The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [99]
By the 1960s, the average American was producing twice as much as only fifteen years before. In theory at least, people could now afford to work a four-hour day, or two-and-a-half-day week, or six-month year and still maintain a standard of living equivalent to that enjoyed by people in 1950 when life was already pretty good—and arguably, in terms of stress and distraction and sense of urgency, in many respects much better. Instead, and almost uniquely among developed nations, Americans took none of the productivity gains in additional leisure. We decided to work and buy and have instead.
Of course not everyone shared equally in the good times. Black people who tried to improve their lot, particularly in the Deep South, particularly in Mississippi, were often subjected to the most outrageous and shocking abuse (made all the more so by the fact that most people at the time didn’t seem shocked or outraged at all). Clyde Kennard, a former army sergeant and paratrooper and a person of wholly good character, tried to enroll at Mississippi Southern College in Hattiesburg in 1956. He was sent away, but thought it over and came back and asked again. For this repetitive willful uppitiness, university officials—I’ll just make that quite clear: not students, not undereducated townspeople in white sheets, but university officials—planted illicit liquor and a bag of stolen chicken feed in his car and had him charged with grand theft. Kennard was tried and sent to prison for seven years for crimes he didn’t commit. He died there before his term was completed.
Elsewhere in Mississippi in the period in separate incidents the Reverend George Lee and a man named Lamar Smith tried to exercise their right to vote. Smith actually succeeded in casting a ballot—in itself something of a miracle—but was shot dead on the courthouse steps five minutes later as he emerged with a dangerously triumphant smile. Although the killing was in broad daylight in a public place, no witnesses came forward and no assailant was ever charged. The Reverend Lee, meanwhile, was turned away at his polling station, but shot dead anyway, just because, with a shotgun from a passing car as he drove home that night. The Humphreys County sheriff ruled the death a traffic accident; the county coroner recorded it as being of unknown causes. There were no convictions in that case either.
Perhaps the most shocking episode of all occurred in Money, Mississippi, when a young visitor from Chicago named Emmett Till rashly whistled at a white woman outside a country store. That evening Till was hauled from his relatives’ house by two white men, driven to a lonesome spot, beaten to a pulp, shot dead, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River. He was fourteen years old.
Because Till was so young and because his mother in Chicago insisted on leaving the coffin open so that the world could see what her son had suffered, there was, finally, a national outcry. In consequence, two men—the husband of the woman who had been whistled at and his half brother—were arrested and a trial was duly held. The evidence against the two was pretty overwhelming. They hadn’t done much to cover their tracks, but then they didn’t need to. After less than an hour’s deliberation, the jury—all local people, all white of course—found them not guilty. The verdict would have been quicker, remarked the grinning foreman, if the jurors hadn’t taken a break to drink a bottle of pop.