Eyes on the Prize

by Juan Williams

  In September 1953, Chief Justice Vinson died unexpectedly of a heart attack at the age of sixty-three. For a month the Court was without a chief justice. President Eisenhower then nominated Earl Warren to the bench. Eisenhower owed Warren a debt from the 1952 Republican convention, when Warren’s political maneuvering assured Eisenhower’s nomination.

  To the NAACP, Warren was an enigma. In newspaper interviews, he extolled equality for all under the law and fair employment. But in 1942, when California’s attorney general, he had supported locking away Japanese-Americans in internment camps during World War II.

  In December 1953, one year after hearing the first oral arguments, the Court heard the attorneys respond to the questions the justices had posed after hearing the first set of arguments. The new chief justice said little; he observed and gathered information.

  It is not clear when Warren made up his mind, but it is clear that he wanted a unanimous decision. If the Supreme Court were to appear divided on this controversial issue, the ruling would be much more difficult to implement. According to Richard Kluger’s book, Simple Justice, Warren had a difficult time securing that unanimity. Justice Stanley Reed wanted to write a dissenting opinion. Reed’s clerk, George Mickum, recalls that his boss struck a deal with Warren: Reed would vote with the majority if the Warren court would allow segregation to be dismantled gradually rather than all at once.

  The Supreme Court customarily announced all its opinions on Mondays. But because the Court gave no advance notice about what cases it would be deciding, the plaintiffs were seldom present to hear the final decisions. Even the press avoided these dry proceedings, waiting in the newsroom downstairs rather than in the courtroom. As the justices read their opinions, copies were distributed to the newspeople.

  On Monday, May 17, 1954, the fourth opinion delivered was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Earl Warren read the first major ruling since he joined the high court. The Court could not determine, Warren said, whether Congress intended segregation to end under the Fourteenth Amendment. As for the separate-but-equal doctrine, the chief justice noted that it was written in 1896 and “we must consider public education in the light of its full development and its present place in American life.

  “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other tangible factors may be equal, deprive children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities?” he continued. “We believe it does … To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way very unlikely ever to be undone.

  “We conclude, unanimously, that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

  In Atlanta, Georgia, students at the Russell High School gather around a radio to hear the news that segregation in public schools has been ruled unconstitutional.

  Reporters scurried to file news bulletins that interrupted radio shows and stopped the presses of the nation’s afternoon papers. The Court had called for a fundamental change in American life: Blacks were to be treated as equals in the public schools. Georgia governor Herman Talmadge, a fervent spokesman for white supremacists, declared the ruling “a mere scrap of paper.” He predicted that abolishing segregation would “create chaos not seen since Reconstruction days.” Newsweek, describing Governor Talmadge’s position, wrote, “Talmadge stands immovable on the school issue. ‘I think about 98 percent of the white and colored people of the state prefer segregation,’ he says. The school decision, he believes, will lead to a breakdown in segregation, and that inevitably will result in intermarriage and the ‘mongrelization of the races.’” Governor James F. Byrnes of South Carolina agreed. “Ending segregation,” he said, “would mark the beginning of the end of civilization in the South as we have known it.”

  New York Times columnist James Reston wrote that, in its ruling, the Court had relied “more on social science than legal precedents, [and] insisted on equality in hearts and minds rather than the equal school facilities.” He contended that the decision read more like “an expert paper on sociology than a Supreme Court decision.”

  That week’s Time magazine noted, “In its 164 years the Court had erected many a landmark of U.S. history … none of them except the Dred Scott case (reversed by the Civil War) was more important than the school segregation issue.

  None of them directly and intimately affected so many American families.”

  In an editorial, the May 19 Washington Post said, “It is not too much to speak of the Court’s decision as a new birth of freedom. It comes at a juncture in the affairs of mankind when this reaffirmation of basic human values is likely to have a wonderfully tonic effect. America is rid of an incubus which impeded and embarrassed it in all its relations with the world. Abroad as well as at home, this decision will engender a renewal of faith in democratic institutions and ideals.”

  To black Americans, the Court’s action on school segregation was a sign of hope. But they had listened to promises from white America before. There were no grand celebrations. As Charles Houston had said years earlier, “Nobody needs to explain to a Negro the difference between the law in books and the law in action.”

  The lawyers who had argued the case, however, were jubilant. After years of work, they understood the magnitude of their achievement. Thurgood Marshall was meeting with Roy Wilkins of the NAACP when they heard the story of the Court’s decision on the Associated Press. The two men silently embraced. That evening, retired Judge J. Waties Waring, who had been forced into early retirement because of his controversial dissent in the Briggs case, held a small celebratory dinner party at his home in New York. In attendance were Walter White, head of the NAACP, Robert Carter, one of the lawyers on the Brown case, and South African writer Alan Paton. The team of lawyers from the Legal Defense Fund knew they had won the most important civil rights case of the twentieth century.

