“Never Cross a Man Not Afraid to Die”

Malcolm XPolitical Science 110EB

Emmett Till, 1941-1955

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Emmett Till

• Born in Chicago, visiting family (sharecroppers)in Money, Mississippi.

• Mamie Carthan Till, mother, was worried that Emmett would not understand the differences between Chicago and the Mississippi Delta– “Mind your manners.”– Tensions on the rise after Brown v. Board of

Education (1954)– The permanent awareness of existing within an

actively hostile majority

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Emmett Till

• Facts uncertain• At local grocery store, Till probably dared by

friends to flirt with Carolyn Bryant, a 21 year-old white woman.– Whistled? (most probable)– Grabbed hand, asked for date?– Said, “Bye, baby.” on leaving?

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Emmett Till

• One of friends runs off to tell Emmet’s cousin, Wheeler Parker, Jr.– Advised to get away fast– Parker on Till: “"He loved pranks, he loved fun, he

loved jokes... in Mississippi, people didn't think the same jokes were funny." “

– All Delta natives know what can happen• The permanent threat of violence is a fact of life

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Emmett Till

• Word spreads quickly among town’s whites• Bryant’s husband vows to “teach the boy a

lesson”• At 12:30am, the Bryants, half-brother J.W.

Milam, one other man drive to house of Rev. Wright, where Till was staying, take him away in the back of a pickup

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Emmett Till

• Taken to a shed• Beaten, skull fractured• Eye gouged out• Shot in the head• Wrapped in barbed wire, bound to 70 lb.

cotton gin fan, dumped in river– Mother demanded open casket funeral

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Emmett Till• NAACP leader Medgar Evars arrives to help

investigate in face of police indifference• Murdered in Mississippi, June 12, 1963 by rifle shot to the head

(Malcolm X: 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr.: 1968)• At trial, positive identification by witnesses, other

black witnesses not even called• Some black witnesses arrested to prevent testimony

• All white jury acquits Bryants, others, in 67 minutes– "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have

taken us too long.”

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Emmett Till• After trial, Bryant & Milam admit to murder• Look magazine pays for interview.– They had meant to “just whip him... and scare some

sense into him.”• Till: "You bastards, I'm not afraid of you. I'm as good as you

are. I've 'had' white women. My grandmother was a white woman.”

• Milam: “Chicago boy, I'm tired of 'em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I'm going to make an example of you -- just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.'”

• He was killed because he wasn’t afraid.– Link to interview, subsequent letters to the editor on website

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Letters to the Editor• “To publish this story, of which no one is proud, but which was

certainly justified, smacks loudy of circulation hunting. Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam did what had to be done, and their courage in taking the course they did is to be commended. To have followed any other course would have been unrealistic, cowardly and not in the best interest of their family or country.”– Richard Lauchli, Collinsville, Illinois

• “..You are champions of the NAACP...”– John Barber, Montgomery, Alabama

• “..I want to cancel my subscription to your magazine at once. I will not have my home contaminated with...filthy, dishonest articles...”– Mrs. W. R. Prevost, Utica, Mississippi

• “...If this case is not reopened and the guilty punished, I shall laugh at the word ‘justice.’”– William T. Bates, Folsom, Pennsylvania

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The Autobiography of Malcolm X

• Read this text as an argument in the first person, not a personal affirmation– The claim is not that Malcolm

X’s experience is remarkable, but that it is not

• Malcolm Little Satan Malcolm X El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz

• Atheist Nation of Islam Sunni Islam

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• Themes– Systematic racism– Degradation & dehumanization– Pervasive violence and domination– Self-loathing– Oppression of ideas– Liberating power of truth– Race consciousness– Dignity, honesty & order

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Systematic Violence

• “When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night.” (3)– From even before the beginning

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Systematic Violence

• Sundown Towns– No blacks allowed on streets after dark

• Mother the product of rape by a white man• Father murdered by white supremacist Black

Legion– Four of father’s six brothers killed by whites

• Home burned to the ground by Black Legion– “The white police and firemen cam and stood around

watching as the house burned down to the ground.” (6)

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Systematic Violence

• Example of systematized racism:• Father’s skull crushed, laid across streetcar

tracks and cut almost in half– Ruled a suicide• “How could my father bash himself in the head, then

get down across the streetcar tracks to be run over?” (14)

– Insurance won’t pay off– Family sinks into poverty

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Systematic Racism

• Mother must raise eight children alone– Life of constant insult: living on charity and

passing as white– Fired whenever it is discovered that she is black• Constant humiliation & degradation

– Stress & shame causes mental illness– Family broken up by welfare agency• “The monthly welfare check was their pass. They acted

as if they owned us, as if we were their private property.” (16)

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The oppressive power of names

• “Soon, nearly everywhere my father went, Black Legionnaires were reviling him as an ‘uppity nigger’ for wanting to own a store, for living outside the Lansing Negro district, for spreading unrest and dissention among ‘the good niggers.’” (5)– Good = subservient– To want to live as a free & independent man is

“uppity”, i.e. not to be permitted of black men.

