Review: Landscapes of Exclusion: State Parks and Jim Crow in the American South, by William E. O'Brien and What Can and Can't Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South, by Dell Upton

Abstract

William E. O'Brien Landscapes of Exclusion: State Parks and Jim Crow in the American South Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016, 208 pp., 50 b/w illus. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781625341556 Dell Upton What Can and Can't Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015, 280 pp., 59 b/w illus. $35 (cloth), ISBN 9780300211757 In late July 2018, someone shot at a historic marker commemorating the place along Mississippi's Tallahatchie River where Emmett Till's mutilated, bullet-riddled corpse was found. Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy, was abducted and viciously murdered by two white vigilantes in the summer of 1955. Vandals stole the site's first sign and then shot up a second one. A third marker had been erected and dedicated only five weeks before the 2018 incident by the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, located in the nearby Sumner, Mississippi, courthouse where Till's murderers were put on trial. A similar spate of vandalism befell a marker sponsored by the Mississippi Freedom Trail, a historical initiative dedicated to marking important sites of civil rights struggles in the state. That marker is located at the former site of Bryant's Grocery in Money, Mississippi, where Carolyn Jones, a white woman, falsely claimed that Till made sexually explicit gestures toward her while he was visiting the store to purchase candy. Incensed by the child's alleged behavior, which transgressed the code of racial apartheid that kept black residents in fear and poverty—and, more important, separate and in their place—Bryant's husband and brother-in-law kidnapped Till, who was in the area visiting family while on holiday from his Chicago home. The two men beat and shot the teenager, then threw his weighted-down body into the river. Till's killing made national headlines when his mother, Mamie Till Bradley, requested an open casket at his funeral to expose the barbaric treatment of her son. The haunting photographs of Till and his grieving mother stunned the nation. Equally incomprehensible were the acquittals of his murderers four months later by an all-white, all-male jury following a five-day trial. These events proved that racial violence had not abated since the Civil War and the end of slavery, …