Sean’s Blog

Today we studied the history of Emmit Till, a Black teenager in the ‘50s who supposedly flirted with a White woman, a crime serious enough at the time that he was murdered for it a few days later. We visited the store where the incident happened and saw the house one of the murderers lived in until recently. We also visited a 70 year old White plantation owner. We got to hear him speak on the farming industry, catfish, and the civil rights movement from his perspective.

For those of you who don’t know. Emmitt “Bobo” Till was a Black teenager from Chicago who was visiting family in Mississippi for the first time in 1955. The details of the incident are really only known to the participants, but the common story is that he was hanging out in front of the general store in Money, Mississippi with a group of a dozen or so other Black teenagers, bragging about having hooked up with some White girls back home in Chicago. His friends dared him to go try to hook up with the woman who ran the store. Not realizing the depth of racism in the Delta, Till took them up on the dare. When the story got back to the woman’s husband a few days later, he and his brother-in-law drove out to the house Till was staying at late at night, took him out to the river, beat him, shot him, and unsuccessfully tried to sink his body. A few days later his body was found. Returned to Chicago, Till’s mother put the body on display as a protest against lynching. Following the funeral, when the murderers were put on trial, it became a major national new story. Despite the media attention, the murderers were acquitted by an all White, male jury who were obviously sympathetic to the murderers. Following the acquittal, the murderers confessed everything in a paid interview. It became a catalysing moment for the civil rights movement in Mississippi. Still, the murderers never paid for their crime. People my age who grew up here, Black and White, remember going to the store run by one of the murderers for candy and ice cream. Though the murderers are both dead now, the wife of the brother-in-law still lives here. We drove by her house.

After studying this story with the kids, we drove out to visit a White plantation owner, Mr. Arant, who just happened to be about the same age as Emmitt Till’s murderers. The kids, however, showed virtually no prejudice against him and were truly earnest in wanting to understand how he saw things. To his credit, even though he was obviously loyal to the White race, he seemed to want to believe in equality and treated the students graciously. So here are my thoughts on him, an interesting balance to my notes on Mrs. Downey.

Race Loyalty – I think he might disagree with my calling it this, but he consistently framed history in terms of a good Christian people (the White community) trying to do right. He tried to portray everything in a balanced way, balanced between the Black perspective and the White perspective regardless that the White perspective was obviously racist. Sharecropping, for example, was “tenant farming” and was described by him as an example of how landowners tried to help people. He acknowledged he oppression of Black people, but only in terms of a mistreatment that was beyond the power of anyone to stop. He never placed any responsibility on the White community or the plantation establishment of which he was a part.

Blinders – He never acknowledged the role of Black people in making changes. When asked why the White community’s attitude towards Black people had changed, his answer was that White people interacted so much with Black people that they came to see their humanity. When asked about Fannie Lou Hamer, he seemed to avoid the question saying only that she was a woman who had been mistreated but was tough enough to do something about it. As he tells it, the end of segregation came from good White people, through their Christian values, coming to see the truth about equality before the Lord.

Color Blind – And his idea of equality is colorblindness. At one point as we were leaving, he put his hands on the shoulders of a young Black woman and told her he cared as much for her as any White child. But at the same time, he also told a story about going to Jamaica and being the only White person not afraid to go out and talk to the “natives.” He said this was because he was the only White tourist used to being around “your people,” as if all Black people were the same. He seemed to earnestly want to live in a world without racism but at the same time obviously pretended to be color blind to avoid looking critically at his role in a racist society.

Devout Christian – His color blindness was intimately attached to his Christianity. Several times he repeated that “we are all equal before the Lord.” He also rationalized his own success not as the result of slavery and segregation, but as a blessing from God that resulted from his piety. He repeatedly advised students that if they “put God first, family second, and business third,” they would be as successful as he is. He also related a story about when he drove down to the maximum security prison to try to save the soul of Byron De La Beckwith (the man who killed Medgar Evers) and the former Grand Wizard of the KKK. Unfortunately, he said they were too spiritually and mentally twisted for him to help. Oh, and he also lamented the lack of prayer in school.

Law – He placed a lot of value in the rule of law. When desegregation became the law, it was the duty of all people to accept it. This actually seems to have been a popular opinion in Mississippi. They absolutely did not want federal troops sent in like happened in Arkansas. He told a story about how even Senator Jim Eastland, a notorious segregationist legislator, worked with the FBI to keep out the KKK so as to maintain the rule of law.

Overall, Mr. Arant struck me as being a lot like the older men in my family. He seemed like a Southern combination of my cop grandfather and my cattle ranching granduncle. I imagine he was one of the more progressive voices in the White establisment during the ‘60s, particularly since desegregation did not threaten him economically. Which incidentally brings up some points from my last posting. He says the market price of crops has stayed more or less steady for decades, even though inflation and the cost of business have hugely increased expenses. They have to keep prices low to compete with overseas farmers. Whatever increase in wealth that has occured, at least according to Mr. Arant, is not in the Delta at all, but in the companies who manage international food distribution. I also got the feeling that he was open to the idea of racial equality because it was not an economic threat to him, not, as he said, because he played with Black boys when he was a child. He referred ambiguosly to how minimum wage laws put an end to tenant farming as if that law ended the old plantation system and the new mechanized system that arose at the same time needed so few people as to make the old degree of labor exploitation unneccesary. That’s just a hunch, though.

Tomorrow I’m hoping to meet B.B. King. I love the blues but have honestly never thought about the politics of it beyond its obvious comtemporary race politics. At least I’ve never thought about it’s relation to the civil rights movement. I can’t wait to see what I’m going to learn tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 9th, 2005 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.