kirkusreviews.com
History is written by the victors—but also by committees and
grant agencies, the subject of this excursus into the “ecology of memory.”
Emmett Till, 14 years old, was murdered in August 1955, his body
weighted down and sunk in the Tallahatchie River of Mississippi. His crime:
allegedly whistling at a white woman. The killing has been presented as ground
zero of the civil rights movement ever since, though, as Tell
(Communications/Univ. of Kansas) points out, the real work in Mississippi was
done through “door-to-door canvassing and the development of local leadership.”
Till’s death, with no punishment of the killers, remains a matter contested in
memory: How should he be commemorated? Should the store where his transgression
occurred be preserved? 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. This is an academic
book, and the author commits some labored prose to the page, as when he strains
to link the Tallahatchie to the Greek river Lethe in “an intimate series of
connection among rivers, oblivion, and forgetfulness.” Still, this is also a
book likely to displease local chambers of commerce, memorial designers, and
others who would weave together stories that were once considered separate and
even today are not fully answered. As he writes, for instance, “while the
inclusion of Bryant’s Grocery in Till’s story is no longer controversial,
questions about what precisely happened in the store remain as all-consuming as
they were in 1955.” Controversially, Tell suggests that the paternalism that
led to Till’s death is also fully in command of his commemoration nearly 65
years later.
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.
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