Literary Representations of the Lynching of Emmett Till

An Annotated Bibliography
by Christopher Metress

The following bibliography lists more than 130 literary works (novels, stories, poems, plays, songs, musical scores, and movie and television scripts) that are based upon—or make significant reference to—the Emmett Till lynching. Annotations are provided for all the works that were not discussed in the preceding essays and, where possible, original publication information is given for each entry. This bibliography is designed to aid those who are interested in learning more about the full extent of Emmett Till’s place in literary memory and imagination, and after the publication of Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination by Louisiana State University Press, the bibliography will remain on-line at this URL, http://faculty.samford.edu/~cpmetress/till-bibliography.html. Taking this resource on-line will enable others to contribute updated information and entries, thus assuring that the bibliography will remain current and representative.

Alston, Nelson G. “Little Emmett.” In A Time for Glory and Hate: The American Civil Rights Movement, 15. Denver: Alpha Books N Press, 1993.

Short poem that asks a series of retrospective questions about the murder, everything from “Where were you when they killed that boy?” to “How did you feel when that all white jury / found those murders / Not guilty?” Accuses the country of indifference, complacency, and hypocrisy.

Anderson, Devery. Untitled Poem. emmetttillmurder.com. September 1, 2006.

In this poem by one of the leading historians of the case, Till is remembered as an “only child, a mother’s son” who “moved a sleeping land.” Now, in death, Till is “one of heaven’s angels” who “move[s] us once again.”

Ascher, Rhoda Gaye. “Remembrance (for Emmett Till, murdered Aug. 31, 1955).” Freedomways 9, no. 2 (1969): 138.

Poem reflecting on how, even though the “night cries are gone now” from the Tallahatchie River, “delta lips are [still] red” with racism: “Take a rotting log from the circling river, / Wear it, piercing your heart, in remembrance.”

Baldwin, James. Blues for Mister Charlie. New York: Dial, 1964.

Barr, David, and Mamie Till Mobley. The Face of Emmett Till. New Plays from Chicago, 309-65 edited by Russ Tutterow and Ann Filmer. Chicago: Chicago Dramatists Press, 2005. 309-65. Original Title. The State of Mississippi vs. Emmett Till. Directed by Douglas-Alan Mann. Premiere 9 September 1999. Pegasus Players, O’Rourke Centre, Truman College Theatre, Aurora, IL.

Play opens with Mamie Till-Mobley preparing to deliver a speech at the dedication of the Civil Right Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama (November 5, 1989). From here, the play moves back and forth across time as it recounts Till’s kidnapping, his subsequent lynching, the return of his corpse to Chicago, and the trial of his murderers. Relying heavily on documentary sources and Mamie Till-Mobley’s memory of the events, the play occasionally works with a split stage—for instance, as Moses Wright gives his court testimony about Till’s kidnapping, that kidnapping is reenacted elsewhere on stage. In addition to the play’s most powerful scene, in which Till-Mobley remembers opening the casket at the train station, other scenes of note include a recreation Till’s beating and a series of scenes depicting Till-Mobley’s conflicts with Roy Wilkins and the NAACP over the role that organization will play in seeking justice for Emmett’s murder. In the closing scene, Till-Mobley’s plea to remember the civil rights martyrs who “paid the ultimate price…for the freedoms we enjoy” is followed by a full-cast rendition of “Woke Up this Morning With My Mind On Freedom.”

Barry, Quan. “Emmett Till’s Open Casket as La Pietà.” Green Mountains Review 17, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2004): 112. Reprinted in Controvertibles, 44. Pittsburg: U of Pittsburg Press, 2004.

Poem that reflects on the death of Mamie Till-Mobley. After recalling the “litany of injuries” marking Till’s corpse, the poem concludes, “When Mary holds the dead Christ in her arms / she has seen everything / but the Resurrection.”

Bates, Arthenia J. “Lost Note.” 1965. In Seeds Beneath the Snow: Vignettes from the South, 114-21. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1975.

Although “Autumn in the South is a season shouting with joy,” this story explores how the news of Till’s death comes as “a heavy grief . . . to mar the expected happiness.” Two “fading widow women” who are raising their young grandsons discuss how they will protect their boys from suffering Till’s fate. One woman, Clara, decides that her grandson does not have “that something that makes you smell trouble a mile off” and so she must teach him a hard lesson. With “tears . . . in her heart,” she realizes that her grandson “whistled for everything: to ignore people, to soothe anger, [and] to hide fear,” so she forces him to sit alone in a dark closet until he begins to know fear, a fear he cannot overcome by whistling. Urged “to see nothing but black when it comes to womenfolks,” the boy is released from the closet and promises never to whistle again.

Beecher, John. “The Better Sort of People.” In To Live and Die in Dixie, 42–43. Birmingham: Red Mountain Editions, 1965.

Condemnation of southern racism by a left-wing southern poet. The racist persona claims that “Our Negroes here are satisfied” until they head up North and “come back with notions.” Although the persona concludes that such Negroes “somehow get spoiled / and need the fear of God / thrown into them again,” he is against what “ignorant rednecks do.” It was “unnecessary / to beat that little Negro boy to death.” Sure, “he was uppity,” but a “good horsewhipping should have been enough.” The “better sort of people” in Mississippi “love our Negroes” and “the violence you hear so much about” comes from the “poor white trash.”

Bilbrew, A. C. “The Death of Emmett Till—Part 1 and Part 2.” Dootone Records 382. Performed by the Ramparts. Published by Dootsie Williams Incorporated, B.M.I. 1955. Lyrics published in California Eagle, 29 December 1955.

Song retelling what happened to Till, whose “name will be a legend we all know.” When Till agrees that Carolyn Bryant is good looking, saying “Wheee! You’re right,” that “remark cost him his life.” The two white men at trial “grinned and smoked and chewed / As the fearful witnesses all did testify.” In the end, however, it was to no avail, and we “won’t see little Emmett any more.”

Brooks, Gwendolyn. “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon.” In The Bean Eaters, 333–39. Harper: New York, 1960.

———. “The Last Quatrain of Emmett Till.” In The Bean Eaters, 340. Harper: New York, 1960.

Brown, Frank London. “In the Shadow of a Dying Soldier.” Southwest Review 44, no. 4 (Autumn 1959): 292–306.

Story about a black Chicago reporter assigned to the Till trial. Having to face Deep South segregation for the first time, the reporter comes to understand both the depths of racial hatred felt by whites and the modest but growing resistance being expressed among blacks. When a local racist marks him as an outside agitator, the reporter must flee Mississippi before the trial is over. Although incredulous when he learns of the verdict, the reporter is in the end comforted somewhat by the lingering image of local blacks “standing on the lawn day after day in the white sun—in the shadow of the Confederate soldier—unafraid, dead set on showing Mrs. Bradley we’re behind her.”

Browne, L. Anthony. “Yours’ to You.” Baltimore Afro-American, 7 January 1956.

Poem addressed to Mississippi, pointing out the hypocrisy of those in the state who praise America but deny rights to the likes of Emmett Till. This poem by a Newark, New Jersey resident, expresses lingering outrage over “that horrible night,” warns Till’s killers that one day they “will hang [their] heads in shame,” and questions how we can still call this country “the land of the free.”

Burrell, Brian. “Emmett Till.” Premiere Theatre-Theatre, Hollywood, CA, December 1994.

Play reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, 16 December 1994. Characterized as a “brutal tragic comedy” about the marital breakup of a black sitcom writer and his white wife. Play script not seen.

Campbell, Bebe Moore. Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine. New York: Putnam, 1992.

Cassells, Cyrus. “Strange Fruit.” Callaloo 18 (Spring-Summer 1983): 5–6.

An older narrator recalls being “frightened by Billie’s song” into “Learning a grief / That is a racial.” He then remembers how with Till’s lynching “the strange fruit was given / A face, a body like my own—.” Now, years later, he sees a “boy’s body / Swinging from a tree” and wonders if one day “fear” will die, “That one word, if we could grasp it, / Which might stop a child from becoming strange fruit.”

Césaire, Amié. “Message sur l’état de l’union.” Présence Africaine, n.s., 6 (February/March 1956): 119–20. Revised heavily as “Sur l’Etat de l’Union.” In Ferrements: Poèmes, 76–78. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1960.

Coleman, George M. “Some Negro Mother.” Atlanta Daily World, 13 September 1955.

