Langston Hughes's "Mississippi--1955": a note on revisions and an appeal for reconsideration.

I want the whole world to see what they did to my boy. -- Mrs. Mamie Till Bradley

On September 24, 1955, an all-white Mississippi jury, after a mere sixty-seven minutes of deliberation, acquitted J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant of the murder of Emmett Till. Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago, had been visiting for the first time his extended family in the Mississippi Delta. One afternoon, barely a week into his visit, he and several other youths were standing outside a white-owned grocery store in the small hamlet of Money. Apparently, Till had been boasting of his friendships with white people up North--in particular his friendships with white girls--and the local kids, looking to call his bluff, dared him to enter the store and flirt with Carolyn Bryant, the white woman and former beauty queen who was working the cash register. Till entered the store, and what he did next is unclear. Some say he "wolf whistled" at Bryant; others say he grabbed her hand and asked her for a date; still others claim he did nothing more than simply say, "Bye, baby," to her as he left the store. What ever Till did, it was apparent to all involved that he had done something that Carolyn Bryant found inappropriate. Till's friends rushed him away from the store as Bryant went to her car to get a gun.

For three days, nothing more happened, and then Roy Bryant--Carolyn's husband--and J. W. Milam--Roy Bryant's stepbrother--struck out in the dead of night in search of young Till. They found him where they thought he'd be at two in the morning: asleep in the modest cabin of Mose Wright, his uncle. The two men, demanding to see the boy "who'd done the talking," took Till forcibly from the house, and his family never saw him alive again. The next morning, at the family's request, the local sheriff searched the county, and when he could not find any trace of Till, he questioned and eventually arrested Milam and Bryant on kidnapping charges. When Till's bloated and disfigured corpse surfaced three days later downstream in the Tallahatchie River, Milam and Bryant were quickly re-arrested, this time for murder.

In the weeks leading up to the trial, media coverage was enormous. Influential African-American weeklies like the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, the New York Amsterdam News, and the Baltimore Afro-American all published loud denunciations of Southern injustice and threatened to exert political and economic pressure should Mississippi fail to give Till's case a fair hearing. In response, white Southern papers, led by the conservative Jackson Daily News and the more moderate Memphis Commercial Appeal, insisted that justice would be done and that continued threats from the "liberal press" would threaten rather than secure justice in the case. Eventually, more than seventy newspapers and magazines sent reporters to the trial, and when, against all reasonable evidence, the jury failed to convict Milam and Bryant, the denunciations were swift and strong. While apologist papers in the South argued that justice had had its day in court, African-American newspapers and magazines, joined by a chorus of suppo rt from the Northern white press and liberal political organizations, called for national protests and boycotts. The NAACP formed an alliance with Mamie Till Bradley, Emmett's mother, and her speaking tour helped to generate one of the most successful fund raising and membership campaigns in NAACP history. According to many scholars of the Civil Rights Movement, the murder of Emmett Till and the brazen acquittal of his murderers were the sparks that ignited the black freedom struggle in the 1950s and '60s (Huie, Whitfield).

The following poem by the distinguished poet and novelist, Langston Hughes, is dedicated to the memory of Emmett Louis Till, 14-year-old victim of a brutal murder in Mississippi. Mr. Hughes sent it to the NAACP with permission for release for publication in any newspaper wishing to use it. -- Henry Lee Moon, NAACP Director of Public Relations

From 1942 to 1962, Langston Hughes wrote a weekly column for the Chicago Defender entitled "Here to Yonder," and while he was not the Defender's correspondent for the Till trial -- that task was ably assumed by L. Alex Wilson--Hughes did devote space in his column to the case. His most prominent response appeared in the paper's October 1, 1955, issue. Beneath a headline pronouncing "Langston Hughes Wonders Why No Lynching Probe," Hughes called for a congressional investigation into Southern vigilantism: "Just one little small investigation of these things, using just a wee tinychee bit of our mutual tax money, and showing just one lynched body on TV, or forcing just one southern mobster to take refuge in the Fifth Amendment, seems to me long overdue." Hughes prefaced his column with an untitled poem written, according to Hughes, "in memory of the dead boy, Emmett Till, whose body was found shot through the head, beaten and bruised, in the Tallahatchie River, 120 miles south of Memphis" (4). This poem, which o ver the years would eventually come to be known by the simple title "Mississippi," was featured in many African-American newspapers that week and would be republished several times throughout Hughes's career. Each time the poem was republished, however, it appeared in a revised form.

