On August 28, 1955, a fourteen year old African-American boy from Chicago, Emmett Till, was kidnapped, brutally murdered and tossed into the Tallahatchie River for allegedly whistling or making inappropriate advances at a white woman while visiting his relatives in Mississippi. Till’s murder would spark a wave of righteous indignation across the nation because of the sheer brutality of the lynching and the young age of the victim. Although Till’s murder would go unpunished, it would prove to be a watershed moment for race relations in the United States serving as a spring board for the Civil Rights movement and the eventual demise of the Jim Crowe South.
The summer of 1955 was a hot one in the United States. Racial tensions were at a pitch in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education which declared race-based segregation unconstitutional. Embittered Southern whites regarded the Court’s decision as a threat to the established racial hierarchy and white supremacist power structure and vowed a campaign of “massive resistance.” In the months before Till’s murder, Rev. George Lee and Lamar Smith were separately shot and killed in Mississippi after organizing black voter-registration drives. In both cases, investigations identified credible white suspects but potential witnesses were afraid to talk and no charges were ever brought. Seeking to escape the boredom of another Chicago summer, Mamie Till Mobley sent her only child to visit her relatives in Money, Mississippi. Before leaving, Mrs. Till Mobley urged her son to be careful and to watch how he behaved in front of white people, warning that Chicago and Mississippi were completely different. “Even though you think you’re perfectly within your right, for goodness sake take low,” she said, according to subsequently published accounts. “If necessary, get on your knees and beg apologies,” she told him. This was the cauldron of hate fourteen year old Emmett Till was about to enter.
Till arrived at the home of his uncle Mose Wright in the Mississippi Delta town of Money on August 21. Three days later he and his two cousins headed to the local grocery store to buy some candy. The store mostly served the local sharecropper population and was owned by a poor white couple, 24-year-old Roy Bryant and his 21-year-old wife Carolyn. Carolyn Bryant was working the front of the store alone that day; her sister-in-law was in the rear of the store watching the Bryant children. What actually happened next is subject to multiple conflicting accounts but most claim that Till had whistled at Bryant or had engaged in some other unacceptable advance that violated the mores of Jim Crowe Mississippi. Bryant stormed out of the store and warned she was going to get a pistol.
Till and his cousins immediately understood the gravity of the situation. They quickly fled the scene at the urging of some of the older men around town hoping to avoid any unwanted violence. Till refrained from telling his uncle what had happened, fearful of what reprimand might happen and pleaded to return home to Chicago immediately. A few days later, Roy Bryant and his half brother , J.W. Millam went to Mose Wright’s home, in the dead of night, and abducted the terrified 14-year old at gun point. They marched Till to the back of their pick up truck and tied him up before driving off to an isolated barn where they proceeded to teach the young boy a deadly lesson. There they beat Till mercilessly as the boy begged for his mother. They poked out his eye and finally shot him in the head. Once dead, they tied a 75-pound cotton-gin fan around his neck with barbed wire and tossed his body into the Tallahatchie River demonstrating absolutely no remorse for what they had done.
The barn where Emmett Till was tortured and killed
When Till’s body was pulled from the river, his mother could barely identify her son. Mississippi officials pressured Mamie Till Mobley to quickly burry her son in a closed casket ceremony seeking to downplay the murder and move on. Mamie Till Mobley was a strong black woman and she was determined that her only son would not die in vain. Instead, she returned the badly disfigured body to Chicago, where she held an open casket funeral intending to capture the nation’s attention and shine a spotlight on the rampant racism and white supremacist violence directed at African-Americans in the South. The train carrying Till’s body was greeted by large crowds and over 200,000 people paid their respects during the four days of public viewings. Jet Magazine published an expose of photos of Till’s mangled body and his grieving mother at the funeral and the photos reverberated across the nation and around the world. These images would galvanize a movement and inspire African-American Americans to put life and limb at risk in pursuit of the rights, racial equality and justice promised to them as American citizens under the constitution. Less than six months later, an African-American woman in Montgomery Alabama, Rosa Parks, was arrested and fined for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. When asked why she refused to move Parks explained that she thought about going to the back of the bus but then she thought about Emmett Till and she couldn’t do it.
Roy Bryant and J.W. Millam were arrested for murder within days after Till’s body was discovered but the likelihood of two white men being convicted of murdering an African-American boy in 1950s Mississippi was somewhere between slim and none. The two men were quickly put on trial in September and battle lines were immediately drawn. Northern outrage at the murder prompted many Southerners to resent what they derisively called outside interference and rally in support of the suspects. When Bryant and Millam could not afford an attorney, every lawyer in the county donated their services and $10,000 was collected from local businessmen in support of Bryant and Millam’s defense. Moreover, many whites showed up to watch the trial, bringing their children, picnic baskets and ice cream cones. Meanwhile, African American spectators were relegated to the back and looked on in fear and anger. This was the reality of the Jim Crow South for African Americans. A black man could be killed by a white man without any care or consequence. Neither Bryant nor Millam would be called to the stand to testify and they would eventually be acquitted by an all white male jury after only 67 minutes of deliberations. Jurors later admitted in interviews that although they knew Bryant and Milam were guilty of Till’s murder, they did not think imprisonment or the death penalty were appropriate punishments for white men who had killed a black man. After the verdict was read, Bryant and Millam defiantly walked out of the courtroom lit up cigars and kissed their wives in celebration.
