That the NAACP in Mississippi proceeded to battle for school desegregation and voting rights in this atmosphere is remarkable. Six days after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Brown II, telling school authorities to move “with all deliberate speed,” the Mississippi NAACP directed its branches to organize black parents to petition local school boards to desegregate the schools. None of these parents could have had the slightest illusion as to the confrontation they were facing, the certainty that it would call forth violence, and the possibility of that violence being visited on their children. Percy Greene, the conservative black editor of the Jackson Advocate, called the NAACP’s school desegregation crusade “leading a group of unthinking and unrealistic Negroes over the precipice to be drowned and destroyed in the whirlpool of hate and destruction.” The Mississippi NAACP begged to differ. The Vicksburg chapter filed the first petition on July 18, calling on the local school board to “take immediate concrete steps leading to the early elimination of segregation in the public schools.”62
The white power structure responded with the strength of public opinion—and implicit threats. When the Vicksburg Post published the names of all those parents who had signed the petition, several asked that their names be removed. By mid-August NAACP chapters in Natchez, Jackson, Yazoo City, and Clarksdale filed similar petitions. As advised by the state conference, the Yazoo City branch asked the school board for “reorganization” of the school system on a “non-discriminatory basis.” In each case the Citizens’ Council published signers’ names, addresses, and phone numbers in large ads in the local newspaper. Reprisals, threats, and intimidation inevitably followed. “If the whites saw your name on the list,” said Aaron Henry, “you just caught hell.”63
Death threats became routine for the petitioners. Many lost their jobs, as did their loved ones. Local banks called in their loans or forced those who signed to withdraw their money. Rocks and bullets flew through their windows. Insurance companies canceled their policies. “In each instance there has been some form of economic reprisal or physical intimidation,” Medgar Evers reported to the national office. The number of petitioners who withdrew their signature grew quickly: in Clarksdale 83 of 303; in Vicksburg 135 of 140; in Jackson 13 of 42; and in Natchez 54 of 89.64
“In Yazoo City, in particular, signers have been fired from their jobs,” Evers reported. “Telephone calls threatening the lives of the persons, have created a continued atmosphere of tenseness which has the city’s two racial groups on edge.” Fifty-one of the fifty-three signatories of the Yazoo City petition soon removed their names; the other two had already left town. In fact, even though NAACP membership in Mississippi swelled in 1954 and grew by 50 percent in 1955, the Yazoo City branch, which before the petition had two hundred members, soon ceased to exist.65 Evers wrote to the national office a few months later, “Honestly, Mr. Wilkins, for Yazoo City there doesn’t seem to be much hope. The Negroes will not come together and our former president has not cooperated at all. It appears that [members of the Citizens’ Council] have gotten next to him and we can’t get any results, not even [to] call a meeting. One thing, the people are afraid—I would say it is worse than being behind the Iron Curtain.”66
Virtually every black activist in the state had heard the rumor of the Citizens’ Council “death list.” Arrington High, who put out a small newspaper in Jackson called Eagle Eye: The Women’s Voice, wrote on August 20, 1955, a week before the murder of Emmett Till, “Citizens’ Council members in Leflore County, ‘Eagle Eye’ alleges, met last Thursday and prepared a list of Negro men to be murdered.” High noted that his source “happens to be a peckerwood.” According to High, the “Citizens’ Council has ordered that no law enforcement body in ignorant Mississippi will protect any Negro who stands upon his constitutional rights.” He also directly addressed the white men threatening him: “To white hoodlums who are now parading around the premises of Arrington W. High, editor and publisher of ‘The Eagle Eye,’ at 1006 Maple St., Jackson, Miss.—this is protected by armed guard.”67 Frederick Sullens, editor of the Jackson Daily News, predicted, “If a decision is made to send Negroes to school with white children, there will be bloodshed. The stains of that bloodshed will be on the Supreme Court steps.”68
It was in this context that a Chicago teenager walked into Bryant’s Grocery and had his fateful encounter with Carolyn Bryant. After Till’s murder defense attorney J. J. Breland told William Bradford Huie, “There ain’t gonna be no integration. There ain’t gonna be no nigger voting.” He saw the murder as part of a larger struggle: “If any more pressure is put on us, the Tallahatchie River won’t hold all the niggers that’ll be thrown in it.”69
11
PEOPLE WE DON’T NEED AROUND HERE ANY MORE
Indifference to black lives did not begin in the twenty-first century. Nor was Mississippi entirely a foreign country to the rest of America in the 1950s. It simply did not matter to most white Americans what happened to black Mississippians; they did not know and did not want to know, and routine terrorism did not dent that indifference until the Emmett Till case. In the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, for example, one Delta legislator declared that “a few killings would be the best thing for the state.” A few judicious murders now, he suggested, “would save a lot of bloodshed later on.”1 In a speech in Greenville the president of the Mississippi Bar Association included “the gun and the torch” among the three main ways to defend segregation.2 NAACP activists in Mississippi endured scores of acts of intimidation. Whites opposed to school integration and black voting would “put the hit man on you,” Aaron Henry recalled of that era. “I could call a roll of the people who died.”3 Reverend George Lee of Belzoni, Mississippi, would be one of the first on any such roll.
In the South’s calculation it took only “one drop” of black blood to make a person black. So George Lee, born in 1902 to a white father and a black mother, was black. All Lee knew about his father was that he was a white man who lived in the Delta. Lee’s stepfather was abusive, and his mother died when he was a little boy; her sister took the boy in, and he graduated from high school, a rarity at the time.