Quick way to learn what happened to Emmett Till

Who Killed Emmett Till?

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by Susan Klopfer

The Mississippi Delta is not a place I would have picked to live and if you had asked me a few years ago what I knew about the region, it would have been a puzzle since I knew nothing of its history or culture -- I'd never even heard of Emmett. But it did not take long to gather fascinating information about the story of this young man who was killed in the cotton hamlet of Money, Mississippi back in 1955.

His lynching, for whistling at a white woman, is legend. His act kicked off the modern civil rights movement. When people talk about Trayvon Martin, they sometimes compare these two stories. And there is reason why. 

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What happened to cause a young African American student's lynching in the Mississippi Delta? When Emmett "BoBo" Till threatened Mississippi's rigid Jim Crow laws this fourteen-year-old paid with his life. Till's murderers were set free yet his death spurred Rosa Parks to take her important stand in Montgomery. By the time of this 58th anniversary, the case was finally reopened with new and intriguing information. 

How many people were involved? Who hid the killers overnight? Where is the first trial's transcript? Learn new facts on this and other Delta murders - Clinton Melton and his wife (1955)- he was shot, she was drowned; Jo Etha Collier(1955), gunned down on graduation night; attorney Cleve McDowell (1997), shot to death by a client? 

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This Emmett Till book gives readers a unique look at Mississippi's secret government agencies and its private white Citizens Councils that spied and did harm to those who fought segregation and more. It remains a murder mystery today.

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Emmett Till Blog; Murder in the Mississippi Delta; Civil Rights Cold Cases: Emmett Till eBook Price Now 99 Cents

"It's time for more people to know this inportant civil rights story," author Susan Klopfer says. The eBook price drop comes as the 56th anniversary of Till's death arrives in August.

Continued --

Fannie Lou Hamer: New Civil Rights Book Reveals Fear of Murder

Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony [Democratic National Convention, 1964] wasn't the whole truth. A recent biography of Hamer, "For Freedom's Sake," by University of Georgia professor Chana Kai Lee, reveals that she omitted a key fact: She had also been sexually abused by the law enforcement officers.

Lee implies that Hamer did not tell the Credentials Committee that she was sexually abused because she was a "modest and dignified" woman, but I think it also must have been in her mind that if she testified on national television that the Mississippi police had also sexually abused her that day, she probably would have been murdered when she returned from the convention.

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Civil Rights Struggle Recalled by Mississippian

Silver Rights

By WES HELBLING
Published: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 3:27 PM CDT

Gloria [Carter] Dickerson was 12 years old when she paused from her back breaking labor in a Mississippi cotton field and questioned whether God had put her on the earth to do better things. Little did she know of the historic role her family was to play in the struggle for integration of southern schools.

Born into an impoverished, sharecropping family in Drew, Miss., Dickerson is now coordinator for the Mid South Delta Initiative (MSDI), which distributes grants fostering economic development in rural communities along the Mississippi River. Invited by the Morehouse Dream Pioneers and New Philadelphia Church to speak in Collinston on Saturday, the story Dickerson told is as inspiring as it is searing.

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Dickerson's family's historic struggle was told in the 1995 book "Silver Rights" by Constance Curry


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News Story Continued ..

Yazoo-Mississippi Delta Revisited

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For you to enjoy -- pictures of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta from over the year. Susan

'Missing Pages' .. Pioneering Black Journalists of Modern America

NONFICTION
Pioneering black journalists tell of early days in history
Missing Pages Edited by Wallace Terry, Carroll and Graf, 375 pp., $16.95

Not so long ago, the American media carried the battle for a racially integrated South onto the front page and into America's living rooms.

Still, newspapers, television and radio in the North and South often were no more open to blacks in the 1950s than a whites-only Southern diner, according to "Missing Pages: Black Journalists of Modern America, An Oral History."

With few exceptions, newsrooms and broadcast studios were resolutely white and male, and determined to stay that way. Max Robinson's television boss in Virginia refused to show his face while he read the news in 1959. He later became the first black anchorman at ABC.

Story Continued--

Striggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi: Dittmer, et. al.

Archives 1996
From the 1996 Archives of
Black Issues In Higher Education

Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi.
- book reviews

by Julian Bond

Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi by John Dittmer Univ. of Illinois Press, Urbana, Illinois, 1994. $29.95 hard, $14.95 paper

These three excellent books represent a developing and welcome trend in civil rights historiography.

Previous histories have described the modern-day 20th-century civil rights movement from the top down -- as a story whose main characters are Martin Luther King, Jr., and Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Most have also described the development of the movement within a restricted time line -- from the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education and the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott that introduced King and his espousal of nonviolent resistance to the passage of important civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965.

Under that time-bound restriction, the movement began suddenly out of nowhere in the middle 1950s; by the middle 1960s it had triumphed. Under the leadership of Martin Luther King and the active cooperation of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, segregation had been vanquished. The battle had been won.

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