Unfortunately, I would argue, Hughes's revisions of "Mississippi-- 1955" have effectively erased the presence of Emmett Till from the poem. As a result, the poem suffers the loss of its own historical specificity, and Till--to whose "memory" the poem was dedicated--is in turn purged from the memory of the text. Moreover, Hughes's revisions have had an effect on the present as well as the past. Because Till's presence was revised out of the poem, the collective memories of scholars and historians have suffered. Only a handful of literary studies acknowledge that Hughes was even remotely interested in the Till case; even fewer studies concede that he wrote a poem in response to it. Furthermore, historical studies of the lynching-even those interested in literary responses to and representations of the crime--fail to recognize Hughes's place as the first major African-American literary figure to respond to the lynching. By charting the poem's publication history, marking its multiple revisions, and analyzing the effects of these revisions on both the poem and our collective memories of Emmett Till, this essay seeks to retrieve the original meaning of the poem by restoring its original text and context. In doing so, it hopes not only to reinvigorate the present by recovering the past, but also to encourage a reconsideration of how, through proper remembrance, we can redeem that past.

In order to trace the publication history of this poem, we must actually begin before the beginning. Although the poem first appeared in newspapers throughout the country during the week of September 24-October 1, 1955, the earliest recorded version is dated September 16. Hughes originally wanted the poem to serve as a lead-in to his weekly Chicago Defender column. As a lead-in, the poem did not warrant a distinct title; rather, it was to be used as a sort of extended epigraph, placed below the title that was intended to reflect on the content of the column rather than the character of the poem. Entitled "Emmett Till, Mississippi, and Congressional Investigations," this draft of the poem--held by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University--reads as follows:

OH, WHAT SORROW!
OH, WHAT PITY!
OH, WHAT PAIN
THAT TEARS AND BLOOD
SHOULD MIX LIKE RAIN
AND TERROR COME AGAIN
TO MISSISSIPPI.

Come again?
Where has terror been?
On vacation? Up North?
In some other section
Of the nation,
Lying low, unpublicized?
Jaundiced eyes
Showing through the mask?

OH, WHAT SORROW,
PITY, PAIN,
THAT TEARS AND BLOOD
SHOULD MIX LIKE RAIN
IN MISSISSIPPI--
AND TERROR, FETID HOT,
YET CLAMMY COLD,
REMAIN.

To blend this poem with the following text, Hughes began his column by noting, "This is a poem written in memory of the dead boy, Emmett Till, whose body was found shot through the head, beaten and bruised, in the Tallahatchie River, 120 miles south of Memphis." Connecting Till's death to the lynchings of Charlie Lang and Ernest Green (hanged in Mississippi from the Shubuta Bridge over the Chicasawhay River in October, 1942), Hughes spent the remainder of his column skewering Congress for failing to investigate Southern lynchings.

Not long after filing his column, Hughes saw possibilities for reprinting the poem independent of its attendant call for Congressional investigation. In a press release dated September 23, 1955, Henry Lee Moon, NAACP Director of Public Relations, notified interested newspaper editors that Hughes had dedicated a poem "to the memory of Emmett Louis Till 14-year-old victim of a brutal murder in Mississippi." This poem, available for publication by any newspaper "wishing to use it," included one major and two minor revisions from Hughes's September 16 version. Adding a title (the most significant revision), then changing the case of the first and third stanzas and replacing a dash in the third stanza with an exclamation point, Hughes wished for the following version of his poem to be released to newspapers across the country:

"Mississippi--l955"

(To the Memory of Emmett Till)

Oh, what sorrow!
Oh, what pity!
Oh, what pain
That tears and blood
Should mix like rain
And terror come again
To Mississippi.

Come again?
Where has terror been?
On vacation? Up North?
In some other section
Of the nation.
Lying low, unpublicized?
Masked--with only
Jaundiced eyes
Showing through the mask?