Inspired by Till’s lynching, this four-stanza poem meditates on the fears that southern black women feel after giving birth. The poem’s mother wonders if she should “Teach [her son] of the Stars and Stripes / And a nation’s glowing spark, / Or of the Klan and the blinded vet / To whom the world is dark?”

Coleman, Wanda. “Emmett Till.” Callaloo 27 (Spring 1986): 295–99.

Beginning with “river jordan run red,” this five-section poem uses the image of a river to recount how Till’s lynching “quickly courses thru / the front page news” and reveals a fragmented national psyche. Till’s whistle, “a smooth long all-american hallelujah” that stirs up a “whole tributary of intolerance,” calls into question the promise of America. Interspersing lists of rivers (“the colorado the columbia the connecticut the cumberland”) with indictments of American exceptionalism (“oh say Emmett Till can you see Emmett Till”), the poem also explores the redemptive power of Till’s lynching: the opening image of “river jordan run red” is echoed in the concluding lines “on that third day / he rose / and was carried forth to that promised land.”

Collins, Durward, Jr. “Temperate Belt: Reflections on the Mother of Emmett Till.” In Beyond the Blues: New Poems by American Negroes, 68–69. Edited by Rosey E. Pool, Kent, England: Hand and Flower Press, 1962.

Employing a series of surreal images drawn from the circus, the poet reflects on Mamie Till as a “Sidewalk barker in yellow silk” who “shook that tiny skull until / pity bled from our eyes.” Poem ends in melancholy as we see her “charming fewer / and fewer” and glimpse her “once or twice, lying in the tracks / of the tilt-a-whirl, full of quarters / among the weeds that sprung from [her son’s] grave.”

Collins, J. C. Letter to the Editor. California Eagle, 13 October 1955.

Letter cast in the voice of Emmett Till as he begs God to avenge his death. Asking God to let his “tortured and mutilated face and [his] agonizing scream . . . haunt [his murderers] continuously both day and night,” Till hopes for a similar torment for all those who clapped “their hands with glee as they beheld my murderers escape the just penalty.” Requesting that God put a curse on the Sumner courthouse—“that house of mockery”—so that all who enter it do so with grave “misgivings lest some evil befall them,” Till urges that God move quickly and “stay not thy hand, lest those who have done this deed further pollute this land.”

Cooper, Mary Carson. “A Tribute to Emmett Till.” Cleveland Call and Post, 22 October 1955.

Short poem by a reader from Akron closes with the lines, “It’s time all Negroes did fight back / With their own lynching team!”

Cornish, Sam. “Calls Me From the Thunder.” In 1935: A Memoir, 138. Boston: Ploughshares, 1990.

Prose poem characterizing Till as “more child than man” who died for “attempting to climb the pedestal where his white woman stood.”

———. “Emmett Till (August 1955).” In Folks Like Me, 92–93. Cambridge, MA: Zoland, 1993.

Told from the perspective of a young black man who has always lived up north (whose identity is, at first and only momentarily, conflated with Till’s), this poem expresses anger against southern Negroes “sitting / in backs of buses / bags of food / in their laps / bladders tight / in silence sweating.”

———. “Langston Variations 1955.” In Cross a Parted Sea, 67. Cambridge, MA: Zoland, 1996.

Brief poem that fuses the language of Langston Hughes with recollections of Emmett Till’s photo in Jet magazine.

———. “Life Was Poor.” In Cross a Parted Sea, 101. Cambridge, MA: Zoland, 1996.

Told from the perspective of a black domestic, this poem contrasts the lives of white people in Money, Mississippi—who “sing / the praises / of the lord and keep / his world and word”—with the lives of blacks, who live in forced segregation.

———. “In Memoriam.” In 1935: A Memoir, 137. Boston: Ploughshares, 1990.

Brief prose poem that remembers Till as a “snappy fellow in good clothes” who “if he lived long enough would have gone to fat in his late twenties from beer, liquor, soul food and lack of exercise.”

———. “My Lord What a Mourning.” In Cross a Parted Sea, 103. Cambridge, MA: Zoland, 1996.

Poem in which the persona recalls viewing the corpse of Emmett Till.

———. “One Hundred Million Black Voices.” In Cross a Parted Sea, 97. Cambridge, MA: Zoland, 1996.

Passing reference to Till in a poem about the unjust sufferings of blacks.

———. “A River the World Knows.” In Cross a Parted Sea, 102. Cambridge, MA: Zoland, 1996.

Poem in which Mose Wright recalls the moment he saw Till’s ring and “knew that [it] was my nephew / pulled from the river like so / many others.”

———. “The Cross.” In 1935: A Memoir, 167–68. Boston: Ploughshares, 1990.

Reflecting on all the black “men and women weighed with anchor and anvil, battered beyond recognition” in the Mississippi, this prose poem seeks to debunk the 1950s mythos surrounding the “Eisenhower years of barbecue and cocktail hours.”

———. “The Good Men.” In 1935: A Memoir, 140. Boston: Ploughshares, 1990.

Poem about the “lessons that are never taught in / school,” in particular how Bryant and Milam (the “good men”) pistol-whipped Emmett Till. Juxtaposes this unspoken history with the stories of other good men (Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner) whose lives also go untold.

———. “The Heart That Breaks.” In 1935: A Memoir, 140. Boston: Ploughshares, 1990.

Poem condemning President Eisenhower for not wishing “to legislate the heart.” Points out that “it is the heart that ties the fan to the / body / of Emmett Till.”

———. “The South Was Waiting in Baltimore.” In 1935: A Memoir, 168–70. Boston: Ploughshares, 1990.

Till’s photo in Jet magazine surfaces in this poem about racism in Baltimore.

———. “Tough in the Streets Dead in Mississippi.” In 1935: A Memoir, 139. Boston: Ploughshares, 1990.

Prose poem depicting Till as “made tough on the streets of Chicago” and not understanding “dark children of Southern blacks” whose “words are so measured they melt in the mouth.”

———. “One Hundred Million Black Voices.” In Cross a Parted Sea, 97. Cambridge, MA: Zoland, 1996.

Poem proclaiming, among other things, that “in America everywhere / on death row / we are / Emmett Till Medgar / Evers / the Strange Fruit / that Billie sings.”

———. “The South is My Home.” Obsidian III 1, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 2000): 67–68.

Till is twice mentioned in this litany of ennobling and disgraceful reasons for why the poet considers the South central to his sense of identity.

———. “The Floating Line.” In 1935: A Memoir, 141. Boston: Ploughshares, 1990.

Short prose poem that attributes the beginning of a bus boycott in Memphis to “the people who walk, Emmett Till in their memory.”

Crowe, Chris. Mississippi Trial, 1955. New York: Phyllis Fogelman Books, 2002.

Young adult novel (grades 6–8) that tells the story of Hiram Hilburn, a white boy who has grown up with his grandparents in Mississippi but whose civil-rights minded father moves him away to Arizona so that he will not adopt the racist ways of his home state. The summer Hiram turns sixteen, he is allowed to visit his aging grandfather. Here, he renews some of his childhood acquaintances and meets Emmett Till (whom he saves from drowning). When Till later turns up dead, Hiram suspects that his boyhood friend R.C., now a racist bully, has helped Milam and Bryant commit the murder. Hiram is served with a subpoena to testify in court, but Hiram’s racist grandfather will not allow him to attend the trial, especially if Hiram testifies against white men in favor of a “colored boy who didn’t know his place.” Against pressure, he decides to testify, but in the end he is not called to do so. When Hiram sees the courtroom celebration following the not-guilty verdict, he feels sick and wants “to get out . . . of Mississippi, and back home where things and people weren’t so crazy.” After the trial, Hiram learns that his grandfather helped to kidnap Till. When Hiram returns to Arizona, he keeps this secret but now understands why his father had to break with Mississippi and the past.

Dasher, Joseph R. Unpublished song about Emmett Till (title unknown). File 1, box 20, Papers of the NAACP. Library of Congress.

In late 1955 (November?), Dasher attended an NAACP rally in Baltimore. In a letter to Glouster Currant of the NAACP, received 1 February 1956, Dasher tells Currant that, “at the rally I presented a group of young fellows who are known as the ‘Honeyboys,’ to sing a song that I had written as a campaign song in memory of the late Emmit [sic] Till.” Dasher notes that he is enclosing a copy of the song, but the song was not found in the files.

