In Remembrance of Emmett Till: Regional Stories and Media Responses to the Black Freedom Struggle

3.Home Going

47 3 Home Going Emmett Till’s brutal 1955 murder exposed the malignant cancer of racial hatred rapidly metastasizing across the South in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. Untreated, this tumor threatened to disfigure and permanently discredit U.S. Cold War efforts at home and abroad. Through interest and disinterest in the case, domestic print media sources positioned themselves in relation to the senseless killing. By foregrounding, obscuring , and whitewashing elements of the saga, national and regional news outlets framed the events and the actors in ways that bolstered existing dispositions toward gender and race. Moreover, these approaches demarcated the importance of the lynching in the psyches of media outlet leaders as well as what aspects of the events these leaders and their staff felt were the most salient. In much the same way as the image of Emmett Till sacrificed at the feet of a Ku Klux Klan–hooded Abraham Lincoln substitute (see figure 3.1), this framing foreshadowed the ways in which the media juxtaposed regional dispositions with perceptions of Mississippi racial norms. Through the process, the entire state of Mississippi was put on public trial. African American individuals and groups understood the hypocrisy of promoting democracy abroad while relegating a significant portion of American citizenry to second-class status; thus, they worked continually to position Emmett Till’s death within the broader milieu of American race relations. At the forefront of these efforts stood Mamie Till-Mobley, who, alongside her relatives, the black press, and the NAACP, underscored the importance of Till’s death with respect to the growing movement for racial equality. Unlike the Scottsboro Boys cases of the 1930s and 1940s—referred to here as the collective defense and conviction appeals of nine black boys accused of the rape of two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama—with Till the NAACP took the lead in the defense of a black youth accused of the inappropriate treatment of a white woman. In the Scottsboro cases, the NAACP did assist; however, the defense of the nine 48 In Remembrance of Emmett Till wrongfully accused black males largely fell to the pro-Communist International Labor Defense (ILD). Referring to Communists’civil rights effort in the 1930s and 1940s, Stephen Lawson noted: “From its defense of the Scottsboro Nine in the early 1930s to its support of organizing sharecroppers in Alabama and factory workers in North Carolina in the 1930s and 1940s, the [Communist] party played an important role in the black freedom struggle.”1 Thanks to Scottsboro, the NAACP had learned that efforts to protect black males from allegations of impropriety levied by white women could be successful. When in 1955 press reports from the Deep South and the West attempted to dismiss Emmett Till as a stereotypical black brute intent Figure 3.1. Another Sacrifice to Jim Crow. Political cartoon, September 12, 1955. Laura Gray Political Cartoons, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. Home Going 49 on raping white womanhood, the organization made sure it was at the vanguard of efforts to defend Till’s image and use his death to forward racial justice. Of course, the rampant anticommunism of the 1950s also precluded Communist organizations like the ILD from taking charge of the Till case, and the NAACP most effectively used Cold War politics to fight for racial justice. As Lawson underscored, “in casting aside the radical economic ideology of the [Communist] Popular Front, groups such as the NAACP succeeded in using America’s anticommunist foreign policy and the corresponding need to win allies in emerging Third World nations to pry civil rights measures from the national government.”2 It had to be the NAACP leading the call for racial justice in the Till saga, and, in the wake of the Brown decisions, the NAACP continued to be a thorn in the side of white southerners by doing all it could to see that those responsible for Till’s death were held accountable. The organization used the tragedy to recruit new members, solicit funds for its campaign for greater civil rights, and highlight the magnitude of racism and racial violence in the South. Till was a logical tool for the NAACP, and through the lynching it was able to confirm the existence of unrestrained white supremacist violence. Moreover, his death validated NAACP legal arguments found in Brown; if Americans could stomach the brutal lynching of this fourteen...