Kamala Harris, Emmett Till, and the Race Card
Senator Kamala Harris' understanding of American history is comparable to Reverend Al Sharpton's understanding of theology.
They are both highly skilled card players: the race card.
Senator Harris is running for the Democratic Party's nomination for President. As part of her campaign, she issued this tweet on August 28.
Sen. Harris was born in 1964 in California. Her father was a Jamaican immigrant teaching economics at Berkeley. Her mother was a Tamil-Indian specialist in cancer research.
When Emmett Till was murdered, blacks in Mississippi picked cotton for a living. They did not vote.
Sen. Harris wants us to take her seriously when she says that not much has changed since 1955 in America, meaning that America today is much like Mississippi in 1955.
I do not take her seriously.
I am very different from Sen. Harris.
I am not running for President.
I am white.
I have lived in Mississippi.
I have a Ph.D. in American history.
I have studied the murder of Emmett Till.
I was an advocate of the Civil Rights movement before she was born.
I am not a lawyer.
I don't know if she is as grossly ignorant of American history as her tweet indicates. She may be. But I can see a lawyer's strategy in front of a jury in that tweet, just as I could see it in her comment to Joe Biden in the first debate.
She knows how to play an audience.
She does not know how to play me. But, then again, I am not in her targeted audience.
THE MURDER OF EMMETT TILL
Academic historians are always in search of turning point events. Sometimes these are called watershed events. Historians do their best to explain why a particular event becomes a turning point, when similar events have not become turning points for decades prior to an event that does become a turning point. Historians of the civil rights movement are generally agreed that two events, three months apart, were the turning points that launched the modern civil rights movement.
They took place approximately three months apart. The first was the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi on August 28. That became a turning point when it became public a few weeks later. The second turning point was Rosa Parks' refusal to move to the back of the bus on December 1. That launched the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. They were related events.
The Wikipedia's entry on the murder of Emmett Till has the basics facts correct. Till was a 14-year-old youth who was visiting relatives in Mississippi. He was from Chicago. He did not know the racial rules of etiquette that prevailed in Mississippi. He supposedly whistled approvingly at a white woman whose husband owned a local store. For this, he was kidnapped, shot to death, and tossed in a local river by her husband and his half brother.
Initially, leaders in Mississippi said they were appalled at what had happened. But, due to the publicity efforts of Till's mother in Chicago, this murder became a national cause for blacks within a month. At that time, opinion in Mississippi shifted against the North.
Till's mother insisted that the deformed body of her son be placed in an open casket in her Chicago church in early September. An estimated 50,000 blacks walked by that casket. The photograph of his body was published in several black media outlets, including Jet magazine. The image of that body galvanized the black community. Nothing like this had ever happened before.
The five-day trial began on September 19. It was attended by journalists from around the nation. It was a media sensation. The jurors cleared the two men who were accused of the murder. This was seen as an outrage by blacks around the country and also by liberal whites.
In January 1956, the two murderers consented to an interview by Look magazine, for which they were paid approximately $4,000. That would be $38,000 in today's money. In the interview conducted by their own lawyers in the presence of a journalist, they admitted to the murder. They were protected by the law against double jeopardy. The article appeared on January 24.
The murderers became instant social outcasts. They had lured Southerners into a self-righteous defense of the South's system of justice, only to metaphorically lynch the system for the sake of money paid by a Yankee magazine. They both moved to Texas for several years.
COLVIN, PARKS, AND HIGHLANDER
Only specialists in the history of the Montgomery bus boycott are aware of the fact that Rosa Parks' stand -- sitting tight -- was not the basis of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in December 1956 to annul the segregation of buses in the South. That honor belongs to Claudette Colvin.
On March 2, 1955, she refused to give up her seat so that a white woman could sit there. She was arrested and charged with minor crimes. One of them was assault, which clearly was not the case. She did not assault the policeman who arrested her. She and four other women sued the city. The case was Browder v. Gayle. It was filed on February 1, 1956. The local NAACP lawyer filed it in the federal courts. Thurgood Marshall had advised him to do it this way.
Why wasn't she the star witness? Because she was 15 years old, and because she was unmarried and pregnant. The local NAACP did not want to use her as the media celebrity they needed to win the case in the court of public opinion. So, they recruited Parks.
Basically, the staged Parks incident was a fallback position. It was carefully choreographed. She later said that she did not get up because her feet hurt. Maybe her feet did hurt, but when she got on that bus, she knew what she was going to do if the opportunity arose. It did arise.
This was personal payback time, although she could never have understood in advance that it would be payback time. The bus driver was James Blake. She had met him before.
Parks had her first of many confrontations with the bus drivers in 1943 when, because it was raining, she boarded the bus through the front door. The bus driver forced her to depart the bus and reenter through the rear door. As she was leaving the bus through the front door, she dropped her purse. She bent down to pick it up and, in the process, half sat in a seat reserved only for white folk. By this time, the driver was in a fit of rage and Rosa barely made it off of the bus before the driver took off up the road. Rosa was left to walk, in the rain, five miles home from where the bus dropped her off.
The story is here. For his 1955 confrontation, Blake got a Wikipedia entry.
For two weeks, late July through early August, she attended a conference at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. These were two weeks of seminars on activism in the field of racial integration. The school was extremely Left-wing, and some of the people associated with it were Communist Party members. The most famous of these was folk singer Pete Seeger. But the basic tenor of the training that summer was Christian social activism, not Communist Party activism.
Parks attended it secretly because she didn't want trouble. Her husband, who had long been associated with civil rights activities, was aware of the Communist connections of the school, and he wanted no part of it. She went anyway. She had been recommended by a white woman she worked for part time as a seamstress: Virginia Durr. Mrs. Durr was on the board of Highlander.
She returned to Montgomery ready to do whatever was necessary to provoke a confrontation with the municipal bus system.
Then came the murder of Emmett Till.
She was arrested on December 1. The NAACP's attorney, Clifford Durr, got her released.
She was convicted and fined $14 on December 5. The boycott began on that day. A rally that evening featured a speech by a new pastor in town, Rev. Martin Luther King.
The article in Look was published on January 24.
The Montgomery NAACP took the bus case into federal court on February 1. On December 17, the Supreme Court invalidated the state's law mandating segregated busing. The boycott ended on December 20. In the interim, the bus boycott had broken the finances of the bus company.
The modern civil rights movement had begun.
On July 2, 1964, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law by a President from Texas.
On October 20, Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, California. "We shall overcome!"
CONCLUSION
The racial conditions that prevailed in the deep South in 1955 involved lynching and murder. Men got away with it. The churches were segregated. The schools were segregated. There were virtually no blacks registered to vote. The social system was segregated. The buses were segregated.
When I lived in Mississippi, 2005-2008, my next-door neighbors were black. Nobody thought anything about it. It was a middle-class neighborhood. Black preachers would occasionally occupy the pulpit of the local Presbyterian church I attended, because the regular pastor had retired and there was no replacement. Again, nobody thought anything about it.
In 2008, Obama was elected President.
If, by playing the race card, she thinks she's going to be elected President, she has another think coming. Her upper-class background as the daughter of economically privileged immigrants has cut her off from the world where the rest of us live. There has been enormous progress. Hatred in 1955 was lynching serious. So was racism. White supremacy was the basis of the Democrats' control of politics in the South.
Today, Kamala Harris is a contender for the Presidency. She is not a serious contender. Obama was. She is not. It's not her race. It's not her gender. It's this: the only card she has to play is the race card. She does not play it that well.