Davidson, Richard. “A Cause for Justice.” Daily Worker, 11 October 1955.

This free-verse poem alternates between depictions of “Mr. and Mrs. XX”—a white Mississippi couple who attends the Till trial—and “the echo of a boy’s voice” that emerges from Till’s grave in Chicago. As Mr. and Mrs. XX go on with their lives after the trial—wondering to themselves “what was all the shouting about”—the voice from Till’s grave “grows louder.” Whereas the white couple finds it easy to forget, Davidson proclaims that Till’s “death becomes part of our living flesh. / His killing a waking cry of our conscience.”

———. Mississippi. Premiere at Pantomime Art Theatre [Second Avenue], New York City, 20 January 1956. File 1, box 20, Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress.

According to a playbill, this “new play based on the Emmett Till Case” was directed by the author and had a scheduled run of three performances. The cast list, containing such characters as “Will Price” and “Judith Mason,” suggests that the play obliquely refers to the Till case. No known transcript exists.

———. “Requiem for a Fourteen-Year-Old.” Daily Worker, 12 September 1955.

This earliest-known poem about the case recounts Till’s funeral, where “Ten thousand heard the service which gave him / To the cool earth.” The memories among those ten thousand vary: some remember Till as “a nice kid with his cap slung back on his head; others remember how he was “sweet / on a girl lived down the block.” The poem ends with an ironic turn, depicting how Till’s buddies leave the funeral “Whistling a low moaning blues,” while later that night in Washington “someone remarked / about the need for a strong colonial policy.”

Davis, Ossie, and Ruby Dee. What Can You Say to Mississippi? 1956. Original performance date unknown.

In their memoir With Ossie and Ruby: A Life Together, Davis and Dee recall writing and performing a play about Till’s murder (staged for Local 1199 in New York City as part of the union’s 1956 Negro History Week celebration). Sidney Poitier also starred. All attempts to recover a script of the play have failed.

Davis, Stephanie (a.k.a “Ainka”). “For You Emmett Till.” 1996. Available at www.timbooktu.com/ainka/ainka.htm. March 1, 2005.

Claiming Till as “My bright eyed son,” the poet wonders what Till “would have grown to be.” The answer is “Black and strong . . . / Proud like me . . .”

Dente, Wade. A Good Place to Raise a Boy. Premiere at Hotel Theresa, New York City, 1956. File 1, box 20, Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress.

The contents of this play are unknown, and the only evidence that it existed is a flyer found in the NAACP papers. According to the flyer, “the whole story was never told in the newspapers,” and “Unless this story is told, the valiant efforts of the few Negroes and Poor [sic] whites struggling in the South will be useless.”

Dickerson, George. “On the Murder of a Black Boy.” 1979. In Selected Poems: 1959-1999, 136. New York: Rattapallax Press, 2000.

Poem recited during an autobiographical one-man show entitled A Few Useless Mementos For Sale (originally produced in 1979 as Fragments from a Broken Window at the American Renaissance Theatre, New York). Near the end of the drama, the main character, a world-weary writer in his late fifties who is a holding a rummage sale in his apartment, recalls how, during the 1950s and 60s, “the world was outdoing me in its madness.” In particular, he recalls the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, and “the memory of Emmett Till.” He then recites his poem, in which he condemns the “mouths white with agreement” that “turn so quickly to evening tea.”

Diop, David. “A Un Enfant Noir” (To a black child). In Coups de Pilon, 24–25. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1973.

Although unmentioned in this work by French West African poet Diop, Till is clearly the boy depicted as killed for gazing “on a mouth on breasts on a body of a white woman.” The American South is described as a “country where one places one hand on the Bible / But where the Bible is not opened.”

DJ Nasty Knock. “Emmett Till.” Sex. Street Records. SS-31008–2. Released 27 February 1996.

Song dedicated to Till, “Who should never be forgot,” who serves as “A reminder to the racists who make this world rot.” DJ’s retelling relies heavily on Huie’s Look narrative. Till, who “went down to Mississippi all strong and lean,” is cast as a defiant hero, a role model for current black youth. Claiming that Till boasted “I’m better than you” to his murderers, DJ pleads that today’s black man must “remember those words and hold your head high.”

Dumas, Henry. “The Crossing.” Negro Digest 14 (November 1965): 80–86

This initiation story involves two young black boys who, upon crossing a bridge in rural Louisiana, begin to discuss the Till murder. When one threatens to scare the other’s little sister and throw her into the river, the other boy recounts his version of the lynching. This version is filled with widely inaccurate exaggerations (including dozens of robed Klansman and a three-day stoning), suggesting that Till’s story has become a larger-than-life example of the racial hatred all black children must learn about as they cross from adolescence into maturity.

Dylan, Bob. “The Death of Emmett Till” [a.k.a. “The Ballad of Emmett Till”]. First performed 26 January 1962. Recorded 2 July 1962. Lyrics in Writings and Drawings, 19. New York, Knopf, 1973.

Recounting the details of the lynching and the trial, the song is notable for its activism and its errors. Dylan not only claims that Milam and Bryant confessed to the crime before the trial started, but he also asserts that “on the jury there were men who helped the brothers commit this awful crime.” The song ends with a call to action, for if “we gave all we could give / We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live.”

Emanuel, James A. “Emmett Till.” 1963. Original place of publication unknown. Repring in The Treehouse and Other Poems, 9. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1968.

A haunting lyric that opens with “a whistling / Through the water” and imagines Till as one who “swims forever, / Deep in treasures, / Necklaced in / A coral toy.”

———. “Where Will Their Names Go Down?” In The Treehouse and Other Poems, 9. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1968.

Crying out for “Our bloodied boys / Sunk link by link” into the “Tallahatchie, the Mississippi, and the Pearl,” this poem affirms the memory of those who have been martyred: “From swollen prayers we rise to fiercely shake a chain of days / That blurry hang across that dying scrawl.”

Falsey, John. “I’ll Fly Away: Then and Now.” Public Broadcasting System. Directed by Ian Sanders, 11 October 1993.

The thirty-ninth and final episode of the acclaimed network series. The episode moves back and forth between the early 1960s and the early 1980s. Lilly Harper, now a grandmother, is trying to educate her indifferent grandson about his heritage (in particular the racial injustices of the past). To do so, she tells the story of Elden Simms, a black youth from Detroit who was lynched in her Georgia hometown for being “uppity” to a white woman. Lilly’s father is the only one who can identify the two white men who killed Elden and, in a scene reminiscent of Mose Wright, he does so at the trial. Fearing for their lives, Lilly and her daughter have to flee the Bedford familyhousehold. The episode ends with the grandson now understanding the sacrifices that were made by the civil rights generation.

Fields, Beryl. “One Way Out.” New York Amsterdam News, 19 November 1955.

Short poem by a reader from the Bronx who encourages subscribers to write to their congressman. “Remember the pen is mighty as the sun,” she exhorts, “So write and fight and make it plain / That the Emmett Tills have not died in vain.”

Fields, Julia. “Mississippi Green, or, Something Is Unfinished Here, Emmett Till.” Slow Coins, 65. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, 1981.

Surveying a desolate Mississippi landscape (where one “almost expect[s] / To see a black man’s hand” rise out of the “idle” swamp), this poem’s narrator wonders “why Emmett’s mother / Would ever even bring / Him for a visit.”

Flanagan, Thomas Jefferson. “The Wolf-Whistler: He Was in the Heart of the Mississippi South.” Atlanta Daily World, 27 September 1955.

Poem by a regular contributor to the Daily World. Focusing on the whistle—prompted by the “boundless joy” Till must have felt to be so “Far from the State Street slum” of Chicago—the poem concludes with Till’s soul lingering “at the beautiful gate [of Heaven] / Where one can wolf-whistle to God.”

Francis, Vievee. “Emmett, I Said Wait.” Callaloo 26, no. 3 (2003): 630–34.

Poem from the perspective of Carolyn Bryant as she recalls many years later what happened on that fateful day. With sleep haunted by images of Till, she recalls how she was offended by his “nasty sound” but “did not say / take him to the river.” Staring at her from “the magazine / years old,” “the crack in [Till’s] face / is a question mark,” and in her dreams she both eroticizes the young boy (smiling “into his slender throat”) and tries to comfort him with soothing hushes.

Graham, Donald G. (Dante). “April 5th.” Understanding Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References, 320–21. Edited by Stephen Henderson. New York: William Morrow, 1973.

In the wake of King’s assassination, the narrator tries to remember King’s words but can only recall “three little / girls malcolm X medgar evers / emmett till and the soft / touch I had die last night.” Proclaiming “non-violence is dead,” the poem concludes with “Lord strike their ass / for they know what / they do.”

Gilliam, Mary. “Little Boy from Chicago.” Baltimore Afro-American, 26 November 1955.

Poem expressing horror over the killing but also an abiding faith that God “knows who and where his murderers are / And in His own way and His own time, / They will be brought before the Judgment bar.”

Giovanni, Nikki. “All Eyez On U (for 2Pac Shakur 1971–1996).” In Love Poems, 62–64. New York: Morrow and Company, 1997.

Poem written after the murder of 2Pac Shakur. According to Giovanni, “this generation mourns 2Pac as my generation mourned Till as we / all mourn Malcolm.” Shakur’s memory “will not go away,” just as “Emmett Till did not go away.”

———. “Bring on the Bombs: A Historical Interview.” In Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, 65–72. New York: William Morrow, 2002.

An interview poem recounting the story of Daisy Bates, who recalls how Till’s murder “rang a resounding bell” and “put some iron in our backbone.”

———. “Here’s to Gwen.” In Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, 30–31. New York: William Morrow, 2002.

In this prose poem tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks, Giovanni calls “Bronzeville Mother” the “most brilliant work on the murder of Emmett Till.”

———. “Visible Ink.” Blues: For All the Changes, 15–16. New York: William Morrow, 1999.

In this poem, Giovanni includes Mamie Till-Bradley among those “greatest heroes [who] probably have no idea . . . how heroic they are.”

———. “For Tupac Shakur (1971–1996).” In Love Poems, 61. New York: Morrow and Co., 1997.

Prose poem about how Shakur’s “spirit will flower and who like Emmett Till and Malcolm X will be remembered by his people for the great man who could have been.”

———. “Rosa Parks.” In Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, 8–9. New York: William Morrow, 2002.

Prose poem in tribute to Rosa Parks and to the Pullman Porters “who organized when people said they couldn’t.” Among other things, it imagines the porters who “welcomed a fourteen-year-old boy onto their train in 1955” and who later “got Emmett’s body on the northbound train” back to Chicago.

———. “A Civil Rights Journey.” In Blues: For All the Changes, 56–58. New York: William Morrow, 1999.

Prose poem opens with Giovanni’s memory of Till’s murder, which she calls the “defining event of my generation.” Unable to “make sense” of what happened, Giovanni asks questions that mark the beginning of her “civil rights journey.”

———. “Lorraine Hansberry: An Emotional View.” In To Those Who Ride the Night Winds, 13–15. New York: William Morrow, 1983.

In this tribute to Hansberry, Giovanni ruminates on the fate of Black Americans since 1619, issuing a list of things she wishes would have been different. Among them, she writes: “I wish we had been enslaved . . . at the same rate we were being set . . . free . . . It would be . . . an entirely different story . . . I wish the battleships . . . had sailed down the Mississippi River . . . when Emmett Till was lynched . . . at the same speed they sped to Cuba . . . during the missile crisis.”

———. “Hands: For Mother’s Day.” In To Those Who Ride the Night Winds, 16–18. New York: William Morrow, 1983.

Reflecting on how “hands must be very important” to women’s lives (and how “wives and mothers are not so radically different”), Giovanni remembers: “I saw a photograph once of the mother of Emmett Till . . . a slight, brown woman with pillbox hat . . . white gloves . . . eyes dark beyond pain . . . incomprehensively looking at a world that never intended her son to be a man.”

“Goodbye to Dixie, Chicago Here We Come.” Unpublished poem. Referred to in Jackson Clarion-Ledger, 8 November 1955.

Sent to columnist Tom Ethridge by a resident of Bright Bank Plantation, Midnight, Mississippi, this poem was supposedly written by an “exasperated Chicagoan” (Ethridge’s words). According to Ethridge, some sample lines read: “Tell all the folks to board the bus . . . the Mayor’s done give this town to us. He’d sell his very soul for votes . . . man, it’s fun to sow wild oats! Romp all over a white man’s place . . . guarded by cops while you spit in his face!”

Guillén, Nicolás. “Elegias a Emmett Till.” Propósitos [Buenos Aires], 21 August 1956, 3. Reprinted as “Elegy for Emmett Till.” In Man-making Words: Selected Poems of Nicolás Guillén, translated, annotated, and with an introduction by Robert Márquez and David Arthur Murray, 87–91. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972.

Holland, Endesha Ida Mae. “From the Mississippi Delta.” Unpublished, 1988.

Emmett Till is mentioned in the opening lines of this short play adapted from Holland’s memoir of the same name. A performance of the play is noted in the New Yorker (5 September 1988), and Cleanora Hudson-Weems mentions it in Emmett Till: The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement (Troy, MI: Bedford, 1994).

Huff, William H. “The Emmett Till Case.” Baltimore Afro-American, 21 January 1956.

Short poem written by Mamie Till Bradley’s legal counsel in an attempt to explain why he withdrew his support from her NAACP-sponsored speaking tour.

———. “Let’s Have that Anti-Lynching Bill.” Pittsburgh Courier, 15 October 1955.

Short didactic poem urging readers to think of “a youngster’s body floating / Where his own race is kept from voting” and “combat” the filibuster against the antilynching bill before Congress.

Hughes, Langston. “Mississippi—1955.” Daily Worker, 26 September 1955. File C, box 18, Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress. Earliest version, “Emmett Till, Mississippi, and Congressional Investigations,” is in an unpublished draft dated 16 September 1955 in Hughes, 317, James Weldon Johnson Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Another draft, dated 23 September 1955, is File C, box 18, Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress.

———. “The Money, Mississippi Blues.” 1955. In The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative, edited by Christopher Metress, 296-98. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002.

Blues song with lyrics by Hughes and music by Jobe Huntley. Attached to a 4 October 1955 letter to Henry Lee Moon [File C, 13. Box 18. Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress], the song was submitted to the NAACP for use in fundraising campaigns. It incorporates some of the language of “Mississippi—1955” and works off variations of the line “I don’t want to go to Money, Mississippi.” Characterizes Till as a “little old boy” who was “beaten because he was so bold” and wonders why Mississippi would do this to the child of a man who “died for democracy.”

———. “I Feel Mississippi’s Fist in My Own Face, Simple Says.” Chicago Defender, 15 October 1955.

Story about how Simple feels in the wake of the Till lynching. Berating his fellow blacks for staying down South in the first place, Simple begins to express his anger about how blacks should respond to the lynching. When he suggests that blacks ought to “get themselves an arsenal,” the narrator accuses him of “advocating race war.” Responding that “there’s no race peace there,” Simple grows angrier and angrier as he begins to relive the lynching. Finally, he exclaims, “I do not want to talk about it anymore, so do not ask me what I would do if I was there, nor how I would protect myself because I might be forced to show you, so do not ask me.”

Huie, William Bradford. “Wolf Whistle.” Unproduced screenplay, 21 May 1960. Folder 350. William Bradford Huie Papers. Ohio State University.

Huie’s screenplay relies heavily upon his 1956 Look magazine account. While visiting his black kinfolks in Mississippi, Chicago-born Bobo Wilson brags about his white girlfriend, whose picture he carries in his wallet. Highly sexualized in Huie’s screenplay, Bobo (who is seventeen in this script) is dared to enter a local store and ask a white woman, Clara Matlock, for a date. Because “the picture has trapped him,” he “must enter the store.” Innocently holding her hand “for a beat,” Bobo tries to save face, but Clara is alarmed and grabs a pistol. Soon, according to Clara’s husband Ray, “every nigger in the Delta is talking about it,” and so he and his brother Big Matt Matlock must do something. The screenplay then cuts to the trial, much of which seen through the eyes of Thomas Darnell, a famous magazine writer from Alabama who also serves as the movie’s narrator. (In his trial scenes, it should be noted, Huie often diverts from the historical record.) The screenplay ends with a post-trial flashback. Darnell has secured a confession from Big Matt Matlock, who now narrates how Till was kidnapped and murdered. Echoing Huie’s Look account, Big Matt tells how the two men beat the boy mercilessly while he defiantly asserts that “I’m as good as you are. . . . . An’ you know som’pin. I got a white girl.” After we witness Till being shot in the head, the screenplay ends with a closeup of the “questioning face” of Darnell, who muses, “the question which caused Big Matt to murder Bobo . . . still tortures many white men. What should a white man do when a Negro youth reaches for the hand of a white girl?”

