Mourning Emmett Till

Abstract

After Emmett Till’s murder in 1955, African-Americans mobilized political mourning to oppose the status quo of white power. Till’s death and media coverage that followed generated an affective connection by white Northern liberals to the plight of African-Americans in the South; as a result, Till’s death and the mourning that followed contributed to subtle but important changes that enabled the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement to appeal to the white majority. This effort succeeded in generating white sympathy because it exposed the distance between formal law and law on the ground and expanded the audience to the conflict.