Another brave mother motivated by grief and outrage.

[Pirate Smile]

How Photos Became Icon of Civil Rights Movement

Mutilated is the word most often used to describe the face of Emmett Till after his body was hauled out of the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi. Inhuman is more like it: melted, bloated, missing an eye, swollen so large that its patch of wiry hair looks like that of a balding old man, not a handsome, brazen 14-year-old boy.


Emmett Till's body was shown in a open coffin in Chicago in 1955. Close-up photographs of his face appeared in black publications.


But if the lynching of Emmett Till was, as the historian David Halberstam called it, the first great media event of the civil rights movement, it became so largely because of the photographs of that monstrous face.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the killing, an occasion for a new documentary film, re-examinations of the story in the news media and updates on the progress of a reopened investigation. The Clarion-Ledger, a newspaper in Jackson, Miss., reported last week, for example, that the body federal agents exhumed from Emmett's grave near Chicago in June had been positively identified through DNA.

But little has been said about the photographs of Emmett taken at his open-coffin viewing, which were first published nationally in Jet magazine and shunned by mainstream news organizations but have since become iconic, textbook images of the Jim Crow era. In "Eyes on the Prize," the PBS documentary on civil rights, Charles Diggs, a former congressman from Detroit, called the Jet photographs "probably one of the greatest media products in the last 40 or 50 years, because that picture stimulated a lot of anger on the part of blacks all over the country."

more at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/national/28till.html?pagewanted=1

[Erika]

1. He was just a kid.

His mother,a fantastic lady.

We have our dead and maimed yet again but mothers are still powerful tools to stop the nonsense.

[democrank]

2. Democracy Now

did a segment on this last night. Love that Free Speech TV.

[MuseRider]

3. That remains

one of the saddest stories.

[OKDem08]

6. epiphany

Think of the link--then and now regarding the abu ghraib photos

[ordinaryaveragegirl]

4. Still such an unspeakable tragedy...

Emmett Till never deserved to suffer and die that way, nor does any human being. It still makes me so sad to hear his story, but it's incredible, the effect that one boy had to help motivate so many in society to demand better for EVERYONE, regardless of the color of their skin.

[jonnyblitz]

5. I read the book his mother wrote that, i believe ,was published

posthumously. I can't remember the name off the top of my head but it was worth reading. I didn't read the article you have the link for yet so for all I know the title of the book might be mentioned there. :shrug:

[Pirate Smile]

7. "Death of Innocence"

"Emmett's mother, Mamie, insisted on seeing her son's body. Then she decided to have an open-coffin viewing. Thousands of people attended. The image of young Emmett in a straw hat was taped to the coffin for comparison. She called her later book, co-written with Christopher Benson, "Death of Innocence."
'

[jonnyblitz]

8. yep, thats it. I can remember the picture of the body in the

casket in the book. :(