A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till.

• Author: Howard, Jennifer

A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till.

Stephen J. Whitfield. Free Press, $19.95. Though the circumstances and the victims were worlds apart, the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, like the death of John F. Kennedy eight years later, shocked a generation out of its innocence. Yet for more than 30 years, Till has been relegated to the status of a footnote. Whitfield's book places Till's murder as a crucial, if hidden, event in the history of civil rights.

In August 1955, the 14-year-old Till traveled from Chicago to visit relatives in the Mississippi Delta. Once there, he whistled at, and perhaps propositioned, a white woman named Carolyn Bryant, wife of a local grocery store owner in a town called Money. Shortly after the encounter, Bryant's husband, Roy, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, apparently dragged Till out of bed, beat him, shot him, and tossed his body into the Tallahatchie River. When the badly mutilated corpse turned up several days later, Till's family identified Bryant and Milam as the men who had kidnapped the boy. They were arrested, brought to trial on kidnapping and murder charges, and speedily acquitted by an all-white jury. Soon after, they sold their story to a Look magazine writer in lurid, lucrative detail, all but confessing to the crime.

Countless blacks have been the victims of vigilante violence in the South; but Till's murder, coming as it did only months after Brown v. Board of Education put Jim Crow under a death sentence, hit blacks especially hard. As white politicians played to southern white hysteria, the Till case suggested...