The Fate of Old Signs

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The murder of Emmett Till has haunted the American imagination. Though Chicago born and bred, he will be forever linked to Mississippi and the South. While visiting relatives in the Delta in August 1955, the fourteen-year-old boy whistled at or said Bye bye, baby to a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, while in her husband's grocery store in Money, Mississippi, to buy bubble gum. For his offense, Carolyn's husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother J. c. Milam savagely murdered Till--cracking his skull open and gouging his eye out--and threw his body, with a seventy-five-pound cotton gin fan tied around his neck, into the Tallahatchie River, where it was found three days later. Determined to show the world what Mississippi had done, Till's mother, Mamie, insisted on an open-casket funeral for her son. Pictures of his mangled body, published in Jet magazine and elsewhere, horrified the world. Adding to the infamy of their crime, Till's murderers were acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury in Sumner, Mississippi, on September 23, i955, and a few months later sold the story of how they abducted, tortured, and killed Till to William Bradford Huie for a Look magazine interview. (1) Till's brutal death and the subsequent sham trial were a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement. Over the years, many composers have memorialized Till in music and song, but his presence in this genre has received little attention. Though the title of a leading novel based on Till's life--Bebe Moore Campbell's 1992 novel, Your Blues Ain't Like Mine--underscores the significance of music in describing his tragedy, Till's place in music and song is rooted in musical inseparable from southern cultures. These songs range from finger-pointin' folk ballads to spirituals/Gospel to blues to jazz to rap and hip-hop. This music charts the popular response to Till, helping us to remember his tragedy and to measure his continuing importance in a racially divided America. Songs about Emmett Till reveal much about how we remember the Civil Rights Movement and how we formulate its discourse. But even more revealing, these songs illustrate how cultural memory works to shape and even reshape history. In them we hear about an Emmett Till who plays changing symbolic roles, reflecting key cultural shifts in thinking about racial identity and relations over the last six decades. (2) If a Bayeza, author of the jazz opera The Ballad of Emmett Till, has eloquently identified two opposing traditions about Till that have major implications for a study of the music and songs about him. There were essentially two conflicting regarding Emmett Till. The first was Emmett's mother's memory of him, which became ritualistically instilled by her many public engagements. Her description of a innocent with a speech impediment, with no real agency in his own life, when coupled with his death photo, froze Emmett Till in a state of perpetual victimhood and objectification. While the shock and outrage over this image awakened consciousness and stirred masses of people to action, Emmett remained in a stasis of permanent dehumanization. On the other side of the spectrum, the fraudulent, perjured testimony of Carolyn Bryant, deemed inadmissible in the trial but reprinted almost verbatim in the 1956 Look article, has been repeated and taken for truth in scores of subsequent treatments of the case. In this scenario, Emmett Till is portrayed as the classic black stereotype of a brute and sexual predator, lusting after white flesh. (3) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] We need to hear the songs written about Emmett Till within the contexts of these divergent perspectives. On the one hand, many of them portrayed him as a prepubescent innocent, ignorant of how the South expected a young African American boy to behave around a white woman and unaware of its punishments for violating any taboo, however small or unthinking. …

