Remembering Emmett Till: Reflections on Geography, Race, and Memory

ABSTRACT

This essay uses the commemoration of Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta to explore the connections among race, geography, and memory. I provide four examples of how race and memory have conspired to fundamentally alter the geography of the Delta. I suggest that these four examples challenge the historic articulation of memory and site. While site is traditionally figured as a stable ground for commemorative work, I suggest that practices of commemoration can transform sites of memory. I conclude by previewing a collaborative, digital, public humanities initiative called the Emmett Till Memory Project. The project seeks to commemorate Till’s murder even as it alters the meaning and practice of commemoration.

On September 21, 1955, the Memphis Press-Scimitar published the first map of Emmett Till’s murder (Porteus, “New Till Evidence” 1). It was a hand-drawn map of three counties: Leflore County, where Emmett Till was kidnapped; Tallahatchie County, where the trial of killers Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam was then in session; and Sunflower County, where, one day later, Willie Reed would testify that he heard J.W. Milam beat Emmett Till to death. Every detail of the map was contested. The counsel for the defense argued that the entire Till affair should be confined to Leflore County. Their version of the story began and ended at Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market in Money, MS.¹ This was the site where, on August 24, 1955, Emmett Till whistled at a twenty-one-year-old shopkeeper named Carolyn Bryant (Anderson 22–38). The winner of two white beauty pageants, Bryant’s storied allure gave the legal defense team their most predictable—and powerful—argument: Till had physically assaulted the “fairest flower of Southern womanhood” (Tyson 4). Although Bryant would later admit it never happened, she testified under oath that Till put his arms around her, held her by the waist, and propositioned her (Tyson 6; U.S. Dept. of Justice 269). Three days later, the defense attorneys explained, Carolyn’s husband Roy and his half-brother J.W. Milam kidnapped Emmett Till, questioned him, and then turned him loose near the grocery store (Anderson 370–71). From the perspective of the legal defense team, Till’s body never left Leflore County. Indeed, it was never further than three miles away from Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market.

The prosecution offered a different geography. According to its account, the Till affair began, not at the Bryant store in Money, but rather at the homestead of Till’s uncle Moses Wright on Dark Fear Road. From this site in rural Leflore County, the prosecution argued, the killers took Till to a barn thirty miles west in Sunflower County. After they tortured and killed him in this barn, they drove his body to Tallahatchie County where they attached it to a cotton-gin fan with a length of barbed wire and sank it in the Tallahatchie River (U.S. Dept. of Justice 213f).

From the perspective of the defense, the geography of the murder was inextricably bound to the race of the victim. Defense lawyer Sidney Carlton instructed the jury that there was “nothing reasonable about the state’s theory that Bryant and Milam kidnapped Till in Leflore County, drove several miles to a plantation in Sunflower County, then doubled back into Tallahatchie County to dump the body” (qtd. in Herbers 7). His colleague, John Whitten, then added, “Every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men” (Wakefield 285). Thus it was that the jury retreated to its chambers to consider two arguments, one about race and the other about geography. When they emerged sixty-seven minutes later, their acquittal was a referendum on both counts: the disposability of black lives was confirmed and Sunflower County was officially excised from the itinerary of Till’s murder.

I begin with this anecdote because it perfectly captures the politics of being on site. Even the single most basic geographic question—where was Till killed?—was politically loaded. In what follows, I tell the stories of two counties and two towns, all of which have been refashioned in significant ways by the memory Till’s murder. The counties are Sunflower County and Tallahatchie County, the two live options of where Till was killed. The towns are Money, MS, in Leflore County, where Till whistled and from which he was abducted, and Glendora, MS, an impoverished hamlet that boasts the first Till museum and the greatest density of Till memorials anywhere in the world.

These counties and towns are object lessons in the politics of being on site. As I tell these four stories, I make obvious the stunning array of ingredients active in the designation of site. First, I talk about money, because every site I mention has been paid for, either by grants, bribery, or extortion. Second, I talk about the topography of the northwest corner of Mississippi, a bioregion known simply as the Delta. Here I am concerned with the path of its rivers, the management of its water, and the improvement of its roads, because these too have provided for Till’s memory. Third, I talk about the affective power of broken things and the nostalgia for midcentury rural life, because these continue to influence what it means to be on the site of Till’s murder. Finally, I talk about race in almost every sentence because racial politics influences every last thing we know about the geography of Till’s murder.

Indeed, in the case of Till’s murder and his memory, the collusion of race and geography has been so pronounced for so long that the two categories—race and geography—have become virtually indistinguishable. The commemoration of Till’s murder has made geography a purchase point for racism and racism has, as it were, spread itself out, unevenly, within the various topographies and jurisdictions of the Mississippi Delta to such an extent that things as otherwise innocuous as hills, bridges, river beds, apartments, and county lines begin to appear as evidence of racial politics and as agents in the never-quite-settled question of where Till was killed.