Oh, what sorrow,
Pity, pain,
That tears and blood
Should mix like rain
In Mississippi!
And terror, fetid hot,
Yet clammy cold,
Remain.

Not surprisingly, many newspapers were interested in "Mississippi--1955." Unfortunately, not all these newspapers reprinted the poem with due care. Compare the above version with the error-filled rendition that appeared in Hughes's own Chicago Defender:

OH, WHAT SORROW!
OH, WHAT PITY!
OH, WHAT PAIN
THAT TEARS AND BLOOD
SHOULD MIX LIKE RAIN
AND TERROR COME AGAIN
TO MISSISSIPPI.

Come again
Where has terror been?
On vacation? Up North?
In some other section
Of the nation,
Lying low, unpublicized?
Jaundiced eyes
Showing through the mask

OH, WHAT SORROW,
PITY, PAIN,
THAT TEARS AND BLOOD
AND TERROR, FETID HOT,
YET CLAMMY COLD,
REMAIN.

Had only the Defender run Hughes's poem, its meaning for readers in 1955 would have remained muddled by the omission of several lines from Hughes's original text. Fortunately, other papers reprinted the poem, although some of these versions were less accurate than others. The Michigan Sentinel, for instance, changed the title to "Mississippi '55," centered all of the lines rather than keeping them flush left, condensed the three stanzas into one, and inadvertently dropped the capital letters off lines ten and eleven. The Atlanta Daily World took fewer liberties, adding "killed at Money, August 1955," to the poem's dedication line and substituting an ellipsis for the exclamation point after line twenty-one. With the exception of one small mistake (capitalizing "what" in line two), the Cleveland Call and Post placed a faithful version of "Mississippi--1955" on its front page, highlighting the work's importance by framing it in a bold, four-inch box in the upper-left-hand corner. The more widely distributed New York Amsterdam News also printed an accurate transcription of the poem (with only an indentation at the beginning of the fourth line differing from Hughes's press release). When the Pittsburgh Courier--which did not originally run the poem--decided to print it as part of a one-year retrospective on the case, it, too, like the Daily World and the Call and Post, offered its readers a near-accurate version (the only change being in the title: "Mississippi, 1955" instead of "Mississippi--1955"). Oddly enough, the only error-free version of Hughes's poem appeared in the first newspaper to run it, the Communist Party-sponsored Daily World, which placed it on the front page of its September 26 issue.

The poem next appeared in 1965, when Hughes submitted it as one of two poems for republication in a special poetry section of Negro Digest. In this September 1965 version, Hughes made several significant changes: retitling the poem, dropping the memorial notation to Till, and compressing three stanzas into one. Moreover, he changed the punctuation in lines seven (from "To Mississippi" to "To Mississippi!") and fourteen (from "Masked -- with only" to "Masked with only"), dropped a word from line twenty (from "Should mix like rain" to "Mix like rain"), and moved two words from line twenty-one ("In Mississippi") and added them to the end of the poem:

"Mississippi"

Oh, what sorrow!
Oh, what pity!
Oh, what pain
That tears and blood
Should mix like rain
And terror come again
To Mississippi!
Come again?
Where has terror been?
On vacation? Up North?
In some other section
Of the nation,
Lying low, unpublicized?
Masked with only
Jaundiced eyes
Showing through the mask?
Oh, what sorrow,
Pity, pain,
That tears and blood
Mix like rain
And terror, fetid hot,
Yet clammy cold,
Remain in
Mississippi!

Some of the changes here are of limited consequence. Adding the exclamation point to line seven neither adds to nor detracts from the poem's overall effect, and one could argue that the corrected punctuation in line seventeen ("Masked with only" rather than "Masked--with only") actually improves upon Hughes's earlier version (lines seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen being the most awkwardly conceived lines in the original poem). Still, neither change completely reconfigures the way we read the poem. The same cannot be said for the title change and the removal of the memorial epigraph.

