Remembering Emmett Till

By Dave Tell

Take a drive through the Mississippi Delta today and you’ll find a landscape dotted with memorials to major figures and events from the civil rights movement. Perhaps the most chilling are those devoted to the murder of Emmett Till, a tragedy of hate and injustice that became a beacon in the fight for racial equality. The ways this event is remembered have been fraught from the beginning, revealing currents of controversy, patronage, and racism lurking just behind the placid facades of historical markers.

In Remembering Emmett Till, Dave Tell 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.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780226559704

Book preview

REMEMBERING EMMETT TILL

Remembering

EMMETT TILL

Dave Tell

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55953-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55970-4 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226559704.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tell, Dave, 1976– author.

Title: Remembering Emmett Till / Dave Tell.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018043686 | ISBN 9780226559537 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226559704 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Till, Emmett, 1941–1955—Anniversaries, etc. | Till, Emmett, 1941–1955—Anniversaries, etc.—Economic aspects. | Murder victims—Monuments—Mississippi—Delta (Region)—History. | Murder victims—Monuments—Mississippi—Tallahatchie County—History. | Delta (Miss. : Region)—Social conditions. | Tallahatchie County (Miss.)—Social conditions. | Delta (Miss. : Region)—Race relations. | Tallahatchie County (Miss.)—Race relations. | Civil rights movements—United States—History.

Classification: LCC E185.93.M6 T45 2019 F347.M6 | DDC 364.1/34—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043686

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For the Emmett Till Memorial Commission of Tallahatchie County, Inc.

The shaded area is the Mississippi Delta. Map by Hammons and Associates. Used by permission.

I have a dream this afternoon that there will be a day that we will no longer face the atrocities that Emmett Till had to face or Medgar Evers had to face, that all men can live with dignity.

Martin Luther King Jr., Detroit, June 23, 1963

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Remembering Emmett Till

1   Race, Geography, and the Erasure of Sunflower County

2   Of Race and Rivers: Topography and Memory in Tallahatchie County

3   Emmett Till, Tallahatchie County, and the Birthplace of the Movement

4   Ruins and Restoration in Money

5   Memory and Misery in Glendora

Conclusion: Vandalism and Memory at Graball Landing

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

If the quality of a book may be calibrated to the extent of its debts, Remembering Emmett Till will be incredible. Initial funding was provided in generous measure by the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities provided the leisure to write. Between the Hall Center at the beginning of the project and the NEH down the homestretch, my research and writing have been supported by an incredible array of institutions, libraries, foundations, nonprofits, state agencies, commercial enterprises, and colleagues of all stripes.

At the Hall Center for the Humanities, I thank Sarah Bishop, Clarence Lang, Eliott Reeder, Bobbi Jo Rahder, and Victor Bailey. Without Sally Utech’s commitment to the public humanities or Kathy Porsch’s ability to fund them, this book would not exist.

I fear I’ve called upon every librarian at the University of Kansas. In particular, Pam Lach, Brian Rosenblum, Rhonda Houser, Sara Morris, Karna Younger, Carmen Orth-Alfie, Scott McEathron, Ada Emmett, Josh Bolick, LeAnn Meyer, Marianne Reed, and Jeromy Horkman have lent their expertise to this project. I’m particularly indebted to Julie Petr’s ability to answer my crazy questions (How high was the Tallahatchie River in 1955?).

At the University of Kansas, I thank Jay Childers, Tom Beisecker, Ben Chappell, Emily Ryan, Anne Dotter, Elizabeth MacGonagle, Beverly Mack, David Roediger, Shawn Alexander, Jonathan Lamb, Ed Healy, Laura Mielke, Frank Farmer, Carl Lejuez, Danny Anderson, Jim Mielke, Germaine Halegoua, Bill Tuttle, Andy Anderson, Ludwin Molina, John Fackler, Sheyda Jahanbani, Erik Scott, Marta Vicente, Maryemma Graham, Randal Jelks, Henry Fortunato, Dorthy Pennington, Cheryl Lester, Sherrie Tucker, Hannah Britton, Tamara Falicov, Joy Ward, Steven Epstein, Beth Innocenti, Jeremy Shellhorn, Nathan Wood, Robin Rowland, Rick Hellman, Christine Metz Howard, Kristi Henderson, and Mary Lee Hummert. Thanks to Lindsay Harroff for fantastic research assistance and to Jenea Havener for reading a draft and making the book more precise, less repetitive, and more compelling!

