The Blood of Emmett Till

The Blood of Emmett Till is a 2017 nonfiction book by Timothy B. Tyson. The text provides an account of the 1955 murder of a young African American boy named Emmet Till. Till was visiting Mississippi from Chicago, where his parents had emigrated during the Great Migration of the 1920s. They sought employment in the North, but they also sought to escape from the terror exercised by whites on blacks in the South.

The Civil War ended slavery, but it did not end white racism or the idea common among Southern whites that blacks should submit to white rule. During Reconstruction (1865 to 1877), Northern whites sought to change the South’s racial caste system by making free blacks more self-sufficient and independent of whites. They also made it possible for blacks to participate in government for the first time and to vote. Southern whites fought back, and after Reconstruction, they instituted rules collectively known as Jim Crow Laws that made black Americans into second-class citizens who were deprived of their rights and forced to live in menial circumstances. The doctrine of white supremacy was used to justify this continuation of slavery; according to its assumptions, blacks had to defer to whites or be treated with violence.