” Then came an odd note in her tale, a note discordant with the claim of aborted assault: Till stopped in the doorway, “turned around and said, ‘Goodbye.’ ”9
The defendants sat on the court’s cane-bottom chairs in a room packed with more than two hundred white men and fifty or sixty African Americans who had been crowded into the last two rows and
the small, segregated black press table. In his closing statement, John W. Whitten, counsel for the defendants, told the all-white, all-male jury, “I’m sure that every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men, despite this [outside] pressure.”10
Mamie Bradley,I Till’s mother, was responsible for a good deal of that outside pressure on Mississippi’s court system. Her brave decision to hold an open-casket funeral for her battered son touched off news stories across the globe. The resultant international outrage compelled the U.S. State Department to lament “the real and continuing damage to American foreign policy from such tragedies as the Emmett Till case.”11 Her willingness to travel anywhere to speak about the tragedy helped to fuel a huge protest movement that pulled together the elements of a national civil rights movement, beginning with the political and cultural power of black Chicago. The movement became the most important legacy of the story.12 Her memoir of the case, Death of Innocence, published almost fifty years after her son’s murder, lets us see him as a human being, not merely the victim of one of the most notorious hate crimes in history.13
• • •
As I sat drinking her coffee and eating her pound cake, Carolyn Bryant Donham handed me a copy of the trial transcript and the manuscript of her unpublished memoir, “More than a Wolf Whistle: The Story of Carolyn Bryant Donham.” I promised to deliver our interview and these documents to the appropriate archive, where future scholars would be able to use them. In her memoir she recounts the story she told at the trial using imagery from the classic Southern racist horror movie of the “Black Beast” rapist.14 But about her testimony that Till had grabbed her around the waist and uttered obscenities, she now told me, “That part’s not true.”
A son of the South and the son of a minister, I have sat in countless such living rooms that had been cleaned for guests, Sunday clothes on, an unspoken deference running young to old, men to women, and, very often, dark skin to light. As a historian I have collected a lot of oral histories in the South and across all manner of social lines.
Manners matter a great deal, and the personal questions that oral history requires are sometimes delicate. I was comfortable with the setting but rattled by her revelation, and I struggled to phrase my next question. If that part was not true, I asked, what did happen that evening decades earlier?
“I want to tell you,” she said. “Honestly, I just don’t remember. It was fifty years ago. You tell these stories for so long that they seem true, but that part is not true.” Historians have long known about the complex reliability of oral history—of virtually all historical sources, for that matter—and the malleability of human memory, and her confession was in part a reflection of that. What does it mean when you remember something that you know never happened? She had pondered that question for many years, but never aloud in public or in an interview. When she finally told me the story of her life and starkly different and much larger tales of Emmett Till’s death, it was the first time in half a century that she had uttered his name outside her family.
Not long afterward I had lunch in Jackson, Mississippi, with Jerry Mitchell, the brilliant journalist at the Clarion-Ledger whose sleuthing has solved several cold case civil rights–era murders. I talked with him about my efforts to write about the Till case, and he shared some thoughts of his own. A few days after our lunch a manila envelope with a Mississippi return address brought hard proof that “that part,” as Carolyn had called the alleged assault, had never been true.
Mitchell had sent me copies of the handwritten notes of what Carolyn Bryant told her attorney on the day after Roy and J.W. were arrested in 1955. In this earliest recorded version of events, she charged only that Till had “insulted” her, not grabbed her, and certainly not attempted to rape her. The documents prove that there was a time when she did seem to know what had happened, and a time soon afterward when she became the mouthpiece of a monstrous lie.15
Now, half a century later, Carolyn offered up another truth, an unyielding truth about which her tragic counterpart, Mamie, was also adamant: “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”
I. Mamie Carthan became Mamie Till after her marriage to Louis Till in 1940, which ended with his death in 1945. Mamie Till became Mamie Mallory after a brief remarriage in 1946. Her name changed to Bradley after another marriage in 1951. She was Mamie Bradley during most of the years covered by this book. She married one last time in 1957, becoming Mamie Till-Mobley, under which name she published her 2004 memoir. To avoid confusion, and also to depict her as a human being rather than an icon, I generally refer to her by her first name. No disrespect is intended. The same is true of Emmett Till and Carolyn Bryant.
