Remembering Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi

Nearly fifty years passed between the 1955 murder of Emmett Till and its first public commemoration in the Mississippi Delta. When the memorials finally emerged, so too did accounts of a long-enforced silence. In her gripping memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody says that she was haunted by Till’s murder, but never allowed to speak of it openly.  Outside the Delta, Till’s story was passed down by writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Bob Dylan, Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Lewis Nordan, and it figured prominently in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “dream” speech in Detroit in June 1963 (though not in the more famous version delivered two months later in Washington). But in the place where it occurred, Till’s murder was seldom discussed publicly.  Architectural historian Dell Upton observes that even as the civil rights movement began to be commemorated across the South in the 1970s, memorials were concentrated in “Alabama, Georgia, and other places where the great, telegenic mass demonstrations were held, rather than, say, in Mississippi, the scene of quieter, less visible efforts and of more sinister, more random, and less restrained violence.”