1955 – A watershed?
In the long, unhappy and unsatisfactory story of attempts to rid America of institutionalised racial discrimination, for me two events in 1955, 100 days apart, seem something of a turning point. Perhaps that is too positive a statement, as many of the same problems are still evident sixty five years later. However, in very different ways, Emmett Till and Rosa Parks both had a major impact, more than my previously superficial reading had revealed. African Americans faced institutionalised racism, violence and murder in the South, and still do today, (I still find it hard to use the word ‘Blacks’, even though that is now both allowed and acceptable). The last recorded lynching took place in 1955, although incidents in 1998 and 2014 might well have been described that way. As a 2019 documentary stated in its title, lynching is ‘Always in Season’.
Emmett Till was a 14 year old, living in Chicago. He went to visit some relatives in Mississippi in the summer of 1955. Once there it was alleged he had confronted a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in a small grocery store, in a way that violated the norms of Mississippi culture, verbally abusing her. In the days after this interaction, Bryant’s husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam brutally murdered young Emmett Till. They beat and mutilated him before shooting him in the head and sinking his body in a local river. When the body was found, his mother was asked to identify the remains, and she decided she wanted to “let the people see what I have seen”. [i] Emmett Till’s body was displayed in an open casket in Chicago. A little later, Jet, a weekly magazine for the African American community, published an image showing his body in the coffin. That image is credited with invoking a particularly crucial response in the civil rights movement in displaying in vivid detail the violence that was being directed at black people.
It wasn’t just the image. In a column for The Atlantic, Vann R. Newkirk wrote: “The trial of his killers became a pageant illuminating the tyranny of white supremacy.” [ii] “At the trial the most explosive testimony, which must have influenced the local white public’s perception of the motive for Till’s murder, were the incendiary words of Carolyn Bryant, who’d been working in the store that night. On the stand, she had asserted that Till had whistled at her, and then grabbed her and verbally threatened her. She said that while she was unable to utter the “unprintable” word he had used (in the words of one of the defense lawyers), ‘he said [he had] – done something – with white women before.’ Then she added, ‘I was just scared to death.’”
The state of Mississippi tried the two defendants, but they were acquitted by an all-white jury. In a mockery of what had happened, just four months after their irreversible acquittal, Milam and Bryant admitted their guilt to Look magazine, receiving a fee of some $3,000 for their story. Even before this was revealed, the murder of Till, the horrified emotional response to his mother’s decision to have an open-casket funeral, and the acquittal of the two men had already mobilized the African American community across America. Emmett Till’s open coffin became a key symbol in fighting against racist oppression for young black activists.
Seventy years later, Carolyn Bryant was reported as saying that she had fabricated the most sensational part of her story in 1955. Carolyn Bryant Donham (she would divorce, then marry twice more) remains a mystery woman. Said to be an attractive mother of two young boys, she had spent approximately one minute alone with Till before, in view of others, the alleged whistling had occurred. That part of the events in 1955 remains unclear. He may not have whistled; he was said to have a lisp. Carolyn then dropped out of sight, never speaking to the media about the incident. There have been many books written about Emmett Till’s murder, but when Timothy Tyson, a Duke University senior research scholar, published The Blood of Emmett Till in 2017, he revealed Carolyn Bryant, back in 2007 and by then 72 years old, had confessed she had fabricated the most sensational part of her testimony. “That part’s not true,” she told Tyson, referring to her claim Till had made verbal and physical advances on her. As for the rest of what happened in the country store, she said she couldn’t remember. She has said nothing since: now in her 80s, her current location has been kept secret by her family.
Emmett Till’s murder continues to be a touchstone for debates over racial issues. In the same year Dyson’s book appeared, American artist Dana Schutz ‘s painting, Open Casket, was put on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the museum’s 2017 biennial exhibition. Schutz explained she had decided to paint the mutilated face of Emmett Till to convey the universal horror of the murder and acknowledge the country’s lingering racism. Perhaps not surprisingly, her painting drew criticisms and protests on the grounds the painting by a white artist represented the exploitation of an excruciating and defining moment in African American history. After the biennial’s opening, a small group of protesters led by African American artist Parker Bright stood in front of the painting to partially block it from view.
Her critics argued that Schutz didn’t have the right to speak for black people as a whole, or for Emmett Till’s family, nor should she be profiting from a painting of a dead black body. Schutz claimed the painting was not for sale, and never would be. “I did not know if I could make this painting, ethically or emotionally. I don’t know what it is like to be black in America. But I do know what it is like to be a mother. Emmett was Mamie Till’s only son. I thought about the possibility of painting it only after listening to interviews with her. In her sorrow and rage she wanted her son’s death not just to be her pain but America’s pain.” Biennial curators added:
“The 2017 Whitney Biennial brings to light many facets of the human experience, including conditions that are painful or difficult to confront such as violence, racism, and death. Many artists in the exhibition push in on these issues, seeking empathetic connections in an especially divisive time. Dana Schutz’s painting, Open Casket (2016), is an unsettling image that speaks to the long-standing violence that has been inflicted upon African Americans. For many African Americans in particular, this image has tremendous emotional resonance. By exhibiting the painting, we wanted to acknowledge the importance of this extremely consequential and solemn image in American and African American history and the history of race relations in this country. As curators of this exhibition we believe in providing a museum platform for artists to explore these critical issues.” [iii]
Dana Schutz has since made it clear the controversy has had a major impact on her art practice.