While my list of debts runs long in Kansas, it runs still longer in Mississippi. At the University of Mississippi, I thank Jennifer Ford, Leigh McWhite, Ted Ownby, Bill Rose, and Jody Skipper. At the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, I thank Susan Glisson, Charles Tucker, Jennifer Stollman, April Grayson, and Portia Espy. At the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, I thank Mingo Tingle, Bill Gatlin, Ken P’Pool, and, above all, Alieen de la Torre. At the Mississippi Development Authority, I thank Sarah McCullough, Joy Foy, Mary Margaret Miller, and director Craig Ray. At Belinda Stewart Architects, I thank Belinda Steward and Holly Hawkins. At Hammons and Associates, I appreciate the support of Wanda Clark and the steady guidance of president Allan Hammons. In addition to these, I benefited from a wide range of indispensable Mississippi contacts. Included are Rolando Herts, Tim Kalich, David Rae Morris, W. Ralph Eubanks, Richard Dickson, Reilly Morse, John R. Hailman, Patrick Magennis, John Elzey, Clay McFerrin, James W. Powers, George Schimmel, Temita Davis, Jim Abbott, Kate Hackett, Allan Barton, Susan Neiman, Kathryn Green, Mary Annette Morgan, Patrick McDonough, Ellen Whitten, and Charles Weir.

This project never would have happened without the unceasing support and collaboration of the Emmett Till Memorial Commission of Tallahatchie County, Inc. In particular, thanks to John Wilchie, Willie Williams, Frank and Judith Mitchener, Martha Ann Clark, Sykes Sturdivant, Devante Wiley, Benjamin Saulsberry, Betty Pearson, Jessie Jaynes, and Mayor Johnny B. Thomas. Above all, thanks to Patrick Weems, whose passion, energy, and Rolodex kept the work humming along. If this book achieves nothing else, it has already given me a close friend and trusted colleague in the pursuit of commemorative justice. Many, many thanks to Patrick!

Among the rewards of writing this book was the pleasure of working with a world-class group of Emmett Till scholars. In a world of dog-eat-dog scholarship, this group stands out for their sheer generosity. Here I thank Devery Anderson, Keith Beauchamp, Jerry Mitchell, Alvin Sykes, Chris Benson, Plater Robinson, Dale Killinger, David Beito, Luther Brown, Steve Whitaker, and Steve Whitfield. Above all, thanks to Davis Houck who would not let me say no to this project. My debts to Davis grow with every passing year.

I’ve also enjoyed the support of a wide range of scholars, colleagues, and friends from across the country. The following lent assistance and/or friendship at critical points in the project: James Young, Doug Blackmon, Tanner Colby, Gene Dattel, Neil Padden, David Trowbridge, Garnette Cadogan, Elizabeth Stigler, Howard Blount, Katie McCormick, Chris Spielvogel, Leslie Von Holten, Bob Hariman, Tony Corbeill, David Frank, Paul Stob, Kassie Lamp, Keith Miller, Ersula Ore, Kirt Wilson, Mike Hogan, Steve Browne, Jeremy Engels, Mary Stuckey, Barbara Biesecker, Bjorn Stillion-Southard, Carole Blair, Brad Vivian, Greg Dickinson, Jess Enoch, Jennifer Courtney, Kundai Chirindo, Vanessa Beasley, Stephen Schneider, Art Walzer, Brent Steele, Debra Hawhee, Catherine Waggoner, Kristan Poirot, Michael Shaw, Mitch Reyes, Meg Handler, Greg Clark, Gerard Hauser, Susan Jarratt, John Lucaites, Maegan Parker-Brooks, Stephen A. King, Allison Prasch, Kyle Jensen, Jay Tolson, Marc Havener, Matt and Kori Podszus, Mark and Brenda Brown, Caleb Stegall, Jason and Jenny Lichte, Leah Henry, Bryan Banz, Josh McBain, Tyler Clements, Kevin Lee, and Deborah Dunn. Thanks to Greg Spencer for teaching me the art of rhetoric and to Rosa Eberly for long-dormant lessons in the public humanities. Thanks to Jack Selzer for the unending support. And thanks to Ned O’Gorman, for his investment in so many aspects of my life.

