Surviving the Jim Crow South: “The Talk” as an African American Rhetorical Form

ABSTRACT

This article contends that “The Talk” about racism and police brutality that Black parents have with their children is an intergenerational rhetorical form that not only addresses the behaviors of Black youth in the presence of law enforcement officers but also encourages Black adolescents to develop racial consciousness about how notions and acts of white supremacy impair Black identities. Focusing primarily on the Jim Crow era and the experiences of Charles Evers, Medgar Evers, and Emmett Till, this article explains how The Talk consistently responds to a history of racial violence against Black people and reveals how tenets of rhetoric, memory, and narration frame African American survival practices.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Christa J. Olson for her insightful feedback, patience, and support, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism of the manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Ersula J. Ore (2019, 32) argues that the ways white Americans created an “us vs. them dialectic” against Black Americans and implemented a “rhetoric of enemyship” to gatekeep notions of citizenship and make the practice of lynching Black people a civic duty is central to the rhetorical history of the United States.

2. Although historian Blair L.M. Kelley argues that “‘proper’ education, manners, and attire did not necessarily improve a person’s status [in public settings], just as improvements in class standing did not improve Black chances toward full and equitable inclusion in southern society,” many Black parents believed that endorsing respectability politics and genteel behaviors could increase their children’s chances of surviving Jim Crow life (Kelley 2010, 41).

3. Local NAACP leader Reverend George Lee was shot and killed while driving his car in Belzoni, Mississippi, on May 7, 1955. Farmer Lamar Smith was shot and killed in broad daylight in front of the Lincoln County courthouse in Brookhaven, Mississippi, on August 13, 1955.

4. As Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley wanted to shelter her son from noticing the racial tensions brewing in and around Chicago during the 1940s and 50s. Chicago was far from a Black Utopia, and the city had its share of racist acts against Black people. Till attended all-Black schools because Chicago neighborhoods were deeply segregated, and Black families that attempted to desegregate white communities were often met with violent acts of resistance. As Timothy Tyson (2017) puts it, “Emmett did not have to go to Mississippi to learn that white folks could take offense even at the presence of a black child, let alone one who violated local customs” (16, 33–4). However, since Black people in Chicago could vote while those in Mississippi were severely disenfranchised, the two landscapes were still very different from one another. Although Black children received The Talk for the social milieu in Chicago, Till-Mobley knew that she had to take even greater proactive measures to keep her son protected in the Mississippi Delta (Anderson 2015, 6, 20; Gorn 2018, 12).

5. After Till neglected to address his abductors by “sir” during his kidnapping, they vowed to “blow his head off” (Colin and Elliott 1955, 5).

6. Till visited Mississippi in his “Sunday Best”: a fedora, dress shirt, slacks, and penny loafers, and not the expected jeans or overalls regularly worn for life in the Mississippi Delta. In Carolyn Bryant’s trial testimony, she called Till a “nigger man” who spoke with “the northern brogue.”

7. Historians and scholars of rhetoric and communication studies have largely doubted the accuracy of the January 1956 “confession” of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam. Although Huie’s publication in Look magazine is regularly cited as the factual account of Emmett Till’s kidnapping and murder, Dave Tell (2019, 49–57) notes that Huie fabricated information in his story to protect additional individuals involved in Till’s assault and killing and to advance his own false narrative about Till’s bravado. I am including Huie’s description of Milam’s take here (including accusations that Till provoked his killers) because it presents a rhetorical context for race relations in the U.S. at the time of Till’s death.

8. Imani Perry has made similar arguments. Although Perry contends that teaching Black children to develop racial consciousness builds “justice warriors for a lifetime,” she finds it troubling that many conversations about The Talk concentrate on how Black parents instruct Black children to handle anti-Black racism but do not critique the individuals and systems responsible for performing and institutionalizing practices of anti-Black racism (Perry 2019, 14; “Imani Perry” 2020).

9. While the examples that I include in this article mostly reflect how Black parents have The Talk with their sons, The Talk is not a masculine form that is used for Black boys only. Black girls were also victims of racialized violence in the Jim Crow era, and they continue to be wounded by acts of police brutality, state power, and sexual violence. If The Talk is a cultural text that Black people invoke to circumvent or mitigate acts of racialized violence and to develop racial awareness, it must also consider the racial climate in which Black girls are criminalized and sexualized regularly. Studies that examine how The Talk is presented to various Black people, including people with disabilities and members of LGBTQ+ communities, are needed. See Eric Darnell Pritchard’s Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy (2016) for a more robust discussion about how Black LGBTQ+ people use literacy to demonstrate care and survive harmful acts of discrimination.

10. According to Ore (2019, 79), the circulated images of Emmett Till’s corpse “contributed to the repository of black experiential knowledge used to combat the silencing and historical forgetting of not just lynching, but also lynching’s relationship to the state.” Likewise, Gorn (2018) writes that what happened to Till “was an intimate tale, told at kitchen tables, passed from one generation to the next about the treachery of the white world” (269).

11. Ore and Houdek (2020, 12–4) challenge the idea that lynchings were practices of the past to identify how rhetoric, storytelling, and memory work together to locate lynchings as unending practices of violence against Black people.

12. Elizabeth Alexander writes that “the knowledge of this pervasive violence provides necessary information of the very real forces that threaten African Americans. In the absence of first-person witnessing, the stories are passed along so that everyone knows the parameters in which their bodies move” (2004, 186).