Reviewed by: Emmett Till: The Murder that Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement by Devery S. Anderson Philip C. Kolin Devery S. Anderson. Emmett Till: The Murder that Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2015. 552 pp. $40.00. Emmett Till scholar Christopher Metress declared, “No one knows more about this brutal murder and its contested legacy than Devery Anderson” (back-cover blurb). I agree. Anderson spent “over a decade of research” writing what is inarguably the definitive history of this fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago who was kidnapped, tortured, and then murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1955 because he flirted with a white woman, twenty-one-year-old Carolyn Bryant, in her husband’s grocery store. As a result, her enraged husband, Roy, and his half-brother, J. W Milam, pistol-whipped Till’s face, shot him in the head, tied his body to a seventy-five-pound cotton-gin fan, and threw it in the Tallahatchie River where it was found three days later. Equally shocking, the killers confessed their crimes to local authorities and were acquitted in two trials (for murder and a few weeks later for kidnapping) and bragged about their crimes in an article in Look magazine, further fueling the firestorm against civil rights atrocities in Mississippi. Released on the sixtieth anniversary of Till’s death, Anderson’s magisterial history is rooted in his exhaustive archival research through newspapers, letters, minutes of meetings, FBI records, and the hard-to-locate 354-page murder trial transcript. Traveling frequently to the Delta and Chicago from his home in Salt Lake City, Anderson also interviewed Till’s mother Mamie numerous times between 1994 and 2003; Till’s great uncle, “Preacher” Moses Wright; cousins Wheeler Parker and Simeon Wright (the latter shared a bed with Till the night he was abducted); the district and defense attorneys; reporters covering the trials; townspeople; a host [End Page 171] of NAACP leaders, especially Roy Wilkins; and prominent Mississippi civil-rights activists, including Dr. T. R. M. Howard. Anderson’s impressive research is documented in 102 pages of endnotes, totaling more than 1,600 citations. Also included are fifty striking photographs of people and places from the 1950s through the 2000s that figure prominently in Till’s tragedy. Anderson deserves high marks for historical objectivity. He identifies, confronts, and impartially resolves many of the controversies swirling around Till’s murder. Such discrepancies, Anderson admits, are inevitable because individuals change their original testimony over time, contradict themselves, or forget events. There is always the possibility of “multiple accounts of an incident by the same individual, or equally valid accounts by multiple people who experienced the same thing” (Preface xviii). Inescapably, too, individuals have fabricated evidence, e.g., the bigoted Tallahatchie County Sheriff H. C. Strider. Summing up the principle guiding his rigorous research, Anderson states: “If I dispute something said by someone decades after the fact, I am usually agreeing with something that same person said in 1955” (xviii). The controversies in the Till case are glaring and persistent—about what he said to Carolyn Bryant inside the store and why; how Roy Bryant found out about it; what exactly happened the night Till was kidnapped; how many individuals were involved in the “kidnapping party”; what transpired between the time Till was kidnapped and later seen the next morning; why Till was taken across county lines to be tortured; and where he was killed. Not only does Anderson investigate all sides of these and other controversies, but he helpfully recaps the evidence that brought him to these conclusions in a concise Appendix. Unquestionably, Emmett Till continues to be at the center of racial trauma in America. The legacy of his terror is indelible. Haunted by what happened decades ago, Wheeler Parker said of his cousin’s death that “[i]t’s always on your mind. . . . It’s something that just won’t go away” (263). Ironically, Anderson initially entitled his history The Boy Who Never Died. In his Foreword, Julian Bond, echoing Parker, writes that Till’s fate was “the touchstone narrative of my generation.” Little wonder that Anderson writes...

Reviewed by: Remembering Emmett Till by Dave Tell William D. Carrigan Remembering Emmett Till. By Dave Tell. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 308. $25.00, ISBN 978-0-226-55953-7.) Dave Tell's account of the struggle to remember Emmett Till, the African American teenager whose 1955 murder in Mississippi sparked national outrage, is a fascinating study based on extensive archival research, personal interviews, and observations during fieldwork research. Remembering Emmett Till does concern itself with what happened in Mississippi in 1955, but such details are only to help better frame and understand the real subject of the book—namely, the way that Till's murder helps us better understand what Tell calls the [End Page 939] "ecology of memory," how race, place, and commemoration are intertwined and catalyze one another (p. 5). The author is particularly compelling as he discusses the way that Till's extralegal execution has been exploited to foster tourism and to help revive the local economy in the poor and struggling Mississippi Delta. Tell excels when analyzing the period beginning in 2005, when commemoration of the Till murder expanded rapidly in Mississippi. A talented writer, Tell is often enthralling as he examines the post-1955 history of Bryant's Grocery, where Till allegedly offended Carolyn Bryant by whistling in 1955, and when he studies the movement behind the erection of recent historical markers in Glendora, Mississippi. Many historians and readers of the Journal of Southern History may find the author's self-insertion into the narrative at times somewhat jarring. Most historians are at pains not to give personal opinions about their subject matter, but Tell (who is not a historian) is quite comfortable expressing recommendations and disappointments. He writes, for example, about his preference that the local authorities not replace the vandalized sign on the Tallahatchie River. Tell argues that removing the sign "hides the entanglement of race and commemoration, and hides the power of the sign to testify to what persists from the distant tragedy that it commemorates" (p. 245). Tell, it should be noted, is convincing and reasonable on this point, even if he departs from the traditional (some I am sure would say old-fashioned) practice of historical writing. Tell, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, is at pains to distinguish his work from the many other studies of Till's murder and its impact on American culture. Tell's work is indeed based on thousands of documents secured from Freedom of Information Act requests and covers episodes and incidents all the way through the 2016 national controversy over the vandalized and bullet-ridden sign commemorating the spot on the Tallahatchie River where the authorities allegedly pulled Till's corpse from the water. Tell is not wrong to emphasize the value of his work and its contribution to studies of not only Till but also memory and racial reconciliation more generally. Nevertheless, he seems (to this reviewer) to overstretch at times, such as when he writes, "I stress that there has never before been a comprehensive account of the people, things, and places that have molded our memory of Till's murder," and then, "It is no exaggeration to say that Remembering Emmett Till will transform everything we think we know about the murder of Emmett Till" (pp. 6, 7). I do think Tell's work is a significant and important contribution to how we understand very important issues of race, memory, and place, even if I am not as confident as he is about the place of the book in the larger historiography. William D. Carrigan Rowan University Copyright © 2020 Southern Historical Association