I am fortunate to work with talented and generous photographers: Ashleigh Coleman, Pablo Correa, and Maude Schuyler Clay.

The University of Chicago Press has lived up to its reputation as a world-class publishing house. I’m grateful Doug Mitchell took a chance on the project and, as it came to fruition, peppered even the most administrative of emails with a lively erudition! The book never would have come to fruition without the professional shepherding of Kyle Wagner. Portions of this book are derived in part from an article published in Advances in the History of Rhetoric 20, no. 2 (2017); © Taylor & Francis, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15362426.2017.1325414. Portions of chapter 4 were first published in Southern Cultures 23, no. 3 (Fall 2017); southerncultures.org.

I am particularly touched to have the support of members of the Till family. While I have been thinking about Emmett Till commemoration for the past fifteen years, Wheeler Parker has borne the memory of his cousin since 1955. I count my time driving through the Mississippi Delta with Wheeler and his wife, Dr. Marvel Parker, as a highlight of my life. They are a talented and powerful couple, deeply committed to protecting the truth of Till’s murder.

I am surrounded by wonderful family: Jeff and Aubrey Tell, Bill and Sue Tell, and Branch and Jaylene Fields have all taken an active interest in the project and its author. Finally, no matter how much I have invested in this book, I find the love of Jack, Ashlyn, and Hannah dearer still. Especially Hannah.

Introduction

REMEMBERING EMMETT TILL

On May 5, 2011, the Tourism Division of the Mississippi Development Authority (MDA) announced the creation of the Mississippi Freedom Trail, a multisite cultural initiative designed to commemorate twenty-five places that played a significant role in the state’s civil rights history. Of the twenty-five sites, the MDA was convinced that none were more important than Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Mississippi. A country store in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, Bryant’s Grocery was the site where Emmett Till whistled at Carolyn Bryant in August 1955.¹ Three days after the whistle, Bryant’s husband, his kin, and an array of accomplices snatched the fourteen-year-old boy from his uncle’s home, tortured him, shot him, attached his body to a cotton-gin fan with a length of barbed wire, and sank him in a Mississippi river.

From the perspective of the MDA, the "murder and funeral of Emmitt [sic] Till was the genesis of the [civil rights] movement, giving Rosa Parks the strength to sit down and Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. the courage to stand up."² In a symbolic gesture to the sheer impact of Till’s murder on the American racial landscape, the MDA made Bryant’s Grocery the first stop on the Mississippi Freedom Trail. On May 18, 2011, surviving members of the Till family joined veterans of the Mississippi freedom struggle at the long-abandoned grocery to unveil the first Freedom Trail marker (see figure 1).³ The well-publicized event announced the investment of the MDA in civil rights commemoration, the national consequences of Till’s murder, and the central role of Bryant’s Grocery in the history-bending homicide.

Figure 1. This is the first sign on the Mississippi Freedom Trail. It suggests that Till’s murder and, by extension, the civil rights movement started at Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market. The trees in the background hide the ruins of the store. Photograph by Ashleigh Coleman. Used by permission.

