Remembering Emmett Till

Dave Tell is professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas and the principal investigator of the Emmett Till Memory Project.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Remembering Emmett Till1 Race, Geography, and the Erasure of Sunflower County2 Of Race and Rivers: Topography and Memory in Tallahatchie County3 Emmett Till, Tallahatchie County, and the Birthplace of the Movement4 Ruins and Restoration in Money5 Memory and Misery in GlendoraConclusion: Vandalism and Memory at Graball LandingNotesBibliographyIndex

"With almost surgical precision, Tell unpacks what he presciently calls 'the deep intertwining of race, place, and commemoration' in his brilliant new history of the remembrance of Emmett Till. Excellent histories of this 1955 murder abound, but no one until now has told the multilayered and painfully tangled history of Till's commemoration in the Mississippi Delta. This may be the single greatest 'history of memory' I have ever read."--James Young, author of The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between "Tell, the principal investigator of the Emmett Till Memory Project, takes readers through thickets of politics and commemoration, of fact and fiction, and of local communities trying to leverage civil rights histories to which they may not have strong connections. . . . A book with broad application to the study of the civil rights movement but particularly useful for students and practitioners of local history and civic tourism."-- "Kirkus Reviews" "A 2019 Book of the Year. . . A fine history of racism, poverty and memory in the Mississippi Delta told through the lynching of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old from Chicago whose murder in 1955--and his mother's determination to display his mutilated features in an open coffin--made him an early martyr of the civil-rights movement."-- "The Economist" "Tell has written the Emmett Till book still begging to be written. The tragedy of this case gave it a place in history books, but its place in American memory was far more complicated. Revisionist history is one thing; rewriting history is another. Tell's argument that race and geography were at the core of that rewriting makes for a compelling and convincing read. As Tell shows, collective forgetting, willfully done, has created a new layer of tragedy to the Emmett Till story."--Devery S. Anderson, author of Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement "Remembering Emmett Till sets the bar for future work on memory, civil rights, and the case that arguably gave the movement its legs. With deft archival work and savvy on-the-ground sleuthing, Tell unearths from the unrelenting Delta landscape many secrets locals have longed to keep buried. Accessible, engaging, and a page-turner from the jump."--Davis W. Houck, coauthor of Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press "Remembering Emmett Till is an expertly rendered and original study of an acutely important episode in modern national memory. Tell shows, in evocative detail, how collective patterns and projects of commemoration can be both necessary and confounding, social and topographical, found and invented, tragic and reconstructive. In doing so, Tell blends ideas, places, artifacts, and evidence together in new ways so that readers may revisit, with striking implications, the question of how best to commemorate a historical injustice that will not--and, as Tell suggests, should not--leave us alone."--Bradford Vivian, author of Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture