Few things get historians more excited than discovering new sources. That's what has happened to Davis Houck, a professor at Florida State University and the author of a book about media coverage of the infamous Emmett Till murder. Till was the 14-year-old boy who allegedly whistled at a white woman and was brutally killed.
The trial of the two men accused of the murder drews reporters from the white and black press. Houck has studied the reporting of the trial, but a few years ago found that that another black newspaper, the St. Louis Argus, also had a journalist there. The problem was that the newspaper's archive was missing.
But recently Houck and his students at FSU discovered the missing issues in a historical archive in Missouri. The discovery is already a treasure trove, with
never-before-seen pictures of the NAACP's Medgar Evers, as well as stories written during the trial. "This is just going to be another layer for us to process," he told National Public Radio. "Another layer of what it was like to be black in the Jim Crow South
covering this case."