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The Emmett Till case is getting a lot of attention lately. Till became one of the first martyrs of the American civil rights movement of the 1950s when he was assassinated by right-wing radical extremists for flirting with a white girl.
It was even 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 of angry southern whites who bombed four schoolgirls in Birmingham a month earlier. Was desegregation the reason JFK was assassinated? Not completely. Not only. Southern white outrage against forced integration with blacks found its most popular place in the form of “White Citizens Councils,” which in turn brought together the most violent extremity of Kennedy’s enemies.
My colleague Paul Trejo from the University of Texas finds a precursor to the JFK assassination in the establishment of the White Citizens Councils (WCC) on Black Monday 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. Pablo says:
“The immediate reaction to Black Monday … was the sudden appearance of the White Citizens Council (WCC) in Mississippi, across the South and North. Robert B. Patterson, World War II soccer star and paratrooper from Indianola, Mississippi, established the first WCC in July 1954. Patterson posted 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 sovereignty and state rights organizations emerged in the South with the same message: It is a tyranny for the federal government to dictate that local schools must be racially integrated. That’s a decision that should only be made at the level of state government. Yet as the WCC progressed, Brady’s tough Black Monday talk would not produce private schools, boycotts, or even a successful politician.
“Although some southern states voted to abolish public schools and even passed laws to establish private schools, these never materialized at the state level. States like Virginia and Louisiana passed laws establishing 100% segregation, in addition to prohibiting schooling. NAACP These laws also got little traction, though they temporarily hampered the growth of the NAACP in those communities.
“In 1955, ten thousand WCC members gathered to hear Senator James O. Eastland speak about the rights of states and the benefits of segregation. However, in Mississippi, on May 7, 1955, the Rev. George E . Lee, a black clergyman, was murdered for advising blacks to vote. On August 28, 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youth, was murdered for whistling at a white woman. Two men were tried, they confessed their guilt and they 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 locating the JFK killers.
