This summer, videos of Black people killed by police officers have sparked outrage and protests across the country. 65 years ago, it was a photograph that shocked the nation. The image of 14-year-old Emmett Till.
Till had traveled from Chicago to the Mississippi Delta to visit family, when he was kidnapped, horribly beaten and killed by white men after allegedly flirting with a white woman. His body was later found in the Tallahatchie river. Today, Emmett Till’s death is considered the spark that ignited the burgeoning Civil Rights movement.
But few people know there was another brazen murder of a Black man that happened just three months later, in a neighboring town in the Delta. Today on the Radio Diaries Podcast, we tell the forgotten story of Clinton Melton.
***
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
The Last Witness
The Press is the Enemy
The View from the 79th Floor
The Dropped Wrench
Prisoners of War
The Working Tapes of Studs Terkel
Stories from a Vanishing New York
Shirley Chisholm: Unbought and Unbossed
The Square Deal
Amanda's Diary: Revisited
Last Witness: Surviving the Tulsa Race Riot
Juan's Diaries: Undocumented, Then and Now
The Bonus Army
The Working Tapes
The Story of Jane
The Ski Troops of WWII
When Nazis Took Manhattan
A Voicemail Valentine
The Border Wall
Thembi's Diary
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Criminal
Ear Hustle
Song Exploder
The Truth
the memory palace