Dropping "1955" from the title and removing the prefatory reference to Till de-historicizes the poem. Certainly, the poem retains some of its power: "Mississippi" can stand alone and effectively evoke historical memories of sorrow, pity, pain, and terror. But "1955"--like the dedication to Till-- contextualizes those memories around a particular event and gives deeper meaning to two specific references in the poem that are lost when the poem is stripped of its historical situation. First, the whole second stanza (which, of course, is no longer its own stanza in the Negro Digest version) loses much of its powerful irony. For instance, the phrase Come again?, when taken out of the context of the Till murder, loses its double meaning of "Say what?" and "Won't you come [back] again?" In the revised version, the line still achieves the first meaning, but the possibility of the more deeply ironic second meaning--with its quick and subtle condemnation of Southern hospitality ("Y'all come again now, you hear?")--is l ost when the memory of Till is removed from the poem. A similar loss of ironic richness occurs in other lines and phrases. The reference to "terror" being on "vacation" "up North" no longer reverses the path of Till's tragedy, as he found terror on his vacation down South, and the image of terror as wearing a "mask" with "jaundiced eyes" no longer carries the freighted memory of the dramatic Jet magazine photograph of Till's battered and bloated face as the young boy lay in state at his funeral ("Will Mississippi" 9). Finally, the lines "And terror, fetid hot/Yet clammy cold" lose all meaning without reference to Till's drowned corpse; thus, the powerful, historically specific ending of the original--with its "clammy cold/Remain" echoing the clammy cold "remains" of Emmett Till--is completely sacrificed to revision. Revealingly, as Hughes revises this poem out of its initial context, focusing more on Mississippi in general than on Till in particular, "remain" gives way to "Mississippi" as the poem's final word.

The next version, which appeared in the 1967 collection The Panther and The Lash: Poems of Our Times, raises even more problems and at once makes "Mississippi" both more and less a poem of its time. To begin with, the copyright acknowledgments suggest that Hughes has taken this version of "Mississippi" from the Negro Digest, where, according to this same acknowledgment (but not according to fact), the poem was "first printed."

Surprisingly, however, the Panther and Lash version contains some striking differences. Several of the revisions made between 1955 and 1965 have been reversed. The poem is once again broken into three stanzas, and several of the 1965 punctuation decisions have been rescinded. The most significant revisions, however, appear in the radical alterations of the final stanza:

"Mississippi"

Oh, what sorrow!
Oh, what pity!
Oh, what pain
That tears and blood
Should mix like rain
And terror come again
To Mississippi.

Again?
Where has terror been?
On vacation? Up North?
In some other section
Of the Nation,
Lying low, unpublicized?
Masked--with only
Jaundiced eyes showing
Through the mask?

Oh, what sorrow, pity, pain,
That tears and blood
Still mix like rain
In Mississippi.

The Panther and the Lash version returns the first stanza to its original 1955 form. The second stanza receives only minor revisions. "Come" is omitted from the first line, leaving "again" to carry all the weight. The dash is returned to its position after "Masked," but then "showing" is moved from the beginning of the final line of the stanza to the end of the previous line. These two decisions--to return the dash Hughes removed in 1965 and shifting the position of a word--show once again that Hughes is aware of the awkwardness of these lines (an awkwardness which he was never really able to work out). However, none of these revisions is as revealing as the ones that occur in the final stanza. If Hughes asks in the second stanza of the poem "Where has terror been?" we may now feel compelled to ask Hughes, Where did terror go? The new final stanza omits any reference to "terror." Moreover, the "clammy cold / Remain" of the original poem is now gone. In Hughes's defense, this omission makes sense, and he was m oving toward this in his Negro Digest version when he deemphasized "remain" by removing it from its privileged position at the end of the poem. With each revision of the poem, Hughes rewrote it further out of its historical situation. First, he removed the marker "1955" and the dedication to Till. Then, he tucked "remain" within, rather than keeping it positioned at the end, of the poem. Finally, in this 1967 version, he takes the logical step of effacing any trace of Till's remains from the poem.

The most recent appearance of "Mississippi" is in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. This 1994 version mirrors, with only two minor exceptions, the version from The Panther and the Lash. The second stanza is no longer italicized and the last line gets an exclamation point. Neither change is significant, and the poem is otherwise a faithful transcription:

"Mississippi"

Oh, what sorrow!
Oh, what pity!
Oh, what pain
That tears and blood
Should mix like rain
And terror come again
To Mississippi.

