Susan Klopfer, author, Who Killed Emmett Till?
In the hot summer before the cold winter in which our nation entered the second war to end all wars, two black males were born two weeks apart; one in Illinois and the other in the Mississippi Delta.
They would never meet. Both were killed in and near the small cotton ginning town of Drew in Sunflower County, heart of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta.
Fourteen-year-
Accused of whistling at a white store-owner’
Some 42 years later, Cleveland McDowell of Drew, a 56-year-old Mississippi attorney whose career was unquestionably defined by Till’s untimely murder, was found shot to death at home in Drew.
McDowell, the first black law student accepted into the James Eastland School of Law at the University of Mississippi, achieved numerous honors throughout his life. He was a bright Drew Junior High School leader the day Till was murdered and was so affected that he went on to study law.
All of his professional life, McDowell secretly tracked details of race-based murders, including the lynching of Till. He remained a friend of Emmett Till’s mother, updating her of information as it was gathered until he died in 1997. Mrs. Till lived until 2003.
Emmett Till’s murder sparked the upsurge of activism and resistance known as the modern civil rights movement, historians now say. Rosa Parks’ act of civil disobedience followed by twelve weeks the September 24 acquittal of J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, who later publicly admitted killing Till.
Klopfer’s blog book she is producing during August covers four other civil rights martyrs from the Delta including Joe Pullen and Jo Etha Collier.
“Some of Drew’s black elders still talk about a story passed down by their parents and relatives focusing on a 1923 gunfight raging into the early morning hours of December 15 between Joe Pullen, a tenant farmer and WWI veteran, and plantation manager W.T. Saunders.
"The fight would also turn out to be a watershed event in U.S. history after Pullen shot and killed Saunders during an argument over money and then Pullen’s own life ended in a ditch at the edge of Drew when he was shot after an all-night gun battle.”
By 1965 concerted efforts to break the grip of state disfranchisement had been under way for some time, but had achieved only modest success overall and in some areas had achieved no success at all.
On May 25, 1971 Jo Etha Collier, an 18-year-old black girl, was shot dead in her hometown of Drew less than an hour after she graduated from desegregated Drew High School. She had been shot below the ear and was bleeding heavily; she died before reaching the hospital.
“School integration had gone smoothly in Drew even though a majority of white parents had taken their children out of Drew High School. Those who stayed were getting along well with their black classmates and there were no reported racial incidents during the school year.”
None of Mississippi’
Photo:
http://www.prlog.org/
