The Blood of Emmett Till
Presented in partnership with the Friends of UW-Madison Libraries, the 2017 Schewe Lecture features Tim Tyson speaking about his new book, The Blood of Emmett Till.
In 1955, a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago named Emmett Till, while visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta, violated racial taboos in a harmless exchange with a young white storekeeper, Carolyn Bryant. Three nights later, several of her kinsmen and family friends tortured the boy to death and threw his battered body in the river. Part detective story, part political history, The Blood of Emmett Till is an explosive reconstruction of the lynching, the trial, and their crucial impact on our history. Award winning author Timothy Tyson uses a range of sources—including the only interview ever given by Carolyn Bryant, along with her unpublished memoir—to tell the definitive story, in which black power and a mother's courage confronted America's enduring racial caste system. Till’s mother’s insistence on an open casket, as well as African American self-assertion in Chicago, spurred nationwide protests that turned this local atrocity into a global symbol of American injustice; it ignited the Civil Rights movement, transforming it from a Southern issue into a national movement. Tyson writes profoundly and cinematically to revise and redefine a history that still confounds us today in the age of Black Lives Matter.
The Friends of UW-Madison Libraries will host a reception after the event. Please visit go.wisc.edu/FriendsRSVP for more information and to RSVP.
Tim Tyson
Timothy Tyson is Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and Visiting Professor of American Christianity and Southern Culture at Duke Divinity School. He is also the author of Blood Done Sign My Name, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, winner of the Southern Book Award for Nonfiction and the Grawemeyer Award in Religion, among others; and Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power, winner of the James Rawley Prize for best book on race and the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in US History from the Organization of American Historians. He serves on the executive board of the North Carolina NAACP and the UNC Center for Civil Rights.