Timothy B. Tyson. The Blood of Emmett Till

The brutal murder of young Emmett Till in 1955 stands as one of the most outrageous crimes of the twentieth century. The case has inspired a rich and substantial literature, including Mamie Till-Mobley’s 2003 memoir, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America; John Edgar Wideman’s searing 2016 book, Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File; and Deverny Anderson’s comprehensive history of the case, published in 2015, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement. In The Blood of Emmett Till, Timothy B. Tyson brings his considerable skills as a writer to bear upon this story to produce a fresh and gripping narrative of Till’s life, his murder, and its aftermath. The story is well known. Two white men, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, kidnapped Till, fourteen years old and black, all because he had the audacity to flirt with Bryant’s wife, Carolyn, at the small grocery store they owned in the Mississippi Delta. They pummeled the boy and shot him in the head, and then dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. The crime sent shock waves through the country and provided fuel for the burgeoning civil rights movement, largely because Till’s mother made it so. She appealed to the media in Till’s hometown of Chicago, held a public funeral, and allowed the black press to publish a photograph of Till’s disfigured and bloated corpse. Bryant and Milam, meanwhile, were tried and acquitted.

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