Blacks in Mississippi seemed not only outside the legal protection of the police, but also outside the moral protection of the press. Then just a few weeks after Lamar Smith was murdered, Emmett Till was killed in Tallahatchie County. It was this event that at last galvanized the national press corps, and eventually the nation. Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago who had gone south for the summer; it was his second trip back to his family’s home.
