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The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative. Edited by Christopher Metress. The American South Series. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2002. Pp. xvi, 360. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8139-2122-8; cloth, $59.50, ISBN 0-8 139-2121-X.)
This brilliant compilation of primary documents takes readers back to dirt-road Mississippi in the summer of 1955. Newspaper accounts, editorial opinions, court testimony, photographs, memoirs, and literary representations track the lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till and the trial of his alleged killers.
Emmett Till was a city boy from black Chicago whose mother sent him to visit kinfolk in rural Mississippi for the summer. He did not survive two weeks. This crossroads of sharecroppers was so removed from the northern ghetto that Till could not have escaped seeming different, at a time when the very structure of racial subordination in the South was directly threatened by the recent Supreme Court order to desegregate. As it was, Till spoke to the white woman who ran the local store in a manner that, when her husband heard...