Reference
- Till, Emmett Louis (1941–1955)Emmett Till was born July 25, 1941, in Chicago, Illinois, and died August 28, 1955, in Tallahatchie, Mississippi. Till, who grew up on the outskirts of Chicago, had just completed the seventh grade when he was sent by his mother to spend a part of summer vacation with relatives in Mississippi. He was unfamiliar with this culture. Swapping stories with the young men there about life in the North and the privileges he enjoyed, he introduced alien concepts to the inhabitants of this poor sharecropping community. He and other young people were in the habit of gathering outside a grocery store to pass the time. Till reportedly did not know his "place" and whistled at a white woman. When recounted, the story seemed to have been exaggerated, but the woman's husband took umbrage anyway. He and his brother kidnapped Till from his bed, pistol whipped him, murdered him, and dropped him in the Tallahatchie River. When Till was reported missing and found in the river, mutilated and tied to a fan, a trial was held. The brothers were acquitted by an all-white jury after just 67 minutes of deliberation. The ruling gained nationwide coverage and outraged the public. Till's death influenced the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and added to the impetus of the Civil Rights Movement.
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Perspectives
The Blood of Emmett Till
* Longlisted for the National Book Award * A New York Times Notable Book * A Washington Post Notable Book * An NPR Best Book of 2017 * A Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2017 * An Atlanta Journal-Constitution Best Southern Book of 2017 * This extraordinary New York Times bestseller reexamines a pivotal event of the civil rights movement--the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till--"and demands that we do the one vital thing we aren't often enough asked to do with history: learn from it" (The Atlantic). In 1955, white men in the Mississippi Delta lynched a fourteen-year-old from Chicago named Emmett Till. His murder was part of a wave of white terrorism in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared public school segregation unconstitutional. Only weeks later, Rosa Parks thought about young Emmett as she refused to move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Five years later, Black students who called themselves "the Emmett Till generation" launched sit-in campaigns that turned the struggle for civil rights into a mass movement. Till's lynching became the most notorious hate crime in American history. But what actually happened to Emmett Till--not the icon of injustice, but the flesh-and-blood boy? Part detective story, part political history, The Blood of Emmett Till "unfolds like a movie" (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution), drawing on a wealth of new evidence, including a shocking admission of Till's innocence from the woman in whose name he was killed. "Jolting and powerful" (The Washington Post), the book "provides fresh insight into the way race has informed and deformed our democratic institutions" (Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Carry Me Home) and "calls us to the cause of justice today" (Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, president of the North Carolina NAACP).
A Wreath for Emmett Till
In 1955, people all over the United States knew that Emmett Louis Till was a fourteen-year-old African American boy lynched for supposedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. The brutality of his murder, the open-casket funeral, and the acquittal of the men tried for the crime drew wide media attention. Award-winning poet Marilyn Nelson reminds us of the boy whose fate helped spark the civil rights movement. This martyr's wreath, woven from a little-known but sophisticated form of poetry, challenges us to speak out against modern-day injustices, to "speak what we see."
Emmett till and the Mississippi Press
Employing never-before-used historical materials, the au-thors of Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press reveal how Mississippi journalists both expressed and shaped public opinion in the aftermath of the 1955 Emmett Till murder. Combing small-circulation weeklies as well as large-circulation dailies, Davis W. Houck and Matthew A. Grindy analyze the rhetoric at work as the state attempted to grapple with a brutal, small-town slaying. Initially coverage tended to be sympathetic to Till, but when the case became a clarion call for civil rights and racial justice in Mississippi, journa-lists reacted. Newspapers both reported on the Till investigation and editor-ialized on its protagonists. Within days the Till case transcended the specifics of a murder in the Delta. Coverage wrestled with such com-plex cultural matters as the role of the press, class, gender, and geography in the determination of guilt and innocence. Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press provides a careful examination of the courtroom testimony given in Sumner, Mississippi, and the trial\'s conclusion as reported by the state\'s newspapers. The book closes with an analysis of how Mississippi has attempted to come to terms with its racially troubled past by, in part, memorializing Emmett Till in and around the Delta. Davis W. Houck is associate professor of communication at Florida State University. He is the author of six books, including Rhetoric as Currency: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Great Depression and FDR and Fear Itself: The First Inaugural Address. Matthew A. Grindy is a doctoral candidate of communication at Florida State University. Keith A. Beauchamp, a filmmaker based in New York City, is the director of The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till.
