Still Divided 

"If you can't speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that's so unjust/Your eyes are filled with dead men's dirt, your mind is filled with dust."

-- Bob Dylan, "The Death of Emmett Till"

It was a reminder, a soul-chilling echo from the Mississippi Delta. "Emmett Till, Emmett Till. We'd kill you still, we'd kill you still." Till was a black kid, 14 years old when two white men savagely tortured and murdered him. That was August 1955.

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• John Sugg
• Emmett Till's lynching began at Bryant's Grocery in Money, MS.

But the hateful echo across the town square of Sumner, MS, rang out on a 107-degree day in September 2005. Five kids in a red pickup spied a group of journalists and scholars who'd trekked to the town's courthouse where 50 years earlier an all-white jury had acquitted two white men who later, in Look magazine, boasted of killing Till.

The lynching, along with Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, AL, bus, almost four months later, ignited the Civil Rights Movement. Those two incidents -- a crime of hatred and a quiet statement of courage -- lit a conflagration of social and political change in America.

In the following decades, Jim Crow, the legal embodiment of the South's segregated society, disappeared -- almost. Officially, schools are now integrated. Blacks occupy positions of power, from municipal offices to the nation's secretary of state. Workplaces are legally color blind. Mixed-race couples seldom turn heads anymore.

Perhaps most symbolic of change, racists who committed murders decades ago and escaped punishment at the time have seen their cases reopened. In the same region where Emmett Till's killers went free, integrated juries have convicted a handful of race terrorists for long-ago crimes. For many of the killers, justice was delayed -- but it finally arrived (see the sidebar "Healing old wounds").

Still, there's that haunting echo in Sumner.

Would Emmett Till be killed today for, as his killers claimed, whistling at a white woman? Probably not.

Racial violence is far from just a subject for history books, however. Southern whites no longer rise in murderous rage at the cry "nigger," often the prelude to a lynching. But more subtle appeals to prejudice can suppress equal justice and equal opportunity just as deeply.

You don't have to dig deep to find those appeals. Just spin the right-wing-dominated AM radio dial and you'll hear harangues virtually indistinguishable from those that drove white mobs into the streets seeking black victims in past generations.

Last October, the Atlanta-based talk-show host Neal Boortz likened the plight of poor (and mostly black) Hurricane Katrina victims from New Orleans to "emptying a septic tank into the nation's water supply." In December, he (incorrectly) predicted mayhem in Los Angeles following the execution of a black gang leader, proclaiming, "The rioting, of course, will lead to wide-scale looting. There are a lot of aspiring rappers and NBA superstars who could really use a nice flat-screen television right now."

That rivaled US-Education-Secretary-turned-moralizing-pundit Bill Bennett, who in September announced, "If you wanted to reduce crime ... you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."

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• John Sugg
• Till's killers were acquitted by an all-white jury in the Sumner, MS, courthouse.

The words echo the message that Klan leaders and Southern politicians used decades ago to isolate African Americans as different and somehow less human than other Americans.

"It's overt racism, the type that's only a few steps away from inciting violence," says Donald Jones, a University of Miami law professor. "They are saying blacks are naturally prone to rape and atrocities. Blacks are beasts. How do you deal with beasts? Kill them."

"Every day more and more people are openin' their eyes to see the only thing wrong with this country is we've gone against the laws of nature. God's law. Only the strong have a right to survive. And now, finally, those not worthy ... the Jew, the African, he who lies with another man ... they're all diggin' their own graves."

-- Klan leader Rollie Wedge, a character in John Grisham's The Chamber

Willie Simmons is a Mississippi state senator and owner of Senator's Place, a soul food restaurant in the Delta town of Cleveland.

"I beat a white guy who had been in office 29 years," Simmons says. "That shows you how much things have changed for some people. But if you ask me, there is much left to be done for most [African Americans]. In many ways, we're seeing reversals. The governor is seeking to decrease funds to public schools, which in this state means funds for black children. We may be going backwards."

