The Blood of Emmett Till

This extraordinary New York Times bestseller reexamines a pivotal event of the civil rights movementthe 1955 lynching of Emmett Tilland demands that we do the one vital thing we arent often enough asked to do with history: learn from it (The Atlantic).

* A New York Times Notable Book * A Washington Post Notable Book * Longlisted for the National Book Award * Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award *An NPR, Los Angeles Times, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution Best Book of the Year *

In 1955, white men in the Mississippi Delta lynched a fourteen-year-old from Chicago named Emmett Till. His murder was part of a wave of white terrorism in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared public school segregation unconstitutional. Only weeks later, Rosa Parks thought about young Emmett as she refused to move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Five years later, Black students who called themselves the Emmett Till generation launched sit-in campaigns that turned the struggle for civil rights into a mass movement. Tills lynching became the most notorious hate crime in American history.

But what actually happened to Emmett Tillnot the icon of injustice, but the flesh-and-blood boy? Part detective story, part political history, The Blood of Emmett Till unfolds like a movie (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution), drawing on a wealth of new evidence, including a shocking admission of Tills innocence from the woman in whose name he was killed. Jolting and powerful (The Washington Post), the book provides fresh insight into the way race has informed and deformed our democratic institutions (Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Carry Me Home) and calls us to the cause of justice today (Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, president of the North Carolina NAACP). See more