'This is what our dying looks like':Elegeía for Emmett Till1 Jared Sexton (bio) Emmett Till is dead. I don't know why he can't just stay dead. —Roy Bryant What will one have to say, in response to Dana Schutz's open casket? To ask this, out loud, would sound, without further inquiry or explanation, like a reference to a funeral service, a wake or a viewing. To say this loudly, while out and about, before the uninitiated or uninformed, would sound like a question about elegy. Elegeía, in the ancient sense of the term—to cry, lament, mourn—for one they may not know. They may not know that this one is white or woman or mother or artist or highly educated or professionally successful. They may not know any country of origin or religious faith or languages spoken. They would have no real sense of any ethical bearing or political beliefs and affiliations. The uninitiated or uninformed would not know any of these things in detail, and none for certain. They would only know that there had been another death and that we were gathering before a body, searching about for a response. No color, no texture, no context, no points or lines or planes in the vast space-time continuum. The cause, too, would remain obscure. "What was the cause?" they would ask, among other things, because they would care about all of the above. They would care, even if they only overheard the opening question: How to speak well of the dead? Emmett Till, a young black boy from Chicago, was abducted, tortured and killed by two local white men while visiting maternal relatives in the small town of Money, Mississippi on August 28, 1955. He was fourteen years old when Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam (and perhaps other accomplices) murdered him and attempted to disappear his mutilated body in the Tallahatchie River. Carolyn Bryant, a young white woman shopkeeper, accused Till of making sexual advances against her when he entered the store to buy candy. Her husband and her brother, once she relayed her version of events, imagined they were avenging a violation of her honor and upholding their solemn duty when they set out to discover and destroy Till. That they were overcome with rage and enjoyed something about the violence they inflicted along the way is beyond question. That the tight-knit white community-the police and the press, the judge and the jury-closed ranks reflexively around them is indisputable. That this was, and is, a deeply rooted dynamic in this and every other society structured in racial dominance goes without saying. The life and death of Emmett Till was singular. The forces that conspired around him, drawn most immediately from the history of postbellum anti-black terrorism, were long-standing, broad-based and [End Page 60] overwhelming. The violence done to him was not unique, but its meaning and significance, its symbolic and material force, may be uniquely obscure. And this is despite and due to the harsh light illuminating the forensic photographic evidence that announced to the world that Mamie Till-Mobley was forced, again and again, to see something terrible and terrifying in her son's remains (Till-Mobley & Benson). Dana Schutz's Open Casket (2016) was featured at the 2017 Whitney Biennial. She painted it, according to the Washington Post, "in response to a slew of shootings of black men by police during the summer of 2016" (Gibson). But the reductively glossed rationale was more complex upon closer scrutiny. ArtNet news asked Schutz in a previous interview, "What was the genesis of the painting? How did you decide to tackle this subject in particular, and what meaning do you think you add to the subject with this work?" She replied: I made this painting in August of 2016 after a summer that felt like a state of emergency—there were constant mass shootings, racist rallies filled with hate speech, and an escalating number of camera-phone videos of innocent black men being shot by police. The photograph of Emmett Till felt analogous to the time: what was hidden was now revealed. The...

