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WORDS OF PROTEST, WORDS OF FREEDOM

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

PREFACE......................................................................................................................................................xiiiACKNOWLEDGMENTS..............................................................................................................................................xviiINTRODUCTION Journey toward Freedom.........................................................................................................................11 "Had she been worth the blood?" THE LYNCHING OF EMMETT TILL, 1955.........................................................................................152 "Godfearing citizens / with Bibles, taunts and stones" THE LITTLE ROCK CRISIS, 1957–1958............................................................353 "The FBI knows who lynched you" THE MURDER OF MACK CHARLES PARKER, 1959...................................................................................434 "Fearless before the waiting throng" THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MEDGAR EVERS...................................................................................515 "Under the leaves of hymnals, the plaster and stone" THE SIXTEENTH STREET BAPTIST CHURCH BOMBING, 15 SEPTEMBER 1963.......................................576 "What we have seen / Has become history, tragedy" THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, 22 NOVEMBER 1963........................................717 "Deep in the Mississippi thicket / I hear the mourning dove" THE SEARCH FOR JAMES CHANEY, ANDREW GOODMAN, AND MICHAEL SCHWERNER, 1964.....................998 "We are not beasts and do not / intend to be beaten" RIOTS, REBELLIONS, AND UPRISINGS, 1964–1971....................................................1219 "Prophets were ambushed as they spoke" THE ASSASSINATION OF MALCOLM X, 21 FEBRUARY 1965...................................................................15510 "In the panic of hooves, bull whips and gas" SELMA-TO-MONTGOMERY VOTING RIGHTS MARCH, 1965...............................................................17311 "Set afire by the cry of / BLACK POWER" THE BIRTH AND LEGACY OF THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY..................................................................19312 "America, self-destructive, self-betrayed" THE ASSASSINATION OF MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., 4 APRIL 1968.....................................................21513 "A gun / Struck, as we slept, a caring public man" THE ASSASSINATION OF ROBERT F. KENNEDY, 5 JUNE 1968...................................................25314 "Mighty mountains loom before me and I won't stop now" STRUGGLE, SURVIVAL, AND SUBVERSION DURING THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA....................................273SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................................317CONTRIBUTORS.................................................................................................................................................327ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF COPYRIGHT..................................................................................................................................349INDEX OF AUTHORS AND POEM TITLES.............................................................................................................................355

Chapter One

Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago, was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, during the summer of 1955 when he made the mistake of flirting with Carolyn Bryant, a married white woman. Roy Bryant, Carolyn's husband, and J. W. Milam, her brother-in-law, later abducted Till at gunpoint, tortured and shot him, and dumped his body into the Tallahatchie River. Although the men were charged with murder, both were acquitted by an all-white male jury in Sumner, Mississippi. The two men later profited from the murder by confessing their crimes for pay to Look magazine. Till's murder, which predates Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, was for many the event that led to their initiation into the freedom movement.

Elegies written for Emmett Till approach his murder and memory from a variety of perspectives, but they all share a sense of remorse and anger, albeit at times implicit or contained. Rhoda Gaye Ascher's "Remembrance," published in 1969 in Freedomways, is an excellent example. While the poem's tone is decidedly somber, the third stanza reveals the speaker's frustration, especially at the perceived indifference of the white community. Ascher's poem emphasizes the lack of respect many white Mississippians held for Negro life, even the life of a murdered teenage boy.

Similarly Gwendolyn Brooks conveys her disgust of the murder and subsequent trial in a seemingly restrained, indirect manner in "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon." Brooks accomplishes this feat by focusing on the interior and domestic life of Carolyn Bryant instead of the death of Emmett Till. Furthermore the violence that occurs in the poem is initiated by Roy Bryant, one of the men responsible for Till's death, but is directed at his wife and children instead of Till.

Nicolás Guillén, the celebrated Cuban poet who in 1961 was named the National Poet of his country, wrote "Elegy for Emmett Till" in 1956, the year following the murder. Guillén directs his frustrations directly at the state of Mississippi and its citizens.

The Mississippians Guillén admonishes are the subject of satirical denial in John Beecher's "The Better Sort of People." Beecher, a distant nephew of the author and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, chooses for his narrator an educated, cultured citizen of the Magnolia State who is "against the kind of thing / the ignorant rednecks do" and insists "it was unnecessary / to beat that little Negro boy to death" (lines 19–22). The speaker represents "the better sort of people" of white Mississippi who disapprove of Till's fate at the hands of the lesser sort of murderous white Mississippians.

However, for many, there was little or no distinction between the two classes of Mississippians explored in Beecher's poem. Langston Hughes, for example, makes clear in "Mississippi—1955" that the entire state was viewed as a land of sorrow, pain, blood, and above all else, "terror" (6). Likewise Eve Merriam's blues-influenced poem "Money, Mississippi" describes the town and its inhabitants in a succession of refrains as dirty, bloody, rotten, filthy, and evil (8, 16, 24, 32, 40). Aimé Césaire's "On the State of the Union" does not dichotomize white Mississippians. His poem makes no behavioral or socioeconomic distinctions, but Césaire does employ a similar brand of condemnation.

Remembrance

Broken on the hard sea the dead waves float Downstream. The night cries are gone now. The Moon, Returned from her hiding, lights the faceless rafts Deserted by yesterday's children.

The water lives; its foams combine, tickling The childish face of death no chains can hold Like Grandpa's lather—now, the old days, son, were different— Downstream, delta lips are red, no future here.

The other boy will...