This Day in Civil Rights History - SEPTEMBER

In what was an obvious veiled threat about his continued resistance to permit James Meredith from enrolling at 'Ole Miss, Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett spoke during halftime show in Oxford – University of Mississippi football game against Kentucky – Barnett whipped up the crowd: "I love Mississippi. I love her people. Our customs. I love and respect our heritage."

During the ensuing 24 hours, one day before riots broke out on campus both President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy have a series of telephone calls pleading with Barnett to maintain order.

President Kennedy responded by federalizing the National Guard and sending Army troops. Two men were killed in the turmoil and more than 300 injured during riots the next day.

Herbert Lee was murdered on September 25, 1961. Lee was a dairy farmer in Liberty, Mississippi who helped SNCC field secretary, Robert "Bob" Moses during voter registration efforts in the summer of 1961. Lee was killed in broad daylight by his white childhood friend, E.H. Hurst, then a state legislator, who was angered by Lee's association with SNCC. Local black neighbors, including Louis Allen, witnessed the killing, declaring, under threat and intimidation, that Lee had threatened Hurst with a tire iron..

Below excerpted from Herbert Lee: SNCC Digital Gateway

Allen later reached out to Moses and Steptoe to tell them that the testimony he gave at the inquest was false. As he later told John Doar at the Department of Justice, the courtroom had been packed with armed men, and he was afraid for his family if he revealed the truth. Allen confessed that Lee had asked Hurst to put the gun down and that Hurst had shot him without provocation. When the local authorities got wind of Allen’s confession, he quickly recanted but nonetheless, began to receive death threats. In early 1964, he made plans to leave the state with his family, but was found murdered just outside his property early one morning.

On this day in 1955, the trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam began for the murder of Emmett Till began in Mississipp.

The trial begin just two weeks after Till's body was found. Reporters, photographers, and the curious packed the tiny Mississippi court room during the proceedings.

Six eyewitnesses testified to the pair taking the boy from his uncle’s home.

Mississippi whites rallied around the two defendants. Five defense attorneys volunteered their services and a defense fund was set up. The defense used a familiar tactic: Don’t let outsiders tell Mississippians how to run their lives. The racially charged defense worked, and both Bryant and Milam were found not guilty, by an all white jury, even after admitting they kidnapped the boy.

Two months later, William Bradford Huie paid the two men to tell their story. Because of their acquittal, Double Jeopardy laws prevented them from being tried again. They recounted in chilling detail how they intended to scare Till to comply with local racial customs. When he refused and did not beg for mercy, they killed him. Kidnapping charges were brought upon both men, but were later found not guilty again.

Two days into the trial, Moses Wright, Emmett Till's great-uncle, took the witness stand and identified J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant as his nephew's abductors. "It was the first time in my life I had the courage to accuse a white man of a crime, let alone something terrible as killing a boy," Wright said later. "I wasn't exactly brave and I wasn't scared. I just wanted to see justice done."

On Monday, September 16, 1963, a young Alabama lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr., a white man with a young family, a Southerner by heart and heritage, stood up at a lunch meeting of the Birmingham Young Men's Business Club, at the heart of the city's white Establishment, and delivered a speech about race and prejudice that bent the arc of the moral universe just a little bit more toward justice. It was a speech that changed Morgan's life—and 50 years later its power and eloquence are worth revisiting. Just hours after the church bombing, Morgan spoke these words (see insert).

He had written the speech that morning, he would recount years later after he and his family were forced to flee Birmingham because of the vicious reaction his words had generated from his fellow Alabamans. He had jotted down his remarks, he said, "from anger and despair, from frustration and empathy. And from years of hopes, hopes that were shattered and crumbled with the steps of that Negro Baptist Church." He had had enough of the silent acquiescence of good people who saw wrong but didn't try to right it.

Following the speech, the threats began almost immediately. The very next morning, at 5 a.m., Morgan received a call. "Is the mortician there yet?" a voice asked. "I don't know any morticians," Morgan responded. "Well, you will," the voice answered, "when the bodies are all over your front yard." Later, Morgan recounted, a client of his drove an hour to tell him to flee Birmingham. "They'll shoot you down like a dog," the client told Morgan. Little wonder that Morgan quickly closed down his law practice and moved himself and his family to safety.

Four Little Girls Were Killed

Text of Charles Morgan, Jr.'s speech, 9-16-1963

We have 10 years of lawless preachments, 10 years of criticism of law, of courts, of our fellow man, a decade of telling school children the opposite of what the civics books say.