Back in 1955, Emmett Till’s murder had another significant outcome. One hundred days after Emmett Till’s murder, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery. She told Till’s mother that her decision to stay in her seat was guided by the image she still vividly recalled of Till’s brutalized body. Rosa Park’s action was carefully considered, and it wasn’t the first. Early in 1955, a 15-year-old high school student, Claudette Colvin, had refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested. On December 1st, Parks rejected a bus driver’s order to relinquish her seat in the ‘colored section’ to a white passenger, as the whites-only section was filled. At the time, Parks was working as a seamstress at a local department store. She was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and had recently attended a training course for activists on workers’ rights and racial equality. She claimed she acted as a private citizen “tired of giving in”. Despite Claudette Colvin actions before, the NAACP believed Rosa Parks was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience. Her prominence in the local community and willingness to be a controversial figure inspired the black community to boycott the Montgomery buses for over a year, the first major direct action campaign in the post-war civil rights movement. She is, without doubt, one of the more famous figures from that time.
If Emmett Till and Rosa Parks were important in addressing institutional barriers in the law and public transport, overall the history of the civil rights movement in America over the past 65 years continues to be one of slow progress marred by frequent reversals. Another of the battlegrounds in 1955 was education. The year before Emmett Till and Rosa Parks became emblems of racial discrimination, the U.S. Supreme Court had issued its historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling. [iv] Based on the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, the decision declared all laws establishing segregated schools to be unconstitutional, and called for the desegregation of all schools in the country. In May 1954, the Court’s unanimous (9–0) decision stated that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal”. However important, the ruling was largely symbolic, failing to nominate how to end racial segregation in schools.
In 1955 the Supreme Court did turn to examine arguments about the task of desegregation. Their decision, known as Brown II, delegated the task of carrying out school desegregation to district courts with orders that desegregation occur “with all deliberate speed”. [v] The term “all deliberate speed” was seen as too ambiguous to ensure reasonable haste and many Southern states and school districts interpreted Brown II as legal justification for resisting, delaying, and avoiding significant integration for several years by closing down school systems, using state money to finance segregated ‘private’ schools, and instituting token integration where a few carefully selected black children were admitted to former white-only schools.
After the decision, the NAACP attempted to register black students in previously all-white schools in cities throughout the South. In Little Rock, Arkansas, the school board agreed to comply with the high court’s ruling. Virgil Blossom, the Superintendent of Schools, submitted a plan of gradual integration to the school board in May 1955, which the board unanimously approved. The plan was to be implemented at the beginning of the new school year. The NAACP registered nine black students to attend the previously all-white Little Rock Central High, on the basis of excellent grades and attendance. As the year began on September 4, the Arkansas National Guard was called in to “preserve the peace”. What a euphemism! Originally, on orders of the governor, they were to prevent the black students from entering school on the basis of a claim of “imminent danger of tumult, riot and breach of peace”. However, President Eisenhower issued an Executive Order which federalised the Arkansas National Guard and he ordered them to support the integration, ensuring they protected the African American students.
One step forward, but it took ten years before another came with busing. The NAACP brought a case to court on behalf of six-year-old James Swann and nine other families. In 1965, Judge Craven decided Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education in favor Charlotte-Mecklenburg on the grounds there was no requirement in the Constitution to act purposely to increase racial mixing. Following a 1968 Supreme Court ruling that ‘freedom of choice’ was insufficient to overcome racial segregation in schools, the Swann case was filed again, before Judge James McMillan. Previously a public opponent of busing, he said the facts outweighed his feelings, and busing was the only way to fulfill the constitutional requirement of desegregation.
Experts from Rhode Island College were brought in to review the effectiveness of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s plan. All through 1969, McMillan repeatedly ordered the board to revise their plan. They eventually submitted a proposal rezoning neighborhoods into pie-shaped wedges, where blacks living in the center of Charlotte would be divided up and distributed to outlying, formerly white high schools. This would achieve a black population of 2-36% in all ten of the high schools. Objections continued, and the Court rejected the Board’s plan in favor of another plan required busing of an additional 300 black students, to achieve even greater integration.
After appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals the case was referred to the Supreme Court. [vi] The Court had been asked to begin their Fall term early to hear the case, but decided to wait until the first day of their new term, which meant it was unlikely it would be decided before the beginning of the spring term of 1971. African American lawyer and NAACP advocate Julius Chambers argued the case, given he had detailed knowledge of the facts involved. He had been involved from the beginning of hearings in 1964: his involvement was to see his car, his home and his offices bombed on separate occasions. The final opinion was 9-0 supporting McMillan’s order. This resolution had taken 7 years from the first hearing, and 17 years from Brown v. Board of Education Topeka. It led to the widespread use of busing to end segregation. As the first, Charlotte became known across the nation as the “city that made desegregation work.”
What is a watershed? In geography, a watershed is an area of land that drains all the rainfall and occasional small streams into a common outlet, eventually consolidating as a river. Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, the desegregation of school, the Little Rock Nine, busing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, each of these have been important moments in the fight for racial equality, each contributing to the determination to demolish institutionalised racial practices. Many of the changes they initiated have been largely successful, but not all of them. When it comes to education, while school segregation declined rapidly up to early 1970s, it appears to have increased since 1990.
If 1955 was a watershed year, we are still stuck at the top of the mountain, waiting for the emerging trickles of change to coalesce and form a sustainable, sparkling, life-affirming river to take us all, every one of us, into a better, equal and inclusive future.
[i] To be found in The American Expeience: https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-707wm14m9k
[ii] https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/02/how-the-blood-of-emmett-till-still-stains-america-today/516891/
[iii] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2017/03/23/dana-schutz-responds-to-outcry-over-her-controversial-emmett-till-painting/
[iv] Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 347 U.S. 483
[v] Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U.S. 294
[vi] Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971)