INTRODUCTIONThe bus lumbered along a back road of rural Mississippi, and out of our windows we saw fields of cotton broken by small homes and gardens that old men were hoeing. The narrow, winding road followed the contours of the Tallahatchie River, its waters muddy and opaque. The journey led 35 high school sophomores and 15 adults, mostly African American and Mexican American, into an often forgotten era in the early stages of the civil rights movement. We had come South for two weeks to talk with and interview people who had participated in the movement and to visit the sites of the struggle. We were seeking deeper understanding about the movement than could be gleaned from the three or four pages generally offered in most school history texts.After interviewing residents of Greenwood about the voter rights issues of the 1960s, we rode to Money, a small town 12 miles from Greenwood, to see if the Bryant Grocery store was still standing. This was the store in which, in 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American Chicago youth who was visiting relatives in the area, talked smart to a local White woman. Young Till did not understand the violent system of segregation that existed in the South in the 1950s and was murdered by the woman's husband and brother-in-law. He was dragged from his Uncle Mose Wright's rural home in the middle of the night, beaten until one side of his head was crushed, shot in the head, weighted with a heavy cotton gin fan, and dumped into the Tallahatchie River. The brutality of the murder, the facade of justice erected during the trial, the acquittal, and the later confession by the two men in an interview with a journalist (Huie, 1956) made the case nationally famous.The store, now abandoned, still resembled the pictures in reference books. Gazing at this symbol of racial oppression, our normally boisterous 15-year-olds were silent. After a while, several students wandered over to a newer grocery located next door to buy something to drink. The cashier, an elderly White woman, asked why the bus had stopped in this isolated part of the state. Told that the students were studying about the civil rights movement and the Emmett Till murder, the woman became indignant and exclaimed that the White men were found innocent and that the students should not be pursuing this topic. Our students were shocked at the obvious vexation of the elderly woman and her defense of the two confessed murderers. They told the story of this encounter several times over several days to other youth and adults who were incredulous and then angry at the incident's implications.The Emmett Till incident and the emotions it evoked had a powerful impact on our students' sense of history and how they perceived themselves as members of disparaged ethnic and racial groups in the United States. We had the opportunity to investigate these issues while we were creating curriculum for these high-achieving African American and Mexican American youth, who were participants in a special scholarship program called TOLEDO EXCEL. We wanted to know whether our curriculum and trip affected how our students viewed their ethnic identity--that is, their relationship to their own ethnic group as well as to the dominant majority group.ETHNIC IDENTITYDue to the changing demographics of urban schools as well as the failure of many of these schools to adequately educate disenfranchised ethnic groups, a focus on ethnic identity issues has arisen with regard to curriculum. Underlying much of the literature on ethnic identity is the often implicit and sometimes explicit assumption that immersing marginalized ethnic students in studies of their own culture enhances their psychological well-being (Grossman, Wirt, & Davids, 1985). Indeed, some researchers see this area of study as one response to reversing the school failure of these ethnic populations. For example, Gay (1985) makes the following claim:Students' levels of ethnic identity development influence their sense of reality and psychological dispositions, thereby affecting how they respond to school environments and instructional processes. …