By highlighting the complexity of being on site, I want to rethink the traditional articulation of memory and site—a well-worn thematic in the history of rhetoric. As Frances A. Yates explains, the art of memory entered the “European tradition” through the art of rhetoric (18). Linking the arts of rhetoric and memory was the notion of site or place. From Cicero through the Renaissance, orators trained their memory by inserting images of objects they wished to remember into real or fictional sites. The ur-moment of this tradition is the much-repeated tale of the poet Simonides, who could recall every guest at an ill-fated banquet by remembering the place in which they were seated. From this story, it became a commonplace “to be forever repeated down through the ages” that, “memory is established from places” (Yates 22).

While the current field of memory studies, born in the early 1990s, is, of course, a long way from the ars memorativa described by Yates, two similarities must be stressed. First, much like the antique mnemotechnic tradition, the commemorative turn in the modern humanities has been shepherded by the field of rhetoric. Second, despite the fact that the modern instantiation of memory studies is not driven by the needs of orators to remember their speeches, it is nonetheless equally fixated on concepts of site and place. Indeed, the commemorative turn in rhetorical studies was effected by a series of studies focused on particular places: museums, memorials, coffee shops, shopping centers, and suburbs (Dickinson; Dickinson et al.; Foote; Gallagher; Jorgensen-Earp and Lanzilotti; Pezzulo).

From the collapsed banquet hall through the commemorative turn in rhetorical studies, site has served as a relatively stable term compared to the variance of memory. Site secures memory, anchors memory, modifies memory, intensifies memory, and even performs memory. In each of these formulations, the role of sites vis-à-vis memory is to function, in Ed Casey’s terms, as stabilitas loci—places that in their stability provide a reference point for memory (28). My four stories challenge the stabilitas of loci. They reverse the conventional direction of influence, suggesting that an essential part of memory work is the remaking of place. If place can function as a reminder, it is equally true that memory is a form of replacement—of transforming what it means to be on site. More than anything else, I want to demonstrate how Emmett Till’s memory has transformed the sites of his murder—four times over.

I conclude by sharing just a bit about the Emmett Till Memory Project, a collaborative, digital humanities project that aims to rethink the articulation of site and memory. It aims to make geography both a political and mnemonic resource in the Delta’s burgeoning Emmett Till memory industry.

Story #1: The Erasure of Sunflower County

The first story begins at 7:00 p.m. on the night of October 28, 1955, two months after the murder and one month after the trial. On that evening, the freelance journalist William Bradford Huie met with two of the murderers, their wives, and their lawyers to share a bottle of whiskey and swap stories. Huie wanted to tell the story of Till’s murder for Look magazine, but the murder was two months in the past, and he knew his only chance of publishing yet another story was if he told it from the perspective of the murderers themselves, so he paid them. He paid murderers J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant $3,150 and their lawyers $1,269. In exchange, they signed consent and release forms. This was the price of publication, as Look refused to print the story unless every named participant signed a waiver. This form had a profound influence on the geography of Till’s murder (Tell, Confessional Crises 63–90).

In letters of October 12 and October 18, Huie told his boss at Look that he knew that four men were involved in the murder: he boasted that he could name them all. But by October 23, he had learned that he could only obtain waivers from the two men who had already been tried and were therefore no longer in legal jeopardy. So, he wrote his boss another letter: “There were not, after all, four men in the abduction-and-murder party: there were only two” (Huie). And thus, because he could only obtain two consent and release forms, the murder party shrank from four people to two people. And this, in turn, would move the murder site across county lines.

During the trial, Willie Reed testified that the murder happened in a barn near the town of Drew in Sunflower County. The FBI confirmed this in 2006 (U.S. Dept. of Justice 91). But Huie could not tell this story. The only reason the murder happened in Sunflower County was that J.W. Milam’s brother Leslie there managed the Sturdivant plantation, on which there was a barn sufficiently isolated for purposes of the night. But Leslie Milam had not been tried, he did not sign a release form, and thus he could not be implicated in Huie’s story. So Huie moved the murder 16.5 miles east, to an abandoned spot of riverbank along the Tallahatchie River in Tallahatchie County.

In January 1956, this was an unprecedented geography. As you will recall, during the trial, the dispute was between a one-county version of the affair championed by the defense and a three-county version championed by the prosecution. Because Huie was the first one to suggest a two-county version of the murder, in which Till was kidnapped in Leflore County before being killed and disposed of in Tallahatchie County, the influence of his story is relatively easy to track. Every single map of the murder published between 1956 and 2005 placed the murder in Tallahatchie County and left Sunflower county off the map entirely. To this day, the murder site sits unmarked, on private property, on the premises of a local dentist, and Sunflower County remains the only relevant county in the Mississippi Delta without a single built memorial to Till’s murder.