2
B O O T S O N T H E P O R C H
It was probably the gunshot-thud of boots on the porch that pulled
Reverend Moses Wright out of a deep sleep about two in the morning on Sunday, August 28, 1955.1 Wright was a sixty-four-year-old sharecropper, short and wiry with thick hands and a hawksbill nose. An ordained minister in the Church of God in Christ, Wright sometimes preached at the concrete-block church tucked into a cedar thicket just a half mile away; most people called him “Preacher.” Twenty-five white-tufted acres of cotton, almost ready for harvest, stretched out behind his unpainted clapboard house in a pitch-black corner of the Mississippi Delta called East Money.2 He had lived his entire life in the Delta, and he had never had any trouble with white people before.
The old but well-built house would be called a “shack” in a certain stripe of sympathetic news story, but it was the nicest tenant house on the G. C. Frederick Plantation. Mr. Frederick respected Reverend Wright and let his family occupy the low-slung four-bedroom house where he had lived himself before he built the main house. Its tin roof sloped toward the persimmon and cedar trees that lined the dusty road out front. A pleasant screened-in porch ran its entire face. From the porch two front doors opened directly into two front bedrooms; there were two smaller bedrooms stacked behind those.3
The accounts of what happened in the Wright home that morning vary slightly, but the interviews given to reporters soon after the event seem to be the most reliable. “Preacher! Preacher!” someone bellowed
from inside the screened porch. It was a white man’s voice. Wright sat up in bed. “This is Mr. Bryant,” said another white man. “We want to talk to the boy. We’re here to talk to you about that boy from Chicago, the one that done the talking up at Money.”4 Wright thought about grabbing his shotgun from the closet; instead he pulled on his overalls and work boots and prepared to step outside.5
Still asleep were his three sons, Simeon, Robert, and Maurice; his wife, Elizabeth; and three boys from Chicago visiting for the summer: his two grandsons, Curtis Jones and Wheeler Parker Jr.; and his nephew Emmett, whom they all called “Bobo.” Somehow Wright had gotten wind of a story involving Bobo at Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in Money. At first Wright had feared trouble might come of it, but the vague details seemed trifling and convinced him that repercussions were unlikely.6 Otherwise he would have put his niece’s boy on the next train home. Now that he had angry white men at his door, he decided to stall, hoping that Bobo would scamper out the back door and hide. Then Wright would tell the men that the boy had taken the train for Chicago on Saturday morning. “Who is it?” he called out.7
In the darkness Wright heard rather than saw Elizabeth head quickly for the two back rooms to wake the boys. Simeon slept in one of the blue metal beds with his beloved cousin Bobo.8 Robert slept in another bed in the same room. Curtis stayed by himself in the other back room. In the second front bedroom the two sixteen-year-olds, Wheeler and Maurice, shared a bed. Eight people in mortal danger.9
Elizabeth later told reporters, “We knew they were out to mob the boy.” There was neither time nor necessity to talk about what to do. Her only recourse was obvious: “When I heard the men at the door, I ran to Emmett’s room and tried to wake him so I could get him out the back door and into the cotton fields.”
Wright slowly stepped out of his bedroom and onto the porch, closing the door behind him. In front of him stood a familiar white man, six feet two inches and weighing 250 pounds. “That man was Milam,” the minister said later. “I could see his bald head. I would know him again anywhere. I would know him if I met him in
Texas.”10 In his left hand the imposing Milam carried a heavy five-cell flashlight. He hefted a U.S. Army .45 automatic in his right.11
Wright did not recognize the rugged-looking man, six feet tall and perhaps 190 pounds, who had identified himself as “Mr. Bryant” and stood just behind Milam, though his small grocery store was not three miles distant.12 Wright could see that he, too, carried a U.S. Army .45. When both men pushed past him into the house, he could smell them; at that point they had been drinking for hours.13
Standing by the door just inside the screened porch, a third man turned his head to one side and down low, “like he didn’t want me to see him, and I didn’t see him to recognize him,” the preacher said.14
Wright assumed the third man was black because he stayed in the shadows, silent: “He acted like a colored man.”15 This was likely one of the black men who worked for Milam. Or, if Wright’s intuition was mistaken, it might have been a family friend of the Milam-Bryant family, Elmer Kimbell or Hubert Clark, or their brother-in-law Melvin Campbell.16
Echoing Bryant, Milam said, “We want to see the boy from Chicago.”17
Wright slowly and deliberately opened the other bedroom door, the one leading into the front guest room where the two sixteen-year-olds slept. The small room quickly became crowded and thick with the odors of whiskey and sweat; faces, guns, and furnishings were caught in the shaky and sparse illumination of Milam’s flashlight. “The house was as dark as a thousand midnights,” Wheeler Parker recalled. “You couldn’t see. It was like a nightmare. I mean—I mean someone come stand over you with a pistol in one hand and a flashlight, and you’re sixteen years old, it’s a terrifying experience.”18
Milam and Bryant told Wright to turn on some lights, but Wright only mumbled something about the lights being broken.19 The wash of the flashlight swept from Maurice to Wheeler and back to Wright. The white men moved on. “They asked where the boy from Chicago was,” recalled Maurice.20
“We marched around through two rooms,” Wright recounted. Milam and Bryant, clearly impatient, may have suspected Wright was stalling. Elizabeth had moved quickly to wake Emmett, but he moved
far too slowly. “They were already in the front door before I could shake him awake,” she said.21
Now the two white men stood over the blue metal bedstead where the fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago lay with his cousin. “Are you the one who did the smart talking up at Money?” Milam demanded.
