they could turn the corner on civil rights issues. Despite the violence, they were hopeful.
“Were you ever concerned about the safety of your family there in Montgomery?” I asked Nelson.
“Every day.”
He continued by explaining that he was often concerned about his own safety and the safety of his family and friends, but it was also a way of life. There was a lot of racial tension all over the South at the time, and blacks were often targets of violence. The Ku Klux Klan, white segregationists, and other hate groups were frequent terrorizers. Some of the violence was random, but much of it was organized. Cross burnings and bombings throughout the South were common. Moreover, Nelson said they happened more often than people realize, because they weren’t always reported in the news or to law enforcement, and that blacks in Montgomery often became aware of incidents of violence because the information was received through a network of black churches throughout the South.
Those type of things happened all the time. This was terrorism before the mainstream media began using the word “terrorism,” and it was always directed at black people. We were the victims of their ire against desegregating the South.
1 Del Quentin Wilber, “Aspiring Agents Learn from Mistakes of FBI ‘Shameful’ Investigation of Martin Luther King Jr.,” Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2016.
2 Clayborne Carson, Editor, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Warner Books, 2001), 80.
3: America Lynched
Nelson’s recollection of lynchings and violence against African Americans during the days of Jim Crow is still vivid in his mind. “You could know a person one day and then the next, they were gone. Later, you would hear that they were beaten up, kidnapped, or even killed by the Klan,” Nelson said. When Nelson was a young man, racially motivated assaults and killings of black people were a way of life that all African Americans were keenly aware of.
The first encounter Nelson remembers having with racist Jim Crow policies was in Pensacola, Florida, in the Crescent Department Store when he was a young child. Inside the department store were designated public water fountains, one that was labeled “Whites Only” and another that was labeled “Colored Only.” Nelson said that he couldn’t read well when he was a little boy, and so he ran over to the water fountain that was designated for whites only to get some water, because he was thirsty. His mother ran up behind him, slapped him hard, and yelled, “Don’t you ever do that again, do you hear me?”
Nelson didn’t understand why his mother was so infuriated with him. He said, “She was so angry she was turning blue in the face.” As he got older and began to understand the world he was living in, Nelson saw that his mother was trying to keep him out of danger. In those years, something as innocent as that could have gotten a person of color killed in the Deep South.
Not infrequently, black people in the South were killed for the most irrational reasons, and sometimes for no reason at all. Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago who traveled south to visit relatives. On August 28, 1955, he was kidnapped and murdered in Money, Mississippi. The story behind the lynching of Emmett Till is still one of the most recognized and talked about in American history. It was a grotesque crime, and the level of brutality inflicted upon the young teenager helped galvanize the civil rights movement, which was just beginning to gather steam.
“I first learned about Emmett Till when I was in the barbershop one day and one of my customers was talking about the incident. He said that a little boy had been lynched down in Mississippi. A short time later, black and white people all over the country were in an uproar about what happened,” Nelson said.
The murder of Emmett Till was an act of cruel senseless violence, and there were cries from many people across the country for the FBI to step in and take control of the case. But those requests landed on deaf ears. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover made the following statement:
There has been no allegation made that the victim has been subjected to the deprivation of any right or privilege which is secured and protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States.3
Even among many white people, the director’s comments created an uproar, leading to even more support for the civil rights movement. Lynching was an act of terrorism used by people who wanted to instill fear in others. It was a tool to punish and silence those who fought for or sympathized with black Americans and the civil rights movement. The idea that a black boy’s right to live was not secured by the Constitution of the United States was an affront to both common decency and common sense.
In December 2016, President Barack Obama signed the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Reauthorization Act of 2016, which provided for the reopening of unsolved civil rights cases. According to the White House, this new law authorized the Department of Justice and the FBI to support the “full accounting of all victims whose deaths or disappearances were the result of racially motivated crimes” and “hold accountable under federal and state law individuals who were perpetrators of, or accomplices in, unsolved civil rights murders and disappearances.”4
President Obama was applauded by civil rights lawyers and activists alike for his support of and dedication to the bill. The new law was an expansion of a previously signed law of the same name, which was passed in 2007 by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush, a surprise to some because of his Southern roots.
To better understand what led to Emmett Till’s murder, the continuing violence against blacks by whites, and the need to help reconcile this deep division in society, it’s important to look at the historical context.
At the time of Emmett Till’s murder, there was a very strict segregation code in the South, which white Southerners enforced to keep blacks, then called “negroes” or “darkies,” in their place. Under these codes, white women were to be kept away from any interaction with black men. Black men were believed to have a sexual potency and lust, and it was widely feared that any social contact at all would lead to a sullying of the purity of white women. Any violation of this code was met with the threat of severe retaliation, so many black people lived highly segregated, fearful lives, with some feeling helpless to do anything to protest or violate this strict code.
It was in this context that fourteen-year-old Emmett Till came from Chicago to stay with a great uncle in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. In Chicago, he had attended a segregated elementary school, but the world was already changing up north with the Supreme Court’s 1954 verdict in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared that segregated education for blacks was inherently unequal and therefore illegal.5 The atmosphere in Chicago, which had seen a huge influx of black workers from the South during the Great Migration, was more respectful to African Americans than that of Southern states.
As a result, Emmett was not prepared for the degree of segregation he encountered when he arrived in Mississippi. Moreover, Emmett had a propensity for pulling pranks, and he enjoyed pushing against some of the barriers of segregation when he was home in Chicago. In an interview with Smithsonian Magazine, his cousin Simeon Wright recalled that Emmett loved to tell and listen to jokes. In school, he sometimes pulled the fire alarm to get out of class, thinking that was funny. “He really had no sense of danger.”6
As a result, he disregarded the warnings of his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, to take care in the South because of his race.7 She had grown up in the rural South and, like Nelson’s mother, she was aware of the risks there, particularly for black men. She told him to “be very careful” and to even “humble himself to the extent of getting down on his knees.”8 But soon after his arrival, Emmett nonetheless was, in effect, on a collision course with the practices of white segregationists, which resulted in his death.
