© 2010 KATE L. FLACH ALL RIGHTS RESERVED MAMIE TILL AND JULIA: BLACK WOMEN’S JOURNEY FROM REAL TO REALISTIC IN 1950S AND 60S TV A Thesis Presented to The Graduate Faculty of the University of Akron In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts, History Kate L. Flach December, 2010 MAMIE TILL AND JULIA: BLACK WOMEN’S JOURNEY FROM REAL TO REALISTIC IN 1950S AND 60S Kate L. Flach Thesis Approved: Accepted: ________________________________ _________________________________ Advisor Dean of the College Dr. Tracey Jean Boisseau Dr. Chand Midha ________________________________ _________________________________ Co-Advisor Dean of the Graduate School Dr. Zachary Williams Dr. George R. Newkome ________________________________ _________________________________ Department Chair Date Dr. Michael Sheng ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................1 II. FROM REAL IMAGES TO REEL EXPOSURE ......................................................5 III. WATCH AND LEARN: ESTABLISHING BLACK MIDDLE CLASS-NESS THROUGH MEDIA ................................................................................................17 IV. COVERING POST-WAR MOTHERHOOD ON TELEVISION ...........................26 V. INTERUPTING I LOVE LUCY FOR THIS? The Televised Emmett Till Trial ..............34 VI. CROSSING ALL Ts AND DOTTING LOWER CASE Js ......................................41 VII. CONCLUSION:“Okay, she can be the mother…” julia, November 26, 1968 .......50 REFERENCED WORKS ..................................................................................................54 iii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Lynching, or ritualized and publicized community sanctioned murder, was the single most terrifying tool Southern whites used to protect white supremacy following the end of slavery. Although lynching had seen its peak in terms of numbers and frequency in the early decades of the twentieth century and had declined since a vibrant movement to eradicate it had emerged in the 1930s, Southern whites never entirely forsook the practice even in the post-war period. With new forms of civil rights activism on the rise in the 1950s, Supreme Court decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education being rendered and constituted, and communities of urban blacks with middle class sectors emerging, white segregationists found themselves on the defensive. Given the increased reach of media in the South in the postwar period, the fewer but arguably more spectacular instances of lynching that occurred in the 1950s had an impact that exceeded the small localities in which they were held—an impact, however over which Southern whites were not in complete control. Intended as a warning to blacks located in the north and south that new anti-segregationist and anti-racist mores would have no bearing on social relations in Mississippi at least, the lynching of Till brought national attention to the state in ways unforeseen by the men who did the lynching and by their defenders. Much of the credit for the change in the way the nation as a whole reacted to instances of 1 lynching in the South following the murder of Emmet Till goes to his mother, Mamie Till Bradley. While lynching continued to have the intended consequence of instilling terror for some, especially those blacks in the immediate vicinity of the murder, the cultural memory of lynching and its political use and meaning at the national level would undergo radical change following the 1955 murder of fourteen year old Emmett Till in Mississippi. It was Mamie Till’s access to and, especially, her deft manipulation of television media that, I argue, transformed her son’s murder from a successful terrorizing tool of segregationists into a vehicle for the discrediting of lynching nationwide. With the assistance of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Mamie Till distributed photographs and video footage of her son’s body at his funeral to a cross-race national audience via both newspaper press and television. Rather than confirming the brutish status of black people, in Mamie Till’s public appearances and telling of her son’s fate, lynching came across as an inexplicable act of murder performed by irrational and hateful whites. Though whites, nationwide, had long been aware of lynching and had been exposed to anti-racist critiques of it since at least Ida B. Wells Barnett’s ‘crusade’ of the late nineteenth century,1 Bradley used television to re- expose the nation to lynching in ways that signaled its demise as a useful tool of the Jim Crow social system. She commanded a reconsideration of the racist rationales and undermined the practice most effectively by asserting herself in the public eye as an educated, middle class black mother devastated over the death of her son. Mamie Till’s poise, middle-class demeanor and her determination to emphasize her son’s youth by 1 Ida B. Wells-Barnett. On Lynchings (New York: Humanity Books, 2002). 1 putting virtuous images of them both before the public destabilized the usual presumptions regarding lynching. Principal among these assumptions was the notion that lynching protected a decorous middle-class Southern white womanhood from rapacious lower-class black male predators—the converse of both depictions was the image of the overly sexual or slovenly black woman. Not only did Mamie Till’s insistence that television viewers recognize the youth and wholesomeness of her son unsettle these assumptions, her presentation of herself as a wholesome and decent mother also constituted evidence contradicting predominant ideas about class and race identity. Television’s immediacy provided a visual juxtaposition of Mamie Till Bradley and the white woman Emmett Till allegedly wolf-whistled at, Carolyn Bryant. Bryant appears, in contrast with Till, as a lower-class woman whose physical appearance fell short of middle-class standards of femininity and beauty as otherwise portrayed on television. The sympathetic posing of Bradley as an articulate, poised, and coiffed middle-class mother, alongside Carolyn Bryant’s more awkward and working-class appearance, upended the racial connotations attached to women’s class status and, in doing so, placed the sexual politics of lynching into jeopardy. To understand the significance of Bradley’s intervention in the symbolic representation of race, this paper analyzes race and gender mores established in popular television sitcoms of the 1950s and compares them to live coverage of Emmett Till’s murder and specifically to media portrayals of Mamie Till Bradley. Bradley’s strategic intervention in American mass cultural depictions of African Americans had a ripple effect in the culture beyond that of destabilizing ideas about the justifications for lynching. Her well-coiffed and gracious appearance, compared to Carolyn Bryant’s plain 2 dress and sometimes unseemly behavior, altered public sensibilities linking race and class paving way for television programs featuring chic middle class African Americans in shows such as julia. Other scholars have shown how previous television programs such as Amos ‘n Andy and Beulah in addition to film, advertisements and magazines served to entertain white audiences while “educating” black viewers on how to speak and act. In this paper, I argue that Bradley’s ‘real-life’ presentation of self in news outlets carried just as much or more significance as an educating vehicle. Bradley’s debut on all three networks’ news broadcast over the course of several months in 1955 helped break down the prevailing race and gender constructs of what middle class motherhood looked like for a new generation of Americans glued to their television sets as well as an international audience tuned in to the controversy. Bradley’s evident black middle class- ness normalized a new image of black motherhood that was later displayed in NBC’s situation comedy julia, starring Diahann Carroll, which debuted in 1968 and ran for three seasons. Carroll’s portrayal of Julia in these years presents a more assertive and independent image of a mother, in strong contrast to 1950s family sitcoms such as Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver in which mothers embodied cooperative helpmates to fathers who took center stage of the programs. Carroll’s role as Julia did not resemble these images of womanhood; instead, as a widowed mother who worked but also maintained a decorous and attractive demeanor, the fictional Julia closely paralleled the ‘real-life’ image presented by Mamie Till Bradley thirteen years prior via live television. Thirteen years after Emmett Till’s violent death, new generations of TV- watchers were psychologically prepared to “believe” in a black woman who met the expected standards of mainstream middle-class motherhood signaled by an attractive 3 appearance, impeccable deportment, and wholesome devotedness to a son. Bradley’s assertion of herself as a respectable mother in 1950s mass media helped transform the gender and racial discourse regarding motherhood and housewifery by visually altering what “decent” families in general, and “good” mothers in particular, looked like. This essay is divided into two parts, with chapters II-IV examining how standards of beauty and motherhood were constructed in 1950s American popular culture, specifically in magazines and on television. Chapters V-VII in the second part of the essay, compare Mamie Till Bradley’s appearance in news stories about her son’s