The Lynching of Emmett Till: a Documentary Narrative.

The Lynching, of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative. Edited by Christopher Metress. The American South Series. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2002. Pp. xvi, 360. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8139-2122-8; cloth, $59.50, ISBN 0-8139-2121-X.)

This brilliant compilation of primary documents takes readers back to dirt-road Mississippi in the summer of 1955. Newspaper accounts, editorial opinions, court testimony, photographs, memoirs, and literary representations track the lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till and the trial of his alleged killers.

Emmett Till was a city boy from black Chicago whose mother sent him to visit kinfolk in rural Mississippi for the summer. He did not survive two weeks. This crossroads of sharecroppers was so removed from the northern ghetto that Till could not have escaped seeming different, at a time when the very structure of racial subordination in the South was directly threatened by the recent Supreme Court order to desegregate. As it was, Till spoke to the white woman who ran the local store in a manner that, when her husband heard of it three days later, ended with Till's brutal death. Till's confessed kidnappers were acquitted of the killing. To the authors of some of the documents included in this collection, the fact that there was a trial seemed proof that the judicial system worked. Other sources, however, substantiate how many ways it failed.

Although this work is subtitled A Documentary Narrative, it is actually a compendium of strongly competing and often contradictory narratives that makes for compelling reading. Historians have found lynchings unusually difficult to study despite both their frequency and their public nature, in part because of evidentiary mysteries attached to these phenomena that defy resolution. Even physical evidence in the Till case is far from incontrovertible. When they fished his corpse from the Tallahatchie River, for instance, Till's remains were so disfigured that one can still debate whether what had punctured his head was a bullet or the bit of a drill. Looking at the grisly photograph of his body in the casket, left open at his mother's insistence that the world witness what had become of her boy, it is not hard to understand how the defense at the trial found the effrontery to cast doubt on a mother's ability to recognize her own son's remains. Chasing shadows and peering through appearances to piece together some sense of actuality, the reader becomes his or her own historian, and instructors will find this collection to be extraordinarily effective in the classroom.

Writing in this journal months before the Till killing in 1955, Francis B. Simkins distinguished, he claimed, "the most important fact in Southern history." "Two biologically aggressive races have dwelt together in large numbers for 335 years," Simkins noted, "without the ruling race losing its integrity of blood." He insisted that "Without this fact there would be no South in the social or psychological sense; the region between the Potomac and the Rio Grande would be just a geographical expression" ("Tolerating the South's Past," Journal of Southern History, 21 [February 1955], p. 7). For those who seek to explore the rigid racial and sexual hierarchies that defined and maintained that South's meaning, The Lynching of Emmett Till is a gripping, painful, and obvious place to start a stark journey.

Yet there is quite a bit more to the tale. This anthology demonstrates the degree of change that has transpired since 1955 by tracking the ways the Till case has worked its way into the collective memory of contemporary Americans. Although David Halberstam identified the Till case as "The first great media event of the civil rights movement," it has also continually resurfaced in the folk culture ever since (p. 44). As editor Christopher Metress notes, during the 1990s alone over a dozen poems, plays, and other literary works either addressed or alluded to the story of Emmett Till. This legacy of the killing is captured here in deftly selected memoirs and literary expressions that force readers to reflect on the nature and causes of cultural change. Metress has compiled a powerfully instructive study.

VINCENT VINIKAS

University of Arkansas at Little Rock