Author Talks: Emmett Till: True Stories of An American Tragedy

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In August 1955, a fourteen-year-old black boy visiting Mississippi from Chicago named Emmett Till was abducted from his family’s home in the middle of the night by white men who believed that Till had harassed one of their wives; he was beaten, murdered, and dumped in a river with a cotton-gin fan tied to his neck by barbed wire. The atrocity, which persisted during the trial of his killers and their acquittal by an all-white jury, rattled a nation and helped fuel the modern civil rights movement. Two groundbreaking accounts of the lynching that changed a generation re-examine the life, death, and legacy of Emmett Till. Historian Timothy Tyson and PEN Award–winning author John Edgar Wideman will speak about their new books, The Blood of Emmett Till and Writing to Save a Life, with historian Nell Irvin Painter, author of the New York Times bestseller The History of White People.

Timothy Tyson’s The Blood of Emmett Till records one of the most comprehensive accounts of Emmett Till’s story, using for the first time trial transcripts that had gone missing for a half century and a revelatory interview with Carolyn Bryant, the woman Till had supposedly harassed, near the end of her life. John Edgar Wideman’s Writing to Save a Life plumbs the story through Louis Till, Emmett’s father, who was hanged for rape and murder by the U.S. Army in Italy a decade before his son’s death.

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 U.S. 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.

John Edgar Wideman’s books include Philadelphia Fire, Brothers and Keepers, Fatheralong, Hoop Roots, and Sent for You Yesterday. He is a MacArthur Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he has won the PEN/Faulkner Award twice and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award. He divides his time between New York and France.

Nell Irvin Painter is the author of many books, including the New York Times bestseller The History of White People, as well as Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol; Southern History Across the Color Line; Creating Black Americans, and Standing at Armageddon: The United States 1877–1919. She is currently the Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University and was Director of Princeton’s Program in African-American Studies from 1997 to 2000. She lives in Newark, New Jersey, and the Adirondacks.

Program is free, but advance registration is recommended.

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