A Visual Critique of Racism: African American Art from Southern California

real event--the murder of civil-rights activist Medgar Evers on 12 June 1963 in his own driveway--sparked Eudora Welty's monologue story Where is the Coming From? She wrote the story at white heat at one sitting the night Evers was shot down in Jackson, Mississippi, where they both lived. By 1999 other real events were bringing a new generation of readers to the story. The victim's surviving brother, Charles Evers, had published his autobiography; the widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, had become chairman of the NAACP board of directors and written her memoir; and Hollywood had issued a film, Ghosts of Mississippi, about why it took thirty years and three juries to convict the white murderer Welty had imagined on paper. Little of Welty's work has such a sense of art imitating life or so direct a link with current events. In her 1965 article for The Atlantic Month[y, Must the Novelist Crusade? she warned against stock characters who might only represent ideas--even if these were good ideas. Yet at least one reader sees this story as a move from aesthetics to ethics. This story stands out as a rare comment on her times, and unlike most of Welty's other stories, which were written more deliberately, Powerhouse and this one each came out in its essential shape at one sitting. Welty was at work on Losing Battles in the summer of 1963 and has told several interviewers that Voice just pushed right through that novel. Comparison of her typed draft (then called From the Unknown) with the version The New Yorker got into galleys just two weeks after the killing shows Welty condensing the story while editor William Maxwell and The New Yorker lawyers worked to make it less actionable, since a suspect with similarities to her character had been arrested before the story ran July 6.(1) third distinction of the story is that only five other Welty narratives are written in first-person point of view, and none this intensely. The Ponder Heart, Why I Live at the P.O., Kin, A Memory, and Circe are all in first person, though Welty has said the last was not spoken aloud was more a soliloquy or meditation. But Voice does seem to be spoken aloud, by the end almost hummed to the twang of a cheap guitar, and its brevity (only two pages when published in The New Yorker) makes it a fine dramatic monologue for actors or speech students. In an interview Welty said she wrote the story to discover who committed the murder, not his name but his nature, and she believed she had come close to pinpointing his mind. The killer she envisioned was of the same type Bob Dylan depicted in his song about the same murder, Only a Pawn in Their Game. His lyrics portray a poor white controlled by his circumstances and by the Establishment. Both were mistaken. One friend told Welty, You thought it was a Snopes and it was a Compson.(2) Instead of being poor white trash, Byron De La Beckwith, the real life murderer, claimed to be the grandson of a general in Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry. He had grown up on a plantation near where Emmett Till, fourteen and black, was also killed, for allegedly flirting with a young white woman, his body dumped into the Tallahatchie River. Yet it was a long way down from an old Delta family that had once owned some of Jefferson Davis's china to this fertilizer salesman called De-Lay by his friends, an anti-Semite and member of both the segregationist Citizens' Council and the Klan. Despite Beckwith's claims to a planter background, this twenty-five-hundred word interior monologue--boiled down from forty-five typescript pages of revised sections--could have been spoken in his bitter, racist voice. Welty's nameless murderer begins by talking to his wife about another voice, that of a black activist on TV in Thermopylae. He describes to her the route he took through a hell-hot night, to a house not too far across town from his own, envying its outside lights, paved street, and garage--the house where Roland Summers lives. …

Reviewed by: In Remembrance of Emmett Till: Regional Stories and Media Responses to the Black Freedom Struggle by Darryl Mace Amanda L. Higgins (bio) In Remembrance of Emmett Till: Regional Stories and Media Responses to the Black Freedom Struggle. By Darryl Mace. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014. Pp. 228. $40.00 cloth) The brutal lynching of Emmett Till in August 1955 is a signpost for civil rights participants and scholars. His murder, and especially the brave decision by his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, to keep Till’s casket open during the funeral (and to allow for the subsequent publication of images of Till’s mutilated body in the casket) resonated with activists young and old and motivated many to dedicate their lives to social justice work. Darryl Mace’s In Remembrance of Emmett Till is not interested in Till the person but instead investigates the way Till’s murder and the subsequent coverage of the lynching, funeral, and trial played out in regional media. Mace argues that “the regional press strategically highlighted aspects of the Till saga that best helped frame their regional perspective on American race relations” (p. 2). Mace grounds his argument in what he calls situational regionalism or “a response to people’s views of the place in which they lived and how their locale compared to the rest of the nation” (p. 2). Using mainstream newspapers with the highest circulations, Mace traces the media coverage from the discovery of Till’s body in the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi, to his Chicago home going, through the Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam trial, and ending with Till as memory and memorial. The newspapers provide the source base and Mace analyzes the stories and coverage for “regionally engendered racial messages” (p. 6). However, the choice of newspapers consulted is problematic, as Mace mixes daily and weekly publications and local and national newspapers to tell his story. While he claims that the large white and black papers took on distinct regional identities throughout the “Till saga,” as he calls it, he does not do enough work to prove such a supposition. Throughout the book, Mace remains stoically removed from the drama unfolding in his evidence. Mace’s best chapters are the last two, [End Page 280] which analyze the effects of Till’s murder on his own generation. Still, Mace does little to contextualize those responses outside the print media he interrogates. Moreover, Mace admits in the introduction that not “all Americans who lived in the 1950s based their interpretations of Emmett Till on the coverage in their local papers” (p. 4), while also compelling the reader to buy into his notion that to understand the “Till saga,” one must do so through the print media because the 1950s were the highpoint for per capita circulation (pp. 6–7). The book would have done well to consult some of those Americans living in 1955 and discuss the role of media in their lives. It would have also been helped by a deeper interrogation of the secondary literature on Till, the civil rights and Black Power movements, and Cold War America. In Remembrance of Emmett Till is most frustrating because it does not seem to view Till as a real person, who lived and breathed and died, horrifically, at the hands of white men. Till, the person, becomes background noise in his own story. Emmett Till’s life and death are too important to the development of modern American race relations and, this reviewer would argue, American society to be subsumed into a discussion of situational regionalism and newspaper circulation. Amanda L. Higgins AMANDA L. HIGGINS is the associate editor of the Register and coordinator of the Kentucky Historical Society’s scholarly research fellowship program. Her dissertation explored the intersections of the antiwar and Black Power movements. Copyright © 2016 Kentucky Historical Society

