by Jon Meacham
They must have been enormously strengthened in this persuasion by the approval of Mr. Culbertson, who, as soon as the Judge had left court, had leapt like a goat from chair to table and from table to chair, the sooner to wring the hands of his clients. Oddly, Mr. Ashmore, the prosecuting attorney, was also busy telling the defendants how glad he was that they had been acquitted, with the rallying smile of a schoolmaster who is telling his pupils that he had to keep them in for a little because they really were too boisterous, but that he knew all the time what fine, manly fellows they were. Clark had now produced his camera and flashlight and was standing on a chair, taking photographs of the celebrations. The defendants were delighted and jumped up on chairs to pose for him, their friends standing below them and waving and smiling toward the camera, so that they could share in the glory. In these pictorial revels, Mr. Culbertson was well to the fore. First he posed with the Hurds. Then he formed part of a group that neither Greenville nor the C.I.O. could greatly enjoy if they should see it in Life. On a chair stood Fat Joy, bulging and swelling with pleasure, and on his right stood the bondsman and on his left Mr. Culbertson, baring their teeth in ice-cold geniality, and each laying one hard hand on the boy’s soft bulk and raising the other as if to lead a cheer. It is unlikely that Mr. Culbertson was unaware of the cynical expression on Clark’s face, and he knew perfectly well what other members of the press were thinking of him. But he did not care. Life is a national weekly. Mr. Culbertson does not want to be a national figure. He means to be a highly successful local figure. My future, he was plainly saying to himself, is in Greenville and this is good enough for Greenville, so let’s go. It will be astonishing if he is right. At that, he was a more admirable figure than Mr. Wofford, however, because at least his credo had brought him out into the open standing alongside the people whose fees he had taken and whose cause he had defended. But on hearing the verdict, Mr. Wofford, who possibly has an intention of becoming a national figure, had vanished with the speed of light and was doubtless by this time at some convenient distance, wiping his mouth and saying, “Lord, I did not eat.”
There could be no more pathetic scene than these taxi-drivers and their wives, the deprived children of difficult history, who were rejoicing at a salvation that was actually a deliverance to danger. For an hour or two, the trial had built up in them that sense of law which is as necessary to man as bread and water and a roof. They had known killing for what it is: a hideousness that begets hideousness. They had seen that the most generous impulse, not subjected to the law, may engender a shameful deed. For indeed they were sick at heart when what had happened at the slaughter-pen was described in open court. But they had been saved from the electric chair and from prison by men who had conducted their defense without taking a minute off to state or imply that even if a man is a murderer one must not murder him and that murder is foul. These people had been plunged back into chaos. They had been given by men whom they naïvely trusted the most wildly false ideas of what conduct the community will tolerate. It is to be remembered that in their statements these men fully inculpated each other. At present they are unified by the trial, but when the tension is over, there will come into their minds that they were not so well treated as they might have been by their friends. Then the propaganda for murder which was so freely dished out to them during their trial may bear its fruit. Not only have they, along with everyone else, been encouraged to use the knife and the gun in ways that may get them into trouble—for it is absurd to think of Greenville as a place whose tolerance of disorder is unlimited—but they have been exposed to a greater danger of having the knife and the gun used on them. The kind of assault by which Mr. Brown died is likely to be encouraged by the atmosphere that now hangs over Greenville. These wretched people have been utterly betrayed.
It was impossible to watch this scene of delirium, which had been conjured up by a mixture of clownishness, ambition, and sullen malice, without feeling a desire for action. Supposing that one lived in a town, decent but tragic, which had been trodden into the dust and had risen again, and that there were men in that town who threatened every force in that town which raised it up and encouraged every force which dragged it back into the dust; then lynching would be a joy. It would be, indeed, a very great delight to go through the night to the home of such a man, with a few loyal friends, and walk in so softly that he was surprised and say to him, “You meant to have your secret bands to steal in on your friends and take them out into the darkness, but it is not right that you should murder what we love without paying the price, and the law is not punishing you as it should.” And when we had driven him to some place where we would not be disturbed, we would make him confess his treacheries and the ruses by which he had turned the people’s misfortunes to his profit. It would be only right that he should purge himself of his sins. Then we would kill him, but not quickly, for there would be no reason that a man who had caused such pain should himself be allowed to flee quickly to the shelter of death. The program would have seemed superb had it not been for two decent Greenville people, a man and a woman, who stopped as they went out of the courtroom and spoke to me, because they were so miserable that they had to speak to someone. “This is only the beginning,” the man said. He was right. It was the beginning of a number of odd things. Irrational events breed irrational events. The next day I was to see a Negro porter at the parking place of a resort hotel near Greenville insult white guests as I have never seen a white hotel employee insult guests; there were to be minor assaults all over the state; there was to be the lynching party in North Carolina. “It is like a fever,” said the woman, tears standing in her eyes behind her glasses. “It spreads, it’s an infection, it’s just like a fever.” I was prepared to admit that she, too, was right.
