The horrific 1955 slaying of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till marks
a significant turning point in the history of American race
relations. An African American boy from Chicago, Till was visiting
relatives in the Mississippi Delta when he was accused of
"wolf-whistling" at a young white woman. His murderers abducted him
from his great-uncle's home, beat him, then shot him in the head.
Three days later, searchers discovered his body in the Tallahatchie
River. The two white men charged with his murder received a swift
acquittal from an all-white jury. The eleven essays in Emmett Till
in Literary Memory and Imagination examine how the narrative of the
Till lynching continues to haunt racial consciousness and to
resonate in our collective imagination.
The trial and acquittal of Till's murderers became, in the words
of one historian, "the first great media event of the civil rights
movement," and since then, the lynching has assumed a central place
in literary memory. The international group of contributors to this
volume explores how the Emmett Till story has been fashioned and
refashioned in fiction, poetry, drama, and autobiography by writers
as diverse as William Bradford Huie, James Baldwin, Langston
Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Anne Moody, Nicol's Guill?n,
Aim? C?saire, Bebe Moore Campbell, and Lewis Nordan. They suggest
the presence of an "Emmett Till narrative" deeply embedded in
post-1955 literature, an overarching recurrent plot that builds on
recognizable elements and is as legible as the "lynching narrative"
or the "passing narrative." Writers have fashioned Till's story in
many ways: an the annotated bibliography that ends the volume
discusses more than 130 works that memorialize the lynching,
calling attention to the full extent of Till's presence in literary
memory.
Breaking new ground in civil rights studies and the discussion
of race in America, Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination
eloquently attests to the special power and artistic resonance of
one young man's murder.
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