Description
At 2:00 A.M. on August 28, 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, visiting from Chicago, was abducted from his great-uncle's cabin in Money, Mississippi, and never seen alive again. When his battered and bloated corpse floated to the surface of the Tallahatchie River three days later and two local white men were arrested for his murder, young Till's death was primed to become the spark that set off the civil rights movement.
With a collection of more than one hundred documents spanning almost half a century, Christopher Metress retells Till's story in a unique and daring way. Juxtaposing news accounts and investigative journalism with memoirs, poetry, and fiction, this documentary narrative not only includes material by such prominent figures as Hodding Carter, Chester Himes, Eleanor Roosevelt, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Eldridge Cleaver, Bob Dylan, John Edgar Wideman, Lewis Nordan, and Michael Eric Dyson, but it also contains several previously unpublished works--among them a newly discovered Langston Hughes poem--and a generous selection of hard-to-find documents never before collected.
Exploring the means by which historical events become part of the collective social memory, The Lynching of Emmett Till is both an anthology that tells an important story and a narrative about how we come to terms with key moments in history.
Author: Christopher Metress
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 10/29/2002
Pages: 384
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.26lbs
Size: 9.24h x 6.12w x 0.99d
ISBN13: 9780813921228
ISBN10: 0813921228
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | African American & Black Studies
- History | United States | 20th Century
- Social Science | Discrimination
About the Author
Christopher Metress, Associate Professor of English at Samford University, is the author of The Critical Response to Dashiell Hammett.