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A review by noahbw
The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy B. Tyson
4.0
I started reading this at the same time as I was listening to the White Lies podcast, and they feel like they're a little bit in the same genre -- a white man/men reinvestigating a civil rights-era murder in the south with pretty clear purposes that history is not past. In both cases, it is worth reading/listening purely to learn the forgotten and written-over histories.
The thing that I also found useful (and somewhat unusual) about this book is the way that it places southern and northern histories alongside each other. Because Emmett Till was from Chicago and died in Mississippi, Tyson tells the stories of both places and the highway that connected them for black people (like Till and his family) who continued to move back and forth. I'm not sure that I've encountered other historical or sociological works that so clearly bring together these histories as part of the same narrative -- and that feels like perhaps the most important scholarly contribution that Tyson makes, in addition to the importance of his telling of the life and death of Emmett Till.
The thing that I also found useful (and somewhat unusual) about this book is the way that it places southern and northern histories alongside each other. Because Emmett Till was from Chicago and died in Mississippi, Tyson tells the stories of both places and the highway that connected them for black people (like Till and his family) who continued to move back and forth. I'm not sure that I've encountered other historical or sociological works that so clearly bring together these histories as part of the same narrative -- and that feels like perhaps the most important scholarly contribution that Tyson makes, in addition to the importance of his telling of the life and death of Emmett Till.