Devery S. Anderson. Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement. (2024)

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Devery S.

Anderson

.

Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement.

Foreword by

Julian

Bond

.

Jackson

:

University Press of Mississippi

,

2015

. Pp. xxiii, 552. $40.00.

Harriet Pollack

Bucknell University

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The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 1, 1 February 2017, Pages 208–209, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.1.208

Published:

31 January 2017

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The 1955 kidnapping, brutal torture, and murder of the fourteen-year-old Chicago boy Emmett Till—sparked by his allegedly whistling at a white woman in Money, Mississippi—together with the trial and travesty of justice that followed, cascaded to create the media events opening the American civil rights movement. When Mamie Till Bradley, Emmett’s heroic mother, published the gruesome image of her son’s ruined face in Jet magazine, she effectively and impressively transformed the previously predictable meaning of the lynched black corpse, so frequently photographed and reprinted to convey the message of white power, to instead signify the grief and anger of a black woman and her community. The ultimate effect of this photograph and the injustice it recorded was to instigate national change. Nevertheless, Till’s name has been largely forgotten, even while over 140 fictionalized retellings of the incident have been published in literary form (novels, plays, and poems) between 1955 and the present (Christopher Metress, “Literary Representations of the Lynching of Emmett Till: An Annotated Bibliography,” in Harriet Pollack and Christopher Metress, Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination [2008], 223–250). Several important histories, memoirs, and academic studies have addressed the murder and the trial that exonerated murderers J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant—perpetrators who, once acquitted, brazenly and outrageously sold their confession to reporter William Bradford Huie for publication in Look magazine, in a pioneering act of modern checkbook journalism.

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