The 2011 ceremony had a strong undercurrent of irony. The MDA seemed unaware that their decision to cast Bryant’s Grocery as the origin of the Till murder was a strategy once tainted by racism. In September 1955, at the trial of Till murderers Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, the grocery functioned as the origin of the murder only for those who sought to justify racial violence. Indeed, those prosecuting the murderers argued that the Till affair began, not at Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, but rather at the site of the abduction, the homestead of Till’s uncle Moses Wright on Dark Fear Road.⁴ By starting their story at the Wright residence, three days after the events at the grocery, the prosecution was trying to keep Till away from Carolyn Bryant, keep Bryant herself from testifying, and thereby prevent the suggestion that Till’s murder was a justifiable homicide—a fitting punishment for a black boy who insulted a white woman.⁵

It was the counsel for the defense that championed the importance of Bryant’s Grocery. In the interest of getting Carolyn Bryant on the witness stand, they argued that the events of Bryant’s Grocery formed the essential background for a later happening.⁶ Judge Curtis Swango ruled in their favor. While he mandated that the jury leave the room, he allowed Bryant to tell her story. Although she confessed in 2008 that none of it was true, she testified in court that Till forcibly held her hand, asked her for a date, grabbed both of her hips, and propositioned her with unprintable words.⁷ The jury did not need to be in the room. They heard Bryant’s tale by other means, and they acted on it. Nine of the twelve jurors later confided that they voted to acquit the murderers not because they believed the men were innocent (they did not) and not because they doubted the identity of the body (the open argument of the defense), but rather because of what happened at Bryant’s Grocery. The simple fact was that a Negro had insulted a white woman. Her husband would not be prosecuted for killing him.⁸

By May 2011, however, the partisan history of Bryant’s Grocery had been long lost. If, in 1955, the possibility of justice hinged on whether or not Bryant’s Grocery was the essential background of the murder, by 2011 the contest over the site was drowned out amidst the pomp and circumstance of the Mississippi Freedom Trail. From a bitterly contested site, the process of commemoration transformed the grocery into the unquestioned origination point of the murder. Irony of ironies, when the Till family gathered at the remains of the grocery to unveil the Freedom Trail, they unwittingly endorsed the same argument that once convinced nine jurors to acquit two murderers. The old racially charged geography that once assured the undeserved freedom of Till’s killers was now advanced by the MDA and put in the service of the state’s epic struggle for equality.⁹

The late emergence of Bryant’s Grocery as the unquestioned starting point of the murder perfectly captures the primary storyline of Remembering Emmett Till: the deep intertwining of race, place, and commemoration. Because the simple fact that a black boy insulted a white woman hinged on the establishment of the grocery as the origination point of the murder, the act of commemorating the grocery registered in the domains of both geography and race. The moment the Freedom Trail sign went up, it was no longer racist to say that the murder began at the grocery. This lesson holds across time: since 1955, practices of Emmett Till commemoration have been calibrated to both racial commitments and the ever-changing meaning of the Mississippi Delta. Race, place, and commemoration always shift in tandem.

Remembering Emmett Till tells five stories about race, place, and memory. Together, they tell the complete story of Till’s commemoration in the Mississippi Delta, accounting for long silences and brief, passionate outbursts of memorial investment. They tell the backstories of the signs and museums that now punctuate (portions of) the land where Till was killed. They reveal a world of controversy, patronage, nepotism, and enduring racism lurking just behind the placid surface of polished historical markers. At times, these controversies were fueled by intellectual debates over what precisely happened to Emmett Till. More often, the controversies were motivated by the simple fact that stories of Till’s death are one of the few remaining Delta commodities not controlled by agribusiness. More often still, however, financial despair has driven intellectual debate: the desperate pursuit of revenue in the Delta has fueled an even more desperate creativity with Till’s story, with the result that the imperative of economic development has unsettled the plotline of a murder that was ambiguous from the very start. If I pay exorbitant attention to the funding schemes that have underwritten the Delta’s commemorative investment, it is because these schemes did not simply disseminate a settled story; they also transformed the story in the interest of making it fundable. In the process, the commemoration of Till’s murder has transformed most of what we think we know about the night Till was killed.

The stories of Remembering Emmett Till are not only exhaustive, covering the full range of the Delta’s commemorative investment. They are also locally textured, full of heroes and villains whose names have never graced the pages of our civil rights histories. They are dramatic, alive to the human virtues and vices that have, since 1955, driven the on-again, off-again industry of Emmett Till storytelling. Most importantly, they are stories in which it is virtually impossible to tell where practices of commemoration end and old-fashioned racial politics begin. Much like the MDA’s Freedom Trail, the stories of Remembering Emmett Till are, simultaneously, stories about race, about the Mississippi Delta, and about the never-settled legacy of a murder.

