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Intruder in the Dust Murray Kempton november 1955 Moses Wright has been a Weld hand in the Mississippi Delta for as many of his sixtyfour years as he has been able to walk. For the last nine of them, he has cropped shares for G. C. Frederick, a planter near Money, Mississippi. Before his troubles came, he was as much of a success as a Weld Negro could hope to be in the Delta. He even owned a narrow corner of land outright; with cotton at $175 a bale, he could expect this year to make a little more than $2,000 from the land he farms for Frederick. It is the essence of the Mississippi Delta that white people live o¤ Negroes. This month, in Sumner, the Negro picked cotton and the white man loafed open-mouthed around the county courthouse. The prime economic law is that the Negro owns nothing . He cannot even be a bootlegger for Negroes; Leroy Collins, a Negro, appears to have made his living selling sneaky pete to other Negroes; but he acted only as agent for J. W. Milam, a white storekeeper. By these standards, Moses Wright was almost a man of substance. Around Money, Negroes and whites alike called him “Preacher,” an honorary title for good Negroes as “Judge” is for white lawyers who have escaped disbarment for twenty years. Moses Wright was not a man with much impulse to escape Mississippi. Once every three or four years, he and his wife, Elizabeth, would travel North on the Illinois Central —W. C. Handy’s “Yalla Dawg”—and spend a few days with their Chicago relatives. Wright’s relatives were an astronomical distance removed from him. The farthest away seems to have been Mamie Bradley, Elizabeth Wright’s niece, a $600-a-year federal worker living in a lower-middle-class section of South Chicago. She had been born Mamie Carthan in Webb, Mississippi, and been taken north when she was two. She was the widow of Louis Till, who had been killed in the war; their son Emmett was now fourteen. Emmett Till was an average schoolboy who seems to have had most of the ambitions of the new Negro: he planned to go to college and learn a skilled trade, both expectations far above the cotton Welds which were Moses Wright’s destiny. One day, early in August, Elizabeth Wright suggested that Mrs. Bradley give Emmett a vacation in Mississippi. She was very happy with the invitation. On August 18 she went home early to help Emmett pack. While he was getting his clothes ready, she says she explained to him that Mississippi was not like Chicago, and that he must be especially polite to any white man he met and, in any crisis, be ready to go down on his knees. Emmett appears to have been quite gay about the approaching adventure. As he was leaving, he picked up his father’s old beat-silver ring, with its initials “L.T.”; it had 110 p a r t 5 the civil rights movement always been too big for him; he showed his mother that his Wnger was now large enough to wear it. “Gee,” she said to him, “you’re getting to be a big boy now.” There were six boys at the Wright house in Mississippi. Their life appears to have been narrow enough to make any relief exciting. On Wednesday night, August 25, Moses Wright took them to church according to custom; he had hardly bowed his head there when the boys had sneaked out and taken his old car. They rode up to Money, which is a row of stores and Wlling stations along the railroad track in the dust and there Emmett Till went into a store to buy a few cents worth of bubble gum. The store he chose was not one frequented by the Wrights; it was owned by Roy Bryant, a smoky-eyed young paratrooper, and the son of a fecund clan with a reputation for brawling, whose chief was his huge, balding thirty-six-year-old half-brother J. W. Milam. Bryant was an ill-tempered, edgy man and a merchant with small appeal to quiet customers like Moses Wright. The night Emmett Till went there for his bubble gum, Roy Bryant was out of town, and the store was tended by his wife, Caroline, a high school beauty already chipping and fading at twenty-one. She and Emmett were alone in...

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