Demanding Rights, Courting Controversy

Black Maverick. By David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito. University of Illinois Press, 304 pages, $35


In the 15 or so years of the civil-rights movement, no incident evoked more outrage than the torture and killing of Emmett Till, the spirited 14-year-old who left Chicago in August 1955 to visit relatives in Mississippi.

15 years? Wonder how he defines the Movement. 1955 to 1970? The fight for the giving of full civil rights to all Americans, blacks included, began long before 1955.

Read an excerpt from ‘Black Maverick’

The murder brought national disgust upon Mississippi, especially after thousands of mourners viewed Till’s open casket and noted the barbarities wrought upon the boy. State authorities felt pressured enough to put two suspects on trial, and civil-rights leaders believed that this time, just once, maybe, justice might be done.

Howard in 1955 holding the arm of the mother of murdered youth Emmett Till. Also pictured, Rep. Charles Diggs and witness Amanda Bradley.





One of them was T.R.M. Howard—physician, landowner, activist, orator and the subject of “Black Maverick,” a compelling biography by David T. Beito and his wife, Linda Royster Beito. “Black Maverick” is a necessary biography, too: Howard played an important part in the Emmett Till story, and in the entire civil-rights era. He deserves to be better known.

I am not familiar with the name.

Famed civil-rights leader Medgar Evers was Howard’s protégé, as was (later) Jesse Jackson. In the most public period of his career (Howard died in 1976, at age 68), Jet magazine tracked him every month and Ebony highlighted him in a story on “The New Fighting South.”

As the Till trial date approached, Howard was poised to take action. He made his home a command center, welcoming Till’s mother, hosting journalists and providing safety for witnesses he’d rounded up with promises of safe passage to Chicago after the trial. Guards roamed the premises, and Howard slept with a .45 at his pillow, a submachine gun at his feet. The “not guilty” verdict returned by the jury dismayed many but inspired Howard to take the case to the public. He delivered speeches in Baltimore, Los Angeles and New York decrying lawlessness in the South and berating J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, whom he accused of foot-dragging whenever a black victim was involved. Hoover replied with a public letter rejecting Howard’s “intemperate and baseless charges.” Liberal white journalist Hodding Carter (the father of Jimmy Carter’s White House adviser) had once called Howard a “one-man uplift movement.” Now he wrote: “I wouldn’t want to gamble on Howard’s life expectancy in the Delta.” In the end, Till’s murderers were never convicted.

What a sorry chapter in US history.Awful. Tragic. Horrible.

With Howard so prominent back then, people might wonder why he has virtually no place in the popular memory of the civil-rights movement. The Beitos have an explanation. Other aspects of Howard’s life, they argue, tainted his legacy: sexual profligacy; becoming an abortionist, his penchant for big cars and fancy clothes, his anti-communism.

A flamboyant Second Amendment, ­anti-communist capitalist doesn’t please journalists and historians searching for civil-rights martyrs.

Quite a value judgment to make.
T.R.M. Howard at his desk at the Friendship Medical Center in Chicago (1975).