If the unsettled legacy of Till’s murder teaches us anything about the practice of commemoration, it is surely the fact that commemoration is not a discrete cultural practice. At least in the Delta, commemoration has always worked in and through the domains of race and place. I refer to the interanimating force of race, place, and commemoration as the ecology of memory.¹⁰ In recent years, ecology has emerged as a critical term to designate, on the one hand, the active participation of humans in processes once set apart as natural (e.g., global warming) and, on the other hand, the active participation of the surrounding environment in processes once reserved for humans (e.g., memory). In short, ecology has become a shorthand term for the interdependence of domains that once seemed independent.¹¹ Just as ecologists proclaim the deep relevance of human action on weather patterns, I am suggesting that race, place, and commemoration are as interconnected as deforestation, fossil fuel consumption, and global temperatures.¹² If this is true, the histories of racism, of Till commemoration, and of the Mississippi Delta cannot even be described (let alone understood or analyzed) apart from the ways that race, place, and commemoration work through each other—and transform each other.¹³

At its most basic level, Remembering Emmett Till is simply the first description of the entanglement of commemoration, racism, and the Delta in the wake of Till’s murder.¹⁴ It follows the legislators, county supervisors, funding boards, nonprofit organizations, private foundations, small-town mayors, anonymous citizens, ex-cons, and midlevel bureaucrats who, since 2005, have overseen an unevenly distributed $5 million investment in the Mississippi Delta’s commemorative infrastructure. Drawing on untapped archives, a thousand pages of never-before-seen Freedom of Information Act documents, reams of grant records, competing maps, and extensive on-site experience, Remembering Emmett Till presents the murder from the perspective of those who live in its shadow and, all too often, survive economically through the desperate repackaging of Till’s story. It tells the sometimes-inspiring, more-often-heartbreaking, always-unlikely backstories of the Delta’s twenty-first-century investment in Till’s story.

Lest description seem too meager a goal for yet another book on Till’s murder, I stress that there has never before been a comprehensive account of the people, things, and places that have molded our memory of Till’s murder. Most of what we think we know about the murder has been shaped, at times in dramatic fashion, by the racial culture, natural environment, and built infrastructure of the Mississippi Delta. Even such basic components of the story as the number of accomplices, the site of the killing, and Till’s supposedly overconfident personality seem uncontestable (and basic) only because of the ways that racism and the natural environment of the Delta have shaped our collective memory. Remembering Emmett Till thus tells the unlikely stories of how the rivers, soils, hills, judicial districts, sidewalks, playgrounds, county lines, courthouses, and service stations of the Delta have become agents of racism and memory at the same time, transforming the story of Till’s murder in elementary ways.

It is no exaggeration to say that Remembering Emmett Till will transform everything we think we know about the murder of Emmett Till. It does so not by uncovering new facts from 1955—which by this point are relatively well known—but rather by demonstrating the differential intensities with which various facts have circulated since 1955. While seemingly major components of Till’s story (such as his murder site) have gone uncommemorated, relatively minor components have achieved a massive, affectively charged afterlife in the Delta. Where was Till’s body dropped in the water? Where was it recovered? From where was the gin fan stolen that weighted his body in the river? If these questions have been debated (and commemorated) with an intensity out of proportion with their historical significance, this is because the economic well-being of entire towns hinges on the answers given (see chapters 2 and 5). To put things rather too bluntly, if the question of the cotton gin from which the fan was stolen has received far more attention in Mississippi than the murder site, it is because the cotton gin is surrounded by poverty and the murder site is not. With slightly more nuance, we can say with certainty that as Till’s story has been passed down through the generations, its plot has been reshaped by the ever-pressing, always-urgent conditions of remembrance in the Delta as much as by the distant facts of 1955. Thus while the murder site intuitively seems as if it deserves the premier commemorative investment, the conditions of twenty-first-century remembrance have given the cotton gin a dearer value. There is an unsettling suggestion here. Much of what we know—or think we know—about Till’s murder derives from the unequal intensity with which various components of his story have been commemorated. The stories of Till’s remembrance must not be separated from the story of his murder; they are the story of his murder.¹⁵

