In August of 1955, 14-year-old Emmitt Till was kidnapped, beaten, and shot in Mississippi. His mother insisted upon an open casket so Americans could see the damage. The story was a critical point in the Civil Rights Movement, particularly when the perpetrators were acquitted by an all-white jury.
Listen beautiful relax classics on our Youtube channel.
Rod Serling, a 30-year-old rising star in a golden age of dramatic television, watched the events play out in the news. He believed firmly in the burgeoning medium’s power for social justice. “The writer’s role is to be a menacer of the public’s conscience,” Serling later said. “He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus the issues of his time.”
Soon after the trial concluded, Serling, riding off the success of his most well-received teleplay to date, felt compelled write a teleplay around the racism that led to Till’s murder. But the censorship that followed by advertisers and networks, fearful of blowback from white, Southern audiences, forced Serling to rethink his approach.
Serling was impelled to change the script of the resulting story until it was about an old white man from an unnamed country killed in a small town in New England. How Serling’s disappointment with “Noon on Doomsday” led to The Twilight Zone is a story told at Smithsonian.
See also: Black and White: The Twilight Zone
Source: neatorama