In Remembrance of Emmett Till: Regional Stories and Media Responses to the Black Freedom Struggle by Darryl Mace (review)

The lynching of Emmett Louis Till, a fourteen-year-old African American visiting Money, Mississippi, from Chicago, is perhaps one of the most horrific atrocities of the civil rights movement era. Though this murder has been covered extensively through historical and literary analysis, Darryl Mace provides a new perspective on how to reengage this history on the sixtieth anniversary of Till’s untimely death.

Mace analyzes the role of print media to provide a nuanced look at Till’s murder and its aftermath. His analysis is grounded in a national context that examines how each region of the country covered the murder. Mace describes the frame of his analysis as “situational regionalism,” a fluid process that “involved people defining their locale with reference to other regions of the country” (p. 2). This regional analysis builds on that of Joseph Crespino and others, who have suggested that the rest of the nation looked at Mississippi as a scapegoat while simultaneously sharing deep resentment toward integration and the ideals of the civil rights movement.

Mace’s most significant findings address how each region interpreted the Till murder, which provides a lens to better examine the origins of the civil rights movement. The midwestern press provided fairly progressive coverage of the trial and its aftermath, liberally covering the NAACP’s positions, for instance, and placing the event in a wider context of discrimination. Northeastern papers were critical, but they opined that Mississippi was a national problem, critically distancing their region from any racial wrongdoing. The mainstream press in the West sparsely reported the events and even defended the Deep South. The press in the Deep South valorized the legal process and blamed the NAACP for seeking “revenge against white people” (p. 127). Mace also examines the role of the black press. For instance, Mace argues that the New York Amsterdam News unequivocally linked Till’s murder to a larger systemic issue and “charged all black people with the task of bringing democracy to the race” (p. 112).

Mace provides a good overview of the events that precipitated the murder, the trial, which was itself a mockery, and the aftermath, including the influence Till’s lynching had on the civil rights generation and the infamous interview with Look in which the killers admitted their guilt. One interesting aspect of this history was the work of James Hicks, the investigative journalist who courageously followed leads law enforcement ignored, such as the disappearance of witnesses who observed the kidnapping of Till.

In Remembrance of Emmett Till: Regional Stories and Media Responses to the Black Freedom Struggle is good history, but it is nothing new. Though the use of newspapers is logical given the objectives of the book, the lack of other primary sources leaves Mace’s reconstruction of the past incomplete from a methodological perspective. As such, this book is better suited toward courses in journalism or communication. In these fields, this book makes a much stronger and original contribution because it begins to apply the insights of a historiography that challenges long-held notions of southern exceptionalism. One of the strongest contributions is its timely publication in the wake of events in Ferguson, Missouri, North Charleston, South Carolina, and Baltimore, Maryland. This text provides needed historical context that situates journalism and the media as important factors in the ongoing institutional discrimination manifest in law enforcement and systems of justice.