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9 CHAPTER ONE  Washington Was Far Away DEFINING A DIFFERENT POSTWAR DELTA As protest began to stir among local Negroes in the early fifties, it became more acceptable to express dissatisfaction with the status quo. This change was significant, because so many Negroes had been willing to accept conditions rather than question them and gamble with reprisals. —Aaron Henry, Fire Ever Burning The only thing I knew about the NAACP was that it is something that is supposed to make these Mississippi white folks act like human beings and I want to be a part of that monster.—Vera Pigee, Struggle of Struggles In Mississippi, the violence of white supremacy stained the land as in few other places in America. The brutal murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, in August 1955 embodied, then transcended, that violence . The crime stunned even those who had grown accustomed to everyday white terror, but it also galvanized a generation in Mississippi and beyond. One of those responding to the violence was Aaron Henry, president of the Clarksdale/Coahoma County branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). “The Coahoma County Branch found itself at the Rail Head of activities relating to the murder of Emmett Till in 1955,” Henry recalled.1 Members of the NAACP leadership, most of whom were not normally found in the fields, donned overalls to comb the area looking for witnesses who either saw the murderers with Till or witnessed the theft of the cotton gin that pinned him down in his watery resting place. Henry remembered , “We all knew we moved under a cloud, and we moved cautiously.”2 He [10] DEFINING A DIFFERENT POSTWAR DELTA told an interviewer in 1969 that “in trying to find out who the witnesses were, who saw what [happened], day after day, [we went] into the cotton fields and chopping cotton with the hands, and picking cotton with the hands, wandering through the crowds just to find out what we could about Emmett.”3 The organization also provided safe passage north for these witnesses after the trial. As northern journalists descended on the Delta, reporting to a rapt national audience on the alien, backward conditions in postwar Mississippi, one of that state’s native daughters came back home. Vera Mae Pigee had recently returned to Clarksdale from Chicago, where she had studied cosmetology. As an active member of the Coahoma County NAACP, she journeyed to Sumner, the site of the trial and about thirty miles from Clarksdale, to observe and offer support to fearful locals: “I was in touch with the people when the trial was over, they wouldn’t stay in a little town like Sumner, they would come to Clarksdale and go other places to stay, and some wouldn’t tell anyone where they were. They were just that afraid,” Pigee remembered. “They were black people and maybe it wasn’t like they were so afraid of one white person, but of a crowd, coming with their white sheets on to kill somebody, like these people had killed Emmett Till.”4 Henry and Pigee are emblematic of postwar grassroots black freedom movements . Virtually unknown on the national stage, they are two of many who devoted the greater part of their adult lives to the struggle for racial justice in Mississippi.Yet Henry and Pigee, by organizing and sustaining the local movement in Clarksdale, were not simply local representatives of a national mass movement.They were, in complex ways, architects of the movement’s foundation , the kind of people without whom a mass uprising against Jim Crow would have been impossible. Aaron Henry, the most celebrated civil rights leader in Clarksdale, was born in the Coahoma County town of Dublin in 1922. His father took shoe carpentry courses at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, enabling him to work his trade in the county. His mother, Mattie, was a member of the Women’s Society of Christian Service, one of the few biracial organizations in Mississippi.5 The family had the means to pay tuition for a decent high school education, and with no black public schools available, boarding at Coahoma County Agricultural High School was the only option. While there, Henry became involved in the NAACP. He credited one civics teacher in particular, Miss Thelma K. Shelby, newly graduated from Dillard University (where she had joined the NAACP), as a major influence on his maturing political sensibilities. She spent extra time with her seniors...

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