Media Coverage of the Emmitt Till Murder Played a Major...

On August 28, 1955, fourteen year old Emmett Till was beaten, tortured and shot. Then with barbed wire wrapped around his neck and tied to a large fan, his body was discarded into the Tallahatchi River. What was young Emmett’s offense that brought on this heinous reaction of two grown white men? When he went into a store to buy some bubble gum he allegedly whistled at a white female store clerk, who happened to be the store owner’s wife. That is the story of the end of Emmett Till’s life. Lynchings, beatings and cross-burning had been happening in the United States for years. But it was not until this young boy suffered an appalling murder in Mississippi that the eyes of a nation were irrevocably opened to the ongoing horrors of racism in†¦show more content†¦Sharpton summarizes her decision, â€Å"She found the strength to say, ‘I’ll bear my pain to save some other mother from having to go through this’. And because she put the pict ure of this young man’s body on the conscious of America she might have saved thousands of young black men and women’s lives.† The Reverend goes on to say that through the media coverage of the funeral, â€Å"She was able to graphically bring home what a thousand speeches could not† therefore forcing America face it’s problem of racism. News of Emmett Till’s murder reached media sources across the country and over the ocean. PBS’s history series The American Experience, provides a timeline of how his story spread like wildfire to newspapers around the world. PBS lists several publications which addressed the murder, causing universal public outrage at how something like this could happen to anyone, especially a child. The list includes that on September 2nd, the same day in which Mrs. Till received her son’s body in Chicago, The Jackson Daily in Mississippi published an article on the Till case. In it, they refer to the murder as a â€Å"brutal, senseless crime,† however in the same story they complain that the NAACP was placing too much attention on the incident by referring to it as a â€Å"lynching†. That same day a Belgium newspaper, Le Drapeau Rouge also published an article which was