Simmons is clearly a success. So are Condoleezza Rice, Barack Obama, Michael Jordan, Denzel Washington and many other African Americans.

But for most blacks, a society in which race doesn't hold them back is still a distant goal. All things are not equal by a long shot. In many areas -- access to loans, health care and even the amount of face time black candidates get in the media -- the racial fault lines determine that blacks are treated less favorably than whites, regardless of income or social class.

In many ways, progress has been at best halting and has even slid backward. Public schools are resegregating at the very time they're turning into dropout factories, according to a recent Harvard University study. And despite a larger black professional class and the seeming ubiquity of African-American celebrity athletes and entertainers, overall economic advancement has been mostly inconsequential: In 1968, blacks earned 54.8 cents for every dollar earned by whites, according to the US Census Bureau. By 2001, black earnings had climbed -- if you can call it that -- to 57.2 cents. At that pace, blacks can expect to achieve parity with white income in the year 2582.

The tenor of public debate hasn't matched up well with the facts on the ground. While blacks continue to benefit from our society less than others do, conservative leaders egg on many whites, especially in the South, to believe they're losing ground to African Americans. Rather than address the reality that blacks are still struggling for the same basic rights as other Americans, policies seem to follow the rhetoric.

Examples? A familiar one occurred in Florida just before the 2000 election. Gov. Jeb Bush's administration purged 57,700 voters, a disproportionate number of whom were black, from the voting rolls for allegedly being felons. Because many of the voters weren't felons, the NAACP and others decried the move as racist.

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• John Sugg
• Mississippi State Sen. Willie Simmons.

In 2004, Alabama voters decided to keep Jim Crow school segregation language in the state constitution. Leading those opposed to scrapping the racist text was the man likely to be Alabama's next governor, Republican Roy Moore, best known for being ousted from the Alabama Supreme Court for refusing to remove the Ten Commandments from the high court's building. Moore says the constitutional amendment would have allowed federal judges to intrude into Alabama's schools. That's not only unlikely, but that rationale -- a throwback to the "states' rights" defense of segregation -- is a clear wink at Alabama's unreconstructed whites.

More recently, two Georgia GOP congressmen, Charlie Norwood and Nathan Deal, have proposed a national law requiring a picture ID to obtain Medicaid. They don't appear overly worried that blacks are less likely than whites to have the birth certificates or passports needed to get the federal identification.

That Medicaid ID proposal evokes a voter ID bill that Georgia's Republican legislators pushed last year through the General Assembly under the guise of deterring vote fraud -- when it was clear who would really be deterred are black, elderly and poor voters. A federal judge has placed part of the bill on hold because of questions about its constitutionality, but Republicans came back this year with a revised version -- one still likely to make voting more difficult for poor, elderly and African-American people who don't have drivers licenses.

State Rep. Sue Burmeister, who sponsored the voter ID bill, drew a candid connection between racist rhetoric and a policy designed to have a negative impact on black voters. According to US Justice Department records, the Augusta Republican declared to Justice Department lawyers that if blacks "are not paid to vote, they don't go to the polls."

"You ravish and debauch the mother as your mistress; You raise a divided city and from her loins springs hate; You sate the greed of greedy men while others starve -- assigned their fate."

-- W.E.B. DuBois, "Litany at Atlanta," 1906

It's important to distinguish between actual racism and political maneuvers that have racial implications or play to racial anxieties. Jim Cobb, a University of Georgia historian who has focused on Southern "identity," argues, for example, that the Florida voter purge wasn't just "to assuage North Florida crackers. It was a political calculation."

Cobb also cautions that bigotry against blacks is no longer peculiar to the South. "It is hard to let go of the idea that race is still just a Southern problem," Cobb says. "The whole damn country is Southern now," Cobb says. "The Republicans just took race and made it a tool for victory."

