Remembering Emmett Till
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Praise For Remembering Emmett Till…
“A 2019 Book of the Year. . . A fine history of racism, poverty and memory in the Mississippi Delta told through the lynching of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old from Chicago whose murder in 1955—and his mother’s determination to display his mutilated features in an open coffin—made him an early martyr of the civil-rights movement.”
— The Economist
“Tell, the principal investigator of the Emmett Till Memory Project, takes readers through thickets of politics and commemoration, of fact and fiction, and of local communities trying to leverage civil rights histories to which they may not have strong connections. . . . A book with broad application to the study of the civil rights movement but particularly useful for students and practitioners of local history and civic tourism.”
— Kirkus Reviews
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.
Hardcover; 312 pages
About the Author:
Dave Tell is professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas and the principal investigator of the Emmett Till Memory Project.