Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Associated Press Dogs were among the tactics police used to discourage civil rights demonstrators. Here, a 17-year-old defying an anti-parade ordinance is attacked in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963.

Cause demanded ultimate sacrifice

Blacks, white allies risked -- and at times lost -- their lives in fight for racial equality.

By Michael H. Hodges / The Detroit News

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It was August 1955 in Money, Miss. Showing off for his cousins, Emmett Till -- a 14-year-old from Chicago -- wanted to demonstrate how unafraid he was of white people. So he bought candy at the little grocery store, and turned to the pretty shop owner before pushing through the screen door.

"Bye, baby," was all he said by some accounts. Other accounts say he whistled at the woman, Carolyn Bryant, who was 21 at the time.

In any event, Till had no idea that in the Deep South, a cavalier remark could cost him his life.

Three days later, Roy Bryant, the woman's husband, showed up at 2 a.m. where Till was staying, and abducted the youth. Till's badly mangled body was later discovered in the Tallahatchie River.

A 75-pound fan from a cotton gin was strapped to the boy's neck with barbed wire.

When the body was returned to his mother up north, Mamie Till Bradley insisted on an open casket, so the whole world could see what "they did to her son."

A white jury acquitted the men charged in Till's death.

Till's murder formed just one link in the chain of violence that choked the South in the civil rights years. Once directed strictly at African-Americans, by the 1950s the terror took aim at their white allies as well, like the Freedom Riders, who stood with blacks against racial tyranny.

It was an era when black Americans who refused to yield sometimes just vanished.

Rosa Parks couldn't help but know that in taking her stand on that segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala., she might be signing her death warrant.

Indeed, fear stalked black Americans throughout the years that many now call the "Second American Revolution." The climate worsened as the white majority dug in its heels, littering the landscape for the next 10 years with more bodies, black and white.

Reprisals against blacks who challenged the white-defined orthodoxy, of course, were as old as slavery. Newspaper ads sometimes announced lynchings in advance. No slight was too small or unintentional to go unavenged.

But the Montgomery bus boycott, sparked by Parks' defiance and led by the Montgomery Improvement Association under the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., unequivocally showed Southerners that blacks would stick together despite the mounting terror from segregationists.

Detroiter Janice Frazier, whose mother was the secretary to the Montgomery Improvement Association, recalled the police shining powerful spotlights into their Montgomery home at night. "We just avoided the front of the house," she said, but added, "I think we felt a lot of fear."

Juanita Abernathy, wife of the late civil rights leader the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, recalled that at the Abernathy household, the tactic of choice was obscene phone calls.

"The White Citizens Council hired a woman to call and cuss all day long and threaten to kill us," Abernathy said from Atlanta.

"She'd stop at 7, and a man would start and go till 1 in the morning, at which time I'd take off the receiver. This went on the whole year of the boycott."

King's home and the Rev. Abernathy's church also were bombed. Neither man backed down. The boycott continued.

Police across the South routinely took down license plate numbers when meetings were held at "troublemakers' homes," said Abernathy, a tactic particularly frightening to public employees like school teachers. But still the tide rushed in.

"You can't help but have a certain amount of fear," said Arthur Johnson, retired head of the Detroit branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "But you can't be stopped by that. If you are, it's total capitulation and leaves the movement exposed."

Montgomery's example electrified black Southern neighborhoods. Soon, people in Nashville, Tenn., launched a crippling boycott of downtown businesses. In 1960 in Greensboro, N.C., and soon in dozens of other cities and towns, black and sometimes white students were pulled from stools at segregated lunch counters to face volleys of feet and fists on the floor.

The early 1960s saw thousands of students board interstate buses, blacks up front, their white allies in back, to force compliance with court rulings -- never enforced -- that desegregated such commerce.

In 1965, at the time of the celebrated march from Selma to Montgomery, Janice Frazier remembered her mother trying to convince Detroiter Viola Liuzzo, a white woman who'd come down to help with voter registration, not to drive two black co-workers back to their homes.

"My mother had received death threats all day long and a warning from the FBI," she said. But Liuzzo insisted. "And of course, they were ambushed" by Ku Klux Klan members. Frazier sighed at the memory.

"I don't think she ever really understood where she was."