  Nearly twenty-five years later, Thurgood Marshall, a supreme court justice himself, remembered the role of Charles Houston in this victory. “A large number of people never heard of Charles Houston … [but] when Brown against the Board of Education was being argued in the Supreme Court … there were some two dozen lawyers on the side of the Negroes fighting for their schools … Of those lawyers, only two hadn’t been touched by Charlie Houston … That man was the engineer of all of it.”

  Chapter Two

  Standing For Justice

  Mississippi and the Till Case

  “Before Emmett Till’s murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell and the Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me—the fear of being killed just because I was black.”

  From Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody’s autobiography

  Cotton sharecroppers at work in Mississippi.

  Black Monday. That was what southern segregationists came to call the day the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education. “On May 17, 1954, the Constitution of the United States was destroyed because of the Supreme Court’s decision,” said Mississippi senator James Eastland. “You are not obliged to obey the decisions of any court which are plainly fraudulent [and based on] sociological considerations.”

  In Linden, Alabama, state senator Walter C. Givhan railed against the NAACP’s campaign to end school segregation. What, he asked his white audience, is the real purpose of the campaign? “To open the bedroom doors of our white women to Negro men.”

  When the Supreme Court handed down its decision, it did not include instructions on how the order was to be implemented. Desegregation began almost immediately in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, but most of the nation waited for the Court to provide specific instructions on how to end school segregation.

  Ku Klux Klan cross-burning rally.

  A year later, the Court still had not acted. Inst
ead, the justices asked the lower federal courts, closer to the local school districts, to ensure that those districts “admit to public schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the [black children].”

  To many blacks, the Court’s delay and the vague wording of its eventual decree were a bitter disappointment. “I remember the great elation that I had—how wonderful I felt the country was and the Constitution [after the 1954 ruling] …,” said one civil rights attorney. “I felt an equally strong sense of depression and bitterness a year later when the Court came out with the ‘all deliberate speed’ formulation. I had the feeling that we’d won a hollow victory.”

  President Eisenhower distanced himself from the Court’s actions. “It makes no difference whether or not I endorse it,” he said. “The Constitution is as the Supreme Court interprets it and I must conform to that and do my very best to see that it is carried out in this country.” But later he commented that his appointment of Earl Warren was “the biggest damn-fool mistake I ever made.” He told one of his aides in the White House, “I am convinced that the Supreme Court decision set back progress in the South at least fifteen years.”

  In Mississippi, unarguably the most supremacist and segregated state in the country, whites’ anger over the ruling fueled violent segregationist backlash. Gangs of whites committed beatings, burnings, and lynchings—murder by mob. The Supreme Court decision also spurred the formation of a new kind of white hate group, composed of urban, middle-class whites determined to fight desegregation. They called themselves the Citizens’ Council, and civil rights activists dubbed them the “white-collar Klan,” after the Ku Klux Klan.

  The Klan’s members were generally poor, rural white men. Wearing white robes and hoods that covered their faces, they set crosses ablaze on the lawns of integrationist “troublemakers.” If that tactic failed to intimidate, they resorted to beatings and murder. The Citizens’ Councils, which began to proliferate throughout the South, sought to control blacks more through economic reprisals than by violence. One Council leader said that their purpose was “to make it difficult, if not impossible, for any Negro who advocates desegregation to find and hold a job, get credit, or renew a mortgage.”

  Several blacks were killed by white men in Mississippi in 1955. Racially motivated murder was not new to the state, but at least three of the killings that year were different.

  Two of the victims, the Reverend George W. Lee and Lamar Smith, were NAACP organizers trying to register black voters. Until 1940 there were more blacks than whites in Mississippi, and in 1955 blacks still outnumbered whites in many counties. To segregationists, the vote was too powerful a weapon to be in the hands of so many “nigras.” The usual reasons for murder ranged from stealing food to talking back to a white person. These latest victims were blacks who were standing up for their rights.

  A Citizens’ Council meeting—its purpose was “to make it difficult, if not impossible, for any Negro who advocates desegregation to find and hold a job, get credit, or renew a mortgage.”

  The victim of the third killing was a teenage boy. His death was different for so many reasons that his murder made the front page of virtually every black newspaper in the nation.

  Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old from the South Side of Chicago. In August, 1955, Emmett and his cousin Curtis Jones were visiting relatives near Money, Mississippi. They were staying with Curtis’ grandfather, Mose Wright. In the town of Money, a black girl had recently been “flogged” for the dubious offense of “crowding white people” in a store.

  Friends and family knew Emmett as a brash, prank-loving eighth grader at McCosh Elementary School. He was doing well enough in school, even with the speech defect he had developed from a bout with nonparalytic polio at age three. The neighborhood kids on St. Lawrence Avenue said his stutter didn’t make Emmett Till shy; he liked to dress smart and talk smart. He was a mama’s boy, an only child.

  Chicago in 1955 was a post-World War II boom town, a magnet for blacks from the South. The Chicago Defender, a weekly black newspaper, ran gossip columns called “News From Home,” covering counties in every southern state. For its fiftieth anniversary that year, the paper printed a full-page drawing that showed an exodus of black people—men loaded down with baggage and tools, women with children on their hips, all marching north to Chicago. The city was “the shining El Dorado of freedom and good jobs to millions of southern Negroes,” the paper editorialized.

  Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Bradley.

  Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Mississippi.

  Carolyn Bryant, the woman Emmett Till met in the grocery store, sits next to her husband Roy and their children.

  Emmett Till’s neighborhood was a working-class black area with its share of storefront preachers and apartment buildings crowded with relatives from Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The music that drifted through the alleyways ranged from old gospel hymns to the modern strains of Fats Domino. Religion, like the numbers and gin, was an important part of black Chicago’s life. That summer blacks and whites sat together at the Jehovah’s Witnesses convention at Comiskey Park. Mayor Richard Daley spoke at the opening of the black National Baptist Convention of America. His appearance there was significant to the transplanted southern blacks who were not yet accustomed to the idea that in Chicago they could cast a ballot—even if there was talk of vote-fraud. There was a strong enough black political presence in the city to ensure that blacks received at least low-level jobs in city government. That same summer the city even sponsored a “Salute to Negroes in Government.” Roy Wilkins, the new executive secretary of the NAACP, spoke on that occasion of the opportunity the war had given blacks because they were now veterans; they had proven they were Americans, and now they were proving it in local government. As veterans they were entitled to veterans’ benefits, help with schooling and housing, and an end to segregation.

  Emmett Till knew segregation. McCosh Elementary was a public school with black students only. When Mamie Bradley, Emmett’s mother, made plans to send him south for the summer on the Illinois Central, she knew he would have to ride in the train’s colored section. But the segregation Emmett knew in the North was nothing like the segregation he rode into in Mississippi. His only warning came from his mother, a Mississippi native who had left for Chicago with her family when she was two years old. She told her boy not to fool with white people down south: “If you have to get on your knees and bow when a white person goes past, do it willingly.”

  His cousin, Curtis Jones, recalled that Emmett liked to pull pranks. One Wednesday evening in August, 1955, Emmett and Curtis drove Mose Wright’s ‘41 Ford to Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, a country store with a big metal Coca-Cola sign outside.

  There the boys met up with some other black children, and Curtis Jones began a game of checkers with a seventy-year-old black man sitting by the side of the building. Outside the store, Emmett was showing off a picture of a white girl who was a friend of his in Chicago. Till bragged to the titillated boys that this white girl was his girl, and Jones recalls that one of the southern boys said, “‘Hey, there’s a [white] girl in that store there. I bet you won’t go in there and talk to her.’ So he went in there to get some candy. When he was leaving the store, he told her, ‘Bye, Baby.’ And that’s when the old man [the checker-player] started telling us that she would go to her car, get a pistol, and blow his [Emmett’s] brains out.”

  The boys jumped in their car as Carolyn Bryant came out the swinging screen doors. They sped out of the little town.

  By the next day the incident had become just a good story to the two northern boys. But the tale went beyond those in the car. One girl who had heard it through the grapevine warned, “When that lady’s husband come back there is going to be trouble.” Roy Bryant was out of town at the time, trucking shrimp from Louisiana to Texas.

  The boys kept the encounter a secret from Mose Wright, hoping it would blow over. Three days passed, a
nd the boys forgot about Emmett’s “Bye, Baby” to the pretty white woman. But after midnight on Saturday, a car pulled off the gravel road and headed through the cotton field to Mose Wright’s unpainted cabin. Roy Bryant was back from his trucking job. He and his brother-in-law J. W. Milam had come to Wright’s cabin to get that “boy who done the talkin’.” Mose told the men that the boy was from “up nawth” and didn’t know a thing about how to act with white folks down south. He told them that the boy was only fourteen, that this was only his second visit to Mississippi. Why not give the boy a good whipping and leave it at that? As the men dragged Emmett outside, one of them asked Mose Wright, “How old are you, preacher?”

  “Sixty-four.”

  “If you cause any trouble, you’ll never live to be sixty-five,” said the man. They pushed Emmett into the back seat of the car and drove away.

  Precisely what happened next is unknown. Two months after the trial, however, William Bradford Huie, a white Alabama journalist, paid Milam and Bryant $4,000 to tell their story. The two Mississippians attempted to justify the murder by claiming that they didn’t intend to kill Till when they picked him up at Mose Wright’s house, that they had only wanted to scare him. But when the young boy refused to repent or beg for mercy, they said, they had to kill him.

  “What else could we do?” Milam told Huie. “He was hopeless. I’m no bully; I never hurt a nigger in my life. I like niggers in their place. I know how to work ’em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice.”

  Milam drove Emmett to the Tallahatchie River, Huie wrote, and made the boy carry a seventy-five-pound cotton-gin fan from the back of the truck to the river bank before ordering him to strip. Milam then shot the boy in the head.

  The Milam and Bryant account of the incident left several questions unanswered. One witness, for example, reported seeing Till and the two accused with a group of other men, both black and white, before the murder. Who were they? How and why would Milam and Bryant coerce blacks into helping them? Why would they need other whites along if they had only wanted to intimidate the boy? And, would a tongue-tied fourteen-year-old boy really make baiting comments, as Milam and Bryant allege, to the men who were viciously beating him?