Rod Serling and the Lynching of Emmett Till
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CHRISTOPHER METRESS Samford University Submitted for Their Approval: Rod Serling and the Lynching of Emmett Till Tell all the Truth but tell it slant- Emily Dickinson You ARE WATCHING TELEVISION, AND A MAN IS ABOUT TO BE LYNCHED. The year is 2215. The earth is parched and ahandoned, inhabited by only two groups of people: the Dwellers and the Drivers. The Dwellers, who are white, work the Drivers, who are Native American, in pursuit of the one last profitable enterprise on Earth: the reclamation of scrap metal for the planet's colony on the New Angeles asteroid. In the town of Carbon, a scrap-depot and smelting-center located on the high desert plains west of the radioactive ruins of Los Angeles, a Driver (Tommy Tallbear) has been accused of attempting to rape the wife of Carbon's head Dweller (Jerry Paul) and Paul is now seeking his own brand of vigilante justice. Witness to all this is Hannify, a reporter for Interstellar Television who is sent to Carbon to cover another story only to find himself in the middle of a lynch mob. Just moments before the violence begins, a member of the mob confiscates the miniature DVD Hannify is using to record the event; he is unaware, however, that Hannify's digital imager has a backup camera that allows him to capture everything that is going on. Here is what the camera captures. A mob drags Tommy TaUbear out of the town jail and into an abandoned industrial site. With the desert sun cutting through the rooñess frame of the building, the air is red with dust and hate. Jerry Paul grabs Tallbear from out of the mob and forces him to face his vengeful accusers. "This coppertone wronged me," Paul shouts, alluding to the attempted rape of his wife. AppeaHng to solidarity, he proclaims, "It could have been your wife, Howie. Or your daughters, Pete. This time you came together for me. Next time, I'll be there for you." Paul then orders Howie to lower the industrial crane, and the noose around Tommy Tallbear's neck is attached to the crane's rusted metal hook. When TaUbear begins to chant a death song, the 144 Christopher Metress crowd's call for vengeance is momentarily silenced, but Paul, sensing that the moment is getting away from him, commands Howie to hoist the hook. When Hovide does so, Tallbear's song gives way to choking gasps and, after a half-minute of defiant struggle, his legs and shoidders go hmp, his body turning slowly in the windless red dust. As the crowd disperses, Howie walks up to the reporter and jokes, "Didn't blink, did you Hannify?" Howie then shows Hannify the DVD he confiscated before the lynching began, beheving that he was preventing the reporter from filming the scene. Before Hannifyf can get the empty DVD in his hand, Howie pulls it back and teases, "They'd have censored it anyway." Although the year is 2215, the location is post-apocalyptic Cahfomia, the victim is a twenty-year-old Native American, the crime is rape, and the tool of choice is a rope hoisted by a crane in what amounts to a spectacle murder, you have just vidtnessed the lynching of Fmmett Till. If you failed to make the connection between Tommy Tallbear and Emmett Till, you are likely not alone, and it is certainly not your fault. The lynching you just watched on your television screen first aired on June 26, 1998, as a Sci-Fi Channel original movie entitled A Town Has Turned to Dust, and in its details the lynching bears little resemblance to the events that occurred in Money, Mississippi, in 1955. However, those events inspired the original story upon which A Town Has Turned to Dust was based, and the author of that original story. Rod Serhng, desperately wanted his audience to witness the lynching of Emmett Till. In late summer 1955, Serling, aghast at the acquittal of Till's murderers, conceived of a story that would focus on the aftermath of a white- on-black lynching in a small Southern town. Understanding the chmate of television at the time, Serhng first tried to write his story for the stage. When it was rejected, Serhng returned to his more familiar medium, reworking his stage drama into a teleplay for the U.S. Steel Hour However, television executives and advertisers, fearful of a boycott by viewers in Southern states, demanded that Serhng revise this teleplay: although he could still Avrite about the aftermath of a lynching, any references that might recall the Till episode had to be excised from the script. Faced with the option of scrapping his idea altogether or changing his script to meet the demands of his medium, Serling chose the latter. The result was Noon on Doomsday, which, after much vetting and revising, aired on April 25, 1956. A comparison of the revisions of this teleplay with the script for