Left to Right: J.W. Millam, Juanita Millam, Carolyn Bryant, Roy Bryant.
Months later, the two men confessed to killing Till in an interview with Look magazine in exchange for $4,000, however, because of the precedent of double jeopardy in U.S. law, they were never tried again for the murder. In 2017, Carolyn Bryant recanted her testimony, that Till had grabbed her wrist and used sexual obscenities admitting that he had never touched, threatened or harassed her. “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him,” she said.
Emmett Till’s story would be a historical footnote if it were the exception but it wasn’t. Lynchings were a way of life in the Jim Crow South. They were a tool of extralegal terror intended to intimidate and control African-Americans and maintain a white supremacist power structure by denying them their constitutional rights as American citizens. From 1882 to 1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the U.S., according to records maintained by NAACP. The highest number of lynchings during that time period occurred in Mississippi, with 581 recorded. Georgia was second with 531, and Texas was third with 493. Most of these acts of racial terror went unpunished and many occurred with the active participation of law enforcement. Because most African-Americans in the South were denied their right to vote, they could neither elect judges, sheriffs and other officials more representative and protective of their interests or serve on juries. In 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law, making lynching a federal hate crime after more than a century of failed efforts in Congress to pass similar legislation.
On August 28, 1955, a fourteen year old African-American boy from Chicago, Emmett Till, was kidnapped, brutally murdered and tossed into the Tallahatchie River for allegedly whistling at a white women in a lewd manner while visiting his relatives in Mississippi. Till’s murder would spark a wave of righteous indignation across the nation because of sheer brutality of the lynching and the young age of the victim and become the catalyst for what would become known as the Civil Rights movement.
The summer of 1955 was a hot one in the United States. Racial tensions were on the rise in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education which declared race-based segregation unconstitutional. Bitter and angry Southern whites vowed a campaign of “massive resistance” to counter the court’s orders to desegregate and other threats to what they perceived as their way of life. In the months before Till’s murder, Rev. George Lee and Lamar Smith were separately shot and killed in Mississippi after helping organize black voter-registration drives. It was against this backdrop that Mamie Till sent her only child to visit her relatives in Money, Mississippi, hoping to escape the boredom of another Chicago summer. Before he left for Mississippi, Mrs. Till urged her son to be careful and to watch how he behaved in front of white people there because Chicago and Mississippi were completely different. “Even though you think you’re perfectly within your right, for goodness sake take low,” she said, according to subsequently published accounts. “If necessary, get on your knees and beg apologies.”
Till arrived at his uncle Mose Wright’s home on August 21. Three days later, he and his two cousins, had skipped church where their uncle was preaching and instead headed to the local grocery store to buy some candy. The grocery store mostly served the local sharecropper population and was owned by a poor white couple, 24-year-old Roy Bryant and his 21-year-old wife Carolyn. Carolyn Bryant was alone in the front of the store that day; her sister-in-law was in the rear of the store watching children. What actually happened on August 21 is subject to multiple conflicting accounts but most claim that Till had whistled at Bryant or had engaged in some other lewd advance, something that was a serious taboo in the Jim Crowe South. Bryant stormed out of the store and warned she was going to get a pistol.
Till and his cousins immediately understood the gravity of the situation. They quickly fled the scene at the urging of some of the older men around town hoping to avoid any unwanted violence. Till refrained from telling his uncle what had happened, fearful that he might incur a reprimand and pleaded to return home to Chicago. A few days later, Roy Bryant and his half brother , J.W. Millam went to Mose Wright’s home, in the dead, of night, and abducted the terrified 14-year old at gun point. They marched Till to the back of their pick up truck and tied him up before driving off to an isolated barn where they proceeded to teach the young boy a deadly lesson. There they viciously beat Till as the boy begged for his mother. They poked out his eye, shot him in the head, and tied a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to his neck with barbed wire before tossing his body into the Tallahatchie River with no remorse for what they had done.
