What Really Killed Emmett Till (1955) w/ Wright Thompson
This Day
Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia
4.6 • 982 Ratings
🗓️ 3 December 2024
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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It's December 3rd. This day in 1955, the Civil Rights movement is gaining attention across the South and the country, due in part to the protest by Rosa Parks, and the death of 14-year-old Emmett Till earlier that summer. Both acts are often portrayed as singular moments of protest and tragedy, but understanding them in context requires us to address much harder questions.
Jody, Niki, and Kellie are joined by Wright Thompson, author of "The Barn," to discuss Till's death and his work to place the murder in a centuries-long history of Mississippi, slavery, memory, and more.
Wright's new book is available now wherever you get your books!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan. |
| 0:11.6 | This day, December 1955, Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, was arrested after refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama, City bus. |
| 0:22.1 | People know this story. We've talked about Rosa Parks a ton on this show, and many of our |
| 0:25.4 | conversations in the show have tried to put her in larger context. She wasn't just one woman who |
| 0:30.5 | decided on her own to refuse to give up her seat, but she was the product of a social and political |
| 0:35.4 | effort to challenge segregation in the South. |
| 0:37.7 | She'd been trained by the NWACP. |
| 0:39.9 | She'd also been inspired by other moments in the burgeoning civil rights movement. |
| 0:44.8 | And one thing that particularly stood out was the murder of Emmett Till earlier that year in August of 55. |
| 0:52.0 | Till was a 14-year-old boy who traveled from Chicago to Mississippi on August 28th. He |
| 0:57.3 | was abducted and brutally murdered. It was an incident that gained widespread media attention and |
| 1:02.2 | remains one of the touchstone moments in the civil rights era. But I mentioned both Parks and |
| 1:06.8 | Till because in some ways they are both seen as these kind of spontaneous acts, these moments that just |
| 1:12.9 | appeared. In one, Parks refuses to give up her seat, and the other there's this brutal murder |
| 1:17.3 | of a black boy by some white thugs over some perceived slight. And of course, a little digging |
| 1:22.6 | into history reveals that both of these acts and most moments of history exist in a much richer |
| 1:27.2 | context. They're products of larger forces that make of these acts and most moments of history exist in a much richer context. |
| 1:27.9 | They're products of larger forces that make those individual actions resonate and implicate |
| 1:33.3 | all of us. So, joining us now is the great Wright Thompson who has done just that work of providing |
| 1:40.4 | context in his new book, The Barn, which reexamines the Emmett Till death, but puts it into |
| 1:44.7 | that context of not just that moment, but the vast historical sweep of the South and the Mississippi |
| 1:50.0 | Delta going many, many, many centuries back and forward to today. But it is all grounded in |
... |
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