The Civil Rights Movement In The 1950's

It is easy to categorize the racial struggles in the 1900s by possessing a general knowledge of Jim Crow laws placed in the south and the power of the Civil Rights movement. Stories of the brave civil rights activists like Rosa Parks and Medgar Evers may come to mind, but there is more to understand of what pushed these righteous leaders to advocate a better life for blacks in America. If there was one cultural object that would represent the 1950s and the beginnings of the civil rights movement, it would be the black and white photograph of Emmett Till’s mutilated face. This image was a powerful representation that explains the domestic terrorism in this moment. The circulation of the image of the little boy whose life was cut short, portrayed

The widely-disseminated photograph of Emmett Till’s disfigured body in the coffin played a huge role in rhetorically altering the way the black body was represented in the 1950s America. The lynching of his black body symbolized domestic terrorism and the ugliness of white violence placed on blacks. Emmett’s murders were terrorist that targeted a child living in the same free country. Unfortunately, Emmett was kidnapped, tortured, beaten, wrapped in barbed wire and tied to a cotton gin and tossed in the river in his own country. The terrorism was placed on him because he whistled at white woman in a store. For blacks in the south, this image reproduced a daily happening of life, but as the image circulated it was a reminder of the disparity between races in the south. As Anderson explains, “among many southern horror stories, this was among the most morbid. The Till death picture was proof of white southerners’ malevolence. Their refusal to acknowledge the killers’ guilt was proof of their acceptance of evil (Anderson xiii). The white’s refusal to acknowledge their mark on the black body in America displayed their enjoyment of their social power over blacks. In this moment

This black press focused on positive images of blacks and established a reflection of blacks that could adapt well to the white America. In 1955, the magazine boomed with popularity after the graphic coverage and images of the murder of Emmett Till. Jet Magazine was based out of Chicago, where Emmett lived. This magazine took the images and plastered them on the spread of their September issue and treated Till as a child of Chicago. Although this magazine catered to blacks, whites got their hands on copies of the issue and the image started to stir up the nation into outrage. None of the other images in this magazine had the power like Emmett’s photograph did. Most magazines and other forms of media that covered this story refused to put the picture of Emmett’s corpse on their magazines. They opted for the image of him when he was alive and young and smiling which did not portray the brutality, but more of his adolescence. It is important in this moment that Mamie Till called for an open casket and allowed photographs to be taken because she wanted “the whole nation had to bear witness to this. . . . [she] knew that if they walked by that casket, if people opened the pages of Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender, if other people could see it with their own eyes, then together we might find a way to express what we had seen”