Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [121]
I have spent a lot of time contemplating that conundrum over the past ten years, and I have come to the conclusion that at least part of the problem is ours. We tend to think of racism, and racists, the way we think of most things—in binary terms. Someone is either a racist or he isn’t. If he is a racist, he does racist things; if he isn’t, he doesn’t. But of course it’s much more complicated than that, and in the Mississippi of 1955 it was more complicated still. Today, we can look back and say that Howard Armstrong should have voted to convict Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam of murdering Emmett Till; but for him to buck the established order like that would have actually required him to make at least four courageous decisions. First, he would have had to decide that the established order, the system in which he had lived his entire life, was wrong. Second, he would have had to decide that it should change. Third, he would have had to decide that it could change. And finally, he would have had to decide that he himself should do something to change it.
Howard Armstrong never made it to that final step. Another juror apparently did, and managed to stay there through two votes before backing down. It is frustrating to me that I will probably never know who that other juror was, where he found the courage that got him that far, and why, ultimately, he changed his mind. But it is even more frustrating to me to imagine that Howard Armstrong made it past Step 1 but got tripped up on 2 or 3.
I only wonder if it was frustrating for him too. In 1995, sitting with him in his living room, I took his answers, his unwavering declarations that he had no regrets, at face value; today, I’m not so sure. Rereading my notes after ten years, I can perceive a certain defensiveness in his words, an urge to keep the conversation short and narrow, perhaps cut off the next question before it could be asked. His insistence, like J.W. Kellum’s, that this was just another trial feels flat now. And then there’s his vacillation on the matter of whether or not the defendants were “outlaws.” Did he really believe, in both 1955 and 1995, that Bryant and Milam were innocent, and that he himself had done the right thing in voting to set them free? Or was this merely something he repeatedly told himself—and others—to get by? I do believe he was not a racist in 1995. But had he been one in 1955 and then grew, in subsequent decades, so ashamed of that fact that he did everything he could to defeat it in his own mind?
I don’t know if Howard Armstrong could have answered those questions then, but I imagine he didn’t want to try. It was easier on him, I’m sure, to believe that he had just forgotten all about it. “I’m glad I can’t remember those old days,” he told me near the end of our visit. “You hear so much about ‘the good old days.’ The good old days weren’t so good.”
RICHARD RUBIN has been a regular contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, and has written for the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, New York magazine, and The Oxford American, among others. His most recent book, Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South (Atria, 2002), is in part a memoir of his experiences reporting for a daily newspaper in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1988–1989. He lives in New York, and is at work on a book about World War I.
Coda
I first heard the story of Emmett Till in 1987, as a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, while watching the documentary Eyes on the Prize as part of a seminar on the subject of Race in America. I was shocked, of course, by Till’s story—most of Eyes on the Prize is shocking, really—and when the narrator recounted how an attorney for the killers said, at their trial, “I’m sure every last Anglo-Saxon one of you men in this jury has the courage to set these men free,” I remember, clearly, thinking: Why would anyone say such