| Abstract |
In August 1955, the mutilated body of Emmett Till - a fourteen-year-old black Chicago youth - was pulled from Mississippi's Tallahatchie River. Abducted, severely beaten, and finally thrown into the river with a weight fastened around his neck with barbed wire, Till, an eighth-grader, was killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman. The nation was horrified by Till's death. When the all-white, all-male jury hastily acquitted the two white defendants, the outcry reached a frenzied pitch - spurring a fury that would prove critical in the mobilization of black resistance to white racism in the Deep South. In this [book, the author] probes Till's death; its ideological roots; the potent myths concerning race, sexuality, and violence; and the incident's enduring effects on American national life. As he recreates the trial, its participants, and the social structure of the Delta, [he] examines how white rural Mississippians actually tried "two of their own." Though they were acquitted, these same defendants were soon being ostracized by their own neighbors, and within four months of Till's death, Southern blacks were staging the historic Montgomery bus boycott - the first major battle in the coming war against racial injustice that would lead to the passage of civil rights legislation a decade later.-Back cover |
| Review |
Whitfield ( Jews in America's Life and Thought , etc.) here examines the national reaction to the grisly murder in 1955 of Emmett Till, a black teenager accused of whistling at a white woman, whose killers were acquitted by a white jury in Mississippi. The Brown v. Board of Education decision, Whitfield argues persuasively, had strengthened the miscegenation paranoia of Southern white supremacists that was based on their attitudes towards race and sexuality. He further asserts, however, that despite federal passivity in regard to the rights of blacks and the Mississippi state-supported Citizens Councils that intimidated and terrorized its large black minority, Till's sensational case, succinctly reported here, imparted a crucially vital impulse to the civil rights movement of the '60s. The author concludes that the feminist movement, its members' civil rights activities and sexual emancipation have helped to reduce racism. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. |
| General note | Includes index. |
| Bibliography note | Bibliography: p. 175-187. |
| Acquisitions source |
Joyner Rare copy gift of Gene and Susan Roberts, 2016. |
| LCCN | 88016328 |
| ISBN | 0029351219 : |
