| dc.description.abstract | This master thesis examines the Norwegian newspaper press coverage of the racist lynching of fourteen year old Emmett Till in Mississippi, 1955. The lynching and the following trial sparked an outrage across the US, especially in the northern states. Till has been called the “sacrificial lamb” of the Civil Rights Movement, and his death accelerated its activity in the months and years to come (Hudson-Weems, 2006). The case also became a matter of public opinion across the world. In Norway, the postwar world meant a closer relationship to the US and a fresh commitment to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. However, it also meant a post-Holocaust transition of what the term “race” was supposed to mean.
Through the theoretical and methodological framework of a Critical Discourse Analysis combined with the use of conventional historical methods, this master thesis explores racial discourses, as well as other general trends and topics, in the 1955-56 Norwegian press coverage of the case of Emmett Till. Deploying Stuart Hall’s (1997) definition of “race” as a “floating signifier”, the thesis examines different ways in which racial discourse gave meaning to the coverage. This examination is done through analysis of the full press coverage of two newspapers, the liberal newspaper VG and the Norwegian Labour Party’s official newspaper Arbeiderbladet, as well as an in-depth debt analysis of a newspaper commentary from the liberal newspaper Morgenposten.
The thesis argues that racial ideology was a powerful concept that gave meaning to coverage of the case of Emmett Till in a Norwegian context. What was meant by the racial concepts that were used in this coverage, however, was never discussed in the press. Within the framework of a moderate discourse that reproduced the interests of the Eisenhower government and the moderates of the northern states, this lack of discussion limited how in particular the Black social actors were portrayed. It also placed the “problem” of the “negro problem” with those most deeply affected by it; the Black population of the United States. While the pro-civil rights coverage of the Norwegian Labour Party press played down the racial categories and deemed them less important, it did not challenge them. The findings of this thesis establish Norway in the 1950s as a society where racial hierarchies were delegitimized, but where both the language and discourses of such hierarchies nonetheless remained part of mainstream discourse, and where one could easily use racial categories while condemning white supremacists of the US. | |
