The Emmett Till Trauma in US Fiction

My immense gratitude also goes to Dr. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard for bringing me the opportunity to spend my research stay at the University of California, Irvine, and for her inspiring feedback on what later became the second section in Chapter 1. Many thanks to every of the members of the “Words of World Survival seminar” for including me in such a necessary and stimulating academic experience. At UCI, my thanks go to Dr. Salvador Zárate, Robert Escalante, and Jennifer Choy for being of immeasurable help from my very arrival at the School of Humanities. For welcoming at his home and treating me like family from the beginning, I want to express my sincere gratitude to Joe Klema.

Dr. Susana Jiménez Placer, Dr. Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis, and Dr. Carme Manuel Cuenca read an early version of this book and provided me with precious insights, for which I am immensely grateful. At the University of A Coruña, I am especially grateful to Dr. Begoña Simal González for welcoming me so kindly into the faculty, and for including me in the research project L&G2 (ref. PID2019-106798GB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033). Many thanks to my colleagues in L&G2 for their generosity and help since my incorporation into the project, John Barlow for his astute suggestions on the introduction and the conclusion, and Kelly Rickert for very kindly ceding his Emmett Till artwork for the cover. At Peter Lang, my sincere gratitude goes to Dr. Phil Dunshea and Abdur Rawoof, as well as the whole team, for their professionalism and generous assistance throughout all the stages of the publication of this book.

Finally, I cannot express enough gratitude to my parents, Celia and José Antonio, and my little brother Marcos for being always there for me; to my dear friends in Santiago and further latitudes for keeping me sane; and to Estela for joining me on the way and bringing her light into my life.

The anti-racist demonstrations against police brutality that followed Floyd’s death were already passionate and widespread when, on August 23, an unarmed black male, Jacob Blake, was shot seven times in the back by police authorities in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Two days after the incident, members and representatives of Blake’s family gave a press conference in which Letetra Wideman, his younger sister, evoked the collective experience of the African American community in verbalizing her pain and anger:

Unlike the other victims named here, Blake did not lose his life, although he might never walk again. Yet thanks to his family and community, his story has created a strong will for change and justice, this in the name of the long list of victims of racial violence. In light of this ill-fated theme in US history, it is particularly revealing to focus on a single name, one which has become deeply ingrained in the African American collective imaginary, invoked repeatedly by victims of racial violence and civil rights activists alike in their struggle for racial justice and equality. This name is Emmett Till, and indeed his face can be also seen on Nelson’s celebrated New Yorker cover.

Emmett Till’s gruesome murder has not ceased to haunt the African American collective imaginary since the fateful day of August 28, 1955, in the Mississippi Delta. Two southern white supremacists kidnapped the fourteen-year-old black youth in the middle of the night, and brutally lynched him in a barn for allegedly flirting with or whistling at a white female storekeeper a couple of days earlier. The horrific nature of Till’s death, along with the controversial acquittal of his killers, followed assiduously by millions of US citizens through the media, gave rise to a mythical narrative that has left an indelible mark on the broader US collective imaginary. Since his lynching, the memory of the young Till has continued to be voiced at rallies, memorials, the arts, storytelling, and in social movements. And, despite almost thirty years in which the academic world did not respond to the heinous incident, his story eventually became the focus of study for many scholars from different disciplines and cultural backgrounds.