the original stage production shows how Submitted Sir Their Approval I45 SerHng attempted, at various stages, to retain some of the Emmett Till story by slanting it into his revisions via obUque references and subplots. A year later, SerUng, stiU smarting from bis run-in witb tbe sponsors of Noon on Doomsday, was offered a second cbance to reteU the story of Emmett TiU, this time for another network. Once again, bowever, tbe medium trumped the message as nervous executives reneged on tbeir promises, demanding tbat SerUng remove aU explicit or impUcit references to the TiU lyncbing. Tbe result of tbis second effort, entitled A Town Has Tumed to Dust (tbe basis for tbe 1998 Sci-Fi Cbannel movie), aired on June 17,1958. As we sbaU see, botb Noon on Doomsday anà A Town Has Tumed to Dust were driven by SerUng's desire to teU Emmett Till's story to a Uve national television audience, a desire that was met with resistance at every turn by executives and sponsors wbo, in tbe midst of a burgeoning Civil Rigbts Movement that was bringing race to tbe forefront of poUtical and social discourse, were intent on appeasing Southem audiences by sanitizing tbe particular racial dimensions of TiU's story. SerUng's response to that resistance, and his attempt—albeit unsuccessful—to work bis way around tbe restrictions of bis medium, give us a more complete understanding of how, in its early and formative years, television positioned itself in relation to race and civil rigbts. SerUng's tale of frustration, of course, does not represent the complete picture. As several recent studies have shown, television played an important role in promoting tbe cause of the Civil Rights Movement, in particular through sympathetic network news coverage and reveaUng documentary specials. As JuUan Bond notes, "For tbe early Movement, newspaper, radio, and television coverage brougbt tbe legitimate but previously unbeard demands of southem blacks into tbe bomes of Americans far removed from tbe petty indignities and large cruelties of southem segregation" (17). Discussing in particular the coverage of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Bond reminds us tbat after tbe story of this boycott first bit tbe front pages of tbe New York Times and New York Herald Tribuneon February 22,1956, television networks responded by featuring regidar boycott stories on tbe nightly news. Although different media responded with "varying degrees of alacrity and enthusiasm," it was clear that television news executives "ultimately endorsed this carefuUy orchestrated confrontation between tbe forces of justice, respectabiUty, decency and progress and tbose of bigotry, violence. 146 Christopher Metress lawlessness, and ignorance" (23). Against this brigbter vision of television's role in the movement, we must, of course, cast some shadows. As Shasha Torres has recently noted, television and the Civil Rights Movement, "through perhaps an unlikely coincidence of interests, formed powerful allies vdth each other during this period" (6). However, "to claim that televisual representation in information genres was dominated by [positive] images of tbe civil rigbts movement in the late 50s and early 60s is not to claim that stereotypical representations in other genres were eradicated or even came temporarily to a screeching halt during tbe period" (7). According to Torres, we must acknowledge tbe persistence of stereotypes and read them "alongside representations of many of the most forceful and articulate African Americans that the nation has known" (7). The key, then, is to situate these two sets of representations "in relation to one anotber," for it is in "the generic interplay between 'information' and 'entertainment' tbat sometbing like Amosn'Andy" (7) can be best understood. Tbe story of Rod Serling's unsuccessful attempt to represent on television the lynching ofEmmett Till introduces another set of images that we must acknowledge if we are to understand the medium's relation to tbe Civil Rights Movement and the cause of racial justice. Into the diptych of positive and negative images, we must also introduce the prohibited image, tbe representation tbat failed to make it to the screen. In the end, I would argue, our appreciation of the medium's relation to the movement must be informed by absences as well as by presences. In order to see botb, we must engage in our own act of resistance against the medium: we must learn to see what it did not want us to see. On September 24, 1955, an all-wbite Mississippi jury, after a mere sixty-seven minutes of deliberation, acquitted J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant of the murder ofEmmett Till. Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy from Cbicago, bad been visiting his extended family in the Mississippi Delta.