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In the courtyard Moses Wright was saying that he’d try to hang on in Mississippi: “I’m so scrounged down in this country that I hate to leave it.” Upstairs the defense was putting on three white witnesses, including the sheri¤ who had turned the body over to Moses Wright, all loudly swearing that it couldn’t have been Emmett Till’s body. The defense was restrained; it had, after all, very little to worry about. There was only the detail of the ring on the body, and this was explained, very sedately, to the jury by J. W. Whitten, of defense counsel, a thin young man of inWnite delicacy, who under ordinary circumstances wouldn’t spit on the peckerwoods before him. Whitten said his theory was that Bryant and Milam had sent the Till boy home just as they said they had. Moses Wright had driven down the road and met Emmett coming back. He had picked him up and gone in search of one of those enemies of good race relations who abound in Mississippi as they do in Chicago. And these people had planted an old corpse in the river with Emmett’s ring on its Wnger. The Delta Negro must have a kind of chemical sense of danger; there could be no other reason why, while the genteel young Mr. Whitten was thus putting the Wnger on him, Moses Wright went into the sheri¤’s oªce, collected his witness fee, and walked down the road, across the bridge that leads out of town. The jury was out an hour and eight minutes and came back with the appointed not guilty verdict. Bryant and Milam heard it with cigars in their mouths, and thereafter luxuriated twenty minutes in the courtroom for the news cameras. There was no demonstration, partly because Judge Swango forbade it and partly perhaps because everyone except J. W. Milam was a little ashamed of himself. Moses Wright went back to his cabin; he still hoped to gather his crop. A few days after the trial, when all the reporters had gone and the television cameramen with them, Wve carloads of white men drove down the road from Money and stopped at his cabin and raised the old cry of “Preacher, Preacher.” Moses Wright hid in the Welds; the next day he went to Chicago for whatever the city holds for a man whose hands know nothing but cotton. His crop appears to be a dead loss. —Murray Kempton, journalist and social critic, wrote for the New York Post, the New Republic, Newsday, and the New York Review of Books. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. The Burning Truth in the South Martin Luther King Jr. may 1960 An electrifying movement of Negro students has shattered the placid surface of campuses and communities across the South. Though confronted in many places by hoodlums, police guns, tear gas, arrests, and jail sentences, the students tenaciously 114 p a r t 5 the civil rights movement continue to sit down and demand equal service at variety store lunch counters, and extend their protest from city to city. In communities like Montgomery, Alabama, the whole student body rallied behind expelled students and staged a walkout while state government intimidation was unleashed with a display of military force appropriate to a wartime invasion. Nevertheless, the spirit of self-sacriWce and commitment remains Wrm, and the state governments Wnd themselves dealing with students who have lost the fear of jail and physical injury. It is no overstatement to characterize these events as historic. Never before in the United States had so large a body of students spread a struggle over so great an area in pursuit of a goal of human dignity and freedom. One may wonder why the present movement started with the lunch counters. The answer lies in the fact that here the Negro has su¤ered indignities and injustices that cannot be justiWed or explained. Almost every Negro has experienced the tragic inconveniences of lunch counter segregation. He cannot understand why he is welcomed with open arms at most counters in the store, but is denied service at a certain counter because it happens to be selling food and drink. In a real sense the “sit ins” represent more than a demand for service; they represent a demand for respect. It is absurd to think of this movement as being initiated by Communists or some other outside group. This movement is an expression...

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