The barn where Emmett Till was beaten and killed
When Till’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie river, his mother could barely identify her son. Nevertheless, Mamie Till was determined that her only son would not die in vain. Mississippi officials pressured her to burry Emmett in Mississippi in a closed casket ceremony hoping to avoid a spectacle. Mamie Till ignored the pressure and brought Emmett Till’s badly disfigured body back to Chicago where she held an open casket funeral hoping to capture the nation’s attention and shine a spotlight on the deep racism and white supremacist violence directed at African-Americans in the South. The train carrying Till’s body was greeted by large crowds while over 200,000 people paid their respects during the four days of public viewings. Jet Magazine published an expose of photos of Till’s mangled body and his grieving mother at the funeral that went reverberated across the nation and around the world. These images would accelerate the civil rights movement and inspire African-American Americans to put life and limb at risk in pursuit of racial equality and justice. Less than six months later, an African-American woman in Montgomery Alabama named Rosa Parks was arrested and fined for refusing to give her bus seat to a white passenger. When asked why she refused to move Parks explained that she thought about going to the back of the bus but then she thought about Emmett Till and she couldn’t do it.
Left: Emmett Till’s disfigured corpse, Right: Mamie Till at the funeral
Within a day after Till’s disappearance, both Bryant and Millam were arrested but the chances of two white men being convicted of murdering an African-American boy in 1950s Mississippi were somewhere between slim and none. The two men were put on trial in September and battle lines were quickly drawn. Every lawyer in the county donated their services and $10,000 was collected from local businessmen in support of Bryant and Millam’s defense. Moreover, many whites showed up to watch the trial, bringing their children, picnic baskets and ice cream cones. Meanwhile, African American spectators were relegated to the back and looked on in fear. Neither Bryant nor Millam would be called to the stand to testify and they would eventually be acquitted by an all white male jury after only 67 minutes of deliberations. Jurors later admitted in interviews that although they knew Bryant and Milam were guilty of Till’s murder, they did not think imprisonment or the death penalty were appropriate punishments for white men who had killed a black man. After the verdict was read, Bryant and Millam defiantly walked out of the courtroom lit up cigars and kissed their wives in celebration.
Left: J.W. Milam and his wife Right: Roy Bryant and Carolyn Bryant
Months later, the two men confessed to killing Till in an interview with Look magazine in exchange for $4,000, however, because of the precedent of double jeopardy in U.S. law, they were never tried again for the murder. In 2017, Carolyn Bryant recanted her testimony, admitting that Till had never touched, threatened or harassed her. “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him,” she said.
On June 21, 1964 three civil rights activist, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney were kidnapped and brutally murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Neshoba County Mississippi. The three were part of what was called Freedom Summer when hundreds of students and young civil rights activists descended upon Mississippi to register and educate the African-American population about their voting rights and to combat the state’s white supremacist power structure that disenfranchised blacks. The murder of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney would prove instrumental in the passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act the following year.
The project was organized by the Council of Federated Organizations, a coalition of the four major civil rights organizations — the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The project set up dozens of Freedom Schools, Freedom Houses, and community centers in small towns throughout Mississippi to aid the local Black population.
Mississippi was chosen as the target of this effort because it had the lowest percentage of registered African-American voters of any state in the Union, only 6.7 percent of eligible black voters. Blacks had been restricted from voting since the turn of the century due to barriers to voter registration and other laws. Many of Mississippi’s white residents deeply resented these “outside agitators” and any attempt to change their ways. The Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizens’ Council, the Sovereignty Commission and even state and local law enforcement were engaged in a campaign of violence and harassment aimed intimidating these students and discouraging local African-Americans from cooperating with these outsiders. Schwerner, in particular, because of his work and “beatnik” appearance, attracted the attention of the Klan, which put him on their special hit list and gave him the code name “Goatee.”
On June 21, 1964, Schwerner, Goodman, and Cheney went to investigate the burning of the Mt. Zion Church in Neshoba county Mississippi by the Klan that served as a Freedom School. They were stopped by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price just inside the city limits of Philadelphia, the county seat. Price, a member of the KKK who had been looking out for Schwerner or other civil rights workers, threw them in the Neshoba County jail, allegedly under suspicion for church arson. Price kept them in jail for seven hours till late in the evening, denying them a phone call, before he released them on bail. During this time he organized,a plan with his fellow Klan members to murder the activists. Price escorted them out of town on a lonely dirt road and directed never to return. Shortly after exiting the town limits they were chased down by the Klan, pulled over, abducted and murdered. Schwerner and Goodman were shot in the head. Chaney was beaten and castrated before being shot. Their bodies were buried in a newly constructed earthen dam just south of town.
The ensuing FBI search for the three slain civil rights workers grabbed the attention of the nation and finally spotlight on Mississippi’s dreadful record on voting rights and the violent campaign against civil rights that was being waged in that state. On August 4, the remains of the three young men were found. The culprits were identified, but the state of Mississippi made no arrests. With the state unwilling to prosecute the case, nineteen men, including Deputy Price, were indicted on December 4, 1964 by the U.S. Justice Department for violating the civil rights of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney (charging the suspects with civil rights violations was the only way to give the federal government jurisdiction in the case). After nearly three years of legal wrangling, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately defended the indictments, the men went on trial in Jackson, Mississippi. Three later an all-white jury found seven men guilty, including Price and KKK Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers. Nine were acquitted, and the jury deadlocked on three others. The mixed verdict was hailed as a major civil rights victory, as no one in Mississippi had ever before been convicted for actions taken against a civil rights worker. None of the convicted men served more than six years behind bars.