We are a mass of intolerance and bigotry and stand indicted before our young. We are cursed by the failure of each of us to accept responsibility, by our defense of an already dead institution.

Yesterday while Birmingham, which prides itself on the number of its churches, was attending worship services, a bomb went off and an all-white police force moved into action, a police force which has been praised by city officials and others at least once a day for a month or so. A police force which has solved no bombings. A police force which many Negroes feel is perpetrating the very evils we decry. . . .

Birmingham is the only city in America where the police chief and the sheriff in the school crisis had to call our local ministers together to tell them to do their duty. The ministers of Birmingham who have done so little for Christianity call for prayer at high noon in a city of lawlessness, and in the same breath, speak of our city's "image." . . .

Those four little Negro girls were human beings. They have their 14 years in a leaderless city; a city where no one accepts responsibility; where everybody wants to blame somebody else. A city with a reward fund which grew like Topsy as a sort of sacrificial offering, a balm for the conscience of the "good people". . . .

Birmingham is a city ... where four little Negro girls can be born into a second-class school system, live a segregated life, ghettoed into their own little neighborhoods, restricted to Negro churches, destined to ride in Negro ambulances, to Negro wards of hospitals or to a Negro cemetery. Local papers, on their front and editorial pages, call for order and then exclude their names from obituary columns.

And, who is really guilty? Each of us. Each citizen who has not consciously attempted to bring about peaceful compliance with the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, every citizen and every school board member and schoolteacher and principal and businessman and judge and lawyer who has corrupted the minds of our youth; every person in this community who has in any way contributed during the past several years to the popularity of hatred, is at least as guilty, or more so, than the demented fool who threw that bomb.

What's it like living in Birmingham? No one ever really has known and no one will until this city becomes part of the United States.

Birmingham is not a dying city; it is dead.

Excerpted in whole and in part from Black Then: Discovering Our History

Clarence Fort and other local black youth activists dined at the city's newly integrated lunch counter after several months of successful protest. Fort organized and participated in the city’s first lunch counter sit-ins in the Woolworth Department store earlier in the year on February 29, among the nation's earlier protests. Fort, a 20-year-old barber at the time, was the new president of the NAACP Youth Council in Tampa. He and Rev. A. Leon Lowry organized 50 students from all-black Middleton and Blake high schools for a sit-in at F.W. Woolworth’s lunch counter on Franklin Street. “We picked a big chain because if we opened one counter, they’d have to open them all.” The store tried ignoring their black customers. They turned off lights and even closed the store. White men surrounded him at the counter and cursed at him.

After a week of the non-violent sit-ins, Tampa’s then-Mayor Julian Lane appointed a biracial committee to discuss segregation issues and, by September 1960, the city’s lunch counters were integrated.

Fort continued his civil rights leadership, leading an initiative to integrate the workforce of Tampa Transit Lines and later, as a Trailways Bus Co. employee, he became Florida’s first African-American long-distance bus driver. He later spent 20 years as a Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputy.

In 2015, on the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, the city honored Fort by dedicating a public park and the half-mile fitness trail that runs through it in his name.

And the minute I sit down and order—we order a certain meal; everybody ordered the same thing, eggs, bacon, coffee. And we were told, “If you have any trouble, call a waitress, pay for the bill, and get up and leave.” So, as I sit down, and they brought my food, and I think I was putting butter on my toast, two guys walked up behind me and said, “Look what we have here, this nigger. And we're not going to let him eat here.”

So, at that particular time, I called the waitress over. I was too nervous to eat anyway. (laughs) So, I call the waitress over and told her to bring my check. And she did, and I paid for it and I got up to leave. And as I was leaving, he followed me around the store. So the same young man that I was cutting hair with at his shop, he walked in the door. He came down to see how it was going. But before he got there, there was an African American female [who] saw what was happening. She said, “Look, why don't you just walk with me? Maybe they won't attack you while I'm walking with you.” So, when he walked in and she recognized that I knew him, she said, “Well, there's another man here, I'll just leave, I think you'll be okay.” So he immediately said, “Well, let's get out of the store.” I said, “No, we can't do that because I think if we leave they will probably attack us.”

So the store manager saw what was going on. And he approached them and told them he wasn't going to have any trouble in his store. And he told them if they didn’t leave, he would call the police. And he did call the police. So as the police walked in the door, we walked out. And they, of course, talked with the gentlemen. I don't know what they did about—I don't think they were arrested. They just stopped them from—one of them spit over his shoulder at me as we walked out.