Pilgrimage I, Day 4 – Despair in the Delta
I have just completed a six day pilgrimage to the civil
rights sites in the Mississippi Delta and environs. These are my reflections.
Preface: This day will prove to be the deepest
descent into our the darkness of our collective Shadow. This was the day we headed
south to the Mississippi Delta to pay our respects to Emmet Till. It would be a
very long, painful and intense day.
Impunity: When Power is Added to Evil
I have struggled my entire time on this pilgrimage to
understand the role evil plays in the events we are learning about. I have
never found Augustinian determinism that posits depravity as our starting place
and the defining aspect of our humanity terribly compelling. I see that as lazy
thinking that avoids the complexities of human existence. I don’t believe any
of us begin evil nor do I believe anyone is irredeemable.
But what happens when one is surrounded by a depraved
culture that refuses to recognize the humanity of the other in their midst? Is
there never a point at which one awakens, realizes this is wrong? If so, the now
conscious human being faces a choice as to whether to refuse to continue buying
into that destructive thinking or, conversely, to begin lying, first to
themselves, then to others and finally confabulating with others.
I have to think so. And if M. Scott Peck is right, it’s when
ordinary wrong doing becomes exacerbated with dishonesty that we begin to talk
about evil.
Now add power.
At what point does evil become constitutional, its
perpetrators beyond redemption?
These questions lumbered around in my soul as I sat in the
courtroom in Sumner, MS Thursday. We heard about a sheriff who had accurately identified
the body of 14 year old Emmet Till, murdered by white men with the Black
accomplices they coerced into participating in that atrocity, only to testify in
court that the body was unidentifiable. He would speculate during his testimony
that the NAACP had imported a Black corpse and dropped it into the Tallahatchie
River to rile up the local Black population to demand the right to vote. The
judge sat silently as the Sheriff perjured himself and interject inflammatory falsehoods
into the proceeding. And it would be his testimony that allowed the all white
male jury to rationalize their verdict of not guilty.
This was evil on steroids. And it was this corruption of the
judicial system that allowed two white men to get away with murder of a Black
teenager, as they would later boast to the nation in an interview with Look magazine.
This a special kind of evil. This is impunity, which mocks
the law, drawing its very legitimacy into question, even as it uses the levers
of power to protect evil doers.
A Subtle Form of Evil
The trial of Emmet Till’s killers was driven by a series of
subtle factors that allowed an atrocity to go unpunished. While the body of
Till washed up on the banks of the Tallahatchie River, the actual murder may
well have occurred in nearby Sunflower County. The defendants were not well
liked by their neighbors and moved for a change of venue. The motion was
denied. Ironically, in the end, the process proved much more malleable in
Sumner for a legal system intent on securing a foregone conclusion.
The white jurors would take just over an hour to find Till’s
murderers not guilty. They would later tell a doctoral student researching the
trial that each one of them had been awakened in the middle of the night by
knocks on the door from local white residents who subtly reminded them that a
wrong verdict could result in the same fate as Emmett Till.
This is the moment when wrongdoing already exacerbated by
dishonesty has become evil. Now add power, beginning with the overt
manipulation of the legal system and coupled with the thinly disguised use of
fear applied to individual actors. What results is impunity, evil on steroids.
[Images by author – tour guide provided by Emmet Till Historic
Interpretive Center]
Tortured Memories
In the tiny town of Glendora, MS, Mayor Johnny Thomas
operates a museum in an old metal cotton mill. Inside, the story of Emmet Till
unfolds.
This history is painfully familiar to Thomas. He relates an
account of his father who was coerced by his white employers into helping
dispose of Till’s body. It was his father who related some of the details of
Till’s torture, a process which employed tools ranging from axes and knives to
hand powered drill, examples of which appear in one of the museum’s exhibits.