Thus it was that Sunflower county was, for the second time, written out of Till’s story. The jury wrote it out the first time, when it accepted the one-county version of the story offered by the defense. You might think of this as a first, faltering attempt to give racism greater latitude by erasing Sunflower County. It was not convincing. Between the verdict in September and the Look article in January, stories of Sunflower County circulated widely: in the California Eagle; in the lectures of T R.M. Howard; and even from the pulpit of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. But Huie succeeded where the jury failed: his two-county geography was reproduced time and again. It eliminated in a single gesture both Sunflower County and the complicity of at least two murderers. Two counties, two murderers: this is the story that has been circulated by the best-intentioned commemorators. In 1987, the celebrated Eyes on the Prize documentary placed the murder in Tallahatchie County. In 2003, Stanley Nelson’s PBS documentary actually used video footage from Sunflower County, but the voiceover claimed that the footage came from Tallahatchie County (American Experience). Both of these documentaries limited the murder party to two people. Ever since Huie, the presence or absence of Sunflower County is a heuristic for the size of the murder party and, by extension, the percentage of that party that was never even brought to trial.² The fact that there is not a single marker in Sunflower County makes it seem as though the landscape itself would prefer to erase the complicity of Leslie Milam in the murder of Emmett Till.

Story #2: The Emergence of Tallahatchie County

The Mississippi Delta is what environmental historian Mikko Saikku has called a “hydraulic regime”—a bioregion in which cultural and economic power are tied to the management of water (Saikku 139). In this regard, it is important to note that the Tallahatchie River splits Tallahatchie County in half geographically, ecologically, and culturally. The western half of the county is in The Delta—the fertile floodplain of the Mississippi River known for its topsoil and its aristocratic planters. The eastern half is in “hill country.” Because the flooding of the Tallahatchie River prevented passage between the Delta and the hills, the county has had two courthouses since 1902, Sumner serving the Delta and Charleston serving the hills (Porteous, “Jury Being Chosen” 4). In 1949, six years before the Till trial was held in Sumner, Tallahatchie County built a through-truss bridge on State Highway 32 over the Tallahatchie River. The river was now passable year-round and there was no longer a compelling rationale for two courthouses. Unsurprisingly, as the economy in the Delta faltered and as their (now redundant) courthouse fell into disrepair, residents of Sumner feared that the legal industry would be consolidated in the larger city of Charleston (MacLean 87–91). If the town of Sumner was going to survive, it had to save its unneeded and ill-repaired courthouse, a high task in times of austerity.³

It was in this context that a state legislator told Tallahatchie County’s first black supervisor, Jerome Little, that he was sitting on a gold mine. While there was no tax money to repair the courthouse, the memory of Emmett Till could be capitalized on to provide grant money to restore the courthouse to its 1955 condition. Within days of this meeting, Little formed the Emmett Till Memorial Commission (ETMC) and gave it the double charge of saving the Sumner Courthouse by commemorating Emmett Till (MacLean 87–91).

Racism coursed through the 18-member ETMC. This was hardly surprising, given that two of the black members grew up as sharecroppers on plantations owned by two of the white members. For this reason, the commission’s double charge (to remember Till and to secure the financial stability of the town) split the ETMC down the middle. The nine black members wanted racial justice; the nine white members wanted the economic benefits of a courthouse. One of them even went on record: “We see this Till thing as a mechanism for saving the courthouse” (Barton and Leonard 314). Despite competing motivations, the project actually worked: a renovated courthouse turned out to be the perfect midpoint between a white desire for revenue and a black desire to see Till’s murder commemorated. The results are beautiful and the building now functions as both an operating courthouse and an operating Emmett Till memorial.

From the perspective of the ETMC, the hopes that a renovated courthouse would provide a fiscal windfall were not pinned entirely on a rejuvenated legal industry. They were also pinned on tourism. By 2009, the Emmett Till Memorial Commission was also the county’s official advisory board on tourism. And, by 2010, the leading members of the Emmett Till Memorial Commission also served on the Emmett Till Public Relations Commission—a body that pursued tourism and memory indiscriminately (ETMC).

In this context, it is hardly surprising that on October 2, 2007, the day the Till family was in town for the dedication of the restored courthouse, the ETMC announced its most ambitious county-wide tourism project: an Emmett Till Trail, a series of eight road-side markers funded by Morgan Freeman and spread throughout the county (McFerrin 6). Several of these signs have fascinating political and intellectual histories, and I will come back to one of them in the conclusion, but for now I simply want to draw attention to the location of the seven signs. Every single one of them is in Tallahatchie County. While the commission entertained the idea of placing three signs in Leflore County, and even drafted prose for a sign in Sunflower County, it eventually decided not to invest outside the county’s borders.

Thanks to the efforts of the ETMC, Tallahatchie County is now the self-proclaimed “Emmett Till International Site.” Fourteen of the state’s sixteen Till memorials are located here, and eleven of these fourteen can be traced to the ETMC which, like the courthouse itself, was a political adaptation to the relative levels of water in the MS Delta. A hydraulic regime indeed.

