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then Daniel White rapes a sixteen-year-old girl and they've got a reason to
hate, they've got something to focus their hate on. So they start taking out
their fear and confusion in any way they can.
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"Look what has happened in just the few hours since the girl was found. Your
church has been bombed, brothers have been fired and ostracized, some have
been beaten up and perhaps that boy they stomped will die. Your homes and that
bar have been burned. This isn't going to stop here.
It's going to get worse. And it's not even going to stop with your town. It's
going to march like a wave to the beach, washing all the work we've done
before it.
"If Daniel White goes free."
He paused.
Roblee made to interrupt, "But to let them haul him out of there and lynch
him, that's ..."
"Don't you understand, man?" Peregrin turned on Roblee with fury. "Don't you
hear what I'm telling you? That man up there isn't merely a poor sonofabitch
who got loaded and pawed a white girl. He's a cold-blooded miserable animal,
and if anyone deserved to die, it's him. But that has nothing to do with it.
I'm talking to you about the need for that man to die. I'm telling you,
Roblee, and all of you, that if you don't take their minds off the Negro
community as a whole, you're going to set back the cause of equality in this
country fifty years. And if you think I'm making this up you'd better realize
that it's already happened once before, just this way."
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They stared at him.
"Yes, dammit, it happened once before. And though we didn't have anything to
do with the way it turned out--and thank God it turned out as it did--we would
have told them to do it just the way they did."
They stared, and suddenly, one of them knew.
"Emmett Till," he breathed, softly.
Peregrin turned on the speaker. "That's right. They didn't even know for sure
what the circumstances had been, but the trouble was starting up--not even as
bad as here--and they hauled
Till out and killed him. And it stopped the trouble like that!" he snapped his
fingers.
"But lynching ..." Roblee said, horrified.
"Don't you understand? Are you stupid or something, like they say we are?
Monkeys? Can't you see that Daniel White dead can be more valuable than a
hundred Daniel Whites alive? Don't you see the horror that Northerners will
feel, the repercussions internationally, the demands for justice, the swift
advance of the program ... can't you see that Daniel White can serve the
greater good? The good of all his people?
"What he never was in life, that miserable bastard up there can be in death!"
Roblee shrank away from Peregrin. The taller man had not spoken with
fanaticism, had only delivered with desperate and impassioned tones what he
knew to be true. They had heard him, and now each of them, where there was no
room for anyone else's opinions, was thinking about it. It meant murder ... or
rather, the toleration of murder. What they were deliberating, was the
necessity of lynching. Therewas no doubt that the trouble could be much worse
in the town, that more homes would be burned and more people hurt, perhaps
killed. But was it enough to know that to sacrifice up a man to the mob
madness, to the lynch rope? Was it enough to know that you might be saving
hundreds of lives in the long run by sacrificing one life hardly worth saving
to begin with?
It might have been easier, had Daniel White been a man with some qualities of
decency. But he wasn't. He was just what the White Press had called him, a
beast. That made it the more difficult;
for had he been easier to identify with, they could have said no. But this way
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...
There were murmurs from around the room, and the murmurs were, "I ... don't
... know ... I just don't know ..."
It meant more than just saving the skins of the people in Littletown--though
men had been sacrificed to save less lives--it meant saving generations of
children to come, from sitting in the backs of movie houses, of allowing them
to grow up without the necessity of knowing squalor and prejudice and the
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