SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Fifteen years before the nation was shocked by the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi, a white supremacist murdered Elbert Williams, an NAACP leader in Tennessee. A new book brings light onto the little-known case and argues that it set the stage for decades of racial violence that followed across the South as Black citizens sought the right to vote. NPR's Debbie Elliott reports on the sad and, we should say, gruesome story.
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DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: Jim Emison walks to a dusty riverbank on the outskirts of Brownsville in west Tennessee, not far from Memphis.
JIM EMISON: This is the Hatchie. It's the swampy river.
ELLIOTT: This muddy tributary of the Mississippi is where Elbert Williams' body was discovered on June 23, 1940. Emison reads from the prelude of his new book, "Murder On The Hatchie: The NAACP's First Martyr."
EMISON: (Reading) The dead man had floated face down in the river for two days and three nights. His macerated corpse, bloated by the Hatchie's turbid water and the summer's heat, had been exhumed from its watery grave and laid out supine on the riverbank. His horrific corpse proclaimed the white terrorist lethal threat, register to vote and die.
ELLIOTT: Emison, who is 83 and white, grew up nearby and practiced law in Haywood County for decades. Yet it wasn't until he was near retirement that he first learned about the murder of Elbert Williams and started digging into why his killers were never prosecuted. Emison wrote the book after getting state and federal authorities to reopen the civil rights case about 10 years ago. By then, the suspects and most witnesses were dead, so it was eventually closed. Emison argues it's a watershed case.
EMISON: Brownsville in 1940 was the headwaters of what became later the river of the civil rights movement.
ELLIOTT: Elbert Williams, a 31-year-old laundromat worker, helped form a local branch of the NAACP. At the time, no Black person could vote in Haywood County, Tennessee, even though they were a majority of the population. Emison says when the group first tried to register five Black voters, a white mob, including local law enforcement officers, went after NAACP leaders.
EMISON: And said, get out of this county and don't ever come back. And if you do, we will kill you. And they meant every word of it.
ELLIOTT: The leaders fled. Emison says that's when Williams decided to fill the void and try again to register Black voters. But he was overheard talking about his plan.
EMISON: The police described the tip they received as, there's going to be a meeting of the Negros, as if that were some treasonous event. So they intended to stop it.
ELLIOTT: The sheriff took Williams from his home to the jail for questioning, but Emison says when his wife went to the jail looking for him, her husband was gone. Two days later, she was called to the Hatchie River to identify his bloated and battered body, which appeared to have two bullet holes in the chest.
EMISON: It was a terrorist murder planned to put the fear of death in every Black person in Haywood County who would even think about attempting to vote, and it worked.
ELLIOTT: The NAACP chapter dissolved, and Emison says at least 20 Black families fled the county. Emison dug through courthouse records, the NAACP investigation from the time and files from the FBI and Department of Justice to document how Williams' murderers were never held to account. He says the investigation was mishandled from the get-go. For instance, the FBI collected no forensic evidence and even allowed the main suspect, the sheriff, to sit in on witness interviews. Still, in 1940, the DOJ ordered the U.S. attorney in Memphis to prosecute Sheriff Tip Hunter and a Brownsville policeman, but it never happened. Emison thinks the federal government caved to political pressure from the Southern establishment, a decision, he says, that led to more racial violence for the next 30 years.
EMISON: We've investigated this. Undoubtedly, it's a violation of federal law, but we're not going to do a damn thing about it. It's open season on Black people that want to vote in the South. Go get 'em, boys. People begin to die as a consequence of this, not just Elbert Williams but all over the South.
ELLIOTT: Brownsville mayor, William Rawls, grew up hearing about those days from his family. His grandfather was the funeral home director who signed Elbert Williams' death certificate.
WILLIAM RAWLS: It was touch and go. Can you imagine living in a society where just a conversation - just a conversation - about registered people vote will cause you to lose your life? That's very powerful.
ELLIOTT: It wasn't until the 1960s that Black people were able to register to vote in Haywood County, and then they were met with an economic lockout. Rawls, elected in 2014, is Brownsville's first African American mayor. He says the fact that it took that long for this majority-Black city to get a Black mayor shows the lingering impact of the killing.
RAWLS: It kind of forms as bookends from the murder on the Hatchie, from the murder of Elbert Williams to my election, which uses voter suppression for all those years, that still loomed not just in Brownsville, Tennessee, throughout West Tennessee and all the rural communities where voter suppression was very prevalent.
ELLIOTT: Back on the riverbank, longtime resident John Ashworth recalls growing up during the Jim Crow era in Brownsville. He's 83 now and is working with Jim Emison to create an Elbert Williams Interpretive Center downtown to preserve the history.
JOHN ASHWORTH: I think the ancestors also look back and say, tell our story.
ELLIOTT: Ashworth says he feels that spiritual connection at the river, and it makes him contemplate what could have been.
ASHWORTH: What would Haywood County have been like if it had been able to take advantage of all the creativity that African Americans had?
ELLIOTT: He says society is still paying a price. Ashworth hopes getting this story out can draw connections between then and now.
ASHWORTH: Now, that's not to say that everybody is racist. That's not what I'm saying, but what I'm saying is the culture does not fully see people of color in the same way that it sees white culture. It doesn't. And that's something we have to reckon with.
ELLIOTT: For writer Jim Emison, there's power in Elbert Williams' story.
EMISON: The question I got from white friends was, why? Why do you want to bring this up? And the answer is, it's the truth.
ELLIOTT: For there to be racial reconciliation, he says, you have to understand what it is you're attempting to reconcile.
Debbie Elliott, NPR News, Brownsville, Tennessee. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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