Kansas City, Kansas Public Library West Wyandotte Library will be hosting Dave Tell, author of the new book “Remembering Emmett Till,” on Monday, May 13, at 6:30 pm. 100 free copies of the book will be given away to the first to arrive.
There will be a discussion and signing. The event will run two hours. West Wyandotte Library is at 1737 N 82nd Street, KCK.
Dave Tell is the principal investigator of the Emmett Till Memory Project.
In the early morning of August 28, 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was abducted and murdered in Money, Mississippi. From Chicago, Till was visiting family and had allegedly flirted with a White woman several days earlier. The white woman’s husband and her brother made Emmett carry a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to take off his clothes. The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head and then threw his body, tied to the cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, into the river.
In 2007, Till’s female accuser admitted to a researcher that she lied.
Plaques marking the people, places, and events surrounding Till’s killing and the subsequent trial have been vandalized since their installation in 2007: sprayed with bullets, scraped of their words, and even uprooted and thrown in the nearby river.
In 2014, Dave Tell of the University of Kansas and Patrick Weems of the Emmett Till Memorial Commission launched the Emmett Till Memory Project to respond to these acts of vandalism by creating digital memorials that could not be defaced.
In “Remembering Emmett Till,” he gives us five accounts of the commemoration of this infamous crime. In a development no one could have foreseen, Till’s murder—one of the darkest moments in the region’s history—has become an economic driver for the Delta.
Historical tourism has transformed seemingly innocuous places like bridges, boat landings, gas stations, and riverbeds into sites of racial politics, reminders of the still-unsettled question of how best to remember the victim of this heinous crime. Tell builds an insightful and persuasive case for how these memorials have altered the Delta’s physical and cultural landscape, drawing potent connections between the dawn of the Civil Rights era and our own moment of renewed fire for racial justice.
“Tell has written the Emmett Till book still begging to be written. The tragedy of this case gave it a place in history books, but its place in American memory was far more complicated. Revisionist history is one thing; rewriting history is another. Tell’s argument that race and geography were at the core of that rewriting makes for a compelling and convincing read. As Tell shows, collective forgetting, willfully done, has created a new layer of tragedy to the Emmett Till Story,” says Devery S. Anderson, author of “Emmett Till: The Murder that Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement.”
More info on the library can be found online at kckpl.org.