While visiting family in Mississippi in August 1955, Emmett Till
allegedly whistled at a white woman working behind the counter of a
crossroads country store. Her husband and brother-in-law kidnapped
the fourteen-year-old Chicago kid in the middle of the night and
tortured, beat, and shot him. Three days later, his body rose from
the Tallahatchie River, a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with
barbed wire. Confronting her son's nightmarishly disfigured face,
Mamie Till-Mobley decided that his funeral in Chicago would be
open-casket. "Let the people see what they did to my boy." The
South Side church where her son's body lay in state kept its doors
open day and night. More than one hundred thousand people came and
saw his face. Millions more stared at the photographs of it
published in the African-American press, especially Jet magazine
and the Chicago Defender. The pictures galvanized the black
community. Journalists and activists drove down to the Mississippi
Delta, and risked their lives interviewing townsfolk, encouraging
witnesses, spiriting those in danger out of the region, and above
all keeping the news cycle turning. Less than a month after Till's
murder, despite strong evidence, a fair-minded judge, and
prosecutors eager for a conviction, an all-white jury found Till's
killers not guilty. For black Americans, the Till lynching and
acquittal was a defining moment. Muhammad Ali, Rosa Parks, Anne
Moody, John Lewis, and countless others later said that it changed
their lives. They were "the Emmett Till generation," and they would
help lead the greatest mass movement in twentieth-century America.
His story haunts us still, its meanings blurring and shifting with
time. Documentaries, histories, memoirs, and oral testimony have
revealed new facts. In 2005, fifty years after the lynching, his
murderers long dead, the FBI reopened the Till case. They reopened
it again the summer of 2018, after new revelations came to light.
Building on all the material, old and new, Elliott J. Gorn offers
the most complete and immersive account of Emmett Till's story. Let
the People See also probes its enduring truths, truths we confront
with each fresh spasm of racial violence. Till is more with us
today than at any time since 1955, his name invoked whenever
another young black man falls victim. His face remains the face of
racism, and, as Gorn shows us in this haunting and definitive
account, we cannot turn away from it.
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