Rod Serling's Story Of Emitt Till Will Finally Get An Airing 50 Years Later..

[Virginia Dare]

Truly a man ahead of his times..


A Tale Too Explosive for '50s TV
Thursday, March 27, 2008By Rebecca James Staff writer
Before Rod Serling introduced the world to "The Twilight Zone," he wanted people to take a closer look at the lynching of a 14-year-old black boy in Mississippi and how the white men accused in the case were acquitted.

But one of the first scripts Serling wrote to dramatize the story of Emmett Till was too hot for television network executives to handle.

It will have its first public reading Saturday at Ithaca College, part of a two-day conference on the legacy of the Syracuse-born writer.

http://www.syracuse.com/articles/entertainment/index.ssf?/base/entertainment-2/1206608290162850.xml&coll=1

[quiet.american]

1. Thanks for posting this. nt

[Echo In Light]

2. Cool. K&R ...and agreed, Serling was ahead of the curve

[mopinko]

3. cool

i had no idea.

[speedoo]

4. Bob Dylan: Death of Emmett Till

Warning.... this video includes graphic images of Emmett Till's mutilated body.

(on edit, after reading about Rod Serling's difficulty in getting his story out... Bod Dylan was lucky in that he did not have to worry about TV executives.)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=QjfGcRM35xg

[Peace Patriot]

5. This is MY America--the Rod Serlings and the Ithaca College conferences, and

all that they represent. Fairness, justice, the truth. And I have an abiding faith that this is the America of the majority of our people. But it is more than faith. It is based on FACTS--for instance, the FACT that 56% of the American people opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, Feb. '03 (NYT poll; other polls 54-55%)--a FACT that was nowhere reflected in the corporate 'news,' but that our political establishment was most certainly aware of. That is why they passed the "Help America Vote Act" (HAVA)--a $3.9 billion electronic voting boondoggle, that fast-tracked voting machines, all over the country, run on 'trade secret,' proprietary programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations, with virtually no audit-recount controls--in the same month (Oct. '02) as the Iraq War Resolution (IWR). The IWR guaranteed unjust war; HAVA provided the means to shove that unjust war down the throats of the American people.

54-56% is a significant majority. It would be a landslide in a presidential election (and believe me, it was). That big opposition to the war has now grown to a whopping, epochal antiwar majority of 70%! They knew it would. They needed a way to foil that great progressive American majority. 'Trade secret' vote counting was/is the answer. And it is being used not only to shove a fascist agenda down our throats, on all issues, across the board, but it is also being used to create a false picture of who we are--a delusionary image of the American people as selfish, greedy, uncaring, racist, stupid, uninformed and warlike. We did not vote for these fuckheads in the White House or in Congress who have escalated the war on Iraq, in the teeth of a 70% antiwar majority, and who have shredded our Constitution, and who have looted our treasuries, and who are destroying our country. We did not vote for them! We did not vote for them! Get that through your heads! It is their biggest lie of all that we did. And understanding that lie is the key to understanding everything else--including how to restore our democracy.