On July 13, 1945, Mamie Till received a telegram at her home in Argo, Illinois, notifying her that her estranged husband, Private Louis Till, had been killed in Italy.1 The Department of Defense subsequently sent her his personal effects, including a silver ring he had bought in Casablanca, engraved with his initials and a date, May 25, 1943. During the following ten years, their son, Emmett Till, would occasionally try on his father's ring. Since Emmett was only four when Louis Till was killed, the ring was always too large for him. But in mid-August 1955, as he packed for what was to have been a two-week visit with relatives in Money, Mississippi, he tried the ring on again. Still too big for his ring finger, it now fit the middle finger perfectly. Emmett and his mother agreed that he could wear the ring on his trip to show his cousins and his friends. In her memoir, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America, written with Christopher Benson, Mamie Till-Mobley recalls that during the conversation about the ring, Emmett asked her about his father: We had talked about the fact that his father was a soldier in World War II and that he had been killed overseas. The only thing I could tell him at that point was the only thing I was told by the army. The cause of death, I explained to Emmett, was I didn't know what that meant, and when I tried to find out, I never got a satisfactory answer from the army. A lawyer and friend, Joseph Tobias, had tried to help in 1948. But he was told by the Department of the Army there would be no benefits for me due to the willful misconduct. (TillMobley and Benson 2003, 103) This incident occurs at the point in the narrative when Emmett's mother has begun to realize that her little boy is becoming an adult. In the preceding pages, she describes his heightened sense of responsibility, his first date, his impromptu driving lessons, his insistence on vacationing with his cousins instead of traveling with her, her hopes for his future. By giving Emmett his father's ring, she thus acknowledges his growing independence and maturity. Furthermore, she binds him symbolically to his paternity and his patrimony, despite the fact that irreconcilable differences had torn his parents' marriage apart. As he boarded the train called the City of New Orleans on Saturday, August 20, at Central Station, Chicago, Emmett kissed his mother goodbye and gave her his wristwatch to keep, telling her he wouldn't need it in Mississippi. Although he removed his watch, he decided to wear the ring. Eleven days later, on Wednesday, August 31, Robert Hodges, a seventeen-year-old white fisher, discovered Emmett's mutilated body floating in the Tallahatchie River, even though his murderers-J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant-had tied a cotton gin fan around his neck in hopes of weighing him down.2 For allegedly whistling at-or saying something inappropriate to-Bryant's wife, Carolyn, in their store, Emmett had been killed. According to his mother's description, his tongue had been choked out of his mouth and left hanging onto his chin. His right eyeball was resting on his cheek. Only two of his teeth remained in his mouth, and the bridge of his nose had been broken. His right ear had been cut almost in half and one of his murderers had taken a hatchet and cut through the top of his head from ear to ear. He had also been shot through the head (Till-Mobley and Benson 2003, 135-36). Given its condition, it is thus little wonder that Tallahatchie County sheriff H.C. Strider scrambled to get Emmett's body buried in Mississippi as quickly as possible. He and other local law enforcement officials wanted to try to minimize the impact of a heinous crime that had already captured national attention. Once Emmett's mother, then known as Mamie Bradley, learned that plans were being made to bury her son in Mississippi, however, she insisted that he be returned to Chicago. …

