"A Crime That's So Unjust!" Chris Crowe Tells About the Death of Emmett Till

ALAN Review, Spring 2003 by Blasingame, Jim

In 1955 Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American visitor from Chicago, Illinois, left his cousins waiting outside of Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Mississippi, while he went inside. Exactly what happened during those next few minutes while the two were alone only Carolyn Bryant, the 21-year-old white storeowner, and Emmett himself would ever know for sure. What happened four days later, however, is quite certain. According to Emmett's great uncle Mose Wright's testimony in court and the admission of the two men later in a paid interview with Life Magazine, Carolyn Bryant's husband Roy and his half brother J.W. Milam kidnapped Emmett, and he was never seen alive again. Three days following the kidnapping Emmett's horribly disfigured body was found in the Tallahatchie River. The two men were found innocent of murder and innocent of kidnapping (PBS American Experience Series: The Murder of Emmett Till).

The murder of Emmett Till is the subject of Mississippi Trial, 1955, BYU Professor of English Education and former ALAN president Chris Crowe's first venture into young adult fiction. He followed soon after with a nonfiction companion work Getting Away with Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case. The success of Mississippi Trial, 1955 has been remarkable for any book let alone a first work. The American Library Association named it a 2003 Best Book for Young Adults, and the National Council for the Social Studies honored it as a 2003 Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People in the category of History, Life and Culture in the Americas. It has also won the IRA Children's Book Award in the YA novel category which Chris accepted in May at the IRA convention, and the Jefferson Cup, an award given for the best young adult historical book, fiction or nonfiction, which he will receive in November.

Chris was kind enough to speak with us recently by email:

JB: Chris, Congratulations on having your very first young adult novel, Mississippi Trial, 1955, win so many awards. Readers are also finding that your nonfiction work, Getting Away with Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case is a wonderful complement to the fictionalized account. The research and the two books were quite a project. Were you thinking of a specific readership as you began?

CC: I'm always thinking about young adult readers, so when I learned about the Emmett Till case, I knew that I wanted to tell the story for teenagers. Emmett was only 14 when he was murdered, so I thought his story would be especially important for YA readers. There are many stories about teenagers in the civil rights movement, and Emmett's death and the trial of his killers was a catalyst for the Montgomery Bus Boycott that took place just months later. The story of Emmett Till was a story I had been ignorant of, and it's a story everyone should know. I thought it would make sense to share it with YAs. I started the novel first, without any plans for a nonfiction book. It wasn't until I finished the novel and looked over the stacks of notes and research material that I realized I had enough information for a nonfiction book about the case. And because this was such an important event in US history, I wanted to present teenage readers with the straight story, illustrated with photographs from the case. I wanted YA readers to know the facts of the murder of Emmett Till without any doubt about what was fact and what was fiction.

JB: In the Acknowledgements to Getting Away with Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case, you thank Mildred D. Taylor, author of the Logan family series, Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry, Let the Circle be Unbroken, The Road to Memphis and The Land, "an awe-inspiring writer, who first sent me in search of Emmett" (6). Was this a figurative or literal sending? Can you tell us about that?

CC: It was more figurative than literal. When I was working on a book about Mildred D. Taylor, I came across a comment she made about the impact the murder of Emmett Till had on her when she was a high school student. That reference sent me in search of the story because I wondered if it might have had some influence on her writing as well. As I said, previous to this, I'd never heard anything about Emmett Till, so when I found the photo of his corpse in Jet Magazine, I was shocked. I was shocked because it was such a horrible crime, but I was also shocked because the murder had been a huge event in 1955 but somehow it never made it into most history books. In all my years as a student and a teacher, I'd never read about it. My ignorance of this major historical event shamed me.

JB: Speculating about the truth is perhaps one of the biggest requirements of writing a fictional account of an actual event. In Mississippi Trial, 1955 you had to imagine or speculate about the truth of what happened during those seven days in 1955, a truth that may have also died, in part, with Emmett Till. How did you accomplish that?

CC: I wanted to make sure that any speculation I did was based on fact, so I did lots of research. As I learned about the people involved in the crime, I tried to imagine what they were like, what would make someone believe that they could justify murder. To create the fictional character of R.C. Rydell, I tried to imagine what sort of childhood a boy would have to have in order to grow up able to do awful, cruel things. I imagined what his home life must have been like and what might have warped him. In terms of the events, I read as many accounts of the murder and trial as I could find. Because it was such a sensational crime in 1955, there were lots of newspaper and magazine articles written about it. The trial transcripts have been "lost," so those weren't available, but I did make good use of microfilm records and even some video interviews of people involved in the case. I even spent a week in Greenwood, Mississippi, the same week in August that Emmett had been there, so I could have an accurate sense of the setting - the weather, the towns, the way people spoke.