Crowe Chris - Getting away with murder: the true story of the Emmett Till case

I was born near Chicago, Illinois, in 1954, just one year before fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was murdered in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. Though his death and the trial of his murderers received national press coverage and especially intense attention in his hometown of Chicago, my parents recall nothing at all of the case or the news coverage of the trial.

But parents cant know everything, so school should have introduced me to this landmark civil rights event; but it didnt. Through elementary school, junior high, high school, college, and graduate school I never once read nor heard anything about Emmett Till. It wasnt until I was writing a book about the life and works of Newbery-winning author Mildred D. Taylor that I first encountered Emmett. In one of her essays, Taylor made a reference to a fourteen-year-old African American boy who had been murdered in her home state of Mississippi in 1955. I followed up on the reference to Emmett just to make sure it wasnt something I should include in my book about Taylor.

What I found stunned me: a gruesome photograph of this boy from Chicago, lying in a casket, his face and head horribly disfigured. The article that accompanied the photo grabbed my interest, not because it had anything to do with Mildred D. Taylor, but because it detailed a critical moment in American civil rights history that I, with all of my years of schooling and reading, had never learned. This article piqued my interest, and I dug some more, eventually finding two very helpful books about the case, Clenora Hudson-Weemss Emmett Till: The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement and Stephen J. Whitfields A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till. Plater Robinson and his Soundprint radio documentary The Murder of Emmett Till also provided invaluable background information about the case.

So, who was Emmett Till and why hadnt I learned about him?

My initial research into the case showed that most white Americans had never heard of him, and a review of history textbooks suggested why. In a survey of twenty-one high school U.S. history books published between 1990 and 2002, I found that every book included information about two famous civil rights events: the U.S. Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education, and the Montgomery bus boycott started by Rosa Parks. Sadly, only two books mentioned Emmett Till, and those books used a combined total of fewer than fifty words to describe his place in American history. Neither book suggested that Emmetts murder had been a catalyst for the civil rights movement. A more recent survey of twenty-seven textbooks published between 2005 and 2016 showed that little has changed: three of the books devoted a sentence or two to the Till case, and one featured an entire page. The other twenty-three books made no mention of Emmett Till or of the significance of his murder.

But most African Americans know well his story and its place in history.

In addition to the thousands of people who attended Emmetts three-day viewing and the funeral that followed, hundreds of thousands more, including Mildred D. Taylor, read about his murder and the trial in the African American media of the time. The most sensational coverage of the murder, which included the photo of Emmetts battered body resting in his casket, appeared in