New Book Announcement
Who Killed Emmett Till?
By Susan Klopfer
A Blogged Book Dedicated To Eight Mississippi Delta Civil Rights Martyrs -- Joe Pullen, Rev. George Lee, Lamar Smith, Emmett Till, Birdia Keglar, Adlena Hamlett, Jo Etha Collier and Cleveland McDowell.
And Written For My Granddaughter, Grace Klopfer
Smashwords Edition 1.0, Jan. 1, 2010
Editor: Jay Mattsson
Copyright © Susan Orr Klopfer, 2010. All rights reserved, including electronic. Legal Notices: While all attempts have been made to verify information provided in this book, the Author assumes no responsibility for errors, omissions, or contrary interpretation of the subject matter herein. Any perceived slights of specific people or organizations are unintentional.
What others are saying about Susan Klopfer’s civil rights books
"Susan Klopfer, the leading authority on the historiy of the Mississippi civil rights movement ... Thank God for enterprising historians like Susan Klopfer who have the courage to state the obvious." Alan Bean, Ph.D., Friends of Justice
"An amazing ... guide to Mississippi's unsolved civil rights murders." Tom Head, Mississippi activist and About.com Guide to Civil Liberties
"... an absorbing and substantial work that speaks in many provocative ways ..." Lois Brown, director of the Weissman Center for Leadership and Liberal Arts, Mount Holyoke College
“Susan Klopfer is determined to tell the truth about Mississippi and about America.” Ben Greenberg, poet, essayist and activist and author of the blog Hungry Blues
Other books by Susan Klopfer
Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited
The Emmett Till Book How Branson Got Started
301 Ways to Get Ahead (with Fred Klopfer)
At Ease With FoxPro
Abort! Retry! Fail!
The DOS Answer Book
Internet Success with Fred (with Fred Klopfer)
Who Killed Emmett Till? (Blog Book)
Learn more about Susan Klopfer at smashwords.com/profile/view/sklopfer
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Prologue
“Those who doubted the [Mississippi] Delta could ever be cleared, tamed, and farmed efficiently failed to take into account the determination, rapacity, and cruelty that humans could exhibit if the proper incentives were in place.”
James C. Cobb
The Most Southern Place On Earth
IN THE HOT SUMMER before the cold winter in which our nation entered the second world war to end all wars, two boys were born two weeks apart; one in Illinois and the other in Mississippi.They would never meet, yet both were murdered at different times in their lives in and near the cotton ginning town of Drew in Sunflower County, the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Each would have their place in this country’s civil rights movement.
Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till of Chicago was kidnapped one early August morning in the summer of 1955 while visiting Mississippi relatives in a small cotton hamlet known as Money, a tiny community spread out on a patch of dirt under ancient oaks with several homes, a few businesses and a red brick church house with a humble graveyard near it.
Accused of harassing a white store-owner’s wife, Till was kidnapped and taken to a plantation owner’s tool shed at the edge of Drew where he was tortured and shot to death. His body was anchored to a gin fan and thrown into the Tallahatchie River.
The sight of Till's brutalized body in an open pine box casket and shown to thousands of mourners in Chicago, after being returned from the Delta, pushed many who had been content to stay on the civil rights sidelines directly into the fight. His body showed the world the racial problems belonging to the United States, and gave a new voice for victims of racial injustice.
Among those moved to action was civil rights activist Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Alabama, who at the age of 42 refused to obey a city bus driver’s order that she give up a forward seat to make room for a white passenger.
Her action came twelve weeks after an all-white Mississippi jury, after sixty-seven minutes of deliberation, acquitted J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant of the murder of Emmett Till. Parks had been planning her action of civil disobedience and the right time had come.
FORTY-TWO YEARS LATER Cleveland McDowell of Drew, a life-long Mississippi attorney and a minister, whose career was unquestionably defined by Till’s brutal murder, was shot to death in his home.
As a foot soldier in the modern civil rights movement, sparked by the death of Till, McDowell became a friend to hosts of civil rights leaders including Rev. Martin Luther King, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Fannie Lou Hamer and Medgar Evers.
In 1963, McDowell was the first black student admitted to the University of Mississippi law school, following in the footsteps of his mentor, James Meredith, and McDowell was only fifty-six years old when he died.