The final exhibit featured a reconstruction of Till’s
mangled and bloated body, fished out of the Tallahatchie River three days after
the 75 pound fan blade retrieved from this former cotton gin to weight down the
boy’s body tossed into a local bayou proved unable to keep it in its resting
place. This was the image Mamie Till insisted that the world must see when her
only child’s body was returned to Chicago. The views from his open casket,
published by a courageous Jet Magazine staff, would shock the world. Mayor
Thomas repeatedly said, “This is where the civil rights movement began.”
Bear in mind Emmet Till was only 14 years old, about the
same age as the boys who would discover his body.
There is no other word for that but evil.
Paradox: Pain, Prayer, Peace
Graball Landing on the Tallahatchie River is an amazingly
peaceful spot with an unbearably painful history. Here the Black Bayou flows
into the river. This beautiful Spring afternoon maple trees are flush with
green new growth, cumulus clouds build on the horizon, recently planted fields
are golden, lit by an afternoon sun. Overhead mockingbirds demonstrate their
extensive repartee.
Below our feet the muddy river swirls past. It was at this
place in 1955 that two young boys were checking their trawl lines in the river.
As they began to pull their lines in to check for fish, they noticed what
appeared to be a human body. Summoning the local police, the body of 14 year
old Emmet Till was pulled from those muddy waters, a boy about the same age as
those who discovered him.
A bullet proof sign, the latest replacement for several
predecessor markers destroyed by vandals, stands at the entrance to this site, just
off the muddy River Road running alongside fields with recently sprouted corn
and cotton plants that is the only means of access here. On the raised timber
base around the sign, pilgrims have placed stones to pay their respects to this
young visitor from Chicago whose life was over before it had fully begun. I
pray silently the Trisagion from our prayer book, striking my breast at
each plea for divine mercy: “Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal One,
Have mercy upon us.” And then I leave my own stone on the wooden frame.
Our group gathers in a circle, observes a moment of silence.
Then one by one we go around our circle of 15 to offer our own respects. When
it is my turn, I speak directly to Emmet:
Emmet, we are hear to say we are sorry. You did not
deserve what happened to you. No one deserves that. And we are here to show our
resolve that we may learn from this and devote our lives to insuring this never
happens again.
I close my comments with a piece of a gospel hymn, inviting
my fellow pilgrims to join me: “Wade in the water, wade in the water,
children, wade in the water, God’s gonna trouble the water..”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_euSS86dvE
With our respects paid, it was time to depart. But I have
little doubt that any of us will ever forget that moment beneath the trees
along that muddy river with the spirit of Emmett Till. I suspect it is
indelibly burned into our memories for the remainder of our lives.
A Crumbling Milepost
The store where Emmet Till made the fatal mistake of
whistling at the white shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant looks nothing like its
appearance in 1955 when the chain of events would end in the brutal murder of
the 14 year old from Chicago. The store long since closed, the structure has
succumbed to age and neglect, its roof collapsed inward, its walls covered with
vines, its interior full of weeds.
After the trial, local Black customers stopped patronizing
Bryant’s store and within a month the store was sold. Two different owners
would buy the property before one of the jurors in the trial of Till’s
murderers bought the property. His family would focus on renovating the next
door gas station gaining funds with a promise to restore the store structure as
a civil rights memorial site but no restoration ever occurred. The station also
has since closed. But the owner, knowing the desires of those seeking to commemorate
Emmet Till at this pivotal site in his lynching, are now demanding $4M for the
site, still hoping to profit from the depravity that began here or alternatively
to prevent any commemoration here.
At some level the demise of this once thriving business is a
tribute to the unwillingness of a people to come to terms with their darkest
aspects of Shadow. It is a visible reminder that fear and loathing, no matter
how culturally baptized they may be, destroy the human soul.
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Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely
an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth
holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.
Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected
don't understand either. – Mahatma Gandhi
For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and
to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? - Micah
6:8, Hebrew Scriptures
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief.
Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to
complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami
Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)
© Harry Coverston, 2025
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