Emmett Till was 14 years old when he was lynched in 1955. Medgar Evers was murdered in 1963, aged 37, for being a lawyer who defended civil rights. They were both from Mississippi. Three months later, four girls, three of them 14 and one 11, were killed in an attack on a Baptist church in Alabama. They were all colored, all perished at the hands of whites.
Nina Simone was outraged by these events. The singer, pianist and civil rights advocate locked herself in a room and wrote “Mississippi Goddam” (Maldita sea, Mississippi) as your answer. She was music, her lyrics were her weapons, her bullets. “Alabama has bothered me so much, Tennessee made me lose my break and everyone knows about fucking Mississippi,” he says. Nina, prey to pain.
The song cost him his career. Whites hated it, the American South banned it. He asked for equal rights, an end to the persecution and criticized the ineffectiveness or the unwillingness to change something on the part of those who held power. That is why today it is important CruzArte a History to know Mississippi Goddam and the dead who inspired it.
Lynched for whistling at a white woman
Emmett Till he was from the north. He lived in Chicago and his reality was very different from that of his cousins in Mississippi, whom he visited in 1955. He was 14 years old, the pride of adolescence and the ignorance of that different world to the surface.
It was never confirmed if it was a challenge, a show of superiority or what, but To he whistled at 21-year-old Carolyn Bryan. Yes it is known that To He was a stutterer, after having suffered from polio in his childhood, and whistling was a way to reduce the tension generated by the speech defect. The woman declared in the subsequent trial that the boy had touched her and had proposed indecency to her. It took him more than 50 years to recant and say that he had lied in court. By then it was too late.
When Roy Bryan, Carolyn’s husband, found out what happened, he began tracking the young man. On August 28, 1955, around 3 a.m., they arrived at the house of the uncle of EmmettThey took him out of the room he shared with five of his cousins, tied him up and took him away in a van. His body was found three days later in the Tallahatchie River. He was disfigured, his head mutilated by a bullet and his body beaten and injured with barbed wire.
In a trial where the jury was made up of only white men (women and blacks could not participate), Bryant and an accomplice were found innocent. In fact, members of the jury admitted that they were guilty, but since state law gave the only possible penalties death or life imprisonment, killing a black was not a big deal.
The first black received in a white hospital died of a gunshot
When the projectile went through his back, moments after getting out of the car in front of his front door, Medgar Evers fell to the floor. He looked up and saw that his wife was trying to come out to rescue him. He got up as best he could, fearing that his wife would be shot. He staggered another 10 meters and fell again.
Myrlie, her spouse, looked around but did not find that the police or FBI cars that always followed her husband to control his actions were in sight. Strangely that day they had disappeared. They loaded him into a neighbor’s car and took him to the hospital, where they only treated whites.
At first they refused to receive it but, realizing who he was, they admitted him. He died 50 minutes later. He was 37 years old. They killed him for fighting for the universities to stop being segregated.
His killer was Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the Ku Klux Klan. They tried him twice in 1964 and did not reach a verdict. No one counted on that Myrlie he was not going to give up. It took 30 years. In 1994, a new jury convicted him. It was too late, but for the Evers family it was at least a bit of justice for the memory of Medgar.
The explosion that was heard across the country
The 19 sticks of dynamite exploded on September 15, 1963 at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. It was Sunday and they were getting ready for Sunday school, so several boys and girls were present. Many people were injured. As the pastor, Reverend John Cross Sr. recited the Bible, hundreds of men and women of color came to help search the rubble for survivors.
Four girls died. They were between 14 and 11 years old. The damage to their bodies was so great that they had to identify them by their clothing. In the following hours, there were clashes between blacks and whites, and two young men of color were killed. One of them by the police when they ignored the order to stop throwing stones, the other by a 16-year-old who shot a 13-year-old boy for fear that he was going to attack him.
These events joined the murder of President John Kennedy. The fight for civil rights intensified. A year later, President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act that abolished segregation and limitations on the black community. There was still a year to go before the Voting Rights Law was approved that would allow access, without restrictions, to the right to vote.
A song of protest, prohibition and exile
Nina Simone presented “Mississippi Goddam”At Carnegie Hall in 1964. Those present thought it was a joke song until they heard the lyrics. It sounded like a song from a television show, it was understood as a deep and painful complaint of reality.
It was banned in the south. Copies of the single were returned, generally broken. However, that didn’t stop Nina, who came to Selma to sing it the day the colored men marched to Montgomery.
But previously, he played her on “The Steve Allen Show.” The driver, Steve Allen, was a defender of the right to free speech. He didn’t care that it hit his rating. In fact, he asked Nina to sing it live for his audience.
The race of Simone faded from this point. The record companies considered her conflictive and her songs were not heard. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was the last straw. He left the United States and never returned.
Mississippi Goddam it is a cry of pain, of rebellion, even a plea for equal rights. For many it was a hymn, for Nina a conviction in her career, which she never regretted. Segregation no longer existed on paper, but in practice, she he was also his victim. However, without that song, the civil rights struggle would not have had a voice.
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