"The Emmett Till murder case in 1955 marked the turning point in the coverage of blacks by the white American press. Till, a black teenager from Chicago, was murdered in 1955 while visiting relatives in Mississippi.
“When Emmett whistled at a white woman storeowner after he purchased candy, the woman's husband and his brother-in-law took Emmett from his relatives' home in the dead of night, drove him away, beat him, gouged out an eye, shot him, tied a cotton gin fan around his neck, and threw him in the Tallahatchie, river.”
The Till murder was covered extensively in the press, since the two white men charged with killing him were acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury on murder charges and later that year were found innocent by a 20-man all-white grand jury on kidnapping charges. At first, most Southern papers denounced Till's murder, but as the Northern white and black presses began investigating the case, anti-black backlash erupted in Southern publications. Editorials appearing in "Life" magazine and the "New York Times" were extremely wounding to Southern pride, and the Southern press retaliated. This media "civil war" continued for about a year after the Till case, raising the question of how to handle race-related news in the news media. By 1960, observers and the press itself agreed that coverage of blacks had improved in both the Northern and Southern press. The Till case gave America a harsh, inescapable glimpse of racial violence and injustice. Even so, problems in the press coverage of minority groups persist, and the task begun more than 30 years ago remains to be completed.
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