Mississippi–1955

Hughes was the first major African American writer to pen a response to the killing, and his poem was widely republished in the weeks that followed.

Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old African American boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after he allegedly offended a white woman, Carolyn Bryant.

The column was headlined "Langston Hughes Wonders Why No Lynching Probe" and advocated for the United States Congress to intervene and investigate the case.

[3] Hughes was "the first African American poet of note" to write a poem that responded to Till's murder.

Due to this lack of specificity, the scholar W. Jason Miller feels that there has been "significant confusion about how to read this important poem.

[3] The poem is not one of Hughes' most famous works, and many studies of his life leave it out, which Metress considers a gap in coverage.

[3] The professor Myisha Priest wrote an essay that compared the response to Till's killing in "Mississippi" with The Sweet Flypaper of Life.