Death in the Delta
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€21.99
1950s
20th century
A01=Stephen J. Whitfield
American South
Author_Stephen J. Whitfield
biography
black history
Category=DNBH
Category=JBSL1
civil rights
civil rights movement
courts
cultural history
Delta
Emmett Till
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Jim Crow law
lynching
Mississippi murder
race relations
racism
Product details
- ISBN 9780801843266
- Weight: 318g
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 27 Dec 1991
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In August 1955, the mutilated body of Emmett Till-a fourteen-year-old black Chicago youth-was pulled from Mississippi's Tallahatchie River. Abducted, severely beaten, and finally thrown into the river with a weight fastened around his neck with barbed wire, Till, an eighth-grader, was killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman. The nation was horrified by Till's death. When the all-white, all-male jury hastily acquitted the two white defendants, the outcry reached a frenzied pitch-spurring a fury that would prove critical in the mobilization of black resistance to white racism in the Deep South. In this sensitive inquiry, historian Stephen J. Whitfield probes Till's death; its ideological roots; the potent myths concerning race, sexuality, and violence; and the incident's enduring effects on American national life. As he recreates the trial, its participants, and the social structure of the Delta, Whitfield examines how white rural Mississippians actually tried "two of their own."
Though they were acquitted, these same defendants were soon being ostracized by their own neighbors, and within four months of Till's death, Southern blacks were staging the historic Montgomery bus boycott-the first major battle in the coming war against racial injustice that would lead to the passage of civil rights legislation a decade later.
Stephen J. Whitfield is Max Richter Chair in American Civilization at Brandeis University. He is the author of A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till and A Critical American: The Politics of Dwight Macdonald