Again?
Where has terror been?
On vacation? Up North?
In some other section
Of the Nation,
Lying low, unpublicized?
Masked--with only
Jaundiced eyes showing
Through the mask?

Oh, what sorrow, pity, pain,
That tears and blood
Still mix like rain
In Mississippi!

What most needs to be discussed when studying this version of the poem are the misleading notes included by Rampersad and Roessel. First, they note that "Mississippi" was "first published as 'Missippi--1955' in The Amsterdam News (Oct. 1, 1955), p. 4" (678). This, of course, is incorrect: The poem was also in other African-American newspapers on October 1, and days before that the poem appeared in the Daily Worker (Sep. 26), the Atlanta Daily World (Sep. 28), and the Michigan Sentinel (Sep. 29). Fortunately, Rampersad and Roessel refer to the near-accurate Amsterdam News version and not to the error-filled poem in the Chicago Defender. The only other note they add is some historical information about Emmett Till, although they do not mention that the poem was originally dedicated to his memory. But if we stop here in our reading of their notes, we miss something very important.

In the annotation for the collection's next poem, "Brotherly Love," Rampersad and Roessel write:

Published in Nation (Aug. 18, 1956), p. 142. Reprinted in New Republic (Aug. 21, 1961). P. 23, and Negro Digest (Sept. 1965), p. 57. Included in TPATL [The Panther and the Lash]. Previously, the last three lines were:

And terror, fetid hot,
Yet clammy cold,
Remain. (678)

Some very confusing things are going on here. First, further notes for "Mississippi" have somehow been mistakenly attached to the notes for "Brotherly Love." True, "Brotherly Love" -- not "Mississippi" -- was published in the 18 August 1956 issue of Nation; however, "Brotherly Love" was not reprinted in either the New Republic or Negro Digest. As I have already noted, "Mississippi" appeared in the September 1965 issue of Negro Digest and was later reprinted in The Panther and the Lash. However, that poem never appeared in the New Republic. A poem entitled "Mississippi" did indeed appear in the 21 August 1961 issue of the New Republic, but this "Mississippi" is not the poem that was originally dedicated to Emmett Till. The New Republic "Mississippi" is subtitled "(Words for a Plastic Sax)" and has nothing to do with the sorrow, pity, and pain of a lynching.

In addition to these reference errors, the note contains another mistake. While Rampersad and Roessel are right to acknowledge that the final three lines of the original poem have been omitted, they have not acknowledged other minor changes: the omission of "Come" from the first line of the second stanza and the shifting of "showing" from the last line of the second stanza to the previous line. However, the most important oversight in this note concerning textual variations is its failure to recognize that the poem originally included the dedication "To the Memory of Emmett Till." Yes, the previous note on "Mississippi" includes information about Till's murder and thus suggests that Hughes's readers need to know this information about the poem. But the omission of the Till dedication from revisions of this poem is as significant as the omission of the poem's final lines, which Rampersad and Roessel rightfully acknowledge. Hughes removed the dedication when he revised the poem in 1965; in failing to acknowledg e the omitted dedication, Rampersad and Roesel, like Hughes himself, end up pushing the memory of Till deeper and deeper into the historical shadows.

We will not forget Emmett Louis Till
In tomorrow's problems or last week's good
    news.
We will not forget him in breakfast food
Or in the rush of winter bells.
We promise the voice that commands our
  attention
The earth that was his earth
Will not wilt and die in a quick hour's decision.
--from Richard Davidson's "A Cause for
   Justice"

"Mississippi" does not hold a high place in the Hughes canon, although Hughes obviously felt the poem deserved attention. He selected it as one of only two poems for contribution to Negro Digest's special poetry section in September 1965, and he reworked the poem again for inclusion in The Panther and the Lash. But when Hughes put together his Selected Poems in 1959, he did not include "Mississippi" -- in part, one assumes, because "Mississippi" had not yet appeared in any collection, but also, in part, because Hughes did not think as highly of this poem as he did of others. Certainly, "Mississippi" does not have the status of such classics as "A Negro Speaks of Rivers," "The Weary Blues," "Theme for English B," or "A Dream Deferred." Still, it is a bit surprising that some of the most comprehensive and influential studies of Hughes fail to mention the poem. James E. Emanuel's Langston Hughes (1967), Richard K. Barksdale's Langston Hughes: The Poet and His Critics (1977), Faith Berry's Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem (1983), and R. Baxter Miller's Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes (1989) do not refer the poem, and even Rampersad's monumental two-volume Life of Langston Hughes (1988) does not mention it.