“Yeah,” said Emmett. “Well, that was my sister-in-law and I won’t stand for it. And don’t
say ‘Yeah’ to me or I’ll blow your head off. Get your clothes on.” Milam told Simeon to close his eyes and go back to sleep, while Emmett pulled on a white T-shirt, charcoal gray pants, and black loafers.22
Elizabeth offered them money if they would leave the boy alone. Curtis thought Bryant might have accepted if he had been there without his burly half-brother, but Milam yelled, “Woman, you get back in the bed, and I want to hear them springs squeak.” With unimaginable poise Wright quietly explained that the boy had suffered from polio as a child and had never been quite right. He meant no harm, but he just didn’t have good sense. “Why not give the boy a good whipping and leave it at that? He’s only fourteen and he’s from up North.”23
Milam turned to Wright and asked, “How old are you, Preacher?” Wright answered that he was sixty-four. “You make any trouble,”
said Milam, “and you’ll never live to be sixty-five.”24
Milam and Bryant hauled the sleepy child out the front door toward a vehicle waiting beyond the trees in the moonless Mississippi night. Wright could hear the doors being opened, though no interior light came on; then he thought he heard a voice ask “Is this the boy?” and another voice answer “Yes.” He and others later speculated that Carolyn Bryant had been in the vehicle and had identified Emmett, thereby becoming an accessory to murder. But besides being dark it was hard to hear the low voices through the trees, and Wright told reporters at the time, “I don’t know if it was a lady’s voice or not.” The vehicle pulled away without its headlights on, and nobody in the house could tell whether it was a truck or a sedan.
After he heard the tires crackling through the gravel, Wright stepped out into the yard alone and stared toward Money for a long
time.25
3
G R O W I N G U P B L AC K I N C H I C AG O
It was Reverend Wright who started the three Chicago boys, Emmett,
Curtis, and Wheeler, thinking about going to Mississippi that summer of 1955, only a few days after Emmett turned fourteen. A former parishioner, Robert Jones, who was the father-in-law of Wright’s daughter, Willie Mae, had passed away in Chicago, and the family asked Wright to conduct the funeral. While he was up north it was decided that he would bring Wheeler and Emmett back to Mississippi with him and that Curtis would join them soon afterward.1
The image of Wright in Chicago is one of the more pleasing in this hard story. While he was in town he rode the elevated train, toured the enormous Merchandise Mart and the downtown Loop, and gazed out from atop the 462-foot Tribune Tower, which featured stones from the Great Pyramid, the Alamo, and the Great Wall of China, among other famous constructions. He enjoyed the sights but was hardly dumbstruck. The city had its glories, he acknowledged, but he boasted of the simple pleasures of rural life in the Delta. Four rivers—the Yazoo, the Sunflower, the Yalobusha, and the Tallahatchie—passed near his Mississippi home, and there were seven deep lakes. This surely offered the best fishing in the world.2 His stories enchanted Emmett. “For a free-spirited boy who lived to be outdoors,” Emmett’s mother, Mamie, said, “there was so much possibility, so much adventure in the Mississippi his great-uncle described.” Although Mamie originally refused to let him go south, she soon relented under
a barrage of pressure from Emmett, who recruited support from the extended family.3
One stock theme in stories of Emmett Till is that, being from the North, he died in Mississippi because he just didn’t know any better. How was a boy from Chicago supposed to know anything about segregation or the battle lines laid down by white supremacy? It is tempting to paint him, as his mother did, as innocent of the perilous boundaries of race; her reasons for doing so made sense at the time, even though being fourteen and abducted at gunpoint by adults would seem evidence enough of his innocence. But it defies the imagination that a fourteen-year-old from 1950s Chicago could really be ignorant of the consequences of the color of his skin.
