Emmett Till and Bayard Rustin

posted to www.marxmail.org on January 21, 2003

To commemorate Martin Luther King's birthday, PBS-TV aired two exceptional documentaries last night. One dealt with the murder of Emmett Till, the other with civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. For those with access to PBS, I strongly urge you to keep an eye out for repeats. For those without access, I recommend the highly informative websites at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/ and http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2002/brotheroutsider/.

In the summer of 1955 a 14 year old African-American from Chicago went to visit his uncle Moses Wright in the Mississippi delta, where he eked out a living picking cotton. Emmett's mother Mamie Till, who died recently, warned him not to look at white women there and to get off the sidewalk if he saw one approaching.

Born in 1941, Emmett Till was a high-spirited youth with none of the submissive attitudes associated with growing up in the South. But he made a fatal mistake. When in the nearby village of Money, Mississippi to buy a soft drink at Roy Bryant's grocery store, he whistled at the man's wife.

That night Bryant and his hulking brother-in-law J. W. Milam descended on the Wright household and seized Emmett Till at gunpoint. They drove him back to their own place and beat him beyond recognition. They then drove him to the nearby Tallahatchie River, tied a heavy cotton gin fan around his neck with barbed wire, and threw him in the water. But only after firing a bullet into his head--he was still alive at this point.

Perhaps if Till had been a native Mississippian, the case would have not gained the notoriety it did. But his mother was determined to confront the racist system that had taken her son's life. Her first act was to put her son's battered body on display at a local church, where thousands of people witnessed the effects of the sadistic beating. Since Mrs. Till had refused to allow the mortician to clean up the damage, those in the procession were shocked to see one eyeball hanging down the side of his face and a nose battered beyond recognition. A photo of the disfigured youth not only appeared on the front pages of black newspapers in the USA, it was featured prominently on front pages all over the world.

When the killers came to trial, most people did not expect a fair trial since the jury was composed exclusively of white men from the county. Mamie Till and her associates did not even bother to wait for the verdict since they knew it would be a foregone conclusion. When she wrote President Eisenhower a telegram demanding a federal investigation, he did not even reply. But an aroused black population was not ready to accept this state of affairs, even if the murderers could not be brought to justice. Just 100 days later Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus and the rest was history. As the PBS website recounts:

Other local leaders courageously stepped forward after the Till murder. Physician and civil rights leader Dr. T. R. M. Howard of the small, all-black Delta town of Mound Bayou was already known in Mississippi for his activism. Howard, whose life had been repeatedly threatened, had armed bodyguards to protect him and his family. During the trial, Howard extended this protection to the black witnesses and to Emmett's mother, Mamie Till Mobley. After they testified, Howard, Medgar Evers and other NAACP officials helped the black witnesses slip out of town.

After Till's murderers, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, were acquitted, Howard boldly and publicly chastised FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover: "It's getting to be a strange thing that the FBI can never seem to work out who is responsible for the killings of Negroes in the South." In December 1955, after the national black magazine Ebony reported that Dr. Howard was on the Ku Klux Klan's death list and that several others on the list had already been killed, Howard sold most of his property in Mound Bayou, packed up his family and relocated to Chicago.

Momentum for a Movement For Dr. Howard and others, the immediate impact of the acquittal of Till's killers was increased repression in Mississippi. Still, the momentum and mobilization that followed Till's murder fed the next stage of the movement. One hundred days after Emmett's death, a black woman, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery city bus and was arrested for violating Alabama's bus segregation laws. The Women's Democratic Council, under Jo Ann Robinson, called for a citywide bus boycott and asked a young, 26-year-old minister to help.

His name was Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

When I first came around the radical movement, Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) had already become a discredited figure in these circles. Not only was he an outspoken supporter of the Democratic Party, he had refused to condemn the war in Vietnam. He was also the most visible opponent of Black nationalism and had taken part in public debates with Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, urging compromise with the white power structure.

In light of that, the documentary "Brother Outsider" is an enormous achievement. Not only does it put Rustin's evolution into perspective, it helps you to understand that on balance he was one of the most important activists on the American scene during the 20th century, even though constant attempts--including those emanating from his comrades--were made to tarnish his reputation because of his sexual deviancy: Bayard Rustin was out of the closet long before Stonewall.

