Customer Reviews

Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Emmett Till murder case is perhaps the most notorious and revealing narrative in the long American saga of "race," and it occurred only a few months before Rosa Parks was arrested on a bus in Montgomery, setting off the bus boycott that let the world know that the African American freedom struggle on the rise. This book is not a history of that event. Instead, it is a scholarly examination of the response of the press in Mississippi to the Till case. As such, it serves up a wide array of fascinating primary sources. For a student writing a paper on the Till case or a historian writing a book, this is a gold mine. The authors are to be congratulated for their patient and thorough contribution to scholarship.

And by the way, the review that calls this book apologetic for the Till murder is simply nonsense. This book really makes no argument about the Till murder. It makes some astute observations about the press coverage in Mississippi, which ranges from wildly white supremacist to defensive "moderate" observations to the complexities of an African American press that is not entirely safe and independent, yet has plenty to say. The authors, careful and thoughtful scholars, are no more tolerant of Till's murder than any sane, decent person in the country. There is a quiet moral strength in these pages, but the point of the effort is to advance a deeper historical understanding of the nation's foremost story of racial insanity, Mississippi injustice, and African American resolve to end it.

This book would be a joke, a farce, if did not deal with such a serious subject. The authors have clipped some newspaper articles and come to the conclusion that the supporters of Strider, Kimball, Bryant, the Milams and other murderous bigots are maligned innocents persued by an "outside" press and the NAACP that was hellbent on misrepresenting the really nice, peaceful, Christian, Jim Crow Mississippi.

These guys are apologists for a very ugly murder and the cruel and unacceptable court decision in Sumner, MS, 1955. The authors contend Till's kidnapping, beating, murder and mutilation was caused by the unanimous decision of the US Supreme Court to end school discrimination. And they contend the people of Mississippi had the right and duty to protect their racist society against this national consensus and any incursion by anyone who believed "all men are created equal."

Shame on these authors for this unscholarly and pathetic reconstruction.