On June 21, 2005, the forty-first anniversary of the three murders, Edgar Ray Killen, was found guilty of three counts of manslaughter for his role in the case. At eighty years of age and best known as an outspoken white supremacist and part-time Baptist minister, he was sentenced to 60 years in prison. He died in prison on January 11, 2018, six days before his 93rd birthday.
Flanked by public defender Chris Collins, left, reputed Ku Klux Klan member Edgar Ray Killen listens as Neshoba County District Attorney Mark Duncan, right, reads the indictment charging Killen with murder in the slayings of three civil rights workers more than 40 years ago, during his appearance in circuit court, Friday, Jan. 7, 2005, in Philadelphia, Miss. (AP Photo/Rogelio Solis)
On June 12, 1963, civil rights activist Medgar Evers was gunned down in his driveway outside his home in Jackson Mississippi by white supremacist and segregationist Byron De La Beckwith. Emerging from his automobile after a late night NAACP meeting, Evers was shot in the back by Beckwith who had been positioned across the street waiting to ambush him. The bullet pierced through his heart but he managed to stagger to his door. Evers’ wife, Myrlie, and his three children—who were still awake after watching an important civil rights speech by President John F. Kennedy—heard the gun shot and hurried outside. They were soon joined by neighbors and police. Evers was rushed to the hospital where he was initially denied admission because of his race. He died less than 50 minutes later at the age of 37. Evers was buried on June 19 in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.
Medgar Evers, the NAACP Field Director for Mississippi
Evers was a decorated World War II veteran who had fought at Normandy in 1944. However, like many other African-American veterans, he returned to a nation that denied him his citizenship rights at the polls. In 1946, Evers attempted to cast a ballot but twenty armed white men, some of whom had been his childhood friends, had learned of his plans to vote and turned up to threaten him. Evers feared for his life. “I made up my mind that it would not be like that again,” he vowed.
Shortly after the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Evers volunteered to challenge segregation in higher education and applied to the University of Mississippi School of Law. He was rejected on a technicality, but his willingness to risk harassment and threats for racial justice caught the eye of national NAACP leadership; he was soon hired as the organization’s first field secretary in Mississippi.
Evers was one of Mississippi’s leading civil rights activists. He fought racial injustices in many forms from segregation to how the state and local legal systems handled crimes against African Americans. Evers’ work put him squarely in the crosshairs of the White Citizens Council, a white supremacist group formed in the aftermath of the Brown ruling devoted to preserving segregation. He garnered national attention for organizing demonstrations and boycotts to help integrate Jackson’s privately owned buses, the public parks, Mississippi’s Gulf Coast beaches as well as the Mississippi State Fair. He led voter registration drives, and helped secure legal assistance for James Meredith, a black man whose 1962 attempt to enroll in the University of Mississippi was met with riots and state resistance.
Beckwith was arrested on June 21, 1963 for the murder of Evers but would escape conviction for most of his life, largely due to the racist system of justice that dominated the deep South in the 1960s. He was tried twice in February and April 1964 but in each trial the two all white juries failed to reach a verdict resulting in two mistrials. Beckwith received the support of some of Mississippi’s most prominent citizens, including then-Governor Ross Barnett, who appeared at Beckwith’s first trial to shake hands with the defendant in full view of the jury. After his release Beckwith bragged about his skill with a rifle and hinting to segregationist friends that, indeed, he had killed Evers.
That Beckwith would not be held accountable, while reprehensible, was hardly surprising and consistent with what was increasingly the norm across the South. African-Americans and civil rights activists could expect little legal protection from the courts and law enforcement in the 1960s South which operated largely to preserve segregation and often ignored the facts when white defendants were accused of harming African-Americans. Moreover, most African-Americans were still disenfranchised by Jim Crow laws and therefore ineligible for jury duty. The two white men who murdered fourteen year old Emmet Till eight years earlier for allegedly whistling at a white woman were acquitted . The Ku Klux Klan members that perpetrated the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama later that year also escaped justice. The same for the murderers of three civil rights workers in Mississippi the following year.
Mylie Evers and son Daniel Kenyatta Evers at Medgar Evers’ funeral
Evers’ assassin, the unrepentant Byron De La Beckwith
Evers was one of Mississippi’s leading civil rights activists. He fought racial injustices in many forms from segregation to how the state and local legal systems handled crimes against African Americans. Evers’ work put him squarely in the crosshairs of the White Citizens Council, a white supremacist group formed in the aftermath of the Brown ruling devoted to preserving segregation. He garnered national attention for organizing demonstrations and boycotts to help integrate Jackson’s privately owned buses, the public parks, Mississippi’s Gulf Coast beaches as well as the Mississippi State Fair. He led voter registration drives, and helped secure legal assistance for James Meredith, a black man whose 1962 attempt to enroll in the University of Mississippi was met with riots and state resistance.
