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

Abstract

Devery S. Anderson first encountered Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old Chicagoan brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1955, as an undergraduate watching the Eyes on the Prize (1987–1990) documentary series. That initial encounter with Till's story launched a nearly twenty-year project to uncover everything that he could about Till and his family, the brutal crime, and its historical legacies. With Emmett Till Anderson has written what will likely become the definitive study of the lynching and its aftermath. Based on an immense amount of research—including over forty interviews by the author—Anderson recounts Till's childhood in Chicago; his fateful trip south to visit family in 1955; the incident at the Bryant general store in Money, Mississippi, that led Roy Bryant and his half-brother J. W. Milam to decide that the fourteen year old needed to be taught the ways of southern white supremacy; Till's lynching; the trial and its aftermath; the reopening of the case by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2004; and Till's presence as a symbol of racial injustice in contemporary America.