A Fourth of July celebration, St. Helena Island, S.C

A Fourth of July celebration, St. Helena Island, S.C., 1939

The Promised Land II: By Nicholas Lemann

"The Promised Land II," by Nicholas Lemann (Vintage Press, 1992):Before World War II, the cotton planters of the Delta were absolutely opposed to black migration to the North. Hortense Powdermaker, enumerating the whites’ "creed of racial relations" in 1939, wrote that one of its main tenets was, "Negroes are necessary to the South, and it is desirable that they should stay there and not migrate to the North."

Whites kept the black school system in Mississippi inferior in part because they didn’t want sharecroppers’ children to have career options beyond sharecropping. Senator James K. Vardaman once said that educating the black man "simply renders him unfit for the work which the white man has prescribed, and which he will be forced to perform . . . the only effect is to spoil a good field hand and make an insolent cook." In the 1920s, Clarksdale was supposed to become the site of a new black college called Delta State, but the white planters succeeded in having it moved to the town of Cleveland, fifty miles away, because they didn’t want new opportunities for blacks opening up in town.

The Hopson Plantation in the Mississippi Delta

The relocation of Delta State was a well-remembered story in black Clarksdale, and there were lots of rumors about other enterprises the planters had kept out.As late as the early 1940s, the owners of the King & Anderson plantation, an enormous spread of seventeen thousand acres just west of Clarksdale that was reputed to be the largest family plantation in Mississippi, sent two of their white managers to Chicago to see if they could get some of the sharecroppers who had left to come back home. The managers first met with John H. Jackson, the pastor of the magnificent yellow-brick Olivet Baptist Church, which was well on its way to becoming the largest black congregation in America. Jackson is probably best known now for having been the leading enemy of Martin Luther King within the black Baptist church; when the city of Chicago changed the name of South Parkway, the boulevard on which Olivet stands, to King Drive after King’s death, Jackson changed the address of the church to Thirty-first Street so he wouldn’t have to have King’s name on his letterhead. In the 1940s Jackson was willing to entertain two white plantation managers, but he said he couldn’t urge members of his flock to move back South until conditions for blacks improved there.

The King and Anderson Plantation sharecropper's children deprived of education

Then the managers held a long meeting with former King & Anderson sharecroppers in an apartment on the South Side. The managers announced that the plantation had undertaken a series of reforms, including electrifying sharecropper cabins and providing sharecroppers with regular written statements of their accounts so they would not be surprised at the settle. The former sharecroppers said they already knew all that, along with all the other recent news from the plantation; the Mississippi-Chicago grapevine was very active. They complained about having been swindled on King & Anderson and other plantations, and about having been abused, degraded, and beaten by plantation managers and policemen. They showed no interest in coming home.

King and Anderson Plantation in the Mississippi Delta

When the managers got back to Clarksdale and told the owners of the plantation what had happened, the owners arranged a meeting in Clarksdale to discuss the situation. After the meeting, the white leaders of Clarksdale asked the black leaders of Clarksdale to draw up a list of grievances, which they did. No good jobs. Cheating at the settle. Lynchings. Being denied the courtesy titles of "Mister" and "Missus." Poor schools. No hospitals. No sidewalks, gutters, or garbage collection in the black neighborhoods. Confronted with all this, the whites did nothing; the list of grievances could have been resubmitted virtually intact in the early 1960s.

King and Anderson Plantation sharecroppers

When word got around about the demonstration of the mechanical cotton picker on the Hopson plantation, though, the attitude of the whites toward black migration changed almost instantly. A plantation didn’t need hundreds of field hands any more; a handful would do. It didn’t matter if sharecroppers moved to Chicago. In fact, it helped to solve the problem of where the sharecroppers would go after their jobs were abolished.