Evers’ home and the driveway where he was shot
Evers’ assassination was a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights movement, a bloody milestone in the fight for racial equality that began with the murder of 14 year-old Emmett Till eight years earlier. It would also prove to be a harbinger of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. by James Earl Ray five years later.
“All lives matter!” or so they say. On the surface it’s reasonable claim. One that is hard to deny or argue with, especially for a nation that was conceived on the premise that all men are created equal. But that’s not really the point, is it? Of course all lives matter, but do they matter equally? History would suggest otherwise. In reality, the phrase “All lives matter” has become a trope to reject and deny the increasingly disturbing trend of unarmed African-Americans killed by police under dubious circumstances and the fact that throughout our country’s history, black lives have been devalued systematically. It’s an expression of fear, based on the erroneous perception that Black Lives Matter is a zero-sum movement that seeks racial advantage rather than the equality promised in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, a redress of historical grievances and a more equitable system of justice.
The Peculiar Institution
The African-American experience has been one of exploitation and marginalization. Since the first ship arrived in the Jamestown colony in 1619, carrying some 20 plus Angolans against their will, black lives have been devalued. Over the next two hundred years, more than 400,000 additional Africans would be kidnapped from their homes, brought to North America in the squalid hulls of slave ships, and forced into bondage as a source of cheap and captive labor. Often toiling in dangerous and inhospitable conditions, where few would do so of their own choosing, these slaves brought tremendous wealth not only to those that enslaved them but the entire country through the large scale cultivation of rice, tobacco, indigo and cotton. Slavery became so woven into the economic fabric of the country that by 1860, 80 percent of the U.S. GDP was tied to the “peculiar institution.” Yet as Carole Anderson points out in her book White Rage, that in return for almost 250 years of forced labor, African Americans received nothing but rape, whippings, murder, the destruction of families, illiteracy, and poverty.
As slaves, African-Americans were a commodity to be bought and sold and once purchased their lives ceased to be their own. They were the property of the slave owner. Slaves had no legal or occupational safety protections, no rights to education, healthcare or religious instruction. They labored six days a week from sun-up to sun-down, with a reprieve on Sundays for rest and worship. They were at the whim and mercy of their owners, who were free to do as they pleased with their property. Disobedience was punished brutally and severely, often at the end of the whip. And if a slave was killed while being “corrected,” the owner was free of any responsibility for their death. Marriages between slaves were not considered legally binding and traditional family ties were not respected. Owners were free to split up families as they liked often with tragic consequences for the slaves involved. Husbands and wives, parents and children were separated, sold elsewhere for profit or some times gifted or transferred for other reasons without any restrictions.
A slave auction advertisement in Charleston, SC
Adding insult to injury, the slave’s subordinate status was given legal standing in the disastrous 1857 Dred Scott decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that slaves were indeed property and therefore had no rights which the white man was bound to respect. Chief Justice Roger Taney, who delivered the majority opinion, argued that at the time the constitution was adopted, blacks were regarded as “beings of an inferior order and unfit to associate with the white race.” He further added that the words in the Declaration of Independence, “all men were created equal,” were never intended to apply to blacks and that “the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”
Even amongst those who believed slavery to be immoral and unjust there was still a strong tendency to view blacks as inferior. For example, President Abraham Lincoln, at least initially, did not believe in racial equality. During the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln argued, “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,” Lincoln further added that he opposed blacks having the right to vote, to serve on juries, to hold office and to intermarry with whites. Lincoln’s views were consistent with those of the times. However, they would evolve and by the end of the Civil War he was openly speaking of limited black suffrage for the “very intelligent” and those who fought for the Union cause.
The Civil War and Reconstruction
The Union victory in the Civil War brought peace and an end to the four year conflict. It did not lead to a new racial reckoning, atonement for past sins or level the playing field for blacks and whites going forward. For if the North won the Civil War, the South surely won the peace. Over the next ten or so years following the Civil War, embittered former Confederates waged a guerilla style war against Federal Government efforts to grant equal rights to blacks, while seeking to resurrect the plantation economy, perpetuate slavery under another name, and reassert white supremacist rule in the South. Aided and abetted by an openly racist President Andrew Johnson and a U.S. Supreme Court that would undercut major legislative acts and protections for blacks, the end result was not racial equality but segregation, exploitation, oppression and intimidation or what would become known as the “Jim Crow South.”
“This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I’m President, it shall be a government for white men.”
