Story Of Their Lives

So Newson went back to Mississippi.

Two white men, Roy Bryant (Till had allegedly flirted with Bryant's wife, Carolyn) and J.W. Milam, were arrested in Till's murder. Till had been shot through the skull and dumped from a bridge into the Tallahatchie River.

Reporters descended upon Mississippi. Never before had so many white and black reporters worked so close together on the same story.

"There was a feeling this had to be covered," Newson says, "that the world had to be made aware of how the South was treating its people."

The prosecution at the Till murder trial struck Newson as lethargic. "When we first got there, we found out the prosecutors hadn't come up with any witnesses," he recalls. "And the sheriff was working with the defense team!"

On the race beat, the reporters sometimes couldn't help but put themselves into the middle of the story. Newson befriended three NAACP officials, Medgar Evers, Amzie Moore and Ruby Hurley. The quartet decided to find witnesses to the Till abduction on their own. So they donned plantation-style clothes to disguise themselves and drove into the Mississippi countryside. "Medgar was driving," Newson says of the NAACP operative who would be assassinated in 1963. "We confirmed that Willie Reed had heard some of the beatings." (Reed was a local high school student.)

There was an even more crucial witness than Reed. His name was Mose Wright, Emmett Till's great-uncle. Wright was tall, old and gaunt. He was also brave, showing no hesitancy in waving the journalists into his home.

"He lived in a little frame farmhouse," remembers Newson. "While I was interviewing him I kept watching the cars going by. He said, 'Don't worry 'bout nothing. You all right.' "

The murder, the trial, the acquittals, all took a mere 30 days. It was all over.

Only it wasn't. Young Till became a memory bigger than a mountain.

And the journalists stayed on the story.

"In his death," write Roberts and Klibanoff, "Emmett Till not only brought Negro reporters into the heart of of the white man's kingdom -- the courtroom -- but he brought white reporters into the Deep South in unprecedented numbers to cover a racial story."