Word: crime
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When the Emmett Till case first became news in Mississippi, the whole state was aroused against the crime, and anxious to see justice done. But the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (along with Life magazine and other Northern journals which referred to "lynching") obscured the issues so completely that the white people of the state retreated to their old position of distrust of the North and to white supremacy. The cause of better racial relations was deeply harmed. Another instance in which the NAACP seems to have hurt itself here was by its recent protest over...
...accusations as soon as the body was found, despite the fact that every person and organization in the state let out a cry against the murder. People from all types of occupations were asked about the Till case, and no one came near condoning such a brutal and senseless crime. The NAACP's continuing protest, however, turned the outrage over the crime into an outrage over its won accusation...
...weeks after the crime, in Money, the scene of the murder, an already-growing reaction was setting in against outside interference. A good many intelligent people here feel that the NAACP deliberately aggravated the local populace in order to create a propaganda martyr, on the assumption that if the two defendants, Milam and Bryant, were convicted, its crusade would suffer. This indictment may be untrue, but the NAACP could not have gotten better results, even if it had tried. The obvious injustice of its accusations against the state has made residents more convinced than ever that they are right...
...important thing is that the state, the legally constituted authority, acted in all apparent good faith to see that justice was done, but that as soon as the crime was announced, the NAACP began a heated denunciation of the state and its political morality. This kind of shot-gun slander produced the predictable result--the local citizens began to turn their condemnation from the murder of a Negro boy to the NAACP. This reaction was so strong that the subsequent acquittal of Milam and Bryant in another trial for kidnapping, in which the state's case was much stronger, appears...
...Tale for Midnight recounts the history of a crime, and does it well. Beyond this it can claim little distinction. Frederic Prokosch is a good craftsman with words in their immediacy, but only that. His book as a whole lacks vitality and meaning...