Not long after the Court issued Brown II,a founeen-year-old black youth, Emmett Till, left his home in Chicago for a vacation with relatives in Tallahatchie Country, Mississippi. Till did not understand the racial mores of the South. He bragged to acquaintances in Mississippi that he had had sex with white women in Chicago. He also entered a store and, it was alleged, whistled at the cashier, a young white woman. The woman’s husband and his brother-in-law went to the cabin where Till was staying with his great-uncle, Moses Wright, and dragged him away. Three days later Till’s mangled body was discovered in the Tallahatchie River. He had been shot in the head and tied to a heavy fan that had dragged him into the depths. His mother had his body returned to Chicago and displayed it in an open casket for four days. Thousand of people paid their respects. The media gave the story wide coverage and graphic photography.

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, …

Remembering Emmett Till

A Southern Sublimation:Lynching Film and the Reconstruction of American Memory Robert Jackson (bio) History, Genre, Projection "As I am finishing this book," National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) executive secretary Walter White writes in How Far the Promised Land? (1955), "something seems to have been left out. It would have been impossible a quarter century ago, or, for that matter, a decade ago, to write a book on the status of the American Negro without devoting at least one voluminous chapter to lynching" (229). Seemingly ubiquitous in American culture during the early decades of the twentieth century, lynching was on the wane by the 1950s. This was cause for relief, of course, but it also gave White pause to remember the need to remember. Even though lynching practices, whether in spectacles that attracted thousands and generated carnival settings or in isolated night-riding episodes with only a few participants, had been an open secret in American life for decades, they were sparsely documented in official records and public discourse. The number of lynchings between 1880 and 1930, a period in which lynching became popular in the American South and overwhelmingly targeted black men, has never been known with accuracy. The local white press in places where lynchings occurred was notoriously vague and unreliable on the subject. [End Page 102] Criminal prosecution was nonexistent. Federal anti-lynching legislation, proposed regularly since 1919, was invariably filibustered to death. Amid this vacuum of leadership it had fallen to the much smaller black press and to civil rights organizations like the NAACP to attempt any sort of record-keeping, as White did in his earlier book-length treatment of the subject, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929). "There have been lynched in the United States 4951 persons in the forty-six years between 1882 and extending through 1927," begins his sobering, statistics-laden appendix, a rare sort of document for its time (227). By 1955, though, at the end of Walter White's life and career, with the incendiary presence and imagery of lynching largely disappeared from the immediate experience of so many Americans, black and white alike, lynching had begun a new phase of contestation in the realm of memory. The death of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago lynched while visiting relatives in Mississippi, powerfully initiated this phase. Helpless to prevent her son's death or the acquittal of his killers, Till's mother launched a campaign for the mass memorialization of her son's lynching. Her decisions to display his mutilated and swollen body (found several days after the killing in the Tallahatchie River) in an open casket, and to publish photographs of his body in Jet magazine, contributed to Till's becoming perhaps the most famous lynching victim in an American history more notable for the anonymity and invisibility of those victims. The episode as a whole came soon before the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and served as one of the key events in the nascent civil rights movement. Because the official record was so indifferent to lynching's presence and influence, mass culture became an increasingly important site where lynching was represented and contested, often in innovative and surprising ways. Consequently, much of the recent scholarship that has revisited lynching in an effort to understand its historical and psychological impact has benefited from the wide-ranging, if uneven, documentation of the phenomenon in mass cultural artifacts and representations.1 James Allen's haunting photography exhibit and book Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000), for example, is composed largely of lithographic and photographic postcards of the dead, whose photographers, in Allen's words, "compulsively composed silvery tableaux (natures mortes) positioning and lighting corpses as if they were game birds on the wing." Allen accounts not just for the motives of the makers of these images, but also for those of their disseminators and collectors. "Lust propelled the commercial reproduction and distribution of the images, [End Page 103] facilitating the endless replay of anguish. Even dead, the victims were without sanctuary" (204–205). Yet even as Allen impugns the crass and deadly impulses that created and kept such...

