Emmett Till

Starred review from September 15, 2015
The brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, in 1955 set in motion powerful protests that sparked the civil rights movement and reverberated through the years, prompting an FBI investigation 50 years later. Drawing on new evidence and interviews with Till's family members, witnesses to the murder, and reporters who covered the trial that exonerated the accused killers, Anderson offers a very detailed examination of the murder and its significance in the long history of racial abuses in the South under Jim Crow. He details the lives of Emmet and Mamie Till, his mother, in Chicago; the fateful trip to Mississippi; and the aftermath. In a separate section, Anderson looks at how the story of Till's death reemerged after 50 years and sparked an intense investigation, including the exhumation of Till's body. He concludes with his own theory about the case and its legacy, a fund to investigate cold cases of civil rights murders prior to 1970. Photographs enhance this very thorough and compelling look at the murder that galvanized the civil rights movement and continues to act as a rallying call for racial justice.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)