President Andrew Johnson
To continue exploiting the newly freed African-Americans as a captive source of cheap labor, the Southern states passed restrictive laws called “Black Codes.” These laws required that blacks sign annual labor contracts with plantation, mill, or mine owners to work for pitifully low wages. If they refused and had no other gainful employment, which was impossible because blacks were only allowed to work as laborers or domestics, they would be charged with vagrancy and rented out as laborers to pay off their fines. Apprenticeship laws forced many minors (either orphans or those whose parents were deemed unable to support them by a judge) into unpaid labor for white planters. After ratification of the 14th Amendment, these laws were replaced by another odious form of peonage, sharecropping, which consigned African-Americans in the South to a life of abject poverty for most of the 19th and 20th century. Fewer than 20 percent of sharecroppers ever made a profit and challenging the system could easily result in being lynched.
Unrepentant southerners violently resisted the Federal Government’s efforts to protect and expand the civil rights of former slaves and to extend the franchise to black men, through the 14th and 15th Amendments. They opposed the idea of political and legal equality between the races and regarded black suffrage as a threat to their political power that would lead to “nigger domination.” In all fairness, the 15th Amendment also encountered considerable resistance in the North as well for similar reasons. Nevertheless, groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, Red Shirts and simple mobs carried out acts of terror and violence to intimidate African-Americans and their white Republican allies and to prevent them from holding political office or exercising their right to vote. Lynchings, with the blessing and involvement of local law enforcement, rose dramatically and would persist as a means of intimidation and control long after the failure of Reconstruction. At the same time, large scale violence such as the 1873 Colfax Louisiana Massacre achieved or overturned what couldn’t be won at the ballot box. By 1880, all Federal troops were withdrawn from the South and the Southern white elite were in control again. The antebellum social, political, and economic order in the South was restored as if the Civil War never happened.
A lynching in Texas
Several important U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the later-half of the 19th century eviscerated the 14th and 15th Amendment protections for African-Americans, opening the door to an extended period of legally sanctioned racial discrimination that would endure for almost a century. In United States v. Cruickshank (1876), United States v. Reese (1876) and United States v. Harris (1883) the court essentially hollowed out the federal government’s ability to prosecute hate crimes committed against African-Americans, allowed state governments to implement poll taxes, literacy tests and other means to disqualify black voters, and gave a greenlight to acts of terror and violence while limiting freedmen’s ability to enforce their rights in federal court, the only forum where they stood a chance of a fair hearing. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1898) the court established its infamous separate but equal standard, ensuring that segregation would increase and endure at least till 1964. These rulings would essentially allow blacks to be segregated lynched, and disenfranchised without anyone ever being brought to justice. African-Americans were once again at the mercy of southern whites and relegated to second class citizens.
“By narrow and ingenious interpretation [the Supreme Court’s] decisions over a period of years had whittled away a great part of the authority presumably given the government for protection of civil rights.”
C. Van Woodward
Life in the Jim Crow South was increasingly bleak and brutish for African-Americans and in many respects was no better if not worse than slavery. Blacks were trapped in a vicious racial hierarchy that denied them the most basic human dignity and freedoms. Deprived of control over the means to earn a living, Southern blacks were still forced to toil for white landowners under a sharecropping system that became a form of debt slavery and offered no economic mobility. Segregation increasingly took hold and Blacks were systematically excluded from everything from schools to residential areas to public parks to theaters to pools to hospitals, asylums, jails and residential homes. Almost every aspect of Southern society was segregated to the disadvantage of blacks and served as a constant reminder of their inferior status. Effectively stripped of their right to vote and denied protection at the Federal level by the U.S. Supreme Court, African-Americans were at the mercy of a legal system stacked against them with former Confederates working as police and judges making it difficult win court cases and gain a fair hearing.
Violence against blacks in the South also increased in frequency and cruelty, uninhibited by the legal system. Lynchings became a public spectacle and the preferred method of southern whites to intimidate blacks and to assert their dominance over political and economic power. Southern whites often showed little mercy. Records include at least one incident where two brothers in Texas were burnt at the stake and one in Georgia in which a pregnant woman was hanged, her belly slashed open and the head of her unborn child crushed under a boot. An estimated two or three blacks were lynched each week in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Mississippi alone, 581 blacks were lynched from the late 1800s to 1955. Nationwide, the figure climbed to nearly 5,000. This tragic combination of violent repression, a lack of economic opportunity and no legal recourse ensured blacks would remain impoverished, endangered, and without rights or hope in the South.
A family of Texas sharecroppers, the Arthurs, arrive in Chicago homeless and without money fleeing Paris, Texas after two of their sons were burned alive, at the Lamar County Fairgrounds, on July 6, 1920.
The Great Migration,World War I, and the Red Summer
Up until the end of the 19th century, 9 out of every 10 African-Americans lived below the Mason-Dixon Line. As a result, most racism towards blacks was concentrated in the South. That’s not to say that whites in the north were free of prejudice and racist sentiment. In fact, the callous and cowardly attacks on African-Americans during the 1863 New York City draft riots showed otherwise. Nonetheless, things began to change around 1916 as African-Americans began leaving the South en mass, fueled by poor economic conditions, an increasing availability of jobs in the North’s booming manufacturing industry and a desire to escape the pain of Jim Crow. Over one million African-Americans from the South would make the long journey northward by the end of 1919. That number would reach 6 million by the year 1970.