———. “Wolf Whistle.” Unproduced screenplay. Revised 29 June 1960. Folder 352. William Bradford Huie Papers. Ohio State University.

Some scenes are rearranged and/or deleted, but the most significant changes involve the way the murder is recast and how the screenplay ends. Instead of being saved until the final scenes, Till’s murder is placed early, in its appropriate chronological sequence. This version ends with the not-guilty verdict. Immediately afterward, in full view of others in the courthouse lobby, Darnell asks the two men if they murdered Till, and they proudly confess that they did. Instead of ending with Darnell’s musing on “what should a white man do when a Negro youth reaches for the hand of white girl,” the screenplay now ends with the image of Big Matt having to plow his own field and ostracized by the white community for publicly confessing to the crime.

Ice Cube. “Cave Bitch.” Lethal Injection. Priority Records. P2–53876. 1993.

Song warning a “white bitch” who wants a “Mandingo” to “ease back.” Unattracted to her “Stringy hair—no derrier—frontin’ and fakin’ with your silicone pair,” he warns black men against this “cave bitch” who “looking for dark meat” because “sooner or later, the bitch’ll yell rape.” And “Soon as daddy found out you a jigaboo / He’ll kill you like he did Emmitt [sic] Till.”

Jackson, Mary Coleman. “The Ballad of Emmett Till.” 10 October 1995. File C, 13. Box 18. Papers of the NAACP. Library of Congress.

A Los Angeles native, Jackson submitted this poem to Roy Wilkins and the NAACP “to use as they see fit (or throw away).” For most of the eleven stanza, Jackson recounts the kidnapping and murder from the perspective of Milam and Bryant, who plead that “We let the Till boy go free.” In the end, however, Jackson warns, “woe to the men and the women of Money,” and “Woe to their children for they’ll reap the fruit / That grew when men murdered a boy.”

Jackson, Reuben. “Thinking of Emmett Till.” In Fingering the Keys, 27. Cabin John, MD: Gut Punch Press, 1990.

Black narrator of this brief poem asks a white waitress for sugar and is met “with / bloodthirsty / smile.” No direct mention of Till but for the title.

Johnson, Bryan. “Emmit [sic]Till.” Denver Quarterly 34, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 57.

Surrealist poem refers directly to Till only in the title. By indirection, the poem uses Till as a metaphor for the redemptive powers of suffering as it tells the story of an unnamed Mississippi woman who is dreaming of transcendence in her world of mundane poverty.

King, Rev. Joseph. “Death in Dixie.” American Negro 1, no. 2 (October 1955): 17.

This poem points out the hypocrisy of American freedom in the wake of Till’s lynching, for despite the claims of our democracy, “Death is our law! Murder our order of justice.” It concludes with a call for “Justice against the beast men! / Black men, human men wrestle down the terror beast deep / down in Mississippi.”

Kramer, Aaron. With music by Clyde R. Appleton.“Blues for Emmett Till.” National Guardian, 7 November 1955. Reprinted in Sing Out 6, no. 1 (Winter 1956): 3.

Comparing Till to a bird whose “feathers were all brown,” the singer bemoans that in Mississippi such a bird “Better not chirp when Mrs. Bryant’s around.” “Slow down when you pass a courthouse, and laugh about that word— / Laugh about ‘Justice,’ friend, and cry for the young brown bird.”

Loeb, Chas. H. “Refugees.” Cleveland Call and Post, 8 October 1955.

This poem, submitted as an “editorial in rhyme” by a Call and Post columnist, reflects ironically on the Cold War policy of having “a fund for displaced Poles / . . . [and] every poor assorted coot / Who wants to try the way of life / We call democracy,” while blacks are denied similar protections. “Who cries out when little kids / are lynched—and lynchers freed?” Loeb asks. “Should foreigners get all the breaks / While our own citizens catch hell?”

Lorde, Audre. “Afterimages.” Cream City Review 17, no. 2 (Fall 1981): 119–23.

Mair, Ernest. Untitled Poem. Baltimore Afro-American, magazine section, 15 October 1955.

Opens by wondering how Southerners, “made in [God’s] image,” could “become / lower [than] the venomed rattler that crawls.” Ends by calling for a “Hercules” to wash America’s “garments clean of Southern slime.”

Malone, Russell. “Flowers for Emmett Till.” Russell Malone. Columbia CK 52825. New York: 1992.

Jazz instrumental. No lyrics.

Maly, Christopher. “This Unsafe Star: The Story of Emmett Till.” Original Music by Matthew Boring and Christiana Wismer. Premiere. Lincoln High School, Lincoln, Nebraska. 12 October 2006.

Accompanied by three muses (and by brief appearances from such figures as Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Arthur Ashe), an elder Mamie Till-Mobley narrates her son’s story. Beginning with Christmas 1954 and concluding with the aftermath of the trial, the play draws its title from Amiri Baraka’s 1966 poem “Jitterbugs,” which condemns white racism for making “this star unsafe, and this age, primitive.” Against the bleakness of Baraka’s poem, however, Maly’s play offers hope. In the closing lines, Bryant and Milam’s Look magazine confession is followed by the appearance of Rosa Parks, who claims, “When I was on that bus, I thought of Emmett the entire time” and, according to one of the muses, the story of Mamie and her son “is about the power one woman and one child can have over this star unsafe.” This hopeful vision is confirmed when, at the very end, Emmett and his mother come together on stage for the first time and a “young Mamie” recites a few lines from Countée Cullen’s “These are no wind-blown rumors,” a sonnet that affirms the power of love to endure even in the face of death.

Matthews, Ralph. “Thinking Out Loud [Aftermath of the Till Case].” Cleveland Call and Post, 19 November 1955.

In this brief “fiction,” published in an editor’s column, Bruno Hauptman returns from hell to meet with Bryant and Milam after their acquittal on kidnapping charges. Hauptman wants to know how two “ignorant country bumpkins” escaped punishment when he had “to pay with [his] life.” Hauptman’s problem, the locals tell him, is that his crime didn’t exploit race and keep “niggers from getting too biggity.” Hauptman responds, “Now I understand . . . The boys in Hades will be glad to hear this and they’ll tell you so themselves when you come down. We’ll be waiting for you.” Upon saying this, he vanishes.

McAllister, Brewster. Lost poem. 1955.

In an October 15 column in the Chicago Defender (“White Reader Admires Negro’s Fight Against Bigotry, Bias and Hatred”) Albert Barnett discusses a letter he received from McAllister and notes, “The poem sent in by Mr. McAllister will be printed in this column next week.” It was not.

McBrown, Gertrude P. “Brotherhood Paradox (Mississippi Way).” Baltimore Afro-American, 3 December 1955.

Brief poem noting the paradox between a “proud nation” that “boast[s] / Of democracy, justice and brotherhood” and “the gasping death groans / Of a black boy hanging from a tree.”

McDaniel, Eugene, and Jonathan Muhammad. The Guardian. Produced by Je’Caryous Johnson. Premiere 20 January 2000. Cullen Performance Hall, University of Houston, Houston, Texas.

According to the play’s author and producer, “The Guardian begs the question of where was Emmett Till's guardian angel during his time of need" and “examines why divine powers allowed such a tragic event to occur." An earlier version of the play was known as “Heaven’s Child: The legacy of Emmett Till.” All attempts to secure a script of either version have failed.

Merriam, Eve. “Money, Mississippi.” Montgomery, Alabama, Money, Mississippi, and Other Places. New York: Cameron Associates, No Date [1956].

Poem condemning “Dirty Money town,” “Bloody Money town,” “Rotten Money town,” “Evil Money town” for its sanctioning of Till’s murder. Ends with a call to “Bring home the body of Emmett Till / From that terrible Money town. / Bring home the body of Justice / With her blood-stained shining crown.”

Miller, Jeanne. “Can I Write of Flowers?” Essence, 1 December 2001.

