Emmett Till:sacrificial Lamb Of...

Most historians mark the modern Civil Rights Movement with the 1956 Montgomery Bus boycott, or the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court Brown versus Topeka, Kansas Board of Education decision. They have yet, however, to fully gauge the impact of the 1955, widely publicized, lynching of the 14-year-old Black Chicago youth, Emmett Louis Till, & the subsequent mock trial of his assailants as the genesis of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Emmett whistled at a twenty-one-year-old White woman, Carolyn Bryant, a naive gesture of one going through the rites of passage. After which, he was abducted at gunpoint in the middle of the night (2:30 am) by the twenty-four-year-old husband, Roy Bryant & his thirty-six-year-old half-brother, J.W. Milam. The incident culminated in the brutal lynching of the youth, who had been mutilated, shot in the head & tossed in the Tallahatchie River, naked with a seventy-pound cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. All this happened just three months & three days before Mrs. Parks' personal demonstration. However, because Till's bloated face was the embodiment of the ugliness of American racism, America found the need & desire to attach itself to a more palatable incident. To order contact: Bedford Publishers, Inc., 4198 Carson Drive, Troy, MI 48098. (313) 641-5063.Hudson-Weems, Clenora is the author of 'Emmett Till:sacrificial Lamb Of...' with ISBN 9780911557077 and ISBN 0911557075.