How an Old WHITE GUY Got Woke
Five years ago, a man called me and began with an apology. “I’m sure you get too many of these,” he said. “But I have to call you because I am writing a book on the Emmett Till murder trial, and you are the only one who was at the trial and is still alive.”
That has become my distinction.
The Supreme Court had outlawed school segregation in its 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education, ruling that “separate but equal” education was not valid and no longer the law of the land. Everyone knew this was a major decision that would have a huge impact on American life. There was a feeling of national apprehension. What would happen? Would the South revolt? Would it be the start of another Civil War? It felt like the country was holding its breath.
A year later, in the summer of 1955, newspapers across the country reported the murder of a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago. Emmett Till had gone to visit his great-uncle in Mississippi and was killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman. It was the first big “racial” story that followed the Supreme Court decision, and the trial of the two white men charged with the crime captivated the nation.
I had come to know Murray Kempton, a columnist for The New York Post, and I begged him to find me, then 23 years old, a way to go to Mississippi and write about the trial. My slim credentials at the time included summer reporting jobs at The Indianapolis Star and The Grand Rapids Press. I was an ambitious young journalist, and this trial would be historic. I felt I had to be there. Somehow, Kempton persuaded The Nation magazine to send me. My payment was a round-trip bus ticket from New York City to Sumner, Mississippi. The trip took two days and a night, stopping at every small burg on the way.
Reporters from all over the country had come to the tiny courthouse in the Mississippi Delta. The prosecutor made his case: Till had gone with some other boys to a small store in a town near
