For all the times I’ve met with racism, the first still burns most
I remember everything about my first brush with racism.
I remember what the people wore and said, the expressions on their faces. I remember the layout of the little convenience store in Liberty, Mississippi, even how it smelled.
Over the next 44 years of my life, other incidents would follow. White people called me a nigger. Police officers pulled me over with no reason. Women tightened the grip on their purses when I joined them in elevators.
But that first one still stands out the most. It was the first time I saw fear and embarrassment on my grandmother’s face. And it led to the first time I heard the name Emmett Till.
The day was Aug. 1, 1976. It was my seventh birthday.
The equivalent of PTSD
A growing body of research on the effects of racism suggests Black people who are exposed to racism can develop sleep disorders, anxiety, depression, even eating disorders. Some researchers have linked exposure to racism with post-traumatic stress disorder, which is typically connected to combat.
While the person may not react outwardly to the impact of racism, their body releases stress hormones as part of a fight-or-flight response, according to Dr. Altha Stewart, the first African American president of the American Psychiatric Association. The chemical cortisol raises alertness to help in those negative situations.
If a person endures repeated acts of racism, the hormone never shuts off. If that happens in children, for example, they can be misdiagnosed with mental disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or be perceived as hypervigilant or aggressive, Stewart said.
Stewart suggested the historical trauma African Americans endured dating to slavery has been passed down from generation to generation. Other researchers have seen the same phenomenon in the descendants of Holocaust survivors and those of warehouse-like orphanages. Subtle biological changes occur in exposure to severe trauma and those changes can be passed down.
“Generations after certain incidents have happened, descendants can still be exposed to that trauma and respond to that trauma,” she said. “We know there is a transmission that we don’t really understand but that we can pinpoint and is accurate.”
A treat that turned sour
My parents had sent me to stay part of the summer with my grandparents at their 40-acre farm in Gloster, Mississippi.
The day started out fine.
I helped my grandmother milk her cows and I fed my grandfather’s pigs.
After breakfast, my grandmother offered me a pound cake for my birthday, but I opted instead for homemade apple pie. It was in the oven by midmorning.
My grandfather then offered to buy me a few comic books for my birthday, provided my grandmother would take me into town to get them. “Town” was Liberty, about 13 miles away. It had a few more stores than Gloster and going there felt like a treat.
When my grandmother and I arrived, I quickly picked up a few comic books and flipped a few pages while another kid took a seat to read his while his mother looked around the store. A store employee, a white guy, walked up to me and said: “The comics are not free. If you don’t have the money to look at them, boy, I suggest you put them back.”
The comment caught me off guard, and I noticed the man said nothing to the white kid doing the same thing.
I put the comic book down and walked around to find my grandmother, who was looking at perfume. She asked me if I picked out the comics I wanted.
I told her what happened and she told me to go get the comic books I wanted so we could leave.
I went back to get them — “The Amazing Spider-Man” and “Howard the Duck” — and we got ready to check out. The mother of the white kid stood behind us as we waited in line. The white cashier told me, “Stand back, boy,” as the white people skipped ahead of my grandmother and me.
“But we were here first,” I said. “You need to teach the boy some manners,” the white lady told my grandmother.
My grandmother didn’t say anything, but I could see in her eyes that she was upset and scared. She just pulled me back by my arm.
The woman said she didn’t know what the world was coming to, and the cashier agreed.
Before she picked up her bag to leave, the woman made one final comment to the cashier.
“You may want to make sure he didn’t steal something.”
I suddenly didn’t want a comic book and I told my grandmother that we could just leave.
She responded that we had driven 13 miles one way on my birthday for that comic book and we were going to leave with that comic book.
When the cashier checked us out, he wouldn’t even make eye contact with my grandmother. I remember he specifically put her change on the counter and not in her hand.
On the way home, my grandmother was quiet. I didn’t say anything either.
Echoes of Martin Luther King Jr.
Years later, I learned that one of the defining moments in the life of Martin Luther King Jr. happened when he was just a year younger than I was that summer.
King grew up in a two-parent, middle-class household in Atlanta. His best friend was a white boy of the same age in his neighborhood. They began to drift apart when King was forced to attend an all-Black school and his friend went to an all-white school. Shortly thereafter, the boy’s father severed the friendship completely, refusing to let King play with his son.
The incident left a bitter taste in King’s mouth and he recalled later that it was the first time he thought of himself as “different” and recognized racism as a problem.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that in his most famous speech — the “I Have a Dream” speech on Aug. 28, 1963 — he included the line: “I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character.”
The legacy of Emmett Till
My grandmother told my grandfather what happened and later that night under the shade tree, my grandfather told me the story of Emmett Till.
Till was a 14-year-old Black child who was lynched in Money, Mississippi, in 1955 after he was accused of flirting with a white 21-year-old woman in her family’s grocery store. Till, a Chicago native, was visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta for the summer.
The interaction between Till and Carolyn Bryant has always been in dispute. But several nights later, her husband, Roy Bryant, and Bryant’s halfbrother went to the home of Till’s great uncle demanding to see the youth. They kidnapped Till, forcing him into the car.
The men beat Till to death, gouged out his eyes, shot in him the head and threw his lifeless body into the Tallahatchie River, a 75-pound cotton-gin fan tied to his neck with barbed wire to weigh him down.
When Till’s body was returned to Chicago, his mother ordered an open casket and a public funeral so the world could see what racists had done to her son. Jet magazine, ran a photo of a stoic Mamie Till Mobley gazing at her son’s bloated corpse. The magazine, which catered to the African American community, often told stories of the horrors of segregation, racism and lynchings.
Although the photos brought national attention to the case, when the men accused of killing Till went on trial in Sumner, Mississippi, an all-white jury found them not guilty. A year later, protected from being tried again due to double jeopardy, the two men admitted to the killing.
In 2017, Carolyn Bryant admitted in an interview that Till had made no verbal or physical advances that day.
Till was killed 21 years before my first run-in with racism. His body was found just three hours north of Gloster.
My grandfather told me not to be upset with my grandmother over the incident at the store earlier that day. He explained to me that in light of what happened to Till, my grandmother feared for my safety, even over something as simple as standing in line to pay for a comic book.
Remembering a loss of innocence
My grandmother didn’t mention the incident until later that summer. She simply said, “Things are different down here.”
I told her that I understood, but that still didn’t make it right.
I felt I lost my innocence that summer in Mississippi. I knew from that point on that my race mattered.
I would later find that Jet magazine with the pictures of Till’s mutilated body. And through the years, from childhood to adulthood to parenthood, I have returned in my mind to the little convenience store on that hot summer day in Mississippi.
“Stand back, boy.”
And each time, I want to take my grandmother’s hand and say firmly: No.
Do you remember the first time you experienced racism? We’d like to hear it. Send your story to jcausey@ gannett.com.