Besides, the more far-sighted whites in the Delta had begun to detect a slight crumbling in the citadel of segregation. The New Deal was a generation old by now, and while politically it represented an accommodation between Northern liberals and Southern segregationists, the Delta’s planters perceived Franklin Roosevelt as a threatening figure. During his reign, various critics of the sharecropper system who at least raised segregation as an issue had emerged, and millions of Northern blacks had been recruited into the Democratic coalition. World War II had exposed thousands of young black men from the Delta to places where segregation didn’t exist, and, having fought for their country, they seemed to feel entitled to things they didn’t have in Mississippi. In Greenville, just after the end of the war, four black veterans went to the county courthouse and said they wanted to register to vote. The registrar said they hadn’t paid their poll tax for 1944. They came back with the money the next day, and the next, and the next, and every day they got a different excuse. Finally they filed a complaint with the FBI in Washington, and two agents came down to Greenville, interviewed the veterans, had them sign a complaint, and got them registered.

The implications of blacks voting were not happy ones for Mississippi whites, especially in the Delta, which was three-quarters black. In 1935, there were more black people living in Coahoma County alone than in the states of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada combined. Most middle-aged whites had been raised on their parents’ and grandparents’ horror stories about life during Reconstruction, when blacks were enfranchised. By the 1940s, the school-desegregation issue had reached the notice of white planters, as well as Aaron Henry. A few civil rights activities had started to pop up here and there. All in all, the idea of getting the numbers of blacks and whites in the Delta a little closer to equilibrium began to seem attractive to whites on Political as well as economic grounds. The best, the only, means to that end was black migration to the North. As Aaron Henry puts it, "They wished we’d go back to Africa, but Chicago was close enough."

On the Hopson plantation, the idea of a looming civil rights crisis was very much on the mind of the Hopson family; it gave a new urgency to the long-running efforts to get the mechanical cotton picker ready for full-scale production. Howell Hopson’s brother Richard, who ran the plantation office, wrote a long, impassioned letter to the local cotton industry association in April 1944, a few months before the public demonstration of the picker, which makes clear the plantation’s thinking on the picker’s political implications. He wrote (via registered mail – an indication that he meant to make an important statement): "I am confident that you are aware of the acute shortage of labor which now exists in the Delta and the difficult problem which we expect to have in attempting to harvest s cotton crop this fall and for several years to come. I am confident that you are aware of the serious racial problem which confronts us at this time and which may become more serious as time passes." After a little more discussion, he arrived at the solution: "I strongly advocate the farmers of the Mississippi Delta changing as rapidly as possible from the old tenant or sharecropping system of farming to complete mechanized farming….Mechanized farming will require only a fraction of the amount of labor which is required by the share crop system thereby tending to equalize the white and negro population which would automatically make our racial problem easier to handle.

Within a few years after the end of World War II, the mechanical picker was coming into general use on the plantations, and the share-cropper system was ending. Usually a plantation would build up its stock of machines until it had enough to harvest the whole crop, and then it would announce to the sharecroppers that it was switching over to an all-day-labor system to handle the shopping, which was still done by hand. One by one the plantation commissaries were closed down. The more established and paternalistic planters, such as King and Anderson and the Stovalls in Clarksdale and the Percys in Greenville, allowed their sharecroppers to stay in the cabins if they wanted to, but not to make a crop of their own.

A lucky few got salaried jobs as tractor drivers; the rest who stayed had to work as day laborers, get jobs in town, or retire. Some planters forced their sharecroppers out by informing them that the garden spots they used for raising vegetables and keeping livestock would now have to be plowed over and planted to cotton. The smaller and rougher planters simply kicked out their sharecroppers and lift them to fend for themselves. Often, when a sharecropper family left, the planter would bulldoze the cabin and grow cotton where it had stood. Sharecropper cabins were understandably not in demand as housing. If the cabin wasn’t on arable land, it usually just sat unoccupied, slowly sagging and giving way to vines. The Delta today is dotted with nearly spectral sharecropper cabins, their doors and windows gone, their interior walls lined with newspapers from the 1930s and 1940s that once served as insulation. They are humbler than what you’d ordinarily think of as the ruins of a vanished civilization, but that is certainly what they are.

Evicted sharecropper on the side of the highway

The sharecroppers who left the plantations sometimes moved directly to Chicago. More often they settled first in the town of Clarksdale, either in preparation for the second phase of their migration or to become day laborers and continue to work in the cotton fields. Day labor as a large scale employment base was doomed in the long run, though, because in the late 1950s the cotton planters embarked on a second phase of their industrial revolution that was just as significant as the introduction of the mechanical picker: the development of chemicals that killed the weeds between cotton plants so reliably as to make hand chopping unnecessary. Within ten years, virtually all the former sharecroppers had to find some entirely new way to live.

