Jet Magazine, a Black news outlet, published pictures of Emmett’s mutilated body next to images of him during his last Christmas at home, smiling next to a television set. Mainstream news outlets, including the New York Times, picked up the story from the Black press and delivered it into White homes. Newspapers emphasized Emmett’s loving family and his youth, countering White racist stereotypes about Black men as sexual aggressors. Headlines, such as “Mother’s Tears Greet Son Who Died a Martyr” in the Chicago Defender, also placed Till-Mobley and her pain at the center of the story.
More significantly, television stations broadcast the funeral, at which an estimated 50,000 attendees, most of them Black, came to pay their respects. Live film captured the anguish and grief of Black visitors, and Till-Mobley herself spoke to journalists about the tragedy of losing her son to White violence.
The lynching of the boy and the subsequent trial of Milam and Bryant for his murder were widely reported, not just in the United States, but internationally. When Milam and Bryant were acquitted, the broad news coverage helped spur protest rallies in Chicago, Detroit, New York, Baltimore and beyond the United States, in Copenhagen, Paris and Tokyo.
Four months later, however, the murder of Clinton Melton generated far less collective action.
Melton, a Black father and gas station attendant, was a lifelong resident of Glendora, Miss., four miles north of the town where Emmett Till was killed. He was fatally shot while at work by Elmer Kimball — a friend of J.W. Milam, in fact — who claimed that Melton “got smart” with him when he wanted to gas up his truck. Kimball also claimed that, after a verbal altercation, Melton fired a gun first before Kimball shot back three times, killing Melton. But no evidence was found indicating that Melton even had a gun or fired any shots at Kimball. Nevertheless, Kimball claimed self-defense and was ultimately acquitted.
But there was a crucial difference between the cases. Melton’s wife, Beulah, did not seek, or seem to want, the help of the NAACP as Till-Mobley had, for fear of White retribution. Unlike Till-Mobley, who lived in Chicago, Melton lived in the heart of the Jim Crow South, which would have made trying to publicize the case or working with civil rights organizations dangerous for her.