The irony is thick. The murderers no doubt intended that the muddy waters of the Tallahatchie would prove an impenetrable grave. Who could have guessed that a through-truss bridge seventeen miles upstream would set in motion a series of events that would lead to the single largest effort to commemorate Emmett Till ever. The water produced a courthouse and later a bridge. The bridge made the courthouse unnecessary and threatened a town, which responded by forming a memory commission. The memory commission—the largest and most influential of its kind—transformed the landscape of the county. Although Till was neither kidnapped, nor tortured, nor murdered, nor recovered in Tallahatchie County, and although the county had zero memorials until 2005, its landscape is now literally dotted with Till memorials and, on this basis, has earned the right to its preferred title: The Emmett Till International Site.

Story #3: Nostalgia in Money, MS

Although Leflore County did not have a single built memorial to Till’s memory until 2011, the county has long boasted the most-visited Till site, the site where Till whistled at Carolyn Bryant, buried in the ruins of Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, in Money, MS. Let me admit at once the sheer affective power of the spot. If there is anything that puts memory scholars at a loss for words, it is the difficulty of describing the experience of being on site, particularly on sites of violence. Here is one attempt by the noted scholar of memory studies James Young: it is “as if the molecules of such sites still vibrated with the memory their past” (Memory’s Edge 62). Although I do not believe molecules vibrate from the force of the past, I have experienced the affective charge of a memory-laden landscape. It was on the site of Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market in July, 2014, that Simeon Wright told me his story of sharing a bed with Emmett Till for two hours on the last night of Till’s life. The molecules vibrated for me that day. However imprecise it may be, Young’s language of vibration gives eloquent expression to the fact that the power of these sites is affective rather than cognitive; the sites are felt in ways that can never quite be put into words.

Some of this power can surely be traced to the presence of ruins. Ruins—as such—capture the experience of loss more directly than they capture the experience of the past (Young, Texture of Memory 113–208.) In their time-worn materiality, in their conspicuous brokenness, they bear witness not simply to the past—in this case 1955—but to the passage of time, and to the violence of that passage. As Kenneth Foote put it, ruins offer involuntary evidence of violence (Foote 5).

As powerful as the ruins may be, they are only half the story of Till’s memory in the town of Money. Although you cannot tell by looking, in 2011 the town was the beneficiary of a $206,000 Mississippi Civil Rights Historical Sites grant. The grant went not to Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, the only site in Money with civil rights history. Rather, it went to Ben Roy’s Service Station, a long-shuttered, house-and-canopy style Gulf station that sits precisely sixty-seven feet south of the crumbling grocery.

Because Bryant’s was crumbling and because Ben Roy’s had a covered portico, the grant application reasoned, the gas station had become a default lecture site from which tourists could gaze at the grocery and learn their civil rights history. According to the logic of the grant writers, the gas station’s adjacency to Bryant’s made it a de facto “visitors’ center” and a civil rights landmark in its own right. The grant application puts its case for civil rights dollars like this:

It is very likely that the events that transpired at Bryant’s Grocery … were discussed underneath the front canopy of the adjacent service station; rehabilitating that service station will allow new and future generations of Mississippians … to meet under that canopy and discuss the events surrounding the death of Emmitt Till [sic]. (“Ben Roy’s”)

Thus, with nothing more certain than the possibility that Till’s murder was discussed from this site, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History gave $200,000 to the restoration of Ben Roy’s.

But the renovation, completed in 2014, makes no reference to civil rights history or the building to its north. The original gas pumps have been reinstalled, the living quarters in the back have been well appointed, and Ben Roy’s now stands as a charming, nostalgic period piece, a reminder of day-to-day life at midcentury. Indeed, the only non-original artifacts added to the renovated service station were items such as midcentury furniture (e. g., a green 1960’s couch) that helped to frame Ben Roy’s as a nostalgic period piece rather than a marker of racial injustice.

This is all well and good. But these were not only civil rights dollars, but the grant itself was made to Annette Morgan and Harry Ray Tribble, the family of which owns both Ben Roy’s and Bryant’s Grocery. This raises an interesting question: why was a Mississippi Civil Rights Historical Sites grant invested in a period piece rather than a civil rights historical site, especially when such a site is next door and owned by the grantees?

There are three possible answers to that question. I suspect that all of them contain a measure of truth. First, there is the issue of finances. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History estimated that it would cost in excess of $750,000 simply to stabilize the ruins of Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market (Belinda Stewart Architects). Since Ben Roy’s could be fully restored for less than one third of that cost, it may simply be that Ben Roy’s was a better commemorative deal.

Second, grantees Annette Morgan and Harry Ray Tribble are descendants of Ray Tribble, juror in the Emmett Till trial. The Tribble family bought Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Although they claim to have bought the property unaware of its historical significance, this stretches the bounds of credulity (Williams C2). How a multigenerational Delta family directly involved in the murder could be unaware of Bryant’s history boggles the mind. But one thing is sure, and this is the second reason the family may have diverted rights money to Ben Roy’s. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, the Tribble family ended up on the wrong side of history. It is plausible that the family is simply reticent to allow the crumbling grocery to be turned into a monument to remind passers-by of their patriarch’s complicity in allowing Milam and Bryant to walk free. If the Mississippi rumor mill can be trusted, the family has declined hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of dollars in order to retain control of the ruins (MacLean 233–34; Mitchell).