All of his professional life, McDowell secretly tracked details of race-based murders, including Till’s lynching, while keeping in touch with the deceased boy’s mother in Chicago.
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Introduction
A river is a living soul that flows along, continually picking up and dropping off tiny pieces of rock and dirt from its bed throughout its length. Where the river slows, more are dropped than picked up and this becomes a place of alluvial soil or a flood plain. Such regions are the stuff of agricultural wealth -- at least for the land owners who make their riches from healthy crops and usually the physical labor of others.
Nearly 18,000 years ago a continental glacier covered North America. As the frozen waters melted, the Mississippi River and its tributaries carved valleys and created flood plains giving birth to what is technically the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, an agricultural flood plain so filled with rich alluvial soil that you can smell the money of wealthy planters in the morning mist.
But as evening comes and there is dampness in the air and when cotton is at its peak, if you take another deep breath, there is a smell that comes from just below the top soil and it is an unsettling scent for those who know the region’s history of enslavement and inhumanity. It fills one’s nostrils as if cruelty has no trouble finding a direct pathway to the brain. Some who have spent time in the Delta and who know its stories, even say they have seen occasional ghosts of martyrs rising from the rich dirt’s faint mist.
The Mississippi Delta is not a place I would have picked to live and if you had asked me a few years ago what I knew about the region, it would have been a puzzle since I knew nothing of its history or culture -- I’d never even heard of the Delta Blues.
My husband was hired by a private group to be the mental health director for inmates in Mississippi’s state-run prisons, and so our lives took on a new dimension as we made a small, red-brick house on the grounds of Parchman Penitentiary our new Sunflower County home, in the heart of the Delta.
Eventually, I would enjoying smelling the richness of the Delta’s alluvial soil and appreciate the redirection our life had taken, of where we had been dropped, so to speak. But not the afternoon of my arrival.
The air conditioning was broken and the house had not been cleaned by maintenance crews. There were cobwebs in every corner, dirt on the floor and it was at least 100 degrees that late afternoon in the shade.
I was madder than hell when I arrived because the car broke down in Oklahoma, putting our three cats and myself into a dilemma. Fred had been living in Jackson, the state capitol, for a month and could only help problem solve by telephone as we drove to Mississippi from Nevada.
One thing I learned following this self-serving fit of anger, was that prisoners don’t ever have air conditioning at Parchman, except in the hospital unit. All of the historic brick and antebellum buildings were replaced years ago by metal construction and the prisoners were living in what amounted to bake ovens. They were living in hell.
Summer left and on cooler fall mornings, I watched out the front window of our new home through the leaves of the ancient pecan trees as several prisoners at a time trotted rescue and misfit horses into the cotton fields. They earned this privilege, working with a unique horse care program, and I wondered how much it would hurt to enjoy and then relinquish such freedom when evening came.
ONE YEAR BEFORE arriving in the Delta, the state’s department of archives and history, upon court order, made its second release of an online full text version of the state’s secret Sovereignty Commission records. The commission operated as a private spy agency from 1956 to 1972 within the state government, with a mission to investigate and halt all integration attempts. The commission’s second goal was to make Mississippi look good to the world, despite the frequent beatings and murders of its black citizens and outsiders who came into the state, trying to bring change.
The year we moved into Mississippi, the FBI was starting to re-examine the murder of Emmett Till and would exhume his body the following summer.
Fred came from a liberal, big-city family and could recall hearing his parents talk about Till when he was a child growing up in Oregon. Raised in a small eastern Oregon town, in a more conservative family, I had never heard the story.
But even Fred did not recognize that we were living in the epicenter of the Land of Emmett Till.
The story of this young man murdered in a small, nearby town began to resurface when his body was exhumed and examined in June of 2005 by the Cook County medical examiner’s office. While eating catfish and greens in Drew’s Main Street restaurant, we listened in as some Delta people, black and white, talked quietly about what was happening.
Who would not be interested in this story? Soon, I was spending more and more hours in the restaurant listening and then driving around the Delta, trying to piece together the stories I was gathering. Many older black people quickly warmed to my questions and shared their secrets of relatives and others who were brutalized and sometimes killed over the years.
