Baptized in the River

“I know where he was murdered. I know the river he was put in,” Elizabeth James calmly said. “I used to buy candy in the store where they say he whistled…,” she continued. Although she didn’t know him or his uncle personally, being from Money, Mississippi, and subsequently living in Chicago, she knew his story well. In fact Ms. James, as she is affectionately referred to by many that know her, had no trouble recounting the events that led up to this tragedy, and its subsequent affect on America.

Due to segregation, racism and Jim Crow laws during the first half of the twentieth century, life was more than difficult for blacks in the South. Many worked as sharecroppers and spent the majority of their days picking cotton in the vast plantation fields. Though a large portion of them were considered to be free, they lived their lives as if they were yet slaves. After slavery was officially abolished, farming land and picking cotton (jobs commonly associated with slaves) were the birthright of many blacks in the South. It was also their “right” to regard white people as superior and to fear the consequences of not doing so, with lynching often being one of those consequences.

Ms. James noted that her brother, whom she simply calls “Brother,” had to step off the sidewalk if a white person was walking toward him. When young white girls turned twelve years old, black people—regardless of their age—had to refer to them as “ma’am” or “Miss.” Public bathrooms, as many today are well aware, were separated: one for coloreds and one for whites.

“I guess I was a child and I felt the world should have been that way. I didn’t know any better.” Ms. James explained. “My mom was a sharecropper. And we had food, and things to eat. But they would say you can’t do this and you can’t do that.”

Money, Mississippi was named after a man known to Ms. James simply as Mr. Money. Mr. Money happened to be Ms. James’ great, great uncle. The town was bordered by the Tallahatchee River, which ran south towards the Gulf of Mexico, on its east side. The town of Greenwood was a few miles to the south of Money, and Sumner, Mississippi was a few miles north. A railway, which ran north to south, connected these delta towns.

With respect to segregation, Money was certainly no different than most other small settlements in the South during that time. Blacks and whites didn’t live in the same areas. Ms. James recalled that the blacks lived on the farmland that was to the south of the town. There was a road that created a line of demarcation between the blacks and the whites. The one black person who lived on the “white” side of the road happened to be Ms. James’ grandfather, Paul Reynolds. Paul was a blunt black man who often spoke his mind despite the looming threat of being lynched. The white people called him “that crazy nigger.” Ms. James believes that her grandfather was given that leeway because he had seven sons who farmed an unusually large amount of land. This brought substantial revenue to the white people who owned the land. As long as his sons produced at the rate at which they did, Paul could get away with saying things to the white people that no other black could.

“You’d be surprised that black people don’t know their culture; they don’t know where they (have) come from. And it’s an old saying, if you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going,” Ms. James said.

During the 1930’s and 1940’s, there was something of a “black flight” from the South to the North. Many blacks moved to the Midwestern states of Illinois and Michigan, and settled in large cities like Chicago and Detroit. In some instances they left all they had in the South, including family and belongings, and moved in with relatives that had already sought refuge in the North. Yet in other instances, blacks took all that they could to the North with no intentions of returning to the South. Those who left much of their family in the South made yearly trips back to their roots. Even though they had moved north where racism wasn’t as brutal, they knew that upon return, they had to carry on as if they had never left. However, this became a bit of a problem when people who were raised in the South began raising families in the North. On their yearly pilgrimage back home they often brought their young, ignorant children with them to meet their relatives. Such was the case in the summer of 1955.

Recounting the time frame, in her seventy-nine year old mind, Ms. James put all the events together. She was able to remember the events of that year well because she was pregnant with her fourth son. He was born in June of 1955. The murder occurred only a few months after that. “It was the week before Labor Day; I won’t forget that, because Sweetheart didn’t have to go to work on Monday. I was visiting my Aunt the day that this happened, but I did not know this had happened.”

As it turned out, no one knew this horrendous crime had taken place for days. It first hit the black media, and then took weeks to make an impact in the national media. When it was all said and done, another wheel had been added to the car that would eventually drive the Civil Rights movement forward.

Sweetheart, her husband, informed Ms. James of the occurrence shortly after they returned to their home in Chicago from Mississippi. “That Tuesday he came home and asked me, did I know that something was going on, or had I heard it on the news, down in my home town?,” Sweetheart asked. “In Money, they have found a boy that they put in the river,” he told her. The following day he came home with the Chicago Defender—a prominent black newspaper that still exists today—where the murder was the major headline. “I didn’t see anything in the white newspaper,” Ms. James remembered.