Mass evictions of sharecroppers

The white people in the Delta were well aware that a massive displacement of people was under way, and that it would have enormous consequences – not necessarily for them, since the consequences would be played out largely in the North. Writing in 1947, David Cohn issued the following dire prediction, which, to say the least, did not rivet the attention of a nation that was consumed with resuming a normal life after the war and wasn’t inclined in any case to pay much heed to jeremiads issued by an obscure Southern apologist:

Evicted Southern Sharecroppers

The coming problem of agricultural displacement in the Delta and the whole South is of huge proportions and must concern the entire nation. The time to prepare for it is now, but since we as a nation rarely act until catastrophe is upon us, it is likely we shall muddle along until it is too late. The country is upon the brink of a process of change as great as any that has occurred since the industrial Revolution….Five million people will be removed from the land within the next few years. They must go somewhere. But where? They must do something. But what? They must be housed. But where is the housing?

Mass evictions of sharecroppers

Most of this group are farm Negroes totally unprepared for urban, industrial life. How will they be industrially absorbed? What will be the effect of throwing them upon the labor market? What will be their reception at the hands of white and Negro workers whose jobs and wages they threaten?

There are other issues involved here of an even greater gravity. I f tens of thousands of Southern Negroes descend upon communities totally unprepared for them psychologically and industrially, what will the effect be upon race relations in the United States? Will the Negro problem be transferred from the South to other parts of the nation who have hitherto been concerned with it only as carping critics of the South? Will the victims of farm mechanization become the victims of race conflict?

There is an enormous tragedy in the making unless the United States acts, and acts promptly, upon a problem that affects millions of people and the whole social structure of the nation.
A few years earlier Richard Wright, who viewed the situation from the completely different perspective of a black man, a migrant to the North, and a Communist, sounded an uncannily similar, and similarly unheeded warning:

Perhaps never in history has a more utterly unprepared folk wanted to go to the city; we were barely born as a folk when we headed for the tall and sprawling centers of steel and stone. We, who were landless upon the land; we, who had barely managed to live in family groups; we, who needed the ritual and guidance of institutions to hold our atomized lives together in lines of purpose; we, who had known only relationships to people and not relationships to things; we, who had had our personalities blasted with two hundred years of slavery and had been turned loose to shift for ourselves – we were such a fold as this when we moved into a world that was destined to test all we were, that threw us into the scales of competition to weigh our mettle.

(continued....)

An interview with Nick Lemann

Nick Lemann talks about "The Promised Land", a book about the migration of African-Americans from the South to northern cities, which is being made into a documentary film for the Discovery Channel

Preserving The Historic Emmett Till Landmark: Roy Bryant's Store

MSNBC reported in an article, "Preserving a tragic civil rights landmark: Some in Mississippi Delta push to save store at heart of Emmett Till case": MONEY, Miss. — The fading, whitewashed brick walls of the old Bryant Grocery & Meat Market store are crawling with vines, and the roof caved in long ago.

But some civic leaders consider it a significant piece of Mississippi civil rights history, and they want to see it preserved before it is too late.

The store in the Mississippi Delta is where black teenager Emmett Till is said to have wolf-whistled at white shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant in August 1955. The 14-year-old was kidnapped, tortured and killed a few days later in a crime that helped set the civil rights movement in motion.

State Sen. David Jordan says the state or private investors should buy the dilapidated building and rehabilitate it. But Jordan says the man who now owns the property is asking an exorbitant price.

“Everybody is concerned about this structure — not so much the structure itself, but the history of what happened here,” says Jordan, who is black.

Revived interest in the case

Interest in the Till slaying has been revived in the past two years, since the FBI reopened an investigation. Federal prosecutors said recently that they are not pursuing charges, and the FBI has given its files to District Attorney Joyce Chiles. She has not said whether she will pursue charges against anyone still alive who might have participated in the crime.