And as they told their stories, it was as though these crimes had just taken place. Most white people, on the other hand, didn’t seem to want to share what they knew unless they were actively involved (and then, they did). Or they simply didn’t know the history.
Mississippi’s William Faulkner once wrote “The past is never dead, in fact, it’s not even past.”
And in true Faulknerian spirit, the people who wanted to talk to me were soon sharing their stories and some had even kept lists passed through their families of people who had “disappeared.” Others told stories of their own involvement in trying to bring change.
I also spent time looking through yellowed files in small town libraries, museums and newspaper offices seeking records of any kind to expand my knowledge; some records were so delicate and uncared for, they crumbled in my hands and I had to quickly put them down so they would not be ruined.
But the best history came directly from the people who talked to me -- men and women willing to share what they experienced or had heard about during some of the worst years of Mississippi’s civil rights. and civil wrongs.
Who Killed Emmett Till?
Mississippi’s earliest history, when kidnapped and enslaved African Americans were brought into the Delta, forced to clear swamps, and plant and harvest cotton under the vilest conditions, is where Emmett Till’s story has its roots.
In 1975 Prof. James Loewen tried to help his students go to these roots for understanding the Till story and other history when he co-wrote the first revisionist state history textbook in America, winning the Lillian Smith Award for “best nonfiction about the South.”
But Loewen had to sue the state to make Mississippi: Conflict and Change even available to public schools. We can hope that today’s Mississippi historical gatekeepers won’t let this happen again.
From Loewen and others, there appear to be three major themes surrounding Mississippi’s civil rights history. First, few of Mississippi’s thousands of murders can be seen as isolated events, including the slaying of Till. These atrocities fit into a pattern reflective of the region’s brutal society formed even before statehood.
Secondly, there were powerful forces outside of Mississippi contributing money and other resources to keep the evil flowing, from the people who had always profited from enslavement in one way or another.
More than three fourths of the cotton consumed by British mills during antebellum years, for instance, came from the American South via New England mills and NewYork businesses that marketed and shipped the cotton overseas.
Northern banking interests supported the slave trade. Slave ships built and outfitted in New England sailed to Africa right up to the Civil War. Twelve million Africans would be shipped to the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries; an estimated 645,000 enslaved were brought to what is now the United States.
Interestingly, Mississippi state records show most money collected and spent by Mississippians to fund and sustain the fight against the 1964 Civil Rights Act and to develop Mississippi’s private, segregated academies, came outside of Mississippi -- from northern business concerns and moved through a northern bank. Significant help, for instance, came from a famous Massachusetts publisher.
Finally, some of the people involved in bringing change to their state have simply been forgotten or still not discovered by historians. Some of the forgotten were gay, their stories shoved into the closet.
Cleve McDowell, Jo Etha Collier, Birdia Keglar and Adlena Hamlett, Lamar Smith, Rev. George Lee and Joe Pullen, and so many others unnamed, have earned a well-deserved place in history. Their stories, in addition to the more popular story of Emmett Till, should not be lost.
Why study Mississippi’s civil rights history? With the increased racism and discrimination often displayed today following the election of this country’s first black president, we would all be well served to watch closely as Mississippi transcends from a state denying some of the worst mental and physical atrocities against African Americans in this nation, to a state accepting its history and seeking clues that explain the functions of racism and discrimination.
We should all take this journey alongside Mississippi.
The South was not Professor James Silver’s native land but he had lived in Mississippi for 28 years and believed that Mississippians would find in time they cannot set the clock back. He also believed that Mississippians were like most other Americans, except they had been victimized by the “terrible toll exacted by their closed society.” In a sense, the insurrection at the University of Mississippi in 1962 where Silver taught, freed this author of Mississippi: A Closed Society, to say and write what he knew must be said to help bring change to the state.
While many of Mississippi’s current state legislators appear hesitant for the state’s history books to change, there are others in Mississippi today who like Silver back in 1964 believe the time for change is now.
Mississippi’s new history in the classroom program is the outgrowth of a law passed in 2006 by the Legislature and statewide implementation is planned for the 2010-2011 school year, following an unsuccessful legislative effort to eliminate the plan in 2009.
It will be an interesting journey to follow and from which to learn.
Susan Klopfer
This book was first written as a blog. Hence, all chapters are “posts” which have been put into reverse order so that the book reads in chronological order.
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