As believable as the first two answers are, the grant application provides a third rationale: tourism and nostalgia. Tourists spent $53.8 million in Leflore County in 2013. At the time of the grant cycle, the sixtieth anniversary of Till’s murder was imminent and promised to bring many of these tourists to the town of Money, and Ben Roy’s could round out their experience. It could, Mary Annette Morgan wrote in a grant application, provide “a more comprehensive sense of what Money was like some sixty years ago.” It is as if the memory of mid-century injustice, latent in the ruins of the store, needed to be offset by the “nostalgia of a rural community’s gathering place.” Morgan hit nostalgia hard. A restored Ben Roy’s, she wrote, “will allow visitors to step back in time to the summer of 1955 and to rural Money, Mississippi.” At that time, Ben Roy’s was not simply a service station. It was also a “front stoop” for the community, a place where locals went for refreshments and conversation. Markers of racial hierarchy are not totally absent from the restoration. On the north side of the building, the restrooms were once again to be marked “colored” and “white” as they were “during segregation.” But Morgan makes segregation itself seem rather charming. A jukebox once stood on the porch, she wrote, and on weekend nights blacks and whites alike gathered to “shed their work-week blues and enjoy the Jukebox at Ben Roy’s” (“Ben Roy’s”).⁴

Thus we have nostalgia and ruins sixty-seven feet apart from each other. At the level of commemorative technique, the pairing is perfect. Both ruins and nostalgia work by giving material form to the experience of loss. Just as much as the brokenness of ruins, the periodicity of the artifacts at Ben Roy’s—from the midcentury signage to the old-fashioned gas pumps—indicates first and foremost the unrelenting passage of time. And much like ruins, nostalgia works affectively, at the level of the body. Mary Annette ensured this. Despite the fact that museum-like panels or interpretive signage would be the only way to connect Ben Roy’s to the history of civil rights, she has refused to install any interpretive guides. “It’s not going to be a museum with panels and reinterpretations… . . It’s the real thing” (Darden 23). As such, the meaning of Ben Roy’s depends exclusively on the periodicity of the artifacts themselves, their conspicuous distance from the present moment, and their ability, like ruins, to set molecules vibrating and induce the experience of loss.

But if the ruins offer involuntary evidence of the racial violence of rural Mississippi in 1955, the nostalgia recodes that violence as exceptional and out of keeping with the time and place. According to the restoration of Ben Roy’s, 1955 rural Mississippi may have been marked by segregation—note the competing bathrooms—but segregation did not seem to impinge on the social experience of sharing music and conversation on a Saturday night. It was in this sense that Mary Annette Morgan, granddaughter of juror Ray Tribble, could claim that Ben Roy’s offered a “more comprehensive” sense of Till’s memory: it contextualized the undeniable violence of the ruins with the unlikely nostalgia of interracial Saturday nights (“Ben Roys”).

To the extent that tourism and nostalgia explain the investment in Ben Roy’s rather than Bryant’s Grocery, Ben Roy’s is best understood as a counter-memorial. While the ruins of the store bring forward the violence of Jim Crow, the service-station-turned-community-gathering-spot tempers that memory of violence by recalling the charms of the same era. One wonders, however, why the charm of racially promiscuous front-stoop Saturday nights merited civil rights money. In any case, it is worth remembering the recreational habits of one black family from Money, MS: the Wright family. On weekends, this family went not to Ben Roy’s, just two and eight-tenths miles away, but to the segregated streets of downtown Greenwood. On the night of Saturday, August 27, 1955, the Wright boys took their cousin Emmett to Johnson Street for a night of big crowds, drinking, and gazing at nightclubs (Wright 54–55). Ninety minutes after they returned to Money, Till was taken from his bed. He would never again see the light of day.

The story of Till’s final night on Johnson Street in downtown Greenwood is an essential context for the restoration of Ben Roy’s. I do not know if the service station ever actually attracted integrated socializers. But I do know that the feeling of a benign segregation which it is designed to evoke is a mechanism for domesticating the site of Till’s abduction.

Story #4: Village of Glendora

Story number four is set in the tiny village of Glendora, Mississippi, population 143. The impoverishment of Glendora is astounding, even by Delta standards. It is a town where fewer than half of the adults have a high-school education, fewer still have drivers’ licenses, and almost no one has a job. The nonprofit organization Partners in Development, committed to helping the “extreme poor,” has chosen to focus on Haiti, Guatemala, and Glendora, MS (Partners in Development). Alongside its poverty, it is also the site of the first ever Emmett Till museum and the greatest density of Till memorials anywhere in the world. I have come to believe that these two facts are related. The poverty of the community makes Till commemoration possible, and Till Commemoration, in turn, does its part to ensure the continued impoverishment of the community. In a way that is true nowhere else in Mississippi, site and memory have become virtually indistinguishable in Glendora.

