The Civil Rights Movement by Thomas C. Holt

Author:Thomas C. Holt [Holt, Thomas C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190605445
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Organizing in the “American Congo”: Mississippi’s Freedom Summer and its aftermath

There is a striking irony about the chronology and character of the so-called classic Civil Rights Movement: Many of its participants attribute their own commitments to it, if not its very origins, to the brutal murder of Emmett Till, and yet the major mobilizations during its first decade emerged far beyond the site of Till’s martyrdom. The casual brutality of a teenage boy’s murder and mutilation of his body compounded by the bland indifference of white Mississippians to punishing the crime, made clear that this state was not a favorable place to mobilize a mass movement. In retrospect, it is equally clear that the grievances that sparked equal rights mobilizations elsewhere in the South were largely irrelevant to the lives and injustices suffered by most black Mississippians, then or later. Even for blacks from other southern states, Mississippi seemed a place out of time, a good place “to be from” went a wry and bitter joke. Or, as William Pickens, an NAACP staffer investigating a gruesome lynching in 1921, called it, “the American Congo.” Written at a moment when King Leopold’s reign of unconscionable terror in the Belgian Congo was being widely condemned—even by other colonial powers—as marking the outer boundaries of human depravity, Pickens’s depiction was damning indeed.

Pickens’s characterization referred to the Delta, the corridor framed by the counties stretching along both sides of the Mississippi River from southeastern Missouri down to Vicksburg, which was one of the most fertile cotton regions in the South. This region was less a remnant of its antebellum slave empire than an early twentieth-century creation of northern and English capitalists that would come to be known later for its extreme poverty and racial terror. In the 1890s, it had been a refuge for black migrants seeking independent farms free from the oppressive conditions of the old cotton economy of the southeastern states. In the Delta they could cut timber for good wages and buy land. At the dawn of the twentieth century, descendants of these pioneers still accounted for two out of every three farm owners in the region, but a quarter-century later most of them had been reduced to landless laborers on vast industrial plantations—literally totalitarian communities that supplied them bare subsistence, monitored their mail, and restrained their every movement.

As elsewhere in the South, however, white hegemony in the Delta began to erode under the pressure of social and economic changes set in motion during the First World War and the Great Migration. The interwar period witnessed flickers of resistance as farmers’ unions and chapters of both the NAACP and Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association became active. In the aftermath of the Second World War, those flickers flamed even brighter and bolder as returning veterans mounted more militant and visible challenges to the racial order. Notable among the activists undertaking these initiatives were veterans of the recent world war, men like Amzie Moore, Aaron Henry, and Medgar Evers. A postal

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