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The oppressive power of names• “The white kids didn’t make any great thing abut us,

either. They called us ‘nigger’ and ‘darkie’ and ‘Rastus’ so much that we thought those were our natural names. But they didn’t think of it as an insult; it was just the way they thought about us.” (12)– Internalizing the contempt of the oppressor– The contempt is casual, unthinking. So habitual that it

isn’t even thought of as an insult.– Demonstrates the unquestioned systematization of white

power– Part of Malcolm X’s goal is to reveal this power & strip it of

it’s legitimacy

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The oppressive power of names• From his favorite teacher: “Malcolm, one of life’s first

needs is for us to be realistic. Don’t misunderstand me, now. We all here like you, you know that. But you’ve got to be realistic about being a nigger.”– Systematic racial oppression seen as just the way it is.– As part of the racist system of oppression, things are

• “A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal for a nigger. You need to think about something you can be. You’re good with your hands—making things. Everybody admires your carpentry shop work. Why don’t you plan on carpentry?” (43)– Don’t be what you are or what you can be, be what the system

of racist oppression wants to make of you.

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The oppressive power of names

• “Where ‘nigger’ had slipped off my back before, wherever I heard it now, I stopped and looked at whoever said it. And they looked surprised that I did.

• “I quit hearing so much ‘nigger’ and ‘What’s wrong?’—which was the way I wanted it.” (44)

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Internalizing Contempt

• For Malcolm X, the problem is not only oppression by white society, but its acceptance by blacks themselves.

• “I actually believe that as anti-white as my father was, he was subconsciously so afflicted with the white man’s brainwashing of Negroes that he inclined to favor the light ones, and I was his lightest child.” (7)

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Internalizing Contempt• “I was among the millions of Negroes who were insane

enough to feel that it was some kind of status symbol to be born light-complexioned—that one was actually fortunate to be born thus.” (5)• “How ridiculous I was! Stupid enough to stand there lost in

admiration of my hair now looking ‘white,’… I vowed that I’d never again be without a conk, and I never was for many years.

• This was my first really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair.” (64)• “In any black ghetto in America, to have a white woman who

wasn’t a known, common whore was—for the average black man, at least—a status symbol of the first order.” (78)

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Internaliz Contempt• “They prided themselves on being incomparably more ‘cultured,’

‘cultivated,’ ‘dignified,’ and better off than their black brethren down in the ghetto, which was no further away than you could throw a rock. • Under the pitiful misapprehension that it would make them ‘better,’

these Hill Negroes were breaking their backs trying to imitate white people.” (48)

• “So many of those so-called ‘upper class’ Negroes are so busy trying to impress on the white man that they are ‘different from those others’ that they can’t see they are only helping the white man to keep his low opinion of all Negroes.” (123)– Division of the black community against itself– Identification with the oppressor– “White” understood to mean “better”, “black” to mean “worse”

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Dehumanization

• “In the ghettoes the white man has built for us, he has forced us not to aspire to greater things, but to view everyday living as survival—and in that kind of community, survival is what is respected.” (105)– A life of oppression and brutality leaves the individual

brutalized– In the absence of even the possibility of better things,

Malcolm X at this point in his life embraces a form of nihilism. He sees his life of self-loathing, drugs, sex, and crime as self-degradation.

– This is due in part to a lack of self-knowledge and self-respect

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The color line• “We laughed about the scared little Chinese whose

restaurant didn’t have a hand laid on it, because the rioters just about convulsed laughing when they saw the sign the Chinese had hastily stuck on his door: ‘Me Colored Too.’” (131)

• “Hymie really liked me, and I liked him. He loved to talk. Half his talk was about Jews and Negroes. Jews who had anglicized their names were Hymie’s favorite hate. Spitting and curling his mouth in scorn, he would reel off names of people he said had done this.” (143)• The race card: “Who in the world’s history has ever played

a worse ‘skin game’ than the white man?” (206)

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• “She knew from personal experience how crime existed only to the degree that the law cooperated with it. She showed me how, in the country’s entire social, political and economic structure, the criminal, the law, and the politicians were actually inseparable partners.” (134)– No legitimate authority: Law, religion, society all

complicit in racist oppression & hypocrisy• The curse of Ham

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Being toward death

• “I believed that a man should do anything that he was slick enough, or bad and bold enough, to do and that a woman was nothing but another commodity.” (155)

• “Deep down, I actually believed that after living as fully as humanly possible, one should then die violently.” (159)

• “I lived and thought like a predatory animal.” (155)

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• “The white man is the devil.”• My mind “flashed across the entire spectrum

of white people I had ever known; and for some reason it stopped upon Hymie, the Jew, who had been so good to me….

• I said, “Without any exception?”• “Without any exception.”

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• Black Legion• Welfare officials• Judges• Teachers• Cops• Johns• Customers• Sophia• Etc.

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