More egregious than this neglect of "Mississippi," however, is the total failure to recognize the existence of "Mississippi--1955." Rampersad and Roessel's Collected Poems does acknowledge "Mississippi--1955" as the source for "Mississippi," but other than this no other study or collection takes notice of the poem. Even the most thorough bibliographic and textual studies of Hughes's work overlook "Mississippi--1955." In A BioBibliography of Langston Hughes, 1902-1967, Donald C. Dickson does not list the poem. He does list a poem under the title "Mississippi" in his bibliography, but he is here referring to the 21 August 1961 New Republic poem, which is not a revision of "Mississippi--1955" but an entirely different poem altogether--the one subtitled "(Words for a Plastic Sax)." Thus, Dickson's study not only fails to acknowledge the poem Hughes originally dedicated to Emmett Till, but it also omits completely any of its revisions. Peter Mandelik and Stanley Schatt's more comprehensive Concordance to the Poetr y of Langston Hughes (1975) lists the revised "Mississippi" but not "Mississippi--1955." Because Mandelik and Schatt are working from poetry collections, failing to acknowledge "Mississippi--1955" is an understandable oversight, especially when we consider that the copyright acknowledgments found in The Panther and the Lash identify Negro Digest as the place where the poem was "first published." Still, their thorough concordance ignores the poem completely.

This disregard for "Mississippi--1955" has lead to an even more glaring problem. In some ways, we could say that "Mississippi--1955" survives in part in its revised offspring "Mississippi." While some of the poem does not make it from its original form to the codified Collected Poems version, a good portion of it does. What doesn't survive these revisions is Emmett Till. Hughes originally wrote the poem in memory of Till ("This poem is written in memory of the dead boy, Emmett Till, whose body was found shot through the head, beaten and bruised, in the Tallahatchie River, 120 miles south of Memphis"), but successive versions of the poem--and erroneous leads as to its initial publication--have all but erased this memory. Of the critical studies listed above, only Rampersad's Life of Langston Hughes mentions Emmett Till. Rampersad does so twice (261, 270), but in neither case does he specify that Hughes wrote a poem in response to the murder. Moreover, a perusal of Mandelik and Schatt's concordance reveals (mis leadingly) that Emmett Till is mentioned only one time in all of Hughes's poetry, in the poem "Ask Your Momma."

Such neglect carries over into areas outside of Hughes studies. In a 1995 essay entitled "Reflections on the Death of Emmett Till," Anne Sarah Rubin surveys scholarly, autobiographical, and literary responses to Till's murder. As Rubin notes, "Some writers described the effect of Emmett Till's murder in their autobiographies and memoirs; others refracted their memories through literature, songs, plays, and poems" (59). Those writers who did this kind of refracting? Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Endesha Ida Mae Holland, Bebe Moore Campbell, and Lewis Nordan. Considering that Hughes's "Mississippi--1955" was one of the first literary responses to the murder--and the first such response by an African-American writer of national reputation--the omission of his work from this list might seem an egregious one, until we consider that Hughes's own revisions have helped to bury the poem. How much can we fault Rubin for not discussing this poem by a major American writer when those who devote themselv es to studying his work do not acknowledge it? The same neglect of Hughes occurs in the most comprehensive study of Till's murder. In Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till, Stephen J. Whitfield, like Sarah Anne Rubin, discusses the enduring influence of Till's murder upon the imagination of writers and artists. Again, Brooks, Baldwin, Morrison, and others are mentioned, but Hughes, not unexpectedly, is not.