Race worked in different ways in Chicago than it did in Mississippi, but there were similarities. After Emmett was murdered one newspaper writer, Carl Hirsch, had the clarity of mind to note, “The Negro children who live here on Chicago’s South Side or any Northern ghetto are no strangers to the Jim Crow and the racist violence. . . . Twenty minutes from the Till home is Trumbull Park Homes, where for two years a racist mob has besieged 29 Negro families in a government housing project.” Emmett attended a segregated, all-black school in a community “padlocked as a ghetto by white supremacy.” Hirsch pointed out, “People everywhere are joining to fight because of the way Emmett Till died—but also because of the way he was forced to live.”4
There was at least one way that Chicago was actually more segregated than Mississippi. A demographic map of the city in 1950 shows twenty-one distinct ethnic neighborhoods: German, Irish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Czech and Slovak, Scottish, Polish, Chinese, Greek, Yugoslavian, Russian, Mexican, French, and Hungarian, among others.5 These ethnic groups divided Chicago according to an unwritten treaty, which clearly stated that Germans, for instance, would live on the North Side, Irish on the South Side, Jews on the West Side, Bohemians and Poles on the Near Southwest Side and Near Northwest Side, and African Americans in the South Side’s “Black Belt.” All of these groups had gangs that regarded their
neighborhood as a place to be defended against encroachments by outsiders. And the most visible outsiders were African Americans.
Black youngsters who walked through neighborhoods other than their own did so at their peril. Those searching for places to play, in parks and other public facilities, were especially vulnerable. These were lessons that black children growing up on the South Side learned with their ABCs.6
• • •
Like many of his contemporaries, Emmett loved baseball. “He was a nice guy,” said thirteen-year-old Leroy Abbott, a teammate on the Junior Rockets, their neighborhood baseball team. “And a good pitcher—a lot of stuff on the ball.”7 With the White Sox and the Cubs both in Chicago, it may seem odd that Emmett rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers, but for a young black baseball enthusiast they were hard to resist. Brooklyn had not only broken the color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson in 1947 but had also signed the catcher Roy Campanella the next year and in 1949 acquired Don Newcombe, Emmett’s hero. Newcombe soon became the first black pitcher to start a World Series game and the first to win twenty games in a season.8
One night when Emmett was about twelve, Mamie sent him to the store to buy a loaf of bread. He was ordinarily reliable about such things, but on the way home he saw some boys playing baseball in the park. He walked over to the backstop and talked his way into the game. He planned to stay for a short time and then go home with the bread; his mother might not even notice, he told himself. But his passion for the game overcame him; he must have become absorbed in the smell of the grass and the crack of the bat, the solid slap of the ball into leather and the powdery dust of the base paths. “So, I guess he just put down the bread and got in that game,” his mother recalled. “And that’s exactly where I found Bo—Bo and that loaf of bread. Of course, by that time, the bread kind of looked like the kids had been using it for second base.”9
Emmett was a lovable, playful, and somewhat mischievous child but essentially well-behaved. He spent his early years in Argo, less
than an hour’s train ride from his eventual home in Chicago, and was unusually close to his mother and other family members. But he grew up in one of the toughest and most segregated cities in America, knowing as virtually every African American in Chicago knew that in Trumbull Park black fathers kept loaded firearms in their home for good reason. Emmett did not have to go to Mississippi to learn that white folks could take offense even at the presence of a black child, let alone one who violated local customs.
• • •
The City of New Orleans was the southbound train of the Illinois Central Railway that would carry Emmett to Mississippi in August 1955. The Illinois Central connected Chicago to Mississippi not merely by its daily arrivals and departures but also by tragedy, hope, and the steel rails of history. Over the six decades from 1910 to 1970 some six million black Southerners departed Dixie for promised lands all over America. Chicago, the poet Carl Sandburg wrote, became a “receiving station and port of refuge” for more than half a million of them, vast numbers of whom hailed from Mississippi. “The world of Mississippi and the world of Chicago were intertwined and interdependent,” writes the historian Isabel Wilkerson, “and what happened in one did not easily escape notice of the other from afar.” Straight up the line of the northbound Illinois Central the carloads of pilgrims from the Delta would rumble, the floors littered with so many empty pasteboard boxes that had been lovingly packed with food from back home that people called it “the chicken bone express.” These migrants brought with them musical, culinary, religious, and community traditions that became a part of Chicago; in fact, the narrow isthmus on the South Side where African Americans were confined was often referred to as “North Mississippi.”10 What they found there, however, was not the Promised Land. Though Chicago offered a welcome breath of free air, the newcomers also faced a relentless battle with the white working class over neighborhood borders and public space.
