Episode Three: Emmett Till Trial and C. Wright Mills

In 1955, Wakefield graduated from Columbia University and went looking for his first job. Through Indianapolis connections, he landed an interview with Barney Kilgore, editor of The Wall Street Journal. He wasn’t, Kilgore told him, quite ready for the Journal, but he was given a reporting job at a small paper in Princeton, New Jersey, where every day he watched Albert Einstein walk to work. The story of how he moved from the “Princeton Daily Packet” to being a reporter covering the Emmett Till trial for The Nation, is inspiring, but it’s the story of the trial itself that is the center of this podcast. The other center is his reminiscence of famed sociologist C. Wright Mills, author of The Power Elite. Both the Till trial and Mills resonate with our current political culture.