Beginning “Must I write / of Emmett Till / problems plaguing / Black Folks / Still,” the poet asks to be freed of history. Confessing that “Emmett Till sleeps / in my bed / haunts me with his swollen / head,” she begs to write of “flowers please / ducklings / swans and / honeybees.” Someone else must express the “violent rage / that I can't capture / on my page.”

Millet, Martha. “Mississippi.” Masses and Mainstream 8, no. 10 (October 1955): 42–48.

Radical poet Millet retells the bloody and racist history of the Mississippi River so that “The blood cries out / speaking truth to your lies / Mississippi.” This retelling is interspersed with images of the Till case, from the cries of young Emmett (“Why have you done this to me?”) to the strength of his mother (“the blood of your child / rose up in you for their damnation”). Poem ends by asking Mississippi what it will do, where will it hide, when “the avenger comes among you”?

———. “Emmett Louis Till (1941–1955).” Baltimore Afro-American, 22 October 1955.

Poem that imagines “a river of righteous men” taking vengeance for Till’s murder by seeking to “topple” the “altar” of white supremacy.

Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon, 79–83. New York: Penguin, 1977.

Early in this novel, a group of black men in a barbershop overhear radio reports about a “boy [who] had whistled at some white woman, refused to deny he had slept with others, and was a Northerner visiting the South. His name was Till.” Some men are silent; others condemn Till for his brashness; still others defend him for being a man. All agree, however, that Till’s murderers will never be convicted, and the scene ends with the men beginning to “trade tales of atrocities, first stories they had heard, then those they’d witnessed, and finally the things that had happened to themselves.” Eventually, this “litany of personal humiliations, outrage, and anger turned sicklelike back to themselves as humor.”

———. “Dreaming Emmett.” Premiere at Marketplace Theatre, Albany, NY, 4 January 1986.

No print or video version of the play exists, and thus details about the drama must be drawn from a handful of newspaper accounts and reviews. According to a succinct summary from the New York Times, “the characters and the action shift back and forth in time and place, and there is a play within a play. The nonlinear story involves an anonymous black boy who was murdered. In a dream state he suffers the pain of remembering his death 30 years before. Seeking revenge and a place in history, he summons up the perpetrators of his murder, as well as his family and friends, all to be characters in the dream. But his ghosts refuse to be controlled by his imagination; all see the past in their own way, as the boy doggedly searches for a meaning to his death—and thereby his life. At one point he is challenged by a member of the audience, a black woman who rejects his dream and provokes a confrontation on sexual issues.” According to another source, all of Emmett’s ghosts—unlike Emmett—have aged thirty years and are “marked by their experiences of the last three decades.” The black woman who challenges him is a “sassy” woman in her early twenties named Tamara, and her confrontation “exposes Emmett as both less and more than he pretends to be.” Requests to secure a script from the playwright have been denied, and the play’s producers—the Albany Capital Repertory Theatre—confirm that, after the 1986 production, Morrison collected all records of the play and refuses to release them.

Nelson, Marilyn. A Wreath For Emmett Till. Illustrated by Philippe Lardy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

A heroic crown of sonnets (fifteen interlinked sonnets, with the last sonnet comprised of the first lines of the preceding fourteen) accompanied by illustrations. Marketed as “juvenile poetry” but rich in meaning, these poems explore how, “like a haunted tree / set off from other trees in the wildwood / by one bare bough,” Till’s presence informs America’s racial memory. For Nelson, “Emmett Till’s name still catches in my throat,” and she confesses her desire to put him in a “parallel universe” where he would “live through a happy childhood.” But knowing that she cannot free him from the “obscene theft” of his life, she explores ways to gather honest flowers for a wreath that will not let us forget that theft, for such “Forgetting would call for consciencelessness.” Instead, “we must bear witness to atrocity” and remember Till as he was “dragged along, blood spattering” upon “white petals as he, abandoning all hope, gasped his agonizing last breath.” If we forget this, we risk “unforgettable shame.”

Nichols, John. “Don’t Be Forlorn.”1959. Manuscript made available by the author.

Unpublished first novel by the author of The Milagro Beanfield War, written while he was a sophomore at Hamilton College. In a 2001 memoir, Nichols confessed, “The plot of Don't Be Forlorn is seriously warped by the weight of catastrophically maudlin writing. Mawkish stereotypes and an absolute lack of subtlety abound on both sides of the race question; my writing is outlandishly melodramatic . . . But my story does indicate a desire for social justice.” Despite Nichols’s misgivings, the novel manages to convey an important message about the need for compassionate identification with those who suffer injustice, especially in the conversion of Carter Fitzgerald, the white lawyer who seeks to convict the men who have murdered young Laury Emmons, a well-educated northern black boy who has been too bold in his talk with a local white girl.

Nielsen, Aldon. “A Good Place to Raise a Boy.” Talisman (Spring 1994): 94–95.

This poem of fragments connects Till’s lynching to the Birmingham church bombing, reflecting on racism as the “complexion of the end of the century.”

Nordan, Lewis. Wolf Whistle. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1993.

Ochs, Phil, and Bob Gibson. “Too Many Martyrs.” Originally “The Ballad of Medgar Evers.” All the News That’s Fit to Sing. Wea-Elecktra. 1965.

This song begins with the image of a man who sees Emmett Till, his “friend,” “a hanging” because “color was his crime.” The “blood upon his [Till’s] jacket left a brand upon his mind.” In the next stanza we learn that this branded man is Medgar Evers and “he walked his road alone / Like Emmett Till and thousands more whose names we’ll never know.”

Packer, Vin. Dark Don’t Catch Me. Greenwich, CT: Gold Medal Books, 1956.

 

Pappas. Nikos. 1958. “Emmet [sic] Till.” In To My Collaborators: The Greek Poets, 154-55. River Vale, N.J.: Cosmos Publishing, 1999.

In this poem by an award-winning Greek writer known for his outrage against social injustice, the narrator addresses Till directly and bemoans the shallowness of an age marked by “the assured careers of the young who drive / hot rods crammed with corruption.” While “Toughs with silk skirts / and high-school diplomas encircle us /beat up their mothers / smoke hashish and gulp gin,” the narrator and Till “write verses, / our thirst still unquenched by the cataracts of silence.”

Parks, Mary. “For Emmett Till.” Daily Worker, 13 October 1955.

Poem describing a one-sided classroom lecture about American history. Praising “Plymouth Rock / The Pilgrims, the Mayflower,” the teacher neglects to mention “Those who came on the slavers’ ships,” and when the teacher professes that “all men are created equal” the poet asks “But what of the slaves? What was the sequel?” Wondering “How many boys in Chicago” have learned of Garrison, Turner, Vesey, Tubman, and John Brown, the poet urges us to remember “this boy with a shattered head / Who died in a muddy river bed.”

Pitcher, Oliver. “Salute.” In Rosey Pool’s Beyond the Blues: New Poems by American Negroes, 161–62. Hand and Flower Press, 1962.

Poem “saluting” Milam and Bryant and “all self-anointed / men / who dole out freedoms to other / men.” Poet decries “all things / Worthy of my confusion.”

Platt, Donald. “Amazing Grace Beauty Salon.” Southern Review 38, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 57–62.

A male narrator enters a beauty salon and overhears two women—one black, one white—joke and “small talk” about their men. When the white one jokes about her man looking “like he’s black” because he dresses in “bright colors,” the narrator hears the “history squeezed into the silence” that follows. The image of Till “carrying / on his back the seventy-five-pound cotton-gin fan, lashed / with barbed wire / to his neck, across the ruts of the night field / to the Tallahatchie River” rises up between the women, and Till’s story becomes like a river whose “floodwaters overflow the casual / conversation” of us all.

Plumpp, Sterling. “Unremembered.” In Ornate With Smoke, 29–32. Chicago: Third World Press, 1997.

Narrator of this brief poem recalls how his father gave him a piece of rope his own father found near “the pass from Money where Emmett / Till was killed.” The rope then begins to tell “moaning narratives” of the “black boys and / black men” who have met death at the hands of lynchers.

Ragland, J. Farley. “Methods in Mississippi.” Richmond Afro-American, 24 September 1955.

Although “the lad had done no wrong,” “prejudice was strong,” and “Ghoulish hate went wild / To lynch a helpless child!” On the eve of the trial, the poet waits “to see what fate / A crime like this shall rate.”

Razaf, Andy. “Timely Question.” Washington Afro American, 12 November 1955.