The lynchpin of this indistinguishability is Glendora Mayor Johnny B. Thomas. In addition to his role as mayor, Thomas is the president of the Glendora Economic and Community Development Corporation, a 501(c)3 he founded and which locals refer to simply as GEDCO. As Mayor, Thomas appoints aldermen to run the town. As president of GEDCO, he appoints officers to run the nonprofit. Given the considerable overlap between officers and aldermen, it is perhaps not surprising that the town has assigned public business to the nonprofit.⁵ GEDCO pays city workers, operates twenty-four Section 8 apartments, runs the only grocery store within thirty miles, and operates the first Emmett Till Museum to open in the Mississippi Delta: the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center (ETHIC).

Intellectually speaking, the ETHIC museum is marked by two claims that set it apart from other Till memory work. In a video that every visitor watches before entering the museum, Johnny B. Thomas explains that his father Henry Lee Loggins was J.W. Milam’s “right hand” and a forced participant in the crime. Based on secret father-to-son confessions, Thomas argues, first, that that Till’s body was thrown into the water from the Black Bayou Bridge inside the Glendora city limits; and second, that the fan with which Till’s body was weighted was stolen from the Glendora Cotton Gin, a business that ceased operation in the mid-1980s and which, since 2005, has housed the museum itself.

These two claims have the potential to stitch Glendora into the story of Till’s murder in profound ways. Without these claims, Glendora has only a marginal claim to relevance: the site where Till’s clothes were burned and his blood washed from the truck of J.W. Milam. If Johnny B. Thomas is right, however, Glendora would rival Drew for the single most important site in the Till saga, and he is about to get a big boost. When Whoopi Goldberg, Keith Beauchamp, and Fred Zollo begin filming their Till movie in August 2017, they are going to follow the Johnny B. Thomas theory and take it one step further. When you see the movie, you will learn that although Till was tortured for four hours in the barn in Drew, he did not actually die until he reached the Black Bayou bridge on the south side of Glendora, where he was finally shot by Roy Bryant before being dropped into the Bayou through the v-shaped gap in the steel girders. If this is true—and it has a certain plausibility—then Glendora itself would be the unquestioned center of Till commemoration.

From the perspective of Johnny B. Thomas, the relative claim of Glendora to the memory of Emmett Till is a claim that matters financially more than it matters historically. To explain this, I need to return once more to the imbroglio that is the town of Glendora, the nonprofit GEDCO, and the local memory industry. Because GEDCO is a nonprofit, it is able to treat city employees, including museum employees, as part-time volunteers, resulting in an effective wage under the minimum wage.⁶ Beyond the cheap labor, the key to the operation is the Section 8 Housing on Gipson Street, the rent from which funnels approximately $100,000 a year of federal HUD money into the nonprofit.⁷ With this money, GEDCO pays the city workers for a portion of their labor, subsidizes the Till museum, which otherwise would have been in the red every single year, and pays its president, Johnny B. Thomas, an annual stipend of approximately $20,000.⁸ I stress that the impoverishment of the townspeople is the condition of memory work. The museum’s only shot at breaking even is the HUD money that flows from the federal government, through the impoverished townspeople, through GEDCO, to the museum.

The Till museum is not just a recipient of GEDCO funding. The approximately $5,000 per year the museum generates in admission fees flows directly into GEDCO, which owns the land and the building. The artifacts in the museum, however, are owned by the town. Once again, this conflation of town and nonprofit is key. The museum is the one thing in Glendora that can attract major grants and the co-ownership of the museum means grant money can be distributed for a variety of different projects. Between a 2005 USDA grant and 2010 IMLS grant, the nonprofit/town entity that is the ETHIC museum has provided Till commemoration, broadband service, a community center, and the Johnny B. Thomas Adult Continuing Education & Training Center. In fact, the original name of the museum was the “Thomas Technology Center and Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center.” The original name reflects the fact that the USDA grant with which the museum was founded was funded solely for the installation of broadband service. Once ETHIC had the money in hand, however, they also built a museum.

The more carefully you look, the more difficult it is to distinguish between the town and the museum, between the memory work and the memory site, both of which would be impossible without the poverty of the people. If no one qualified for Section 8 Housing, and if no one spent food stamps at the GEDCO store, the museum would be gone in a year’s time, and the town would have no mechanism for providing basic services.

It is essential to remember that the museum’s two unique claims—(1) that the body was thrown from the Black Bayou bridge in Glendora (and perhaps shot there too); and, (2) that the gin fan was stolen from the same building that now houses the museum—are site-specific claims. The museum has not a single original artifact. All it has are papier-mâché recreations, replicas of midcentury items, and informational placards. Without any artifacts, the only leverage the museum has to obtain grant funding is its location at 33 Thomas Street, an address that once housed the M. B. Lowe Cotton Gin. If this version of Till’s story could not be sold, if the gin fan could not be traced to this spot, the town would lose, all at once, its museum, its broadband service, and its adult education.⁹ Thus it is that Till’s commemoration is the condition of basic municipal services even as other municipal services—the Section 8 Housing—is the condition of Till’s memory. In Glendora, it is simply impossible to talk about the site of Till’s murder without also talking about poverty and memory. Without the poverty of the community, and without the continuing impoverishment of the community, Glendora would not long be the site of the Delta’s first Till museum.