An African-American family leaving Florida for New Jersey
African-Americans would soon find that the North was not the promised land they hoped and in the summer of 1919, racial violence exploded throughout the country, in what would become known as “The Red Summer.” It was some of the worst white on black violence in U.S. history and demonstrated that racism was not simply a regional problem indigenous to the South but a national one. Race riots erupted in Chicago, Arkansas, Washington DC, New York City, Omaha, Charleston, Memphis, Philadelphia, Texas and elsewhere. Hundreds if not thousands of African-American men, women, and children were brutally shot, hanged, and beaten to death by angry white mobs threatened by black advancement and intent on preventing them from asserting their equality. As one black sharecropper remarked, “they just hated to see niggers livin like people.”
The outbreak of violence was the result of competing social forces: Black men were returning from World War I expecting the same rights they had fought and bled for in Europe, and African Americans were moving north to escape the brutal Jim Crow laws of the South. Whites saw blacks as competition for jobs, homes and political power. In Chicago, riots broke out in late July after a 17 year old African-American boy was attacked by a white mob for violating the unofficial segregation of the city’s beachfront. Four days of fighting between black and white mobs in Chicago’s predominantly black south side left 15 whites and 23 Blacks dead, and an additional 1,000 Black families were left homeless after rioters torched their residences. Newspapers reporting the events would claim that blacks were rioting and that anarchists were allegedly operating in the black neighborhoods, but there is not real evidence of any of that. These actions were overwhelmingly by white mobs.
In Elaine, Arkansas, over 200 poor black sharecroppers were killed in a police-led white rampage because they dared to unionize and break free from unscrupulous white landowners who cheated them out of cash and crop. In Washington DC white mobs — many made up of members of the military — rampaged through the city beating any black they could find after false rumors of a white woman being assaulted by black men spread. Black military veterans organized and retaliated The Washington Times newspaper described the situation as such, “Bands of whites and blacks hunted each other like clansmen throughout the night, the blood-feud growing steadily. From nightfall to nearly dawn ambulances bore their steady stream of dead and wounded to hospitals.” These scenes were repeated elsewhere throughout the country in the summer.
Racial tensions and white mob violence continued and did not really begin to wane until 1923. Two of the most heinous acts of racial violence against African-American communities occurred shortly after the Red Summer. In May of 1921, a race riot broke out in Tulsa, Oklahoma after a young black man allegedly assaulted a white woman. Hundreds of white people descended upon the Black neighborhood of Greenwood. Whites killed more than 300 African-Americans. The Tulsa police did nothing to quell the violence and some actively participated in it. It was also reported that white men flew airplanes above Greenwood, dropping kerosene bombs. More than a hundred businesses and other buildings were destroyed, including a school, a hospital, a library, and dozens of churches. More than 1,200 Black-owned houses burned. The economic losses in the Black community were stunning, amounting to more than $1 million. In January 1923, more than 10,000 angry white men from across the state of Florida rampaged through the prosperous black community of Rosewood after a white women claimed she was raped by a black man. The number of deaths from the massacre remains unknown but the town was entirely destroyed by the violence, and the residents never returned.
Covenants and Redlining
The rapid influx of African-Americans in northern cities prompted a white backlash in other less menacing but still disturbing ways. Although there was no official policy of racial segregation in the North, unofficial segregation existed, especially in the housing market, which exacerbated racial tensions. In the major northern cities, African-Americans were often funneled into areas of the cities that were overcrowded ramshackle slums, through the deliberate policies of restrictive covenants and redlining, which prohibited blacks from owning or renting property in certain neighborhoods and discouraged banks from investing in predominantly black areas. These policies inhibited any upward mobility for African-American families, relegating them to a life of urban poverty. Any efforts to escape these confines and relocate to better and more prosperous white suburban neighborhoods met with violent resistance. As Richard Rothstein points out in his book, The Color of Law, white families sent their children to college with their home equities; they were able to take care of their parents in old age. They were able to pass on their wealth to their children. None of these advantages were available to African-Americans who were prohibited from owning homes in the suburbs.
Returning Home from World War II
Approximately 1.2 African-American men again answered their nation’s call to service, putting life and limb at risk in the fields of Europe and the islands of the South Pacific, only to face an even greater danger when they returned home. Black soldiers returning home from the war found the same socioeconomic ills and racist violence that they faced before. Despite their sacrifices overseas, they still struggled to get well-paying jobs, encountered segregation and endured targeted brutality, designed to eliminate any expectation of racial equality.