The first wave of the Great Migration, from 1910 to 1930, doubled the number of African Americans in Chicago, placing them in competition for jobs and space with earlier generations of migrants, most of them from central and southern Europe. Herded into the South Side, quickly overwhelming its capacity, the descendants of enslaved Southerners overflowed the ghetto’s narrow confines. Housing shortages pushed them over invisible racial boundaries into formerly all-white neighborhoods, where they confronted threats and violence. One 1919 study of race relations in Chicago called these upheavals “a kind of guerilla warfare.” Between July 1917 and March 1921 authorities recorded fifty-eight bombings of buildings bought or rented by African Americans in formerly all-white sections of the city.11
On Sunday, July 27, 1919, a black seventeen-year-old named Eugene Williams drifted across one of those invisible boundaries and set off a small race war. As he and his friends swam at a segregated beach on Lake Michigan, their wooden raft floated into “white” water. A white man threw rocks at them, hitting Williams in the head, causing him to sink and drown. Rather than arrest the assailant, white police officers hauled off a black bystander who objected to their inaction. Soon carloads of white gunmen raced through the African American neighborhoods, spraying bullets. Black snipers returned fire. Mobs of both races roamed the streets, stoning, beating, and stabbing their victims. The riot raged for five days in that notorious Red Summer of 1919; police shot down seven African Americans, white mobs killed sixteen more, and black mobs killed fifteen whites. Thousands became homeless as a result of arson, and more than five hundred citizens, two-thirds of them black, were seriously injured.12
The politics of “the New Negro” were in evidence even before the upheavals but were far more prominent in Chicago afterward, in a direct response to the race riots.13 Though mourning the deaths, African Americans in Chicago were proud that they had risen up to defend their lives and communities. Added to that, pride in the patriotic sacrifices and military achievements of black soldiers in World War I met a new determination to make America itself safe for democracy.14 W. E. B. Du Bois, who had urged African Americans at
the outset of the war to lay aside their special grievances and support the war effort wholeheartedly, wrote:
We return.
We return from fighting.
We return fighting.
Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the
reason why.15
Du Bois’s Crisis magazine, which had a circulation of 385,000 in 1915, sold 560,000 copies in the first six months of 1917.16 Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association had awakened the spirit of black pride and self-assertion on a scale unprecedented, and the charismatic Jamaican black nationalist’s movement swelled across the country, including a flourishing UNIA chapter in Chicago.17
African American parents began to buy dark-skinned dolls for their children and to sing what in 1919 became known as the “Negro National Anthem,” penned years earlier by the NAACP’s James Weldon Johnson:
Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of liberty. . . .
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun
Let us march on until victory is won.
The circulation of “race” publications skyrocketed.18 The Chicago Defender’s rose from 10,000 to 93,000 in the war years alone, making it the largest-circulation black newspaper in America. The Defender shipped two-thirds of its issues outside Chicago, most of them to Mississippi.19 “On our porches we read the Chicago Defender,” recalled Mississippian Helen O’Neal-McCrary, “the only news that black people in Clarksdale could read and believe.”20
“I did not understand the restrictive soreness imposed by segregation,” wrote a summertime visitor from Mississippi, “until I got off that train and breathed the freer air of Chicago.”21 If he had stayed longer, however, this temporary migrant might have grown
disillusioned. In the decades after the bloody conflict of 1919, the color line in Chicago was even more sharply drawn. The South Side became almost totally black and the North Side almost entirely white. The Chicago where Emmett Till grew up became one of the most racially divided of all American cities and would remain so into the twenty-first century.22
By the 1940s Chicago led the nation in the use of racial covenants on real estate; these restrictions on who could buy property and where they could buy it covered roughly half of the city’s neighborhoods. Realtors generally refused to show homes to buyers except in neighborhoods occupied by people of their own race. Many African Americans, regardless of their means, could not get a mortgage and became ensnared in a vicious contract-based buying system that routinely ended up bankrupting them. Federal Housing Authority mortgage insurance policies strengthened Chicago’s racial boundaries by denying mortgage insurance and home improvement loans to any home on a “white” street after even one black family moved in. Later the Chicago activist Saul Alinsky sardonically defined integration as “the period of time between the arrival of the first black and the departure of the last white.”23