Conclusion: The Emmett Till Memory Project

At stake in each of these stories is the relationship between memory and site. As I indicated at the outset, rhetorical studies have long considered site to be a stable term compared to the vicissitudes of memory. From the mnemotechnic tradition, through the commemorative turn of the 1990s, rhetoric has proceeded under the assumption that site functions first and foremost as a reminder. In and by its stability, the tradition seems to say, site has earned a place in the history of rhetoric.

While it is true that a place can be a reminder, it is equally true that commemorative work is a powerful mechanism for transforming a site. Indeed, upon inspection, site is no more stable than commemorative work. Just as the latter is vulnerable to the unanchored swells of symbolism, so too is the former. We must not consider site as the solid ground upon which, or against which, commemoration does its work. While they are closely articulated one to the other, site and memory are equally adrift, neither grounding the other, neither providing the long-dreamed-of stabilitas locus. The perceived stability of site is little more than a political effect.

Indeed, all four stories I have recounted are intended to demonstrate how commemorative work transformed the sites it inhabited. The barrenness of Sunflower County, the signs peppering the landscape of Tallahatchie County, the gas station bearing silent witness to a counterfactual era, and the entanglements of the ETHIC museum with the town of Glendora—all of these are evidence of how commemoration has fundamentally transformed the sites of Emmett Till’s murder.

I conclude by describing the Emmett Till Memory Project, a collaborative project I have undertaken with Davis Houck of Florida State; digital humanist Chris Spielvogel from Penn State; Pablo Correa, photographer; and Patrick Weems, director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, Mississippi. The project uses a website and a smartphone app to commemorate fifty sites in and around the MS Delta.¹⁰ I will explain the project by telling one more story, the contested story of where on the Tallahatchie River Till’s body was recovered.

Story #5: Fixed at Graball Landing

Let us start with the sign that for eight years marked a spot where Till’s body may have been pulled from the water. Erected in 2008 by the ETMC, the sign was a constant target of vandalism. After a highly publicized scandal in the fall of 2016, the sign (by this time filled with bullet holes) has been taken down (Rogers; Tell, “A Brief Visual History”). Until it was taken down, however, it sat at the confluence of the Tallahatchie River and the Black Bayou (1.3 miles due east of Glendora) and marked one of the two spots from which Till’s body may have been pulled from the water. In the immediate aftermath of the murder, multiple newspapers suggested that the body was recovered near Pecan Point. In 2006, the FBI confirmed this, indicating that the body was recovered at Fish Lake Landing. Fish Lake Landing is very near to Pecan Point, but nearly three miles downstream from the site the ETMC chose to place their sign.

The only reason the shot-up sign is at the confluence of the Tallahatchie and the Black Bayou is that the Emmett Till Memorial Commission was influenced by a questionable theory emailed to them by Tulane’s Plater Robinson.¹¹ Robinson is an elusive, self-taught expert on the Till case who, although he has never published a thing, is something of a local legend (MacLean 234). His rapport with the ETMC stems from his friendship with Maude Clay, an accomplished photographer and a prominent resident in Sumner, more on whom momentarily. Robinson’s site is plausible and may be correct. If Till was indeed dropped from the Black Bayou Bridge in Glendora, as Johnny B. Thomas argues, it would be only a short 1.3 mile float to this spot. There are, however, two difficulties. First, Robinson claimed that the body did not float there; rather, he claims it was dropped on the side of the river as a warning to a local black community (William Winter Institute Collection)—this is a claim for which there is zero evidence, either in the commemorative record or on the topographic maps of the time. Second, Robinson’s theory would require us to disbelieve the earliest testimony of eyewitnesses when there was no political advantage to be had by the placement of the body.

My concern here is not the fact that Plater Robinson and I have different opinions about where the body was recovered. Rather, I am concerned that traditional commemorative markers do a really poor job of capturing historical uncertainty. Whether they are set in stone or, like this sign, cast in aluminum, memorials are simply not very good at capturing historical uncertainty and the political controversy that attends it. Scholars call this the finality of commemoration. Kirk Savage, for example, has decried the finality of memorials precisely because, in their finality, memorials erase the political conditions of their emergence (4, 65). In the case at hand, the shot-up ETMC sign does not mention that this is one of several possible spots at which Till may have been recovered. What is needed is some form of commemoration that both records the uncertainty of the past and preserves the political relays through which we know the past.

