Lynching: Selected Resources: Emmett Till

There are many heroes of the civil rights movementmen and women we can look to for inspiration. Each has a unique story, a path that led to a role as leader or activist. Death of Innocenceis the heartbreaking and ultimately inspiring story of one such hero: Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till an innocent fourteen-year-old African-American boy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who paid for it with his life. His outraged mother's actions helped galvanized the civil rights movement, leaving an indelible mark on American racial consciousness.

Clenora Hudson-Weems, Ph.D., was the first to establish the position of the August 28, 1955, brutal lynching of Emmett Louis ?Bobo?Till, the 14-year-old Black Chicago youth, for whistling at a 21-year-old white woman (Carolyn Bryant) in Money, MS, as the catalyst of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. In her 1988 doctoral dissertation, ?Emmett Till: The Impetus for the Modern Civil Rights Movement? (U. of Iowa), later published as Emmett Till: The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement (1994), she carefully documents the Till murder case as having set the stage for the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, since it happened 3 months and 3 days before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus, December 1, 1955.

The author, known for her writings about Emmett Till and how his murder became a catalyst for the civil rights movement; now writes of how others in the historical and publishing community have minimized her scholarly contribution on this topic.

With a collection of more than one hundred documents spanning almost half a century, Christopher Metress retells Till's story in a unique and daring way. Juxtaposing news accounts and investigative journalism with memoirs, poetry, and fiction, this documentary narrative not only includes material by such prominent figures as Hodding Carter, Chester Himes, Eleanor Roosevelt, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Eldridge Cleaver, Bob Dylan, John Edgar Wideman, Lewis Nordan, and Michael Eric Dyson, but it also contains several previously unpublished works -- among them a newly discovered Langston Hughes poem -- and a generous selection of hard-to-find documents never before collected.

Employing never before used historical materials, the authors 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, journalists reacted.

In this sensitive inquiry, historian Stephen J. Whitfield probes Till's death; its ideological roots; the potent myths concerning race, sexuality, and violence; and the incident's enduring effects on American national life. As he recreates the trial, its participants, and the social structure of the Delta, Whitfield examines how white rural Mississippians actually tried "two of their own." Though they were acquitted, these same defendants were soon being ostracized by their own neighbors, and within four months of Till's death, Southern blacks were staging the historic Montgomery bus boycott -- the first major battle in the coming war against racial injustice that would lead to the passage of civil rights legislation a decade later.