In February 1946, Isaac Woodard, a Black veteran who served in the Pacific theater, got into a heated argument with a bus driver while traveling from Georgia to South Carolina. Woodard, in his uniform, was ordered off the bus in a town now known as Batesburg-Leesville, S.C., and beaten so terribly with a billy club by the local police chief that he was permanently blinded. John C. Jones, a Black veteran, was lynched in Louisiana after he was accused of looking at a young white woman through a window of her family’s house. Two other Black veterans, Richard Gordon and Alonza Brooks, were murdered in Marshall, Texas, after a labor dispute with their employers. The violence became so pervasive and brutal that civil rights activists lobbied President Truman for a federal anti-lynching law, but Southern Democrats shut down Truman’s efforts.
African-Americans Veterans also struggled to benefit from the G.I. Bill, upon their return. Many black veterans were denied access to a college education and were largely relegated to vocational programs. By comparison, 28 percent of white veterans went to college on the G.I. Bill, compared with 12 percent of Blacks. Of that number, upward of 90 percent of Black veterans attended historically Black colleges and universities — institutions mainly in the South that were already underfunded with limited resources. During the summer of 1947, Ebony magazine surveyed 13 cities in Mississippi and discovered that of the 3,229 V.A. home loans given to veterans, two went to African-Americans.
Civil Rightsand the Death of Jim Crow
In the late 1940s, cracks began to appear in the legal foundation of Jim Crow segregation. In 1948, President Truman issued an executive order to begin the integration of the United States’ armed forces, a process that would be accelerated by the Korean War. Earlier that year, Truman, a native Missourian, delivered a civil rights speech before a joint session of Congress. He called on Congress to adopt a civil rights package that included federal protection against lynching, better protection of the right to vote, and a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, despite strong opposition from he southern wing of the Democratic Party. The Supreme Court, which was complicit in the enactment of the Jim Crow system with its earlier rulings, also began to re-examine it’s separate but equal doctrine that served as the foundation of legal segregation. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court turned the country upside down with its ruling in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In a unanimous opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” as segregated schools are “inherently unequal.” As a result, the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being “deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.” The ruling drove a stake through the heart of Jim Crow but it would take a decade long struggle for civil rights to bring about its demise.
The Supreme Court’s ruling outraged segregationists through out the South while energizing civil rights activists. Over the course of the next ten years, African-Americans waged a campaign of non-violent civil disobedience to end institutionalized discrimination, disenfranchisement, and segregation but were repeatedly beaten, bombed, shot, imprisoned, humiliated and degraded by a southern power structure determined to resist their efforts at all costs. Fourteen year-old Emmett Till would pay with his life for no reason other than allegedly whistling at a white woman. In Greensboro North Carolina, four young African-American men staged a sit-in at an all white lunch counter, enduring heckling and harassment from white patrons, sparking similar actions across the city and rest of the South. Freedom Riders protesting against segregated interstate travel were beaten and shot at by the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama. Four young African-American girls lost their lives in the despicable 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham Alabama. James Meredith’s desire to attend the University of Mississippi touched off a brutal battle on the streets of Oxford between Federal Marshals and segregationists. Six hundred protestors were beaten by the police on the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma Alabama for simply demanding their constitutional right to vote. These are just some of the individual and collective acts of bravery and the suffering that helped lead to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act that closed the curtain on the Jim Crow era.
Clockwise: White youths protesting protesting the Brown ruling; Protestors at a Greensboro sit-in being heckled and harassed by whites; Freedom Riders in 1961 protesting segregation of interstate travel were savagely beaten and bombed by the Klu Klux Klan in Alabama; the four young black girls murdered in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama; Demonstrators in Selma Alabama are beaten by the Alabama State Police for demanding to exercise their right to vote.
All Lives Don’t Matter!
There is probably no other idea or concept more central to the American identity or ethos than the notion of equality. It’s at the forefront of the Declaration of Independence and it is the foundation of the American dream, the idea that we all have equal access and opportunity to better ourselves. It is also a key feature of our legal system, the idea we are all equal under the law. Yet when we peel away the onion, that is our history and when we are honest with ourselves, can we really say that there is racial equality in modern American society. We would all like to believe that 13th Amendment outlawing slavery leveled the playing field for blacks and whites while the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act purged racial discrimination from our society but that is not the truth. We still want to see ourselves as that “ the city upon a hill” that John Winthrop wrote about in the 17th century but we continued to fall short of our aspirations.
Today, in America we are at another historical crossroads regarding race. We have another opportunity to confront our past, warts and all, to make amends, and to lay the foundation for a new racial reckoning, a third Reconstruction if you like. When we defiantly say, “All lives matter,” we refuse to acknowledge that past. When we say “All lives matter,” we deny and delegitimize all the pain, suffering and indignity that African-Americans have endured for the past 400 years. When we say, “All lives matter,” we are saying aren’t listening and African-American concerns are not valid. At a time when racial tensions are being deliberately inflamed maybe we should stop talking and start putting some meaning behind that empty phrase.
Tragedy and Farce 