Emmett Till, a Black 14-year-old from Chicago, was brutally murdered while visiting Mississippi Delta relatives during the summer of 1955.
A few weeks later, an all-white, all-male Mississippi jury deliberated for 68 minutes before acquitting two local white men – men who had previously confessed to abducting Till and who would later admit, in a national publication, to having murdered him.
The crime and trial weren’t the first of their kind, but their circumstances and timing (shortly after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision) forced racial hatred and injustice onto America’s front pages and accelerated a growing civil rights movement. Soon after, in neighboring Alabama, Rosa Parks would have Emmett Till on her mind as she refused to move to the back of a Montgomery bus.
Scores of U.S. and foreign reporters attended the murder trial, including New York journalist Dan Wakefield, a Broad Ripple native and recent Columbia graduate who covered the story for The Nation magazine. Wakefield’s article, “Justice in Sumner,” captured the horror of those events, the absurdity of that legal proceeding, the mood of that place, and the fear and fury of those people – but it also suggested, in microcosm, much of the larger story of race in mid-20th century America.
Since then, Dan Wakefield, now age 90, has had a celebrated career in writing – as journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and teacher – and more recently as a keeper of the Kurt Vonnegut flame.
On Wednesday, March 8, he will return to the Emmett Till story, reflecting on what it taught him at the time and what it means to him today, almost seven decades later.
The public is invited and admission is free for the 6 p.m. event at Northminster Presbyterian Church, 1660 Kessler Blvd. E. Drive, Indianapolis. For those preferring to participate virtually, live-streaming instructions will be available on the church’s website, northminster-indy.org.