Given the importance of the Mississippi Delta to the stories I tell (and to the story of Till’s murder that we think we know), Remembering Emmett Till is organized spatially. The first chapter begins with a basic geographical fact: the erasure of the murder site in Sunflower County from every map of Till’s murder published between 1956 and 2005. By retelling Till’s story from the perspective of the long-excluded county, the chapter does two things. For those who need it, it provides a careful historical review of the murder. More than a review, however, the chapter demonstrates that as the geospatial coordinates of Till’s murder shifted (where was he killed?), so also did the mechanics of racism, the possibility of justice, the size of the murder party, the identities of the perpetrators, and the roster of those who fought for justice. Indeed, virtually every variable in Till’s story shifts with the movement of Sunflower County in and out (mostly out) of Till’s story.

Chapters 2 and 3 focus on Tallahatchie County, Mississippi—the site of the greatest concentration of Till memorials anywhere in the world. Just as Sunflower County was written out of Till commemoration despite its significance in 1955, Tallahatchie County is filled with memorials despite the fact that it has little historical claim to Till’s story beyond serving as the accidental site of the trial. The latter county now boasts over twenty historical signs, a museum, a park, an interpretive center, a community building, and—at the center of it all—a multimillion-dollar renovation to the county courthouse designed to return the building to its 1955 appearance. An investment on this scale required the collaboration of committed activists and unlikely champions. Chapter 2 tells their story and, as it does so, attends to the improbable role of the Delta’s natural ecology in bringing this investment to pass. In the Delta, both racism and commemoration are calibrated to the composition of the soil, the flatness of the land, and—above all—the management of rivers. Explaining the ways that Till’s story has been shaped by the natural-aquatic-political history of the Delta, the chapter suggests that even soils and rivers are agents of memory and racism.

Chapter 3 considers the relationships between Till’s murder and the civil rights movement. Until the twenty-first century, the civil rights movement generally began with the Montgomery bus boycott or Brown vs. Board. The Mississippi Delta was virtually—if not totally—ignored. Starting in 2005, however, under the imperative of raising money to commemorate Till’s murder, local memory workers wrote Tallahatchie County into the history of the civil rights movement. Insisting that Rosa Parks was thinking of Emmett Till when she refused to cede her seat (which may or may not be true), and posting signs to this effect across the county, activists made Tallahatchie County what they needed it to be: the origin of the movement. Situated as the long-ignored starting point of the freedom movement, locals found themselves with a powerful argument for state funds.

Chapter 4 focuses on the hamlet of Money, Mississippi, the site of Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market. I recover the forgotten history of Young’s Grocery and Market, the country store that inhabited the shell of Bryant’s Grocery during the 1980s. Although Bud and Rita Young have never appeared in a book on Till’s memory, they controlled the famous building during the first revival of Till commemoration, and the history of their store provides a powerful critique of the assumptions that have long governed Till commemoration. When the Youngs were bought out in the mid-1980s, the building that once housed Bryant’s Grocery began to fall into disrepair. Hurricane Katrina claimed the roof and a story-sized portion of the north wall, and, to this day, the building is little more than four crumbling brick walls, held up by vines, filled with rubble, and surrounded by a cheap, plastic construction fence designed to protect visitors from falling bricks. The ruin of the grocery is made all the more conspicuous by the pristine restoration of the adjacent gas station, Ben Roy’s. This chapter tells the scandalous story of how and why money earmarked for the preservation of civil rights sites transformed Ben Roy’s but left Bryant’s in ruin. It is a story about how materiality, memory, money, and racism transformed the meaning of the Mississippi Delta.

Finally, chapter 5 focuses on the village of Glendora, Mississippi. The tiny town in the heart of the Mississippi Delta has only five streets but eighteen markers related to Till’s murder. In addition to an unparalleled density of historical signs, Glendora is also a site of staggering poverty, even by the standards of the already impoverished Mississippi Delta. I trace the links that bind these two facts together, suggesting that the impoverishment of the town has bound the commemoration of Emmett Till to questions of municipal infrastructure and welfare programs. In Glendora, it is no exaggeration to say that the poverty of the community has transformed Till’s story. The story has been attached to (and funded by) poverty-driven projects like the construction of sidewalks and the provision of internet service, and, as a result, the site of the murder and the size of the murder party have shifted once again.

