According to Moore, it was shortly after J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant kidnapped Emmett Till that Moses Wright first called him. Like Reverend Wright, Moore’s first response was hope: “I thought to myself, well, he’s probably around Greenwood there somewhere. I never thought anybody was going to lynch him. [A few days later], I got another call.” By that time the teenage fisherman had come across Emmett’s body in the currents of the Tallahatchie. Now harder choices needed to be made.
Moore set out for Money even though friends told him, “?‘You’d better not go, they watching out for you, they’re going to kill you.’ But I went over there. And then when I got to Money nobody would tell me where Mr. Wright lived. He lived out from Money, but nobody would, they claimed they didn’t know where he was. So I left and come back.” This was far from the end of Moore’s involvement in the case, however.29 Over the previous twenty-four hours decisions had been made and events set on a course that would sweep up Mississippi and Chicago, and eventually the United States and the world.
The Till case affected everyone in Moore’s activist network in Mississippi, many of whom were also World War II veterans unwilling to accept the old ways after a costly global crusade, ostensibly for universal democracy. They became what the historian John Dittmer calls “the shock troops of the modern civil rights movement.”30 Many became NAACP leaders, especially after the Brown decisions of 1954 and 1955 shone a spotlight on school desegregation and lifted up new leaders who rejected the “separate but equal” framework. Moore’s network included Medgar Evers; E. J. Stringer, a Columbus dentist who would be elected president of the state conference of NAACP branches in 1954; Aaron Henry, a druggist from Clarksdale who would become an important civil rights leader; the voting rights advocates Reverend George Lee and Gus Courts; and Dr. T. R. M. Howard, a charismatic and daring physician from Mound Bayou.31
Few were more involved than the intelligent, serious-minded Medgar Evers. His military service in the thick of the European theater during World War II had given him gravity beyond his years. “He went to the army and fought for this country and came out and we wasn’t enjoying the freedom we fought for,” his brother Charles observed. For Medgar voting was the central litmus test of democracy, especially in Mississippi. “Our only hope is to control the vote,” he said.
In 1946 Medgar and Charles and four friends registered to vote at the courthouse in Decatur, Mississippi. When they returned to cast their ballots in the Democratic primary on July 2, however, a small white mob blocked the courthouse steps. “When we got into [the clerk’s] office, some 15 or 20 white men surged in behind us,” Medgar recalled. Menaced with guns as they were leaving, they went home, got their own guns, and returned to the courthouse. Leaving their weapons in the car, the Evers brothers and their companions tried to walk in again, but once more the way was blocked. “We stood on the courthouse steps, eyeballing each other,” Charles recalled. Finally Medgar decided to avoid what seemed inevitable bloodshed and said, “Let’s go, we’ll get them next time.” “More than any other single thing,” Charles claimed, “that day in Decatur made Medgar and me civil rights activists.”32
Medgar’s first order of business was to use his GI Bill benefits to attend college. He enrolled at Alcorn State College that fall of 1946. Muscular and athletic, he played running back on Alcorn’s football team. He also served as editor of the Greater Alcorn Herald and was elected president of the junior class. Evers worked hard, made good grades, labored over his vocabulary, and became a faithful reader of newspapers. He met and married Myrlie Beasley from Vicksburg, a brilliant and beautiful young woman who would become a full partner in his civil rights work. According to a friend, he also joined a monthly interracial discussion group on world affairs at all-white Millsaps College. He developed a keen admiration for Jomo Kenyatta, leader of the Kenyan anticolonial struggle against the British; in fact, in 1953 Medgar and Myrlie christened their son Darrell Kenyatta Evers. Kenyatta led an armed revolution, and Medgar’s admiration suggests that he was willing to consider any means necessary to overthrow white supremacy in Mississippi. For African Americans in the South the means of effecting change were always limited and fraught with risks, but most were at least considered, their consequences carefully weighed. The historian Charles Payne writes that Medgar “thought long and hard about the idea of Negroes engaging in guerrilla warfare in the Delta” but ultimately could not square it with his religious beliefs.33
Soon after he graduated from Alcorn, Medgar renewed an acquaintance with T. R. M. Howard and became a sales representative for Howard’s Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company. He and his bride moved to Mound Bayou, the historic all-black community in the Delta. His new job required he drive the lonely roads of the Delta, and he became sharply aware of the harsh lives of Mississippi’s black sharecropping families. “He saw whole families there picking cotton, living like slaves,” Charles recounted. The Evers brothers came to believe that black Mississippians’ suffering was the result of economic exploitation, the threat of physical violence from whites, and the denial of their right to the ballot. “Medgar vowed to improve these people’s lives,” said his brother.34
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Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard was the tall, light-skinned head of surgery at Mound Bayou’s Taborian Hospital, whose all-black staff served the black community. No civil rights advocate in the state of Mississippi could match Howard’s charisma, charm, and wealth. In addition to his plantation he owned a housing construction firm, a beer garden and restaurant, some livestock, and an insurance firm. He could afford servants and chauffeurs; pheasants, quail, and hunting dogs; and a fleet of fine automobiles, as well as a Thompson submachine gun and a number of other weapons. These were simple acknowledgments of his having achieved stature and influence in a society that demanded he never wield it. “One look,” wrote Myrlie Evers, “told you he was a leader: kind, affluent, and intelligent, that rare Negro in Mississippi who had somehow beaten the system.”35