Ms. James was in Money to visit old friends and relatives. Among the friends she visited was a lady by the name of Ms. Crawford. Ms. Crawford lived next door to a minister that everyone called Uncle Mose. Uncle Mose’s great nephew was visiting from Chicago at the same time that Ms. James was in Money. Uncle Mose’s nephew and Ms. Crawford’s kids went to the store to buy some snacks one day. During their visit to the store, Uncle Mose’s nephew whistled at a white woman, according to the Crawford kids. He was kidnapped from Uncle Mose’s home a few days later by the same white woman’s husband and his half brother. For days, he was missing.

They found his body north of Money in Sumner, in the Tallahatchee River, where Ms. James was baptized. His face, horribly mutilated; his head, with holes; his neck, encased in a cotton gin; his life, tragically cut short.

“I remember when they brought his body back to Chicago. It was hot. Sister, and a lot of people who lived in the building where I lived, went to see him. I heard the mother on the radio talking about, ‘I’m not going to let the undertaker make him up, I want everybody to see what they done to my child.’”

A line of people went to go see this slain child. The line went for about two and a half Chicago blocks. Upon viewing the mutilated corpse many people fainted or vomited. The incredibly maimed figure that existed in the coffin could hardly be identified as a human being. Although heavily urged by her sister to go see the corpse, Ms. James opted not to. She had two young children to watch, and she didn’t want to leave them behind with anyone.

The men who kidnapped the boy were put on trial in Sumner, Mississippi. The jury was all white and the courtroom setting was something like a white gathering. There appeared to be nothing professional about the behavior of the defendants or the spectators in the courtroom, who were chattering amongst themselves, telling jokes and carrying on as if they were in a cafeteria and not a courthouse.

Well aware of what happened to the boy and who killed him, but mindful of the consequences of speaking up about it, most of the blacks in Money that knew anything hid in the fields, fled northward, or kept their mouths shut. There were a couple of courageous souls who testified at the trial. Among the brave was Uncle Mose. When asked who had kidnapped the boy from his home, Uncle Mose famously stood up, pointed at the kidnappers, and said “Dar he.”

Paul Reynolds, Ms. James grandfather, attended the trial and noted how the black dignitaries and news reporters who were present had to sit in a corner at a particularly small table. Among the dignitaries was Congressman Charles Diggs from Detroit. Congressman Diggs was expecting the trial to be carried out the same way it would have been carried out in the North. As the trial neared its end, he anxiously awaited the verdict. In the meantime, all the blacks who were in the courtroom began to file out. Congressman Diggs was advised by the other blacks to leave as well. He questioned why they would leave before the verdict was read. The response he got was that he didn’t want to know what the verdict was going to be, and that he would be better off not hearing it.

After sixty-seven minutes of deliberation, the men were found not guilty. A few months later, they sold their story to Look Magazine for $4000. In the magazine, the kidnapper/murderers told how they only intended to put a scare into the boy. Thy pistol-whipped him numerous times to no avail. The boy still wasn’t afraid. “They asked him, ‘Nigger ain’t you afraid?’ And he said ‘no’,” Ms. James recalled.

The murder, the trial, and the media attention that it eventually garnered helped to jumpstart the Civil Rights movement. It, along with the Brown vs. the Board of Education decision in 1954, the murder of a black man who was attempting to vote in 1955, and numerous other pointless black lynchings, helped to fan the winds of change. Though the history books often point to Rosa Parks and the bus boycott in December of 1955 as the start of the Civil Rights movement because of the unity amongst blacks it created, Ms. James believes that this boy’s death was truly the starting point of intolerable outrage in the black community that brought about the necessary unity that eventually brought change in America. This case, in particular, made the world recognize the horror of racism that existed in the United States.

One of Ms. James’ daughters doesn’t like to dwell on stories such as this one. She once told her mom that their generation made a way for her, and that she doesn’t like to think about how her ancestors were treated. “She says they paved the way, and she just wants to leave it back there,” Ms. James noted about her daughter’s comments. “But you can’t leave it back there. You’ve got to remember what happened. If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going.”