Across all of these stories, I stress the ecology of memory, the deep intertwining of Till’s story with the contours (natural and otherwise) of the Mississippi Delta. Lurking behind the stories told in each chapter is a resolute insistence that Till commemoration bears the imprint of the Delta, that the physical, cultural, and symbolic landscape of the Delta has been permanently altered by the memory of Till’s murder, and that racism works most powerfully at those moments in which it is difficult to distinguish racism from the natural environment, when historical revisionism is driven by soils and prejudice at the same time, and when intolerance seems to be a function of a river’s path through the Delta. Given the fundamental nature of these entanglements, the stories of Remembering Emmett Till assume a newfound urgency. They are not simply a record of long-past racial atrocities; they are also an index to the continuing ways in which race works in and through the Delta, its natural environment, and its built infrastructure. It is not too much to say that the story of Till’s commemoration is, quite simply, the story of race and the Mississippi Delta.

The Mississippi Delta

The Mississippi Delta is shot through with contradictions. It is a place of rich land and poor people. It is a bioregion where the contours of the natural environment (flooding rivers, deep soils) weigh heavily on day-to-day life, and yet it is also a place known for its cultural production (the blues, southern literature). It is a place of vast, sometimes unimaginable poverty, and yet there remains to this day a wealthy planter class with second homes in Oxford and escapes on the gulf shore. Finally, it is a place of genteel extravagance, gracious manners, and southern charm, all of which flowered in the vice-like grip of Jim Crow racism. The Delta was a place, Yvette Johnson writes, where planters wore suits when they lynched you. They drank illegal whiskey from a clean glass. They delicately wiped their mouths on monogrammed handkerchiefs after they spat on you.¹⁶

Geographically speaking, the Mississippi Delta is a diamond-shaped expanse of land in the northwest corner of Mississippi, not to be confused with the river delta to the south where the Mississippi River fans out to meet the Gulf of Mexico (see map in front of book). For those who know it, the Mississippi Delta can be distinguished by any number of features. Geographically, it sits between the Mississippi River and its eastern tributaries; ecologically, it is a massive alluvial floodplain; agriculturally, is was the site of the second cotton kingdom; economically, it is defined by the extremes of exceptional white wealth and extensive black poverty; culturally, it is the taproot of black culture and ground zero of white southern literature; and racially, it has inherited the legacy of once being known as the worst place in the entire country for Negroes.¹⁷ With distinctiveness in virtually every register, locals refer to the area simply as the Delta. In Mississippi, James C. Cobb explains, people don’t go to Clarksdale, Greenwood, or Greenville. Rather, they simply go into the Delta—a region so overdetermined with meaning that the significance of one’s specific destination is overwhelmed by layer-upon-layer-upon-layer of meaning proper to the Delta.¹⁸

The best-known geographic coordinates of the Delta come from the patriarch of the region’s white literati, David Cohn. Two hundred miles north to south, Cohn wrote, the Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg.¹⁹ Bounded by the Mississippi River on the west and the Coldwater, Tallahatchie, and Yazoo Rivers on the east, the Delta stretches seventy miles across at its widest point. In between are 4.5 million acres of the best land and starkest poverty anywhere in the country. Cohn’s oft-cited coordinates are telling. The boundaries of the Delta are marked by rivers, an upscale Memphis hotel (the London Savoy of this section), and a fictional black business district called Catfish Row that never existed.²⁰ We might think of these natural-cultural-racial boundaries as a reminder of the ties that, at least in the Delta, bind the natural environment, the distribution of wealth, and racial injustice. Although Cohn would be the last to admit it, both the landforms and infrastructure of his beloved Delta were entangled with a deep commitment to white supremacy. In the Delta, it is simply impossible to talk about nature—especially rivers and soils—without also talking