Far from the Delta, Florida State University’s Strozier Library now houses the most comprehensive collection of scholarly papers, research documents, newspaper clippings and other artifacts related to the notorious murder of Emmett Till and the trial of his killers.
Professor Davis Houck, author of “Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press” and a professor at FSU, said in a press release that the university spent 20 years accumulating the material in the collection, most of which came from Mississippi and from other archives around the South.
The archive of one of the most significant moments in American civil rights history is open to researchers, students, visiting school classes and the public at large.
Houck said the collection is in the process of being digitized for online access, although it will take years for that phase to be completed.
Steve Whitaker, a former Charleston, Mississippi, resident and witness to the events following Till’s death, has said that the materials he’s collected over the last 60 years will be donated to the archive.
Till, a black 14-year-old from Chicago, was killed in 1955, while visiting relatives in Money, for being fresh with a 21-year-old white shopkeeper, Carolyn Bryant, at Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market. Her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother J.W. Milam were acquitted of the crime by an all-male, all-white jury, although they subsequently confessed to it in a paid-interview with Look magazine.
The highly publicized murder has been credited with galvanizing the civil rights movement.
Whitaker’s masters thesis, “A Case Study in Southern Justice: The Emmett Till Case,” published in 1963, was the first comprehensive study of Till’s slaying and the trial that followed.
Some of the source materials Whitaker collected were destroyed in a Florida flood some years back, but what remains will go to the FSU collection.
Whitaker previously taught at Florida State as well as at Temple University and the University of Southern California.
Whitaker was 15 years old and living in Charleston when Till was murdered. Whitaker’s stepfather, N.Z. Troutt, the Charleston police chief, was responsible for protecting everyone involved with the case during the trial held at the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner.
A bomb was placed on the family’s front porch during the trial, just feet away from where young Whitaker was sleeping.
Whitaker told Houck in a 2015 interview for the Emmett Till Memory Project that he feared retribution against his parents when his thesis was first published.
Whitaker’s thesis, which is included in the archive, has served as an important source for the books about the Till case that followed some 20 years later and beyond.
Devery Anderson, author of “Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement,” a bestseller of University Press of Mississippi, has contributed to the archive a large collection of newspaper articles, genealogical work, interview transcriptions and obscure magazine articles he used in his research.
Anderson’s research followed the Till case all the way to the 2010s, incorporating the FBI’s 2004 re-opening and investigation into the case. The FBI’s published report on its investigation is part of the archive.
Interviews and oral histories gathered by filmmaker Keith Beauchamp for his Emmy-nominated documentary, “The Untold Story of Emmett Till,” are also part of the archive.
In a recent story in the Tallahassee Democrat, Special Collections librarian Katie McCormick said it’s important to note that Florida State is a safe home for the material, an open space for researchers, the public and anyone else interested in “teasing out the facts of the case from the mythology.”
Florida State represents a “neutral ground” for the archive, she said.
“We’re not Mississippi, we’re not Chicago, we have a connection to the story but we don’t have a particular agenda in collecting or in sharing information about the Emmett Till case. It’s a very personal and volatile topic for many good reasons, and we can be caretakers, curators, facilitators of this research.”
For information about the Till collection, go to http://guides.lib.fsu.edu/Till.
•Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
