The Ballads of Emmett Till

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Archive on 4: The Ballads of Emmett Till

BBC Radio 4 - Archive on 4, The Ballads of Emmett Till

Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi in 1955. His death still haunts America.

Emmett Till, 14 and black, was lynched in Mississippi on August 28 1955. Maria Margaronis travels through landscape and memory to explore stories around a black life that mattered.

Emmett Till, 14 and black, was put on the train from Chicago by his mother Mamie in August 1955. She got him back in a pine box. His corpse mutilated and stinking. He had been beaten, shot and dumped in the Tallahatchie River for supposedly whistling at a white woman. His killers would forever escape justice. 

What Mamie did next helped galvanise the Civil Rights Movement and make Emmett the sacrificial lamb of the movement. From the very first, Till's death was both a call to political action and the subject of songs, poetry and prose. Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and many more have been drawn to tell his tale - his is the never-ending ballad of a black life that mattered.

His disfigured image from the legendary photograph in Jet magazine is seared into the memories of generations of Black Americans. And now Till has returned to haunt America. Taken up by the mothers and fathers of the slain in the Black Lives Matter movement, the subject of new documentaries, a trio of forthcoming Hollywood films and a new FBI investigation as the search for justice continues. His coffin lies at the heart of Washington's new museum of African-American history - a secular shrine and symbol of the enduring pain of American racism.

Maria Margaronis draws on archive from Washington University St Louis, home to the interviews for the groundbreaking series Eyes on the Prize and rare recordings of the Till family conducted by filmmaker Keith Beauchamp. She travels through landscape and memory across Mississippi and Chicago, listening to historians, poets, writers and Till family members as she grapples with the many layers of meaning and the many, many ways Emmett's story has been told and retold. These are the Ballads of Emmett Till.


Producer Mark Burman

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