II
Into the Streets
On May 17, 1954, just before 1 P.M. in Washington, Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the opinion of the Court in Brown v. Board of Education. “Separate but equal” was now unconstitutional; so, therefore, were segregated schools. A year later, the court would rule that its decision be enforced “with all deliberate speed”—for the segs, there was no real hope of returning to the old order. At an integrated dinner during a meeting of the Southern Historical Association at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis the next year, William Faulkner (1897–1962) and Morehouse College president Benjamin E. Mays (1895–1984) talked about the decision and the new world struggling to be born. Faulkner was the descendant of a Confederate colonel; Mays, born the son of a South Carolina sharecropper, had risen within the ranks of the African-American church and academy. Their remarks were published in a pamphlet, though Faulkner’s best line—“We speak now against the day when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say, ‘Why didn’t someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?’ ”—was in fact part of a letter to the editor of a Memphis paper a few days later.
Even beyond the school question, 1955 was a pivotal year. In Money, Mississippi, the bludgeoned corpse of 14-year-old Emmett Till was fished out of the Tallahatchie River. Till had been down from Chicago, visiting cousins; he boasted he had a white girlfriend back home. His cousins challenged him to go talk to the white female cashier at a crossroads store, and Till did, allegedly saying, “Bye, baby,” as he walked out. A few nights later the woman’s husband and brother-in-law rode out to Till’s uncle’s place, rounded up the youth, and murdered him, tying his body to a cotton gin and dumping it in the river. Back in Chicago, Till’s mother insisted on an open casket, and the pictures of the boy’s disfigured head put a human face on Southern lynchings. The trial unfolded in Sumner. Murray Kempton (1918–1997) sent a column back to New York describing Till’s uncle’s courage in identifying the men who took the teenager from home—and who were predictably acquitted. In the 1950s and ‘60s, Kempton, one of the great newspaper columnists
of the century, wrote largely for the New York Post; an elegant man who could quote Aeschylus while chronicling the vicissitudes of life in the Mafia, he once showed up for dinner during the Till trial in British walking shorts. The race story fascinated him, and he also covered the integration crisis in Nashville, a standoff orchestrated by John Kasper, a roaming white supremacist.
By December 1955, the action moved from Mississippi to Montgomery, where Carl T. Rowan (1925–2000) chronicled the bus boycott and the emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr. Rowan’s life experience and natural gifts—a native Tennessean who had moved North, served overseas, and could write gracefully—equipped him well to sense nuances that might elude journalists from outside the region. Decades later, in this excerpt from his groundbreaking 1988 biography of King, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, Taylor Branch (1947– ) re-creates the young minister’s debut as the spokesman for the boycott at a mass meeting at Montgomery’s Holt Street Baptist Church in the days after Rosa Parks’s arrest.
In the fifties, television was a new force in American life, and it fueled the movement, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1950– ) recalls in the 1993 memoir of his childhood in rural West Virginia—a book he wrote, he says, so that his young daughters could grasp the milieu in which he had grown up. “As artlessly and honestly as I can,” Gates said, “I have tried to evoke the colored world of the fifties, a Negro world of the early sixties, and the advent of a black world of the later sixties, from the point of view of the boy I was.” In a “Letter from the South” to The New Yorker in 1956, E. B. White (1899–1985) suggested that embarrassment about the “silliness” of Jim Crow might one day help bring it down.
But that was still a long way off. Born in Guthrie, Kentucky, educated at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) had moved to Connecticut, and to Yale, by 1954. In the aftermath of the Brown decision, the novelist-poet-critic agreed to do a piece for Life on desegregation in the South. He took two trips home and, back in the North, battled the flu as he wrote a 20,000-word chronicle of his journeys; for Life, he cut it down to an 8,000-word article entitled “Divided South Searches for Its Soul.” In September 1956, Random House published the complete text as Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South, which is reprinted here. One of Warren’s conclusions: “History, like nature, knows no jumps. Except the jump backward, maybe.”
In New Orleans, John Steinbeck (1902–1968) absorbed the local crisis and talked it all over with whites and blacks in the trailer he drove around the country with his poodle, Charley. Back in Mississippi, there were a few white voices of tolerance: Hodding Carter (1907–1972), of the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Mississippi, was one of a collection of moderate Southern editors and publishers (Atlanta’s Ralph McGill was another) who tried to nudge their readers toward the middle. In the piece reprinted here, Carter recounts how the state legislature officially branded him a liar after he denounced the White Citizens Councils.
The author of the classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) grew up in Oklahoma City. More Southwestern than Southern, the city was not as racially riven as those in the Deep South, though Ellison did go to Alabama to attend the Tuskegee Institute in 1933. In 1936 he moved to New York, where he studied sculpture and met Langston Hughes, who introduced him to Richard Wright. In his 1964 essay collected here, Ellison points out that the crisis of race extended beyond the Southern borders, to Harlem.