Various “neighborhood improvement associations” and street gangs fought to keep their neighborhoods all-white; racially motivated residential bombings were one preferred method in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1949 a mob of two thousand whites attacked a small apartment building in Park Manor, a white neighborhood on the South Side, after a black couple had purchased the building. Violence flared again in 1951, when five thousand whites spent several days firebombing and looting a building in suburban Cicero after the owners rented a single unit to a black family. The governor of Illinois dispatched the Illinois National Guard to quell the riot, which injured nineteen people. In 1954 the Chicago Housing Authority acknowledged that “bombings are a nightly occurrence” where African American families had moved into neighborhoods that white people regarded as their own.24
In 1948 the Chicago Urban League reported that 375,000 black residents of the South Side lived in an area that could legally
accommodate 110,000. The overpopulation led to abysmal sanitary and health conditions, and many of the buildings were firetraps. Overcrowding pushed hard against the racial boundaries that encircled the African American areas; between 1946 and 1953 six episodes of riots involving between one thousand and ten thousand people followed efforts of black citizens to move into areas such as Cicero, Englewood, and Park Manor.25 In neighborhood after neighborhood a familiar drama played out along the hard lines of Chicago segregation. An aspiring black family seeking to escape the ghetto agreed to pay an inflated price for a home on a previously all- white block. Alarmed white residents would quickly sell their homes, allowing landlords to gobble them up at bargain prices. The landlords would then subdivide the apartments and houses into kitchenettes and rent them to blacks, substantially increasing the combined rental income for the building. Neglecting repairs and maintenance, the landlords—the entire local real estate industry, really—created the same ghetto conditions that the African American pioneers had fled at the start in the first act of this three-act tragedy. “In Chicago’s ‘bungalow belt,’ where a large number of European ethnic working- class families owned their own homes,” observes the historian and cultural critic Craig Werner, “the first signs of the depressing pattern understandably generated fierce resistance. The result was what one historian called ‘chronic urban guerilla warfare.’ ”26
The worst and longest-running of the Chicago housing conflicts lasted from August 4, 1953, until well into the fall of 1955.27 It began when Donald and Betty Howard and their two children moved into Trumbull Park Homes, a 462-unit development in South Deering near the steel mills. The project had been kept all-white since opening in 1939; the light-skinned Betty Howard got in because the Chicago Housing Authority misidentified her during the requisite interview. By August 9 a mob of two thousand angry whites was throwing bricks and firebombs and Donald Howard was guarding his family’s apartment with a rifle. The white vigilantes used fireworks to harass and intimidate the Howards at night. Though police cars shuttled the family in and out of Trumbull Park, once the Howards were in their home the officers did little to ensure their safety, simply yielding the
streets to the mob. On August 10 the white mob stoned thirty passing black motorists and attacked a city bus carrying African Americans, nearly tipping it over before police intervened. Throughout it all Mayor Martin Kennelly said nothing about the ongoing violence.
As the number of African American families moving into Trumbull Park increased to ten, the so-called South Deering Improvement Association kept the riots rolling and organized economic reprisals against any neighborhood stores that served African American customers. The city parks became particular battlegrounds; when black youths tried to use a baseball diamond in the neighborhood, the Chicago Police Department had to dispatch four hundred officers to protect them. In protest Willoughby Abner, a trade unionist who was president of the Chicago NAACP, organized a baseball “play-in” at South Deering’s main park; the United Packinghouse Workers of America, an interracial but increasingly black union devoted to civil rights, provided support as Abner mobilized the NAACP and sued the city for inaction. Still conditions in South Deering did not change appreciably; in late 1954 Chicago’s Federal Housing Administration director called Trumbull Park “a running sore in our civic life.”28
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CONTENTS
Epigraph
1. Nothing That Boy Did
2. Boots on the Porch
3. Growing Up Black in Chicago
4. Emmett in Chicago and “Little Mississippi”
5. Pistol-Whipping at Christmas
6. The Incident
7. On the Third Day
8. Mama Made the Earth Tremble
9. Warring Regiments of Mississippi
10. Black Monday
11. People We Don’t Need Around Here Any More
12. Fixed Opinions
13. Mississippi Underground
14. “There He Is”
15. Every Last Anglo-Saxon One of You
16. The Verdict of
