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A crime without punishment

The death of Emmett Till (1941–55) continues to stalk the American imagination. On the sixtieth anniversary of his murder in Sunflower Country, Mississippi, independent scholar Devery S. Anderson produced a major act of historical retrieval, Emmett Till: The Murder that Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement. Anderson’s book is expected to be the basis of a six-episode HBO series made for American television. (The executive producers include Will Smith and Jay Z.) In addition, Keith A. Beauchamp, who produced and directed a 2005 documentary, The Untold Story of Emmett Till, has provided the script for a documentary film that Whoopi Goldberg and Fred Zollo are scheduled to produce. (Zollo’s credits include Mississippi Burning and Ghosts of Mississippi.) But Beauchamp’s documentary should not be confused with Stanley Nelson’s Emmy Award-winning The Murder of Emmett Till, which was broadcast in the United States on PBS (Public Broadcasting System) in 2003. Finally, Jerry Mitchell, whose investigative reporting focuses on hate crime in the South, is reported to be writing the screenplay for yet another film, to be produced by Michael De Luca, and directed by John Singleton, who was nominated for an Oscar for his direction of Boyz N the Hood (1991). At the Whitney Biennial in the spring of 2017, the Brooklyn-based painter Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016), inspired by the ghastly photograph of the tortured face of Till in his coffin, stirred widespread debate. Who, the questioners asked, can properly serve as custodians of African American memory? Schutz claimed to have identified with the grief of Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. Dissenters instead charged the artist with callow exploitation of black suffering. In the world of print, at least two Young Adult books have appeared that recount Till’s murder. This genre is grimly fitting because the books’ subject had just turned fourteen when he was murdered, a crime that went unpunished. The novelist John Edgar Wideman has recently published a short book on the execution of the father of Emmett Till, entitled Writing to Patterns of Prejudice, 2017 Vol. 51, No. 5, 453–459, https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2017.1393127