Television

police officer outside of St. Paul, Minnesota where he had been pulled over for a busted light.

Mamie Till went to Jet because, at the time, it was the top news source for black America, said MSNBC’s Joy Reid, who participated in the documentary. “If you were a mother in Mamie Till’s position, you wouldn’t go to NBC or CBS or even The New York Times,” she said.

The pictures “took the issue of lynching away from the grainy photographs of a body hanging in the woods,” she said. The anniversary of Till’s death was later chosen as the date of King’s March on Washington, she noted.

“The civil rights movement never forgot Emmett Till,” Reid said. “He was to that movement what Trayvon Martin was to Black Lives Matter, a symbol that remained incredibly potent.” NBC’s documentary shows how King innately understood the power of images beamed by the stillinfant medium of television. A peaceful march or sit-in could draw yawns from a general public, yet a march of well-dressed children set upon by police with dogs and fire hoses produced pictures that made many Americans recoil when they saw them on the evening news.

Repeatedly, King could count on racists to reveal themselves and provide the pictures he needed to give the movement momentum. Many demonstrations were planned before noon to give enough time for film to be delivered to New York to be shown on the network evening news.

Noted civil rights icon John Lewis is quoted in the documentary as saying, “without television, the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings.” The movement changed television, too: evening news programs expanded from 15 minutes a day to half hour to keep up with the news.

Lack said he also hoped the documentary would give attention to some notable black journalists from the time. Two examples: Ernest Withers, who took the picture of a man who stood in the courtroom and pointed to Till’s murderers during their trial, and L. Alex Wilson, who followed black students integrating a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, and continued walking despite being beaten by a crowd of angry whites.

The documentary was initially made for MSNBC but, midstream, Lack said he felt compelled to request a prime-time window on the network. Once common, documentaries are now such a rarity on network television that NBC said it hasn’t aired a two-hour film like this since 2004.

It is being repeated on MSNBC Sunday at 9 p.m. ET.