Amid general unification behind anticommunism, Emmett Louis Till's 1955 lynching engendered regional stories and illuminated racial dispositions that placed center stage all the vitriolic hatred that remained as a legacy of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy. Chronicling events surrounding the lynching, regional press coverage of the Till saga marked a response to people's views of the place in which they lived and how their locale compared to the rest of the nation. Using regionalism as a lens, this book provides a textual analysis of press coverage of Emmett Till's lynching. The regio ... More

Amid general unification behind anticommunism, Emmett Louis Till's 1955 lynching engendered regional stories and illuminated racial dispositions that placed center stage all the vitriolic hatred that remained as a legacy of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy. Chronicling events surrounding the lynching, regional press coverage of the Till saga marked a response to people's views of the place in which they lived and how their locale compared to the rest of the nation. Using regionalism as a lens, this book provides a textual analysis of press coverage of Emmett Till's lynching. The regional press strategically highlighted aspects of the Till saga that best framed their perspective on American race relations, and, through their letters to the editor, readers both supported their local papers' coverage and challenged the staff to intensify their reports. Even with the horrific nature of the crime and the national climate after the 1954 and 1955 Brown v. Board of Education decisions, Till's death would not have garnered the attention it received were it not for his family, the black press, and civil rights organizations. Mamie Till-Mobley allowed the world to see gruesome images of her son, and civil rights organizations and black news outlets lambasted the state of Mississippi for the crime. The Emmett Till saga struck a chord for many who followed the saga through the pages of regional and national publications, and, unwilling to let his brutal murder go unchallenged, they leaped into the burgeoning modern civil rights movement and formed the Emmett Till generation.