There was another, increasingly important, story taking shape: the rise of the Nation of Islam. In 1959, a documentary about the sect entitled The Hate That Hate Produced brought Elijah Muhammad and his disciple Malcolm X to the country’s attention. Researched by Louis E. Lomax (whose Harper’s piece, “The Negro Revolt Against ‘The Negro Leaders,’ ” is found later in the section) for The Mike Wallace Show, the program was broadcast about the same time Alex Haley (1921–1992), an aspiring writer nearing retirement after 20 years in the Coast Guard, heard about the Muslims from a friend. Haley then embarked on a piece for Reader’s Digest; the story, “Mr. Muhammad Speaks,” appeared in early 1960. He co-authored a second article on the Muslims for the Saturday Evening Post, then convinced Malcolm to sit for a Playboy interview, which is included here. As he laid out his aggressive manifesto, Malcolm X doubted Haley’s promise that the magazine would publish the interview verbatim: “You know that devil’s not going to print that!” he would say after an especially vehement anti-Christian or anti-white remark. “He was very much taken aback,” Haley recalled, “when Playboy kept its word.” The interview then led to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which Haley wrote from long sessions with Malcolm, who was assassinated in 1965.
Down South, Alabama Governor George Wallace became a force to be reckoned with, first in the 1963 standoff over the integration of the University of Alabama and, as the decade wore on, in presidential politics. Marshall Frady (1942– ) paints a portrait of the segregationist pol who had started out as a moderate, lost, and sworn that race would never beat him again. “It was sometime back in the spring of 1966, when I was covering the Alabama governor’s campaign for Newsweek,” Frady recalls, “that it occurred to me George Wallace was worth a book as the palpable, breathing articulation into flesh of Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.” That was the year Wallace was running his wife, Lurleen, for governor since he couldn’t constitutionally succeed himself. Frady’s epiphany: At a rally in Birmingham, Wallace was pumping up the crowd, and “the sense I got from his oration to that multitude was, ‘I am you and you are me,’ and that’s when I realized: This is Willie Stark.”
In a little-known 1963 interview, Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) offered a vision of the role manners might play in bringing peace to the war between the races. She knew, however, that “good manners seldom make the papers.” Sit-ins were making news. As Louis E. Lomax (1922–1970) points out, young black activists did what their parents’ and grandparents’ generations had not: genuinely and effectively challenge the status quo. Lomax understood the emerging intricacies within black America—between violent and nonviolent and between young and old. A freelance journalist and expatriate Georgian, Lomax wrote a book called The Negro Revolt in 1962 and was a critic of the established black leadership and an integrationist. He occasionally debated Malcolm X; in fact, when Malcolm delivered his most famous speech in Cleveland in April 1964, Lomax had been the first speaker on the program. Malcolm’s title: “The Ballot or the Bullet.”
America Comes of Middle Age
MURRAY KEMPTON
He Went All the Way
Sumner, Mississippi, September 22, 1955
Mose Wright, making a formation no white man in his county really believed he would dare to make, stood on his tiptoes to the full limit of his sixty-four years and his five feet three inches yesterday, pointed his black, workworn finger straight at the huge and stormy head of J. W. Milam and swore that this was the man who dragged fourteen-year-old Emmett Louis Till out of his cottonfield cabin the night the boy was murdered.
“There he is,” said Mose Wright. He was a black pigmy standing up to a white ox. J. W. Milam leaned forward, crooking a cigaret in a hand that seemed as large as Mose Wright’s whole chest, and his eyes were coals of hatred.
Mose Wright took all their blast straight in his face, and then, for good measure, turned and pointed that still unshaking finger at Roy Bryant, the man he says joined Milam on the night-ride to seize young Till for the crime of whistling suggestively at Bryant’s wife in a store three miles away and three nights before.
“And there’s Mr. Bryant,” said Mose Wright and sat down hard against the chair-back with a lurch which told better than anything else the cost in strength to him of the thing he had done. He was a field Negro who had dared try to send two white men to the gas chamber for murdering a Negro.
He sat in a court where District Attorney Gerald Chatham, who is on his side, steadily addressed him as Uncle Mose and conversed with him in a kind of
pidgin cotton-picker’s dialect, saying “axed” for “asked” as Mose Wright did and talking about the “undertaker man.”
Once Chatham called him “Old Man Mose,” but this was the kindly, contemptuous tolerance of the genteel; after twenty-one minutes of this, Mose Wright was turned over to Defense Counsel Sidney Carlton and now the manner was that of an overseer with a field hand.
Sidney Carlton roared at Mose Wright as though he were the defendant, and every time Carlton raised his voice like the lash of a whip, J. W. Milam would permit himself a cold smile.
And then Mose Wright did the bravest thing a Delta Negro can do; he stopped saying “sir.” Every time Carlton came back to the attack, Mose Wright pushed himself back against his chair and said “That’s right” and the absence of the “sir” was almost like a spit in the eye.
When he had come to the end of the hardest half hour in the hardest life possible for a human being in these United States, Mose Wright’s story was shaken; yet he still clutched its foundations. Against Carlton’s voice and Milam’s eyes and the incredulity of an all-white jury, he sat alone and refused to bow.