Near the end of her essay, Rubin makes a powerful claim about Emmett Till and the operations of social memory. "As he was for so many people," Rubin writes, "Emmett Till's enduring legacy is the variety of memories we have of him. Each Till, innocent or impudent, brash or brutalized, is a piece of collective memory, a facet of not only his specific life but of the civil rights movement as a whole" (63). In failing to remember "Mississippi-- 1955," and its dedication "to the memory of Emmett Till," we are failing to acknowledge the full force of Till's "enduring legacy." Granted, that failure is tied in great part to the decisions Hughes made to write Till out of the poem, to remove, as it were, his "remains." As scholars, however, we can write Till back into the poem. We cannot do this literally, of course, but with proper annotation and recognition of the poem's initial form and dedication, we can remind Hughes's readers of the poem's origin and its proper place within a specific historical discourse. In thi s way, we not only help to put Till's remains back into the poem and assure that it is repositioned in the collective memory, but we also help to resist the effacement of history that marks so much discussion of African-American writing. When, in 1955, the state of Mississippi wanted to bury Till's remains in Mississippi, his mother--Mamie Till Bradley--insisted that her son's casket be returned home to Chicago. When it was, she insisted that her songs remains be displayed for public viewing. She did so, she claimed, because she "want[ed] the whole world to see what they did to my boy." In recovering the original form and dedication of "Mississippi-- 1955," we too keep Till's remains from being buried in a place where they will be, and have been, forgotten. In this way, we too can help the world remember--and, in turn, never forget--what they did to Mrs. Bradley's boy.

Works Cited

Barksdale, Richard K. Langston Hughes: The Poet and His Critics. Chicago: American Library Association, 1977.

Berry, Faith. Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem. Westport: Laurence Hill, 1983.

Davidson, Richard. "A Cause for Justice." Daily Worker11 Oct.1955: 7.

Dickson, Donald C. A Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes, 1902-1967. Hamden: Archon, 1967.

Emanuel, James E. Langston Hughes. Twayne: Boston, 1967.

Huie, William Bradford. Wolf Whistle. New York: New American Library, 1959.

Hughes, Langston. "Brotherly Love." New Republic 18 Aug. 1955:142.

---. "Emmett Till, Mississippi, and Congressional Investigations." Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale U. James Weldon Johnson Papers. Hughes, 317.

---. "Langston Hughes Wonders Why No Lynching Probe." Chicago Defender 1 Oct. 1955: 4.

---. "Mississippi." Negro Digest 14 (Sept 1965): 57.

---. "Mississippi." New Republic 21 Aug. 1955: 23.

---. "Mississippi." The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times. New York: Knopf. 1967. 43.

-----. "Mississippi." Rampersad and Roessel 452.

-----. "Mississippi '55." Michigan Sentinel 29 Sept. 1955: A9.

-----. "Mississippi-1955." Atlanta Daily World 28 Sept. 1955: 3.

-----. "Mississippi-1955." Cleveland Call and Post 1 Oct. 1955: 1 A.

-----. "Mississippi-1955." Daily Worker 26 Sept. 1955: 1.

-----. "Mississippi-1955." Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress. Manuscript Reading Room. Microform Call Number 20, 560. Part 18, Series C, Reel 13.

-----. The Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage, 1959.

Mandelik, Peter, and Stanley Schatt. Concordance to the Poetry of Langston Hughes. Detroit: Gale, 1975.

Miller, R. Baxter. Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1989.

Moon, Henry Lee. Press Release. 23 Sept.1955. Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress. Manuscript Reading Room. Microform Call Number 20, 560. Part 18, Series C, Reel 13.

Rampersad, Arnold. Life of Langston Hughes: Vol 2: 1941-1967, I Dream a World. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988.

Rampersad, Arnold, and David Roessel, eds. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage, 1994.

Rubin, Anne Sarah. "Reflections on the Death of Emmett Till." Southern Cultures 2 (Fall 1995): 44-66.

Whitfield, Stephen J. Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till. New York: Free P, 1986.

"Will Mississippi Whitewash the Emmett Till Slaying?" Jet 24 Sept. 1955: 9-11.

Associate Professor of English at Samford University. His essays on Southern history and literature have appeared in Mississippi Quarterly. American Literary History, the Southern Quarterly, and the Southern Review. He is the editor of The Lynching of Emmett 7711: A Documentary Narrative (UP of Virginia, 2002) and is engaged in a book-length study of Southern writers and the Civil Rights Movement.