At the same time, race symbolism has always soaked through to the core of Southern politics, and the continued reliance on a racial subtext by conservatives is part of a conscious strategy that has helped the GOP become the dominant party in the South and across the nation.

Following Barry Goldwater's landslide defeat in the 1964 presidential election, Republicans launched an offensive to attract white, Southern voters appalled at the thought of integration. President Lyndon Johnson pushed the passage of hallmark civil rights legislation, but he presciently remarked at the time that the Democrats' support of voting rights and integrated schools had cost the party the South "for a hundred years."

Witness how candidates embrace the Confederate battle flag, as Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour did when he won election in 2003. Or, with somewhat more subtlety, as Sonny Perdue did to capture Georgia's governorship in 2002.

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• Courtesy: University of Miami
• University of Miami law professor Donald Jones.

To be sure: These aren't the bad old days. Certainly, terrorism against blacks in the South is much more rare than in past decades.

"I'm not afraid of being lynched today," says the University of Miami's Jones. "But has there been a fundamental change in the relationship between blacks and whites? No, there hasn't.

"The majority belief," Jones continues, "is that blacks belong in the position that they are in. It's an ideology, and it's a lie. But because it's an ideology, people aren't aware it's a lie."

Bigotry may still be as much of a mainstay among many Southerners as grits, magnolias, hurricanes and NASCAR. But could that bigotry erupt into widespread racial violence?

Certainly, the embers of crosses that once burned at Klan rallies or on the lawns of black civil rights workers still smolder. North Carolina witnessed the ominous flaming symbols of white supremacy just last year.

Last year Chattanooga Klansman Daniel Schertz sold five bombs to a man who turned out to be an FBI informant; the goal was to kill immigrants, not blacks, but the incident had all the earmarks of Klan violence of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1999, embalmer Lawrence Lombardi set off two bombs at the historically black Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. Just a decade ago, the Klan burned a black Baptist church in South Carolina; the terrorists not only were prosecuted, they were sued and ordered to pay the church $38 million.

The most notorious recent lynching of a black man in the South ended in stiff sentences. In 1998, James Byrd Jr. was chained to a pickup in Jasper, TX, and dragged down a road until his body was ripped to pieces. Likely alive for most of the dragging, Byrd died only after his head and arm were ripped off by a culvert. What was left of him was deposited in front of a black cemetery. It was a message -- the sort that Southern white society often sent in past decades.

Two killers -- one was a member of a North Carolina Klan group -- were sentenced to death, the first such sentences for a white killing a black in Texas. The third killer received life in prison.

While many of those cases have been prosecuted -- an obvious difference from years gone by -- enough incidents remain unsolved to make one wonder whether the South is committed to racial healing.

Three years after Byrd's lynching, another black man was found hanging from a tree near Jasper. It was ruled suicide, but the fact that he dated a white woman provoked fears of a Klan-style lynching.

And, in Linden, TX, two years ago, four white men brutally beat a mentally retarded black man. The perpetrators were "punished" with what amounted to a legal shrug, and 30- and 60-day jail terms.

Numbers paint the picture another way. Of the 9,035 hate crimes reported nationally to the FBI in 2004, 54 percent were race-based. Blacks were victims in 68 percent of those reports of race-based crimes.

In a nation increasingly divided along race, class, ideological and political axes, some claim that indifference toward the problems faced by African Americans amounts to a form of violence.

Numerous black leaders point to the Bush administration's indifference to the plight of post-Katrina New Orleans as certain proof that racism still has a lethal edge.

"They died from abject neglect," New Orleans community activist Leah Hodges told NBC News. "The people of New Orleans were stranded in a flood and were allowed to die."

"But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and he is not white? What then is our response?"

-- Robert F. Kennedy

There have been stunning changes in the Southern landscape since the Jim Crow years. But tragedies among blacks -- the deaths and devastation in New Orleans after Katrina, for example -- are often cited as proof of systemic racism. State-sanctioned murders are quite different than allowing people to die from neglect, however.

