The Emmett Till case has been getting a lot of attention lately. Till became one of the first martyrs of the 1950s civil rights movement in the United States when he was assassinated by radical right-wing extremists for flirting with a white girl.
Until it was one of dozens. For twenty years, beginning in the 1950s, federally mandated integration brought violence against both blacks and whites. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, seven Americans were killed in 1963 by extremists who opposed racial integration.
We added 3 more victims to the SPLC list.
John F Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Dallas police officer JD Tippet died in the same terror by angry southern whites who bombed four schoolgirls in Birmingham a month earlier. Was desegregation the reason JFK was assassinated? Not completely. Not by himself. Southern white outrage against forced integration with blacks found its most popular outlet in the form of “White Citizens’ Councils,” which in turn brought together the most violent extremists of Kennedy’s enemies.
My University of Texas colleague Paul Trejo finds a precursor to the JFK assassination in the establishment of the White Citizens Councils (WCC) on Black Monday in 1954. Most of us know Black Monday as a stock market crash, but in the American South, Black Monday is when Earl Warren delivered the milestone brown v. board of education decision, the famous decision to separate is NOT the same in terms of schools. Paul says,
“The immediate reaction to Black Monday…was the sudden appearance of the White Citizens Council (WCC) in Mississippi, throughout the South and in the North. Robert B. Patterson, football star and World War II paratrooper from Indianola, Mississippi established the first WCC in July 1954. Patterson published that the NAACP was “the enemy” and vowed to fight stubbornly against anyone who supported the NAACP in any way.
“In addition to the WCC, state rights and state sovereignty organizations have sprung up in the South with the same message: It is tyranny for the federal government to dictate that local schools must be racially integrated. That is a decision that should only be made at the state level of government.” As the WCC went, however, tough talk of Brady’s Black Monday would not produce private schools, boycotts, or even a successful politician.
“Although some southern states voted to abolish public schools and even passed laws establishing private schools, this never materialized at the state level. States like Virginia and Louisiana passed laws establishing 100% segregation, as well as banning the NAACP. These laws, too, gained little traction, although they temporarily blocked the growth of the NAACP in those communities.
“In 1955, ten thousand members of the WCC gathered to hear Senator James O. Eastland speak on states’ rights and the benefits of segregation. Yet in Mississippi, on May 7, 1955, Reverend George E . Lee, a black clergyman, was murdered for advising blacks to vote. On August 28, 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy, was murdered for whistling at a white woman. Two men stood trial, confessed to his guilty and were acquitted”.
We hope that Emmett Till finds justice in 2018, sixty-three years after his death. We believe that accepting the Emmett Till case is essential to finally understanding and identifying JFK’s assassins.
