So Another Racist Finds Himself Behind Bars ... So?

Coming close on the heels of the Senate apology for failing to pass one of the three anti-lynching measures laid on its doorsteps by the House between 1920 and 1940, the conviction of Edgar Ray Killen for the 1964 slaying of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County Mississippi marks another chapter in an ongoing drama of expiation and attempts to right some of the racial wrongs of the last century. In the space of a decade or so, we have seen successful prosecutions both of the murderer of Medgar Evers and two of the men who were responsible for the deaths of four children in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Not only did then president Bill Clinton apologize for American participation in the slave trade during what some critics called his “contrition mission” to Uganda in 1998, but a host of bankers, businessmen, and university presidents have also expressed regret for their institutions’ historic links to slavery. The next installment in this saga is unfolding even now with the reopened investigation of the brutal murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta in 1955.

It’s a bit hard to fathom this apparent dawning of the Age of Atonement and Apologia in an era when social consciousness and sensitivity otherwise seems decidedly out of fashion. To some extent it may be simply a matter of timing. After all, the absence of any statute of limitations on murder means little if the search for the murderers leads only to the cemetery. It may not have escaped your notice that those convicted for their long-ago crimes against humanity are at best long in the tooth if not lacking in teeth altogether. After he was finally convicted at age 71 for a crime committed nearly four decades earlier, Birmingham church bomber Bobby Frank Cherry’s four life terms were over in thirty months, and this week’s sentencing of the eighty-year-old Killen to what amounts to sixty years in prison is a classic example of the grand, but substantively empty gesture. A cynical observer might even point out that assigning specific guilt and imposing largely symbolic retribution on octogenarian killers amounts to states and communities shifting some of their collective culpability onto individual sinners before it’s too late. Killen’s supporters charged, with some justification, that prosecutors had shown him guilty of nothing more than being one of a number of Klansmen in Neshoba County at a time when Klan activities were not only common knowledge but openly condoned by quite a few. The same could be said of Leflore and Tallahatchie counties over in the Delta, where local whites and, apparently, even some blacks, clearly knew a great deal more about the slaying of Emmett Till than they were willing to share with authorities. Regardless of age or infirmity, the individuals responsible for these heinous acts should be held fully accountable, but the very length of time that it has taken to bring them to justice surely convicts as much as it exonerates the communities where there crimes were committed.

Although heightened political sensitivity to historic black grievances is testimony to the long-term significance of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the rapid expansion of the black electorate has also left many whites feeling anxious and defensive. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Mississippi, where only 7 percent of eligible blacks were registered to vote in 1964 when the Neshoba County murders occurred, as compared to more than 70 percent today. That Mississippi’s Trent Lott, who would probably be more excited about exhuming Strom Thurmond than Emmett Till, was among the fifteen or so non-apologizers for the Senate’s inaction on lynching was hardly surprising, but even Lott’s supposedly more moderate colleague Thad Cochran must have seen the prospect of more white votes lost than black votes gained and withheld his sponsorship as well. Certainly, Cochran’s explanation that he did not feel compelled to “apologize for something I did not do” was pointedly out of sync with his earlier co-sponsorship of bills offering apologies to American Indians and to Japanese-Americans placed in interment camps during World War II.

Elsewhere in the South and throughout the nation, however, most Senators, could clearly see little downside in a largely symbolic act that cost them nothing politically.

Symbolic politics can have real power and meaning, but it can also substitute style for substance. To their credit, southern business and development leaders have thrown their support not only to punishing those guilty of racial oppression but to removing public sanction from the Confederate flag and other perceived reminders of that oppression. Still, it is far cheaper, both economically and politically, to acknowledge and bewail the manifold sins of the past than it is to seek actively to redress the consequences of those sins for the present. Neither convicting the half-dead perpetrators of old atrocities, nor apologizing for tolerating such actions, nor discarding the symbols associated with them is going to make a single child’s diet more nutritious or his or her school any better. Prosecuting Edgar Ray Killen and seeking the whole truth about Emmett Till might suggest that Mississippi is no longer what it was, but if such deeds are to have lasting value, it will be not as ends in themselves but as long overdue beginnings toward making Mississippi what it should have been all along.

This is true not just for folks in Mississippi but for Americans as a whole, of course. One of the most encouraging aspects of the general public’s reaction to the Senate apology, the Killen trial, and the re-opened Emmett Till investigation is the sense that these events are national rather than regional in import. Not long ago the South was a place where men like Edgar Ray Killen and Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam (the acquitted, then self-confessed slayers of Emmett Till) strode boldly about among people who not only knew what they had done but in many cases admired them for it. Today’s South is no racial paradise, but by most standards of measurement, it is the nation’s most educationally, residentially, and politically integrated region, so much so that it has for some time been the destination of choice for relocating African Americans. Since the Civil Rights movement surged across the Mason-Dixon line at the end of the 1960s, conflicts over integration and discrimination in jobs and housing have made it clear that “the race problem” is, and always was, not just a southern burden but a national one.

If the distinction between southern and national is neither particularly valid or helpful, the same is true of efforts to separate the past from the present. From the New York Times to the Neshoba Democrat, journalists and other observers repeatedly used the word “closure” as the anticipated result of Killen’s conviction. The naiveté of such expectations is apparent in the words of civil rights activist Anne Moody, who recalled that in addition to “hunger, hell and the Devil,” at age fourteen the murder of Emmett Till brought into her life the new and more terrible fear “of being killed just because I was black…. I . . . was told that if I were a good girl, I wouldn’t have to fear the Devil or hell. But I didn’t know what one had to do as a Negro not to be killed.” Whatever may be learned by reinvestigating Till’s murder, there will be no closure for Moody or any other southerner or American, black or white, touched either by its immediate impact or its significance across two generations. As William Faulkner clearly understood, because there is no real separation between “Was” and “Is” the responsibility for a past that we did not make and cannot undo is not ultimately ours to reject unless we are willing to abdicate our responsibility for the present as well.

This article was first published in Newsday and is reprinted with permission of the author.