Emmett Till, JFK, and the Radical Right

The Emmett Till case is getting a lot of attention lately. Till became one of the early martyrs of the 1950s American civil rights movement when he was assassinated by radical right-wing extremists for flirting with a white girl.

Until he was one of dozens. For twenty years, beginning in the 1950s, federally mandated integration brought violence against both blacks and whites. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, seven Americans died in 1963 at the hands of extremists who opposed racial integration.

We added 3 more victims to the SPLC list.

John F Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald and Dallas police officer JD Tippet died in the same terror of angry white southerners who bombed four schoolgirls in Birmingham a month earlier. Was desegregation the reason JFK was assassinated? Not completely. Not for himself. Southern white outrage against forced integration with blacks found its most popular arena in the form of “White Citizens Councils,” which in turn brought together Kennedy’s most violent enemies.

My colleague Paul Trejo of the University of Texas finds a precursor to the assassination of JFK in the establishment of the White Citizens Councils (WCC) on Black Monday in 1954. Most of us know Black Monday as a stock market crash, but in the American South, Black Monday is when Earl Warren delivered the landmark brown vs. board of education decision, the famous decision to separate is NOT the same in terms of schools. Paul says,

“The immediate reaction to Black Monday…was the sudden appearance of the White Citizens Council (WCC) in Mississippi, throughout the South and North. Robert B. Patterson, football star and World War II paratrooper from Indianola, Mississippi established the first WCC in July 1954. Patterson published that the NAACP was “the enemy” and vowed to fight hard against anyone who supported the NAACP in any way.

“In addition to the WCC, state rights and state sovereignty organizations have sprung up in the South with the same message: It is tyranny for the federal government to dictate that local schools must be racially integrated. That is a decision that should only be made at the state government level.” However, as the WCC went forward, Brady’s tough Black Monday talks would not produce private schools, boycotts or even a successful politician.

“Although some southern states voted to abolish public schools and even passed laws to establish private schools, this never materialized at the state level. States like Virginia and Louisiana passed laws establishing 100% segregation, as well as banning the NAACP. These laws, too, gained little traction, although they temporarily blocked the growth of the NAACP in those communities.

“In 1955, ten thousand members of the WCC gathered to hear Senator James O. Eastland speak on states’ rights and the benefits of segregation. Yet in Mississippi on May 7, 1955, the Reverend George E. Lee, a black clergyman, was murdered for advising blacks to vote. On August 28, 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youth, was murdered for whistling at a white woman. Two men stood trial, confessed their guilt and were acquitted.

We hope that Emmett Till finds justice in 2018, sixty-three years after his death. We believe that accepting the case of Emmett Till is essential to finally understanding and identifying the assassins of JFK.

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