Newspapers in countries across the world called the acquittals “scandalous,” “monstrous,” “abominable,” and worse.44 Eleanor Roosevelt published an editorial entitled “I Think the Till Jury Will Have an Uneasy Conscience,” in which she noted that “the colored peoples of the world, who far outnumber us,” had fixed their attention on the Till trial and that the United States had “again played into the hands of the Communists and strengthened their propaganda in Africa and Asia.”45 She did not exaggerate. In fact, outrage over the verdict in Ghana represented a legitimate threat to U.S. goals in Africa.46 Carl Rowan, a successful black journalist for Time magazine, was in New Delhi in the mid-1950s on a speaking tour sponsored by the State Department to highlight white Americans’ growing acceptance of African Americans. He had to “face hundreds of questions over the weeks about white people in America murdering a fourteen-year-old boy named Emmett Till because he allegedly whistled at a white woman.”47 The State Department reported that “in Communist pamphleteering” in the Middle East the Till case was highlighted as “?‘typical’ of repressive measures against minority groups in the United States, with special focus on the feature that the courts condoned this act.”48
In 1956 the U.S. Information Agency surveyed European disdain for American race relations and found the Till case the “prevalent” concern, though it would soon be weighed alongside mob violence at the University of Alabama and in Little Rock.49 “Since the Emmett Till case in Mississippi last fall,” the American Embassy in Brussels reported to the State Department, “the Belgian Press has directed increasing attention to problems of racial relations in the United States. The press of all shades of political opinion and political leaders with whom the Embassy has talked have been astonished at and strongly condemned the racial prejudice evident in such recent cases.”50 The Italian communist press hammered readers with the Till case day after day, and the Vatican’s official mouthpiece, L’Osservatore Romano, found it deplorable that “a crime against an adolescent victim remains unpunished.”51 A memorandum from the American Embassy in Copenhagen to the secretary of state described “the real and continuing damage to American prestige from such tragedies as the Emmett Till case.” Sweden’s Le Democrate responded to the verdict with an editorial, “A Disgusting Parody of Justice in the State of Mississippi.”52 Das Freie Volk in Düsseldorf declared, “The life of a Negro in Mississippi is not worth a whistle.”53
In 1956 the State Department reported that the “Till affairs drew greater attention in France than they did in the United States.”54 Feeling the sting of world opinion about French colonial rule in Algeria, France welcomed evidence of American hypocrisy on race. The conservative Paris daily Figaro printed an editorial three days after the acquittals with the banner headline “Shame on the Sumner Jury,” urging Americans to “look into their own actions.” The conditions under which black people live in America, observed the centrist paper Le Monde, should “incite more reserve and modesty on the part of those who decry the ‘colonialism’ of others.”55 A mass meeting in Paris adopted a resolution addressed to the U.S. ambassador calling the lynching and acquittals “an insult to the conscience of the civilized world.”56
The New York Post’s editorial board perhaps said it best: “Like other great episodes in the battle for equality and justice, this trial has rocked the world, and nothing can ever be quite the same again—even in Mississippi.”57 Beyond the commonly understood borders of race, nation, and freedom, the Till case laid bare the contradictions at the heart of America’s history and forced this most powerful nation to take stock of itself—if nothing else, to assess its loudly self-proclaimed standing among the world’s peoples. Many believed America itself had killed Emmett Till. Its allies were concerned, its enemies gleeful. The Magnolia State’s own native son, Richard Wright, issued an astute assessment of the case’s implications from his self-exile in Paris: “The world will judge the judges of Mississippi.”58
17
PROTEST POLITICS
None of the hopeful organizers of the protests on September 25, 1955, could have forecast the scope of their success. Four thousand church and United Auto Workers members packed Detroit’s Bethel AME Zion, designed to accommodate 2,500; fifty thousand more lined an eight-block radius around nearby Scott Methodist Church. Representative Charles Diggs addressed between six and ten thousand people in that city, describing the “sheer perjury and fantastic twisting of the facts” at the trial in Sumner. Diggs charged that Mississippi represented “a shameful and primitive symbol of disregard for the essential dignity of all persons which must be destroyed before it destroys all that democracy is to represent.”1 Reverend C. L. Franklin, one of the most admired black preachers of his generation, showed up waving a wad of cash and urging the crowd to give generously to support the struggle. Ushers carried bags and baskets brimming with cash.2 Churches, labor unions, and other organizations presented substantial checks. One source reported that the Diggs rally alone contributed $14,064.88 to the coffers of the NAACP, a princely sum in 1955.3
NAACP branches in scores of communities collaborated with more than a dozen labor unions, coordinated by the national office of the NAACP and the United Packinghouse Workers of America. The national convention of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers swelled the crowd in Cleveland on September 25.4 In Kansas City preachers and meatpackers gathered at Ward AME Church at 22nd Street and Prospect.5
The protest at Metropolitan Church in Chicago drew ten thousand to hear Mamie Bradley, the journalist Simeon Booker, and Willoughby Abner, president of the NAACP’s Chicago branch and an official for the United Auto Workers.6 Mamie must have quickly hopped a plane after her appearance in Chicago in order to take the stage with Roy Wilkins and A. Philip Randolph in Harlem. After gathering at churches, labor halls, and campuses across New York City, tens of thousands made their way to a big outdoor stage in Harlem to hear Randolph declare that “only the righteous revolt” of citizens throughout the country could halt “this wave of terrorism” in the South. He called for a March on Washington to protest President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s failure to protect African Americans in the South. Mamie told the crowd, “What I saw at the trial was a shame before God and man.”7 An internal report of the UPWA estimated that “50,000 people turned out in New York City to hear A. Philip Randolph, president of the AFL Sleeping Car Porters, blast the whitewash of the brutal crime.”8 The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the NAACP, and the Jewish Labor Committee, “representing 500,000 workers in the AFL,” along with a number of progressive churches and other groups, sponsored the huge rally.9
The Mississippi underground that located nearly all the African American witnesses for the murder trial of Milam and Bryant was well represented on the stump during the September 25 national rallies. Dr. T. R. M. Howard gave a two-hour speech to a crowd of more than 2,500 at Sharp Street Methodist Church in Baltimore, calling for the investigation of negligent FBI agents in the South and irritating the hell out of Director J. Edgar Hoover. “It’s getting to be a strange thing,” said Howard, “that the FBI can never seem to work out who is responsible for killings of Negroes in the South.”10 In Detroit, Howard’s old friend Medgar Evers also blasted the treatment of blacks in Mississippi, detailing the murders of George Lee and Lamar Smith. Ruby Hurley, who had worn a red bandana and work clothes to sneak onto the Delta plantations with Evers and Amzie Moore in search of witnesses, spoke alongside Thurgood Marshall at an “overflow rally” in Holy Rosary Church’s school auditorium in Brooklyn.11