Till was kidnapped from his uncle’s home in the dead of night four days after the encounter at the store. Three days later, his mutilated body was found in the muddy Tallahatchie River, weighted down with a cotton gin fan.

His nose was crushed. His left eye was missing, and his right eye was dangling on his cheek. A hole was blown in his right temple. Most of his teeth were gone. The body was identified only by a ring he was wearing.

His mother held an open-casket funeral in Chicago, shocking the public with the sight of her son’s battered body.

Suspects confessed to murder

Roy Bryant, and his half brother, J.W. Milam

Carolyn Bryant’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother, J.W. Milam, stood trial on murder charges weeks later. After 67 minutes of deliberations, the all-white jury found the men innocent. They later confessed to the crime in a paid interview in Look magazine. Both have since died of cancer.

Roy Bryant, and his half brother, J.W. Milam

Jordan says the Bryant store closed shortly after the killing and has been boarded up ever since. It is now owned by Harry Tribble, whose home sits about 100 yards away. Tribble is a son of one of the jurors who acquitted Milam and Roy Bryant.

Jordan says a local businessman offered to buy the store from Tribble last year for $50,000, but Tribble asked for significantly more. Tribble did not return repeated calls. His wife, Adrian, told The Associated Press in 2004 that her husband wanted to turn building into a civil rights museum.

Roy Bryant, and his half brother, J.W. Milam

Hank Holmes, director of the state Department of Archives and History, recently traveled to Money — about 100 miles northwest of Jackson — to look at the old store. Holmes suggests Delta residents form a group to buy and renovate the place before it falls in on itself.

“I think there is something to be said for the local community retaining its sense of ownership in its local history,” Holmes says.

No historical markers

Byrant's Store from 2010 in Money, Mississippi

Folks who want to see the store nowadays practically need a tour guide. There are no historical markers, though the state is considering erecting a sign to at least let people know where to tap their brakes on the lonely stretch of road.

Money consists of little more than a tiny collection of homes, a cotton gin, and a post office in a single-wide mobile home. Till’s body was found several miles away, in a different county.

The store is about five miles up the road from one of three reputed gravesites of the blues legend Robert Johnson. It is a simple marble headstone where pilgrims leave offerings of cigarette lighters, weathered coins and Gibson guitar picks.

Bryant's Store in 1994, Money, Mississippi

Jordan was 19 when Till was slain, and he and some college friends attended the trial.

“After this happened,” Jordan says, “we were not afraid anymore. It ignited in us something we didn’t know we had — that is, the courage to stand up for what’s right.”

EMMETT TILL: MORE THAN A MURDER

The Clarion-Ledger/ Jackson Daily News on August 25, 1985 article, "Emmett Till: More Than A Murder: Bryant wants the past to ‘stay dead’," by Joe Atkins a Jackson Daily News Staff Writer and Tom Brennan a Clarion-Ledger Staff Writer"

Roy Bryant seems to be two men.

On one hand, the 54-year-old white Delta storeowner is sick of questions about the 14-year-old black youth he and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, were accused and acquitted of killing 30 years ago.

This Roy Bryant’s voice becomes a growl at the mention of Emmett Till. “He’s been dead 30 years and I can’t see why it can’t stay dead,” he says.

The other Roy Bryant is an agreeable sort whose face brightens with pride when he talks about the flowers he has grown in front of his store. He says he gets along fine with blacks.

“I don’t mistreat a man because he’s black any more than I do a white man,” he says. “I treat a man like I want to be treated.”

The second side of Roy Bryant wants his privacy and worries that some young black might seek belated vengeance. He possesses such loyalty from friends that one of them nearly slugged a television reporter who recently tried to interview him.

“I don’t know what happened to Emmett Till,” this Roy Bryant says.

Yet, the other Roy Bryant grumbles darkly that he isn’t making a dime out of renewed publicity about Emmett Till’s slaying. He says his memory could be jogged “for a bunch of money.”

This Roy Bryant even thinks enough of his notoriety to keep in his modest brick home a video cassette of the Today show’s recent televised report on the Till case, a show in which host Bryant Gumbel innocently asks, “Whatever happened to Roy Bryant?”