This is the lofty ambition of the Emmett Till Memory Project. Here is how it works. GPS technology allows us to calibrate the history of Emmett Till to a user’s location in the Mississippi Delta. Wherever a user happens to be standing, he or she will get the history of Emmett Till from the perspective of that place. For example, if a user is standing on the farm once run by Leslie Milam, she will learn about the testimony of Willie Reed and the undercover work of Medgar Evers—both of which helped the FBI locate the murder in Sunflower County. By contrast, if the same user is standing on the banks of the Tallahatchie River, she will learn of William Bradford Huie’s story, his consent and release forms, and why, for so many years, people thought the murder happened there. Beyond the particulars of this example, the GPS technology is designed to emphasize the fragility of memory rather than its finality. Simply by moving around the Delta, a user of our app will be confronted with dozens of different stories of Till’s death—many of them in conflict with each other. This is important because it draws attention not simply to the facts of 1955, but also to what has been done with those facts since 1955. The Emmett Till Memory Project is designed not simply as a refresher course for memory, but as a lesson in the politics of commemoration. It will teach the user not simply where Till was killed or his body was recovered, but how, why, and through whom we think we know the answers to these questions. We have used the geography of the Delta, the distances between memory sites, and the mobility of the tourist to capture the two things that tend to be forgotten by traditional memorials: the contingency of history and the influence of politics in the stabilization of the past.

Let me return one last time to the confluence of the Black Bayou and the Tallahatchie River. In 1840, 186 years before an ETMC sign was shot at this spot, Cullen McMullen (b. 1794) came to the Delta. He arrived with 35 slaves via a Tallahatchie River Steamboat and disembarked at Graball Landing, near what we now know as Glendora. Although the names of the slaves are not recorded, McMullen’s great grandson Joseph Albert May was still using African-American labor (this time prison labor from Parchman Penitentiary) to clear the land in 1925. This is a good reminder of the politics of being on site. Even the unbroken flatness of the Delta, the bioregion’s most important natural feature, is a product of black labor. The Delta is not flat. It was flattened, first by slavery; a second time by the convict lease system, or “slavery by another name” (Blackmon).

In the case of the McMullen plantation, thirty-five black slaves entered the Delta at Graball Landing and cleared the land so that McMullen could farm it while one of his sons died carrying the Confederate flag at Shiloh. In 1894, a tornado wiped the land clean, eliminating every trace of the old steamboat landing (Clay 85–93). If you visit Graball Landing today, the only evidence of human activity you would see is the ETMC sign, filled with bullet holes, marking a spot where Till’s body may have been pulled from the water. It is hard to believe, but at six generations removed, the same family that once cleared the land arranged for a sign at the same spot. McMullen’s great-great-great-granddaughter is Anna Booth Schuyler Clay Weems, whose mother is Maude Clay, photographer, through whom the ETMC found Plater Robinson, and whose husband is Patrick Weems, director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center and a collaborator on the Emmett Till Memory Project. In 1840, the site of Till’s recovery was permanently altered by thirty-five slaves with axes. Just as much as the physical labor of these men altered the site they found, the Emmett Till memory work of the twenty-first century has fundamentally altered the landscape of the Delta. No matter where you think Till was killed or his body was recovered, one thing is sure: the sites of his murder have been transformed by his commemoration.

Notes

1. The origination point of the murder is important legally and rhetorically. As Davis Houck has argued, the defense began its story at Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market in order to claim that Till’s murder was a justifiable homicide. If Till assaulted Bryant in the grocery store, as the defense claimed, then the jury may well have seen the murder as justified (Houck and Grindy 11).

2. By moving the murder to Tallahatchie County, Huie helped protect the reputations of men such as Henry Lee Loggins, Levi Collins, and Leslie Milam—all of whom must have been involved if the murder was in Sunflower County. Thus, the site of the murder can be calibrated to the number of guilty but untried perpetrators.

3. For a more detailed account of the river, the bridge, and Till commemoration, see Tell, “Emmett Till.”

4. Although the application spoke of restoring the “colored” and “white” signage, I don’t believe these signs were ever actually restored. They were certainly not there in December 2016 (my last visit).

5. Officers of the Glendora Economic and Community Development Corporation are listed on tax returns, available publicly by services such as Guidestar. EIN: 64-0799536. Town aldermen are listed on town website (when the website is running): www.glendorams.com.

6. Confirmed by a former employee on the condition of anonymity.

7. Glendora Economic & Community Development, 78 Westbrook Street, Glendora, MS 38928. 2014 990 EZ Form lists $133,614 in revenue. Johnny B. Thomas told me that this income came from the apartments.

8. In 2014, the stipend was $32,906. Thomas takes no paycheck for his job as mayor.

9. ETHIC did in fact lose a 2011 Mississippi Civil Rights Historical Sites Grant (the same grant that funded Ben Roy’s) for precisely this reason.

10. Emmett Till Memory Project. http://tillmemoryproject.com/.

11. Robinson claims that the ETMC messed up the directions he provided (Robinson). But, at least in the case of this sign, his email is preserved in the William Winter Collection at the University of Mississippi Library.