Brief, ironic poem by the famed lyricist begins with the question, “Is your town a good place to / Raise a boy?”— referring to the slogan of Money, Mississippi). No mention of Till, but by allusion the poem mocks “true democracy” in Mississippi.

Reed, Ishmael. Reckless Eyeballing. New York: St. Martin’s, 1986.

In this satirical send-up of 1980s feminism, Reed has his protagonist, the black playwright Ian Ball, write a play called Reckless Eyeballing, which is about how a southern white woman demands that the corpse of a black boy dug up from its grave and put on trial again. The boy, Ham Hill, is clearly a stand-in for Emmett Till, and although Ball has written the play to appease his feminist critics, the play gets recast and much goes awry. In Reed’s complexly plotted novel, the Ham Hill story serves to implicate white and black feminists (in particular Susan Brownmiller and Alice Walker) for perpetuating self-interested caricatures of violent and sexualized black men.

Richardson, W. James. The Ghost of Emmett Till. Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse, 2005.

Freelance journalist Jamal Peterson travels to Mississippi to cover the Till trial. Deeply moved by the heroism of local blacks and angered by the intractable racism of southern whites, he returns to Detroit determined that “Emmett’s death be a lighting rod for justice and a ramrod against oppression and injustice everywhere.” Soon after the trail, strange events begin to occur in the Delta as Emmett’s ghost begins to mete out its own justice (for instance, one by one, the jurors suffer misfortunes). As Jamal grows more involved with the civil rights movement (covering the Montgomery bus boycott and other events), he almost loses his own life. Through all his tribulations, however, Jamal is strengthened by his memory of Till’s sacrifice. When he returns to Mississippi in 1975 for a statue dedication in honor of the slain boy, he learns that blacks throughout the Delta have drawn a similar strength from Till’s memory.

Ristau, Harlan. “Elegy on the Death of Emmett Till.” Free Lance 4 (1957): 5.

A poem of mourning in which the narrator wonders if “this boy died / only a symbol of gigantic wrongs unredressed” Urging remembrance and a rejection of violence, the poem closes with pity for “those diseased in mind / those sick in private darkness.”

Robinson, Bruce. Marching to Freedomland. Premiere at Mitchell-Robinson Youth Theatre, Germantown, PA. May 1998.

Reviews note that this play tells the story of the civil rights movement through the eyes of children, with particular emphasis on Emmett Till and the Birmingham church bombing. Script unavailable.

Roper, William. “Poem for Emmett Till: A Freedom Song.” Written for Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick. Composed May 2000. First performance unknown.

According to the notes, this violoncello solo “is an abstraction of those events in the life of Emmett Till.” The work is divided into eight episodes, ranging from “Emmett in the Womb” and “Emmett’s birth” to “Emmett’s ascension” and “The cry of our mothers.” Wanting the musician to “communicate what you feel about this moment in history,” Roper warns that “If you feel nothing, it might be more wise to not play the piece.”

Seese, June Akers. “Emmett Till and the Men Who Killed Him.” In James Mason and the Walk-in Closet, 75-78. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994.

Story dealing with a white woman’s memory of her racist uncle, a northerner “unmatched in his hate.” As she grows older and thinks of what happened to Till, who “whistled at a white woman standing on the hot sidewalk and before the sun went down . . . [and] was buried in concrete,” she understands that her uncle “could have done it if he had been in Mississippi with the mob,” could have been one of “those men who went home and ate their suppers in the heat with wet concrete on their pants, bragging, in my uncle’s voice.”

Serling, Rod. “Noon on Doomsday.” Unproduced teleplay. Undated [November-December 1955?]. Box 71. Ts. Rod Serling Papers. U.S. Manuscript Collection, 43 AN. University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Set in Demerest, Georgia, this unproduced teleplay explores the aftermath of the murder of a nineteen-year-old black man, Henry Clemson, by a twenty-year-old white man, John Kattell. At first, the local police hope to cover things up, but when the Atlanta papers pick up the story, local law enforcement charges Kattell with murder. Led by the town lawyer, Demarest rallies around Kattell, an unlikable bully. Soon, secrets about the town’s dark past begin to emerge, in particular the lynching thirty years earlier of a black man who allegedly raped a white woman. After Kattell is acquitted, he confesses to his crime, and, after being mocked by his lawyer’s father, he stabs him with the same knife he used to kill Clemson. When Kattell tries to escape through the stunned crowd, the sheriff warns him to stop but is forced to shoot him down. This teleplay was rejected by the sponsors of the U.S. Steel Hour, and Serling was forced to revise it heavily so that all references to race and the South were omitted.

———. Noon on Doomsday. Teleplay. United States Steel Hour. Broadcast 25 April 1956. Box 71. Rod Serling Papers. U.S. Manuscript Collection, 43 AN. University of Wisconsin, Madison. Reprinted in Television Plays for Writers: Eight Television Plays with Comment and Analysis by the Authors, edited by A. S. Burack. Boston: The Writer, 1957.

In this revised version (the result of at least four rewritings, one of which included the unwelcomed addition of a wolf-whistle to the alleged crime), Serling’s story is no longer set in the South; instead, the murder happens in a small New England village. As the story opens, the town is awaiting the jury verdict in the case of John Kattell, an angry white man in his early twenties who has murdered Moses Chinik, a seventy-seven-year-old arthritic Jewish grocer, after a scuffle in Chinik’s store. Kattell is clearly guilty, but the national press coverage of the trial is making the town defensive in the face of outside agitation. When the jury acquits Kattell, his lawyer has an angry confrontation in the town square with his own father, who accuses his son of acquiescing to prejudice and defending a guilty bigot. Kattell overhears this accusation and attacks the father, but then a northern Jewish newspaper man accuses Kattell of preying on the defenseless and challenges him to a fight. Kattell senses that the town is turning on him and, knife in hand, falls to his knees and begs for forgiveness. Serling’s final direction captures the teleplay’s explicit moral: “The camera starts a slow dolly away from Kattell until he remains a tiny dot in the middle of a loneliness. What we are looking at is John Kattell’s desert, the one he’s going to live in for the rest of his life.”

———. “Untitled Original Teleplay.” Draft, June 19, 1957. Ts. Rod Serling Archives: Playhouse 90 Television Scripts. Ithaca College.

The story of the trial and acquittal of Jerry Paul, a twenty-three-year-old, white merchant accused of killing a Mexican American teenager who was allegedly trying to rob Paul’s store. The story is set in a contemporary Southwest town where most people know that the teenager and Paul’s wife were attracted to each other. A reporter covering the trial learns that another lynching took place in town many years ago, this one involving a “colored man” who “whistled at a girl or something like that.” In a fate similar to John Kattell’s in Noon on Doomsday, Jerry Paul watches as the town turns on him in the wake of his acquittal. In a final public confrontation, Paul strikes a man dead in a bar fight and, fleeing, is shot in the back by the sheriff. Commissioned by Playhouse 90 in 1957, the teleplay was rejected by sponsors. Later, with revisions, it was produced as A Town Has Turned to Dust.

———. A Town Has Turned to Dust. Rod Serling Archives: Playhouse 90 Television Scripts. Ithaca College. Broadcast: June 17, 1958. Broadcast: June 17, 1958. Final version of Serling’s heavily revised “Untitled Original Draft” of 19 June 1957.

Set in the 1870s Southwest, this story is about a Mexican American teenager named Pancho Rivera who is awaiting trial on charges that he robbed the store of a white man, Jerry Paul. Paul leads a mob that strings up the young boy from the town flagpole. This lynching recalls a similar one in which the town sheriff participated. This past lynching, however, has none of the black-white racial overtones of Serling’s original draft, and no one in town can quite remember why the man was lynched (rather than saying he was lynched for whistling at a white woman). The story ends with the sheriff killing Jerry Paul.

Skelton, T. R. Untitled Poem [submitted as a letter to the editor]. Pittsburgh Courier, 8 October 1955.

This poem asks how Mississippi will “wash the boy’s blood” from its hands after acquitting Till’s murderers.

Smith, R. T. “Dar He.” Ploughshares 31, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 134–37.

Older white poet recalling how “I was not yet eight / when the news hit and can remember my parents at dinner / . . . . / shaking their heads in passing and saying it was a shame / but the boy should have been smarter.” Needing “a revelation to lift me from the misery of remembering,” the poet claims he has long been haunted by Mose Wright’s court testimony “like a scene / from some reverse To Kill a Mockingbird.” The poem ends, however, with the poet wondering if all this remembering is “an exercise in sham shame” or something true and genuine.