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• John Sugg
• Roy Ennis, chairman of CORE.

Historian Cobb of the University of Georgia argues that the largely rural Old South was fundamentally different, hostile to outsiders and introverted in its perspective.

The chilling reality of a half-century ago was that lynchings, the bombings of black churches and other race violence were often a community affair, a celebration of supremacy. Families, including children, attended the gruesome ceremonies, which commonly featured burning, castration and dismemberment -- often performed while the victim still lived, writhed and screamed. Local newspapers publicized the atrocities, tours were arranged, photographs became family keepsakes. Fingers, ears and penises were popular mementoes.

Lynchings and, in general, race violence weren't just retribution exacted for a crime. They were a statement of superiority. In the same way a man "puts down" a diseased dog, white society disposed of blacks who evidenced the peculiar affliction of straying from their "place." The murders were a clear message from one race to another: We have power over you. By cutting off blacks' genitals, the mob was denying the victims their right to participate in society as men.

"Emmett Till wasn't killed because society had a few deviants," the University of Miami's Jones says. "He was killed because of a system, and the foundations of that system exist today."

Thus, Till received what Southern society deemed a fitting and common penalty for insulting a white woman. During the Jim Crow decades, 3,446 blacks were lynched in the South, as well as well as 1,297 non-blacks -- mostly Jews, Catholics, civil rights workers from the North and others who had offended Southern sensibilities.

Georgia, with 531 victims, ranked number two in lynchings, behind only Mississippi with 581. Florida, with 282 murders, ranked seventh. North Carolina had 101 lynchings, number 13.

Those are "official" tallies. Many, many lynchings were private affairs, the crimes unrecorded, the victims denied even the humanity of an acknowledged death. In mass violence such as the 1906 Atlanta race riot, for which the centennial comes up in September, there are only estimates on the number slain -- somewhere between 20 and 40, perhaps more.

Similarly, the official death toll in the 1923 destruction of Rosewood, FL, by a white mob was pegged at six blacks and two whites. Other estimates put the number of blacks killed as high as 120. (In one of the few instances of justice for lynching victims, albeit delayed, the Florida legislature in 1994 approved $2.1 million for nine Rosewood survivors and scores of descendants because of the complicity of officials in letting the massacre happen.)

"We don't have the same society today," says Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, AL. "We do see a significant increase in white supremacist, white nationalist groups. But, no, we haven't seen a huge upswing in violence against African Americans, although there have been numerous incidents targeting immigrants."

Potok contends that factors such as the urbanization of much of the South and the influx of people from the North have pushed violent racism out of the South's mainstream and into the fringe. "You can't say everyone from the North is a liberal, but overall the trend is clear," he says. "The vast majority of people living in the South no longer accept racial violence, period."

Yet, one undeniable fact about Dixie is that we know the central story in our history.

The key question now is how to understand race and race-motivated violence, and then how to create a dialogue. Maybe then the South can move on.

Common understanding is the first step. We don't have that today, attested to by the race divide over, say, Georgia's voting rights law passed last year and then revised this year. Most whites applaud such legislation, while blacks perceive a threat. Similarly, when affluent Atlanta suburb Sandy Springs incorporated as a city last year, blacks saw it as another chapter in white flight, while the municipality's mostly white residents said they just wanted local control.

Roy Ennis, chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, argued last summer during the Mississippi murder trial of a Ku Klux Klansman that the South -- the scene of so much racial violence -- is far better situated to deal with racism than the North.

"In the South, you can't be in denial about race," he said. "The South has had the drama. History won't allow [Southerners] to ignore the past."

But Ennis also warned that backsliding would be easy. "We know progress is fleeting. Do I think we'll see more race riots and lynchings? Yes, I do, unless America, led by the South, finally excises its horrible legacy."

Read More
Healing Old Wounds.
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