I want the whole world to see what they did to my boy. -- Mrs. Mamie Till Bradley On September 24, 1955, an all-white Mississippi jury, after a mere sixty-seven minutes of deliberation, acquitted J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant of the murder of Emmett Till. Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago, had been visiting for the first time his extended family in the Mississippi Delta. One afternoon, barely a week into his visit, he and several other youths were standing outside a white-owned grocery store in the small hamlet of Money. Apparently, Till had been boasting of his friendships with white people up North--in particular his friendships with white girls--and the local kids, looking to call his bluff, dared him to enter the store and flirt with Carolyn Bryant, the white woman and former beauty queen who was working the cash register. Till entered the store, and what he did next is unclear. Some say he wolf whistled at Bryant; others say he grabbed her hand and asked her for a date; still others claim he did nothing more than simply say, Bye, baby, to her as he left the store. What ever Till did, it was apparent to all involved that he had done something that Carolyn Bryant found inappropriate. Till's friends rushed him away from the store as Bryant went to her car to get a gun. For three days, nothing more happened, and then Roy Bryant--Carolyn's husband--and J. W. Milam--Roy Bryant's stepbrother--struck out in the dead of night in search of young Till. They found him where they thought he'd be at two in the morning: asleep in the modest cabin of Mose Wright, his uncle. The two men, demanding to see the boy who'd done the talking, took Till forcibly from the house, and his family never saw him alive again. The next morning, at the family's request, the local sheriff searched the county, and when he could not find any trace of Till, he questioned and eventually arrested Milam and Bryant on kidnapping charges. When Till's bloated and disfigured corpse surfaced three days later downstream in the Tallahatchie River, Milam and Bryant were quickly re-arrested, this time for murder. In the weeks leading up to the trial, media coverage was enormous. Influential African-American weeklies like the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, the New York Amsterdam News, and the Baltimore Afro-American all published loud denunciations of Southern injustice and threatened to exert political and economic pressure should Mississippi fail to give Till's case a fair hearing. In response, white Southern papers, led by the conservative Jackson Daily News and the more moderate Memphis Commercial Appeal, insisted that justice would be done and that continued threats from the would threaten rather than secure justice in the case. Eventually, more than seventy newspapers and magazines sent reporters to the trial, and when, against all reasonable evidence, the jury failed to convict Milam and Bryant, the denunciations were swift and strong. While apologist papers in the South argued that justice had had its day in court, African-American newspapers and magazines, joined by a chorus of suppo rt from the Northern white press and liberal political organizations, called for national protests and boycotts. The NAACP formed an alliance with Mamie Till Bradley, Emmett's mother, and her speaking tour helped to generate one of the most successful fund raising and membership campaigns in NAACP history. According to many scholars of the Civil Rights Movement, the murder of Emmett Till and the brazen acquittal of his murderers were the sparks that ignited the black freedom struggle in the 1950s and '60s (Huie, Whitfield). The following poem by the distinguished poet and novelist, Langston Hughes, is dedicated to the memory of Emmett Louis Till, 14-year-old victim of a brutal murder in Mississippi. Mr. Hughes sent it to the NAACP with permission for release for publication in any newspaper wishing to use it. …

This chapter narrates the account of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy who had been kidnapped and found dead in the Tallahatchie River, with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck. In particular, it explores the initial encounter of Till at a country store with two whites—Carolyn Bryant and her husband, Roy—who had murdered him. The interactions of the three in this encounter shared a fundamental performative component that guided daily life in Jim Crow Mississippi—the localized, informal, and yet seemingly ever-present surveillance of a white audience. In Wright's Jim Crow performer-audience racial relations, Till, as a performer, was unaware of the extent of the white audience watching him. He delivered the wrong performance, and the Bryants responded with violence, leading to his death.