Her body was not mangled. Her family was not mourning her death or facing continual exposure to scenes of a mutilated dead body. The photo gained public sympathy for the innocent victims of war, but did not influence US withdrawal. Nixon had started cutting back on troops in 1969 and again in March of 1970. The photo was taken in 1972.
Kent State did turn a lot of people in the US against the way protesters were treated, and by extension, against the war and the Nixon administration. While drawing down troop numbers, Nixon was escalating the bombings, which is what the students protested.
What was much more influential in ending the Vietnam War was the public revelation of the facts surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964. The Gulf of Tonkin had influenced Congress to give the president the power to escalate troops in Vietnam and to fund the fighting. In the 1970s, when the incident was revealed to be partially based on false reporting, Congress began actions to withdraw financial support for the war.
Emmett Till's mother made the decision to have an open casket for her son's body and yo let it be photographed. It took great courage and stamina for her to do that. But now people are so determined to have photos of mass shootings publicized that they don't even talk about consent from relatives.
The photo of Emmett Till did influence the civil rights movement. But he died in 1955. There were several years of marches, protests, and beatings, dogs, hoses, and setting full buses on fire throughout the 1960s before civil rights laws were passed and more years to fully enforce them.
Yet, racist attacks and murders continue to happen, even today. Only one year ago in May of 2022, a racist specifically targeted Blacks at a supermarket for a mass murder in Buffalo. The Buffalo NPR station started a new program after those murders for the people of Buffalo and surrounding areas to discuss race and discrimination issues, primarily about Blacks, but also including Native Americans, LGBTQ people, Holocaust survivors, Muslims in America, and women of all heritages.
I have listened to the majority of those programs, aired in the morning and again in the evening. I have heard the heart-rending stories of the people who were at Tops when the shooting occurred and who survived, and of the people who lost loved ones and how they found out, how they cope, and how they have pulled together for support. I have not heard ANY of them suggest making photos public. They have discussed issues of violence and programs designed to reduce violence in communities and reaching out to disturbed people before they act out violently. They talk about gun control, mental health care, and various social and political reforms and the organization needed to make those reforms a reality. They do not ever talk about publicly showing the photos of their loved ones' mutilated bodies.
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