Jayland Walkers killing didnt spur expected protests. Heres why.

On June 27, Jayland Walker was killed by Akron police after a car chase over a traffic violation. When Walker fled from his vehicle, eight officers fired more than 90 rounds, with Walker suffering more than 60 gunshot wounds. Anticipating protests, the city of Akron restricted downtown access and canceled its annual weekend-long Independence Day festival.

There were local demonstrations against the Akron police. Yet nationally, the incident did not galvanize the public to anywhere near the degree that George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police did in 2020. Protests across the nation have been comparatively muted. Walker didn’t even trend for long on Twitter, a platform that has been a critical organizing tool for recent protest movements.

The difference between the two cases exposes the way media plays a critical role in fueling activism. In the 21st century, that means social media. But in the 20th century, another kind of media — television — was intertwined with the growth of the civil rights movement. A look back to the 1950s and the infamous lynching of Emmett Till, and the lesser-known murder of Clinton Melton, shows how media stories and images create narratives about victims and play a crucial role in rallying the public against racial violence and injustice.

In the 1940s, television provided entertainment and the public did not view it as a way to learn about current events. Because so few Americans owned a television — roughly 3 million sets were sold in the entire decade — they depended on newspapers and radio for their news stories.

This began to change in the 1950s, when more than 5 million television sets were sold every year. With the rise of the civil rights movement, tragedy mixed with new media to help rouse the nation against segregation. The immediacy that television offered when covering the struggle for civil rights legitimized the medium as a reputable news source. Likewise, the civil rights movement also benefited from television’s interest. Video recordings allowed Black people to show the world how violent racist Whites in the South could be, while also publicizing activists’ visions of equality. Through television, Black Americans were able to challenge the racial social order in ways they could not before.

The murder of Emmett Till in 1955 provided one notable example of this. While visiting family in Mississippi, the 14-year-old Emmett was kidnapped and killed for the alleged crime of whistling at Carolyn Bryant, a White woman. Bryant’s husband, Roy, and half brother, J.W. Milam, took Emmett from his uncle’s house. They beat the boy mercilessly, shot him in the head and threw him in the Tallahatchie River with a 70-pound cotton-gin fan tied to his body with barbed wire.

Three days later, the boy’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, learned of her son’s lynching, and even in her grief, she set out to “make the whole world see” how violence was used to maintain white supremacy. To that end, she insisted on an open-casket funeral for her son and, with the help of the NAACP, invited news stations and newspapers to cover the event.

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.

Yet the killing of Melton still made national news. As with Emmett’s murder, newspapers — particularly those outside the South — used the grief and suffering experienced by Melton’s wife and children to tell a story of another wanton murder in Mississippi. An article in the Pittsburgh Courier even included a telegram from the Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Club pleading with President Dwight D. Eisenhower to sympathize, as a father, with the Melton family. The federation called upon Eisenhower to send federal troops to Mississippi to stop white supremacists from continuing what was described as a “genocide” against Black Americans.

Although newspapers reported on Melton’s killing and the trial of Kimball, media coverage was minimal compared to that of Emmett’s — a detail that journalists commented on. A local newspaper in Connecticut compared the Till trial, which had an average of 75-100 reporters in attendance each day, to the trial in Melton’s slaying, which only attracted about a dozen. Journalist David Halberstam of the Reporter suggested that one reason for this could have been that the Melton family “lacked reader appeal” because they were from the South, compared to the middle class Till family from the North.

But more important, without the springboard of print coverage, television broadcast news skipped covering the event. The story didn’t reach Americans in their homes the way Emmett’s death did, and without media coverage to help spark outrage, protests remained local and small.

In the 1950s, broadcast journalists capitalized on the frequently recurring television drama that larger protests and marches provided. And civil rights organizations understood this correlation, too. For instance, organizers skillfully shaped protests to ensure media coverage by arranging for marches to take place before 2 p.m. so network news crews had enough time to prepare their film for that evening’s broadcast. They even sang freedom songs with short, repetitive phrases — such as “We Shall Overcome” — to be sure that their message fit into short 10-second sound bites.

This symbiotic relationship between media and movements continues today with the advent of the internet, smartphones and social media.

Long ago, television amplified the horror of the lynching of Emmett Till, but it also amplified the immediacy and urgency of the crisis, much like social media has done for Black people killed by police in the 21st century. But in Jayland Walker’s case, the video of his death was caught on police body cameras, not a bystander’s phone. The reporting of his death circulated for six days before the video was released by Akron police, disrupting the way the public connected the story of Walker’s death with the visual evidence. Furthermore, Walker’s mother, Pamela, sought to blur her son’s image in the video in an effort to prevent the type of voyeurism that can fetishize Black pain.

Walker’s mother and sister, Jada, have, thus far, given few interviews. Instead they have requested privacy and peace, something George Floyd’s brother, Philonise, had hoped for before eventually choosing a public role as police reform activist.

While this is understandable, the media’s ability to personalize grief depends, in many ways, on explicit videos of public murder and on the emotional strain of mourning family members to put themselves in the spotlight. The variations in public response to these two killings, therefore, does not indicate that people are desensitized to violence against Black people. Instead it shows how normalized it has become, and how it requires something more to capture public attention.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLqisMRmmbJlmJ7AtbvRsmZraGJnfHGDjmpqaKKRrrmiusNmrpqkm5q%2FtHnKoqOloZ6ceqW1w6erZqugqr9usdepnJyslZl6sb7OrZysrKNitaa%2BxKxksKCpZA%3D%3D