Manoucheka Celeste names a recurring media figure, the wailing black woman, and tracks her across twenty three episodes of season seven of The First 48, the A&E series that follows detectives through the opening two days of a homicide case. The show is one of the few places on American television where poor black communities appear at all, and it introduces them through criminality, pathology and death. Celeste asks what the grieving woman's presence accomplishes: she carries the emotional weight at the start and close of episodes, and the serial format leaves no room to ask why she is in pain. Taking up Herman Gray's call to examine the affective labour of media images, Celeste argues that the same figure operates differently outside the show. The mothers in the Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin cases converted public mourning into a demand for justice, and their wailing works as an activist act.