A professor has launched a smartphone application to educate people about the life, death and memory of Emmett Till.
Davis Houck, a professor at Florida State University’s College of Communication and Information and a prominent Till researcher, developed the Emmett Till Memorial Project app with Niantic Labs.
The app features 51 sites in and around the Delta, each significant in the story of Till’s death and the commemoration thereof.
Till, a black 14-year-old from Chicago visiting family in Money, was abducted and killed on Aug. 28, 1955, for whistling at Carolyn Bryant, a white shopkeeper a few days earlier.
Carolyn’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, dragged Till from his uncle’s home before beating and eventually fatally shooting him. Till’s body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River on Aug. 31.
Despite the overwhelming circumstantial evidence against them, Bryant and Milam were found not guilty of Till’s murder by an all-white jury in nearby Sumner. A few months later, protected by the ban on double jeopardy, Bryant and Milam confessed to the murder in a paid interview with Look magazine.
Houck said that the app will add new dimensions to the contemporary experience of Till’s memory. “Niantic’s Field Trip app allows people to learn new stories about Till’s murder — stories that, in some cases, have never yet been told — from the very places where they happened,” he said.
The app enables smartphone users to visit precise locations related to the murder, trial and memory of Till.
The Memory Project app uses GPS data from smartphones to tailor content to each user’s precise location in the Mississippi Delta.
The app is designed to provide users with narrative descriptions alongside multimedia presentations to tell the story of Emmett Till from the perspective of the user’s location.