Sneed, Pamela. “Eyes on the Prize.” In Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery. New York: Henry Holt, 1998.

Black narrator of this poem traces her anger to Till’s face “bloated, beaten, / burning in my mind / every time I climb the stairs / to my house.” Addressing a white friend, she tells how she hears “white laughter gurgling / from courtrooms / when they say you’re free / to kill niggers whenever you like,” noting that the difference between black and white is that “You are free.”

Spicer, Kevin. “The Baby in Emmett Till’s Eyes.” Highways Performance Space. Santa Monica, California. 1994. August 1, 2006.

Content of this performance piece unknown, except that it dealt with violence toward black men. See two websites: www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=2537&IssueNum=116 and www.dogonvillage.com/african_american_news/Articles/00000252.html.

———. “The Murder of Emmett Till: 50 Years Later.” Premiere at Highways Performance Space. Santa Monica, California. 26 August 2005.

A group of performance pieces by Spicer and other local multimedia artists. For best details, see www.dogonvillage.com/african_american_news/Articles/00000252.html.

Stephens, Georgia. Untitled Poem. 3 October 1955. Submitted as an addendum to a letter to the NAACP. File C, 14. Box 18.Papers of the NAACP. Library of Congress.

Long, handwritten poem sent to the NAACP for use in fundraising purposes.

Stevens, Ernest Wakefield. “Blood on Mississippi.” Cleveland Call and Post, 15 October. 1955.

Poem castigating Mississippi for a killing that will reflect poorly upon American efforts to promote democracy: “Bow your head low, Mississippi, / For the damage you have done / To the efforts of our country / In its fight for everyone.”

Strong, Alfred. “For Emmett Till.” Baltimore Afro-American, 10 December 1955.

Poem hoping that good will come from Till’s murder, for “Somewhere there shines / The morning that will see such horrors gone, / When men with hearts of beasts will be unknown.”

Tarpley, Natasha. “Slow Dance.” Callaloo 15, no. 4 (Fall 1992): 928.

Recollection of a slow dance that took place during the “summer they dragged / Emmet [sic] Till’s almost body out of the Tallahatchie.” The two dancers are left “holding each other up, / finding our rhythm in those blues.”

Thompson, Julius E. “Till.” Blues Said: Walk On. Energy Earth Communications: Galveston, TX, 1977. Poem reprinted in Black Southern Voices: An Anthology of Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Nonfiction, and Critical Essays, edited by John Oliver Killens and Jerry W. Ward Jr., 288–89. New York: Meridian, 1992.

Poet wonders if his readers are able to imagine “a black son, walking / down a mississippi highway headed / home” and to “feel the four hundred years.” “Can you awake to see / yourself / dead like he died?” the poet asks. “Can you , can you, / can you save one black son / who god didn’t save?”

Untitled play. Performed at the Jewish Cultural Club, 924 E. 123rd Street, Cleveland Ohio, 8 October 1955.

In a letter to the editor of the Cleveland Call and Post (15 October 1955), Jerry Gordon, chairman of the Ohio Labor Youth League, mentions the performance of this play. No known transcript exists.

Vargas, Fish. “The L.I.F.E Foundation of Emmett Till.” 2004. Available at www.louderarts.com/poets/fish/. August 1, 2006.

Poem published on the louderARTS Project webpage by a middle-school creative writing teacher who tells his young students about the lynching. When Vargas urges them to see Emmett Till “as every facet of prejudice you face,” the students respond by seeing all the Emmett Tills in their own lives: their friends who have been shot, beaten, and mistreated. When one student responds, “Emmett Till could have been / Martin Luther King,” the poet is “met by a face stretched with sadness / eyes lost.”

Walker, Alice. “Advancing Luna—and Ida B. Wells.” In You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down, 85–102. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971.

Story about the development and disintegration of a close friendship between the narrator—a nameless black woman from Georgia—and Luna, a rich white girl from the North. The two meet in the summer of 1965 during a voter registration drive in Georgia, and a year later they share an apartment in New York City. It is here that Luna confides to the narrator that she was raped by a black civil rights worker the previous summer, and while the narrator believes her, she reflects on the historical privileges that give Luna, a white woman, the power to destroy, on her word alone, the life of a black man. These reflections lead her to think of, among other things, the lynching of Till, and force the narrator to question conflations of race and gender.

Walton, Anthony. “The Lovesong of Emmett Till.” In Mississippi: An American Journey. Knopf: New York, 1996.

Poem wondering about the identity of the young Chicago white girl whose picture Till allegedly had in his wallet. “More than likely she was Irish / or Italian, a sweet child who knew him / only as a shy clown,” and Till that day in Mississippi was “just showing / off, showing the rustics / how it was done.” But Till “paid the price of / not innocence but affection,” affection for a girl “who must by now be an older / woman in Chicago, a woman / who will never know.”

Ward, Jerry W., Jr. “Don’t Be Fourteen (In Mississippi).” 1982. In Black Southern Voices: An Anthology of Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Nonfiction, and Critical Essays, edited by John Oliver Killens and Jerry W. Ward Jr., 296–97. New York: Meridian, 1992.

Poem comparing Till’s lynching to the sentencing of Robert Earl May Jr., a fourteen-year-old black boy convicted of a crime. With the haunting refrain “Don’t be fourteen / black and male in Mississippi,” this poem characterizes Till as a “guilt-offering to blue-eyed susans.”

Warren, Nagueyalti. “Till’s Death Did Us Part.” In Lodestar and Other Night Lights: Poems, 11. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992.

This loss-of-innocence poem recalls how the days of “grandiose memories,” when children could “run wild / And free in the woods,” ended in the summer of 1955, “When fear paralyzed” and left children “with no space to run.”

Weeks, Ricardo. “Song for Emmett Till’s Mother.” Washington Afro-American, 8 October 1955; Pittsburgh Courier, 8 October 1955.

Poem from Mamie Bradley’s perspective as she laments her son’s death and hears God commanding her not to weep but to “find a way.”

———. “Too Tight.” Washington Afro-American, 29 October 1955.

Poem that wonders whether Too Tight Collins truly did witness Till’s murder. If so, the poet pleads, Too Tight “should speak / And not stand by / Shaking in the shadow / Of Truth.”

West, Kanye. “Through the Wire.” College Dropout. Roc-a-Fella. B0001AP12G. 2004.

Written by West two weeks after he was in a near-fatal car accident in October 2002 and had his jaw broken in three places and his mouth wired shut. West sings about a public appearance and asks, “just imagine how my girl feel / On the plane scared as hell that her guy look like Emmett Till.”

Wideman, John Edgar. Two Cities. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.

Several times in this novel, fifty year-old Robert Jones remembers “the photograph of a black boy’s face that turned me to stone.” In particular, he recalls seeing the Jet magazine photo in 1955 and trying to “read the story squinting, eyes narrowed to avoid Till’s crumbled face.”

Wiley, Mike. “Dar He: The Lynching of Emmett Till.” Directed by Serena Ebhardt. Multimedia Design by Ben Davis. Premiere. Virginia State University. Petersburg, Virginia. 26 February 2006.

This innovative, ninety-five-minute, one-man, multimedia stage show weaves together some of the most important source material about the case with imaginative recreations of key events. Wiley plays a dozen-plus characters, from William Bradford Huie, Moses Wright, and Mamie Till to Wheeler Parker, Carolyn Bryant, and Willie Reed, as he tells the story from different perspectives and time periods. All the while, the story is played out against a background of shifting media images. The result is a moving and sophisticated drama that raises important questions about historical memory and the power and obligations of retelling.

Wright, Richard. The Long Dream. New York: Harper, 1958.

Although Wright’s final novel doesn’t directly mention Till, many critics have noted the presence of Till’s lynching in the fate of Chris Sims, best friend to the novel’s protagonist Fishbelly. After Chris is discovered in a hotel room with a white woman, a white mob lynches him. At his father’s mortuary, Fishbelly takes a long hard look at Chris’s brutalized corpse, in particular his “bloated head and torso.” Throughout the novel, Fishbelly is haunted by Chris’s face—with its “mouth, lined with stumps of broken teeth . . . an irregular, black cavity bordered by shredded tissue that had once been lips.”