In order to have a better understanding of this movement, it is crucial to analyze from its roots. There are many theories that linked the Genesis (beginning) of the civil rights movement to many protests and boycotts. One of these major events was the murder of Emmett Till that brought a lot of tension between black and white people in the United States. Emmett, a 14-year-old black teenager from Chicago, was allegedly murdered for whistling a white woman in a store. Sanford Wexler, an eyewitness to the murder of Emmett, writes in his book,
Milam and Bryant [the two white guys who murdered Emmett] drove Emmett to the Tallahatchie River and made the boy carry a 100-pound cotton-gin fan from the back of the truck to the river bank before ordering him to undress. Milam then fired one bullet at Till’s head. Both men then tied the fan around the boy’s neck and dumped his
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(Wexler)
Some days after the disappearance of Emmett Till’s body, the murderers were arrested, but a month later they were declared innocent. During the funeral, his mother decided to see the body with the coffin open so that people could observe the things that the kidnappers made him. More than 50,000 people could see the body of Emmett Till, but also there were photographs of his deformed face published in Jet magazine and various newspapers. This event became the icon and a martyr of the civil right movement in the United States.
Another important event that challenged the status quo and called all the black people to action was the bus boycotts, specifically the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama which was the one who called the most attention from the mass media. Aldon Morris writes, “Under the Jim Crow system, every public bus had a ‘colored section’ in the back and a ‘white section’ in the front. If the white section filled up, blacks had to move farther toward the back, carrying with them the sign designating