When Rustin was a freshman at all-black Wilberforce College in Ohio, he organized a strike to protest poor food in the cafeteria and was then expelled. He moved to NYC and enrolled at City College, a hotbed of radicalism at the time. He paid for tuition and expenses through income as a back-up singer to Josh White, a blues singer close to the Communist Party. They performed at Café Society, the legendary Greenwich Village nightclub where Billie Holliday first sang "Strange Fruit" and where radical politics and interracial dating were accepted if not encouraged. (You can hear Rustin singing several songs in a haunting tenor voice on the PBS website, as well debating Malcolm X.)

Eventually Rustin joined the CP but left in disillusionment in 1941 after discovering that the party intended to put civil rights on the back burner as part of its wartime policy of subordinating the class struggle to the struggle against fascism.

In no time at all, Rustin hooked up with A.J. Muste's Ghandian Fellowship of Reconciliation. Although Muste had become an ordained minister, only 5 years or so earlier he had led a revolutionary socialist organization that had fused with the American Trotskyist movement. Muste still retained the mass action perspective from his CIO organizing days. In his post at the F of R, Rustin continued in this tradition even though the emphasis would be on passive resistance rather than armed self-defense.

When Muste discovered that Rustin was not only gay, but openly so, he began to make things difficult for the self-assured African-American. The film includes pointed commentary from David McReynolds, also a disciple of Muste and an out of the closet gay man for many years. When Rustin was busted on a sex offense in Pasadena, McReynolds visited him in jail. He says that Rustin was rueful for having acted stupidly, but never felt ashamed for being a same-sexer. (I am cc'ing David McReynolds on this to ask him a question. Dave, were any of you folks aware of or sympathetic to the Mattachine Society at the time, or was this early gay rights organization seen as somehow disjoined from the rest of the left.)

In 1956 Rustin came to Montgomery and provided crucial advice to Martin Luther King, who was inexperienced in organizing mass actions. Later on King had to disassociate himself from Rustin after enemies of the civil rights movement made a stink about Rustin's sexuality. But to King's credit, he refused to back down in 1963 when the same attempts were made prior to the March on Washington, which was essentially organized by Rustin, under the auspices of the A. Philip Randolph Institute. Randolph was the president of the Sleeping Car Porter's Union, which had called a March on Washington *during* WWII, a move that was condemned by the CP.

It should come as no surprise to discover that Rustin was deeply engaged with the Emmett Till struggle. To tie together the strands of these two notable icons of the civil rights movement, I will conclude with the final paragraphs of an article Rustin wrote in Money, Mississippi not longer after the youth was murdered and Bryant and Milam were let off:

Just then I saw a strange-looking factory on the left and asked [local NAACP leader] Amzie what it was. He explained that it was a cotton oil mill. "They employ mostly Negroes. It's hard work and poor pay," Amzie said. "After the Till murder so many Negroes left this county that they were short sixty hands. I hear they ain't running full yet."

We turned up a small dirt road and onto the highway. Amzie was suddenly very quiet. "What's on your mind?" I asked. "I was thinking about Twotype and Logan," he said. "They used to hang out around here." It developed that they were the two Negro witnesses who disappeared and could not be found until after the Till trial was over. Amzie explained that the sheriff had picked them up and held them in the country jail at Charleston, Mississippi, so they could not testify for the state. This seemed hard to believe. But a few days later in Charleston, an old Negro man said: "Yes, they were here, all right. At night they slept in jail and by day they worked nearby. I was as close to them once or twice as I am to you. But we knew it was best not to get mixed up in that mess. So we kept quiet. God will take care of them and those white folks too. He sure will and in his own good time. We all pays for what we do in this world."

As we drove down the highway and out of the Till county, we passed a large, well-kept graveyard. At one end of it there was a section in very bad condition, separated from the rest by a high iron fence. "That's the Negro section," Amzie remarked, "but I don't get excited about that. The graveyard is the only place where things can be separate... and equal."