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On Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, PBS rebroadcast a documentary on the lynching of Emmett Till. In August of 1955, this black boy from Chicago, barely 14 years old, was visiting cousins in Laflor County, Mississippi.
Reports vary on Emmett's exact transgression. Some whites claimed he whistled at the white shopowner's wife. Others say he called “Bye, Babe,” as he left the store. Such familiarity was an unacceptable assault on a white woman's place on her pedestal. The threat of the black male bogeyman—even a 14-year-old boy—served to unify the Old South's white community in suppressing their black neighbors.
But Emmett's “offense” was not prosecutable in court. So the shopkeeper and his brother-in-law formed a coalition of the willing—willing to take extra-judicial action, to seek retaliation beyond the law. They snatched Emmett at night over the frightened protests of his uncle, savagely beat his face, shot him, tied a 100-pound factory fan to his neck with barbed wire, and dumped him in the Tallahatchie River. Emmett's murderers were identified in court, but promptly acquitted by the all-white jury.
Lynch mobs—coalitions of the willing—were not unusual in the Old South. From Florida to Kansas whole families were burned alive in their homes, entire black neighborhoods were massacred, destroyed, or bombed, to terrorize “uppity” black citizens into submission.
The PBS documentary interviewed African Americans who had lived in Laflor County. They described how blacks had to step off the sidewalk if a white person approached, how blacks' eyes had to be averted to avoid even a visual challenge to white authority. It included interviews from the time of the trial with whites expressing outrage that a black male could step out of line and their determination that the white murderers should be acquitted. One sad interview showed a young black man, soft-spoken and clearly well educated, who dared not express an opinion as to whether the white murderers should be convicted.
As I listened to the justifications for acting violently outside the law, I was struck with the familiarity of the arguments. Not because I had seen the program before. Not because I grew up in Memphis in the 1940s and ’50s and had heard such excuses then. No, the arrogance of the Laflor County white supremacists reminded me of our government’s arguments to justify war on Iraq.
The people bombed and burned in their homes are now in the Middle East. Our government rejects an international criminal court and shrugs off UN votes. The Bush Administration will lead what they have termed a “coalition of the willing” to savage any leader, nation, people we choose to punish. As the only superpower and the world’s richest nation, the U.S. can bribe other countries into compliance in order to provide a pretense of international support.
And our government is using Arabs and Muslims as the “bogeymen” to garner support from frightened Americans for continuing illegal and reckless attacks on other nations. The reticence of the young black man in his interview reminded me of the fear that now hangs over Arab-Americans as they face coalitions of those willing to demonstrate their “patriotic” superiority by attacking the new “bogeymen” in our midst.
Our government has no problem with violence, assassinations, or aggression when they serve to secure foreign resources to U.S. corporations or when they strengthen U.S. control over desirable parts of the world. The U.S. had no argument with Saddam Hussein when he invaded Iran at our urging—our government supported him with weapons and intelligence. The U.S. had no objection when he massacred “his” rebellious Kurds with poison gas supplied by U.S. companies with the necessary permission of the U.S. government. But when this “uppity” Arab invaded Kuwait without our express permission (the possibility that our ambassador tricked him into believing he had implicit permission is another story), the U.S. unleashed wrath on him and especially on his people.
The invasion and occupation of East Timor by Indonesia with U.S. military assistance and Israel's invasions of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, as well as Israel’s ongoing illegal, brutal occupation of Palestine—supported by U.S. tax money and military aid—expose the U.S. hypocrisy in retaliating against oil-rich Iraq.
Certainly no one wants weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein, nor in the hands of Israel, Russia, China, France, the U.S., or any other government for that matter. In the development and use of napalm, Agent Orange, land mines, harbor mines, carpet bombing, weapon-ready anthrax, nuclear weapons, and depleted uranium munitions, our government has not set a very good example of self-restraint. The entire world, including Americans, will be safer when we accept and extend international arms control agreements. Sen. Robert Byrd (Dem., WV) has pointed out that our willingness to attack Iraq (which does not now have nuclear weapons) while ignoring the threat in North Korea (which apparently does have them) will lead inevitably to a rush by other countries to develop nuclear arms as protection against the U.S.
Like the white supremacists, our government only provokes frustration, hostility, and greater destabilization when we opt out of legal structures and use our military superiority to bully our neighbors.
Many of my friends in Memphis had relatives in Mississippi. These were upstanding people—they worked hard, nurtured their children and grandchildren, were kind to their dogs, kept their yards tidy. But threatened by presumed assaults to their comfortable superiority, they tolerated abysmal acts committed in their names.
The Old South, in spite of the likes of Trent Lott, has come a long way. The solution lies, not in greater firepower in the hands of the lynch mob, but in incorporating African Americans into full participation in the privileges and duties of society. The elections in Florida, with the systematic disenfranchisement of thousands of African American voters, shows there is still a long way to go, but people of good will are slowly gaining control over the “coalitions of the willing.”
Only when the U.S. is ready to step off its pedestal and join the nations of the world as one among many equals—when we accept and submit to the rule of international law in place of greed-driven unilateral actions—can we hope to begin building peace and true security.
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