“Hell no, I didn’t do it!” Bryant said during one of two recent interviews at his store and home. “I didn’t admit to it then. You don’t expect me to admit to do it now. Of course they couldn’t do anything to me if I did.”

But, he adds, “I feel this way: If Emmett Till hadn’t got out of line, it probably wouldn’t have happened to him.”

The man who, with Milam, gained international attention in the Emmett Till slaying today lives an obscure life not unlike that of 30 years ago.

Map of Money, Mississippi

He lives in a Mississippi Delta town. He runs a store. He vigorously maintains his innocence in Till’s death.

Bryant mostly refuses to discuss the events of that Sunday morning in August 1955, when Till was dragged from his great-uncle’s home. He and Milam told authorities at the time they’d taken the youth off to punish him but later released him unharmed.

Bryant was described by news reports in 1955 as the handsome ex-paratrooper with the beautiful wife. Now, the good looks and the woman, both, are gone.

Bryant has gained a thick paunch, lost much of his jet black hair and says he is legally blind. He uses a thick magnifying glass to read price tags when he rings up purchases at his store.

He has been divorced for six years from Carolyn Holloway Bryant, the dark-eyed brunette beauty whose honor Bryant and Milam are said to have defended 30 years ago. Bryant says both have remarried, but their three children and eight grandchildren keep them in touch.

“She was a good-looking woman,” he said as he watched an old film of her on the Today report.

Despite the support shown them by white Delta residents during their trial, Bryant and Milam were ostracized afterward by both the white and black communities.

Their isolation worsened after January 1956, when a shattering article by author William Bradford Huie appeared in Look magazine. The article quoted Milam, who described in detail how he and Bryant brutally beat the boy and finally dumped him in the river after Milam shot him.

“J. W. Milam was from Glendora. He was acquitted in the trial, but he was not acquitted by the people of this area,” recalls unsuccessful 1983 gubernatorial candidate Mike Sturdivant, a large landowner in the tiny Tallahatchie County town of Glendora. Sturdivant knew Milam and Bryant.

“J. W. left Glendora because the people in the area convicted him in their relationship with him.”

Bryant bitterly maintains he was driven from the state by the same community that rallied to his and his half-brother’s defense during the September 1955 trial.

“I had to leave to make a living; there was nothing here for me,” he said.

After the trial, he and his first wife tried to reopen the store in Money, the scene of the infamous wolf-whistle, but a boycott by black customers forced its closing.

“We had it open for three weeks and didn’t clear $100,” he said. “I saw the handwriting on the wall.”

Bryant says he did odd jobs for 75 cents a day before learning welding at the Bell Machine Shop in Inverness. The family moved to Orange, Texas, in 1957, where he spent 15 years as a boilermaker – the job he says cost him his eyesight. In 1972, the Bryants returned to Mississippi to take over a grocery owned by one of Bryant’s brothers.

Roy Bryant's Store in Money, Mississippi

“Mississippi was my home. Once you are raised up in a state, it’s home,” he says.

I wouldn’t have come back to Mississippi for a job.”

For 13 years , Bryant has been satisfied with his hew life. His sister helps him out at the store.

“It may not be much, but it’s a honest living and that’s all a man can ask,” he says.

His domain how is a converted gas station with a wooden floor. The store is cluttered with the mainstays of small-town living: canned goods, snacks, cigarettes and one beer cooler.

As in 1955, Bryant today relies on credit purchases and a black clientele. “I have a good black business, more black customers than whites.”

Chain smoking behind the counter while a spotted cat sleeps nearby on a pile of grocery sacks, Bryant talks not of the past, but of what he has done with the store.

He points with a dedicated gardener’s pride to the rose moss flowers growing by a shoeshine stand outside the store. He welcomes visitors to the café he built in the back, with its three red-vinyl booths, pool table and three-stool bar.

“It is a family type of place,” he said. “We serve plate lunches and sandwiches and that type of stuff (publicity about the Till slaying) just wouldn’t help.”

He speaks fondly of Milam, his half-brother, who was 36 at the time of the Till trial. Milam died of cancer of the backbone on Dec. 31, 1981.

“He was a hell of a fine fellow and brother. He was gentle as a lamb and helped a lot of people that never paid him back.”

Like Bryant, Milam spent many years in Texas after the trial. Like Bryant, he eventually returned to his home state. He lived in Greenville and worked in construction until his illness made it impossible.

“My father never said much to me about it and I never asked,” says Milam’s son, Bill, a 34 year-old Greenville truck driver who attended his father’s trial along with his brother, Harvey, who was 2 years old at the time.

“I don’t have any memories of it at all,” Bill Milam says of the trial in Sumner. “I was so little, didn’t none of it affect me. I never wanted to get involved in it. Most folks I know had never said anything about it.”

Bill Milam is single. Harvey is married and has three children, but Bill wouldn’t say where his brother lives.

Bryant’s son, Frank, shields his mother from publicity. “She doesn’t want to make any comment on anything and she doesn’t want anyone to try to contact her,” he said.

Bryant still fears economic and physical retaliation for the 30-year-old incident and refuses to have his picture taken or to have the location of his store revealed.

“This new generation is different and I don’t want to worry about a bullet some dark night,” he said. “This store is all I have now, that and my disability check.”

Does he have any personal regrets about what happened in 1955?

“You mean do I wish I might wouldn’t have done it? I’m just sorry that it happened,” Bryant said.

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The.Untold.Story.Of.Emmett.Louis.Till.2of2

Mississippi Cotton Picker: Charlie Pride

Charlie Pride

One of 11 siblings born into a poor, Mississippi-based sharecropping family, Charley Pride was raised on a cotton farm, where he was forced to work for most of his childhood. At an early age he developed a passion for country music, purchasing his first guitar at the age of 14 and teaching himself to play by listening to radio broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry. After turning seventeen he enrolled in a baseball training camp, eventually joining the American Negro League and playing for teams in Detroit, Memphis and Birmingham.

Two years in the army interrupted his baseball ambitions, but after his discharge in 1958 he resumed his involvement with semi-professional leagues, supporting himself during the day through various manual labor jobs. His hopes of moving into the major leauges were ultimately blocked by the racist attitudes pervasive at the time, and by 1962, after being denied a tryout for the New York Mets, he left the sport behind in favor of his music.

Charley Frank Pride was born in Sledge, Mississippi, on March 18, 1938. (population 489, from the 2010 US census)

Throughout his involvement in baseball, Pride had continued to develop his musical skills, performing on the bus between games for his teammates and occasionally joining different bands onstage. At the urging of country performers Red Sovine and Red Foley, he traveled to Nashville in 1963 and, despite initial disinterest from the locals, secured a management contract with Jack Johnson.

"I'm not a black man singing white man music, I am an American singing American music. I worked out those problem years ago, and everybody else will have to work their way out of it too."

A year later a demo was cut with producer Jack Clement, and the two songs -- The Snakes Crawl At Night and Atlantic Coastal Line -- attracted the attention of RCA Nashville chief Chet Atkins, who quickly signed the singer to a recording contract. Snakes was chosen as the first single in 1966, making a strong showing in the charts, as did its two follow-up releases later in the year, Before I Met You and Just Between You And Me. Due to concern about a backlash against a black country singer, Pride's skin color was kept concealed at the beginning of his career -- and live performances did result in some awkward moments when audiences saw him for the first time. In time the subject of his race became irrelevant, and Pride established himself as one of the leading country acts of his time, topping the country charts 36 times between 1969 and 1984.

In 1986 Pride discontinued his long association with RCA, which was now directing most of its resources towards young, up-and-coming performers. A deal was signed with the Opryland label 16th Avenue, with whom he released several reasonably successful records before the label ceased to exist. An arrangement was subsequently made with Honest Entertainment in the 1990s, but by this time Pride's recording career was largely over. Pride continued to be active as a performer, however, as well as pursuing numerous business interests, amongst which are the Charley Pride Theater in Missouri, majority holdings in the First Texas Bank, his publishing company The Pride Group, and a variety of real estate and broadcasting properties. An autobiography was published in 1994 (source: http://www.nndb.com/people/024/000023952/)

Charlie Pride: Cotton Fields


Charlie Pride: Mississippi cotton pickin' Delta town w/Lyrics