Remembering Emmett Till
Take a drive through the Mississippi Delta today and you'll find a landscape dotted with memorials to major figures and events from the civil rights movement. Perhaps the most chilling are those devoted to the murder of Emmett Till, a tragedy of hate and injustice that became a beacon in the fight for racial equality. The ways this event is remembered have been fraught from the beginning, revealing currents of controversy, patronage, and racism lurking just behind the placid facades of historical markers. In Remembering Emmett Till, Dave Tell gives us five accounts of the commemoration of this infamous crime. In a development no one could have foreseen, Till's murder - one of the darkest moments in the region's history - has become an economic driver for the Delta. Historical tourism has transformed seemingly innocuous places like bridges, boat landings, gas stations, and riverbeds into sites of racial politics, reminders of the still-unsettled question of how best to remember the victim of this heinous crime. Tell builds an insightful and persuasive case for how these memorials have altered the Delta's physical and cultural landscape, drawing potent connections between the dawn of the civil rights era and our own moment of renewed fire for racial justice.
Emmitt Till's Funeral
- Films on Demand This link opens in a new window
The horror aroused by Emmitt Till's open casket funeral in Chicago led Jet Magazine to publish photos of the beaten corpse, and to follow the murders' trial.
Not Guilty
- Films on Demand This link opens in a new windowEmmitt Till's mother was not surprised by the verdict. Four years after the trial, Bryant and Milam sold their story to reporter William Bradford Huie.
The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till
- Kanopy This link opens in a new window
Never-before-seen testimony is included in this documentary on Emmett Louis Till, who, in 1955, was brutally murdered after he whistled at a white woman.
Online Resources
- 'Let me gather spring flowers for a wreath': writing about historical trauma for young people in A Wreath for Emmett Till[...]teachers should be prepared for the range of responses that students may have to this text, from anger to confusion, from denial to pain, from expressions of sadness to expressions of hope for a more just world. When Robertson (1997) asks, "what knowledge are we trying to teach when we ask children to read stories about incidences of horror?" (p. 457), possible answers in relation to Nelson's text might include a more complicated understanding of American racial history, a way to understand the individual and collective forces in traumatic events, and the potential power of readers and writers to engage in acts of commemoration and creation toward a more just world.
- Forgotten Manuscripts: "Blues for Emmett till": The Earliest Extant Song about the Murder of Emmett Tillashington was undisputedly implicated in this travesty. "Since the men were protected from further prosecution, an FBI investigation was the last hope for justice, but President Eisenhower refused the goahead" (Segali and Holmberg 37). [...] Eisenhower never publicly commented on the Till case for fear of alienating the Southern states.
- Mourning Emmett TillAfter Emmett Till’s murder in 1955, African-Americans mobilized political mourning to oppose the status quo of white power. Till’s death and media coverage that followed generated an affective connection by white Northern liberals to the plight of African-Americans in the South; as a result, Till’s death and the mourning that followed contributed to subtle but important changes that enabled the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement to appeal to the white majority. This effort succeeded in generating white sympathy because it exposed the distance between formal law and law on the ground and expanded the audience to the conflict.
- The Trauma of the Routine: Lessons on Cultural Trauma from the Emmett Till VerdictCultural traumas are socially mediated processes that occur when groups endure horrific events that forever change their consciousness and identity. According to cultural sociologists, these traumas arise out of shocks to the routine or the taken for granted. Understanding such traumas is critical for developing solutions that can address group suffering. Using the African American community's response to the not guilty verdict in the Emmett Till murder trial as a case study, this article extends cultural trauma theory by explicating how cultural traumas can arise not only when routines are disrupted but also when they are maintained and reaffirmed in a public or official manner. In so doing, this article analyzes the interplay between the history or accumulation of the "routine" harm at issue, the shocking or unusual occurrences that frequently precede such "routine" harms, the harm itself, and public discourse about such harm's meaning in cultivating a cultural trauma narrative.
Emmett Till Murder
- Films on Demand This link opens in a new windowMose Wright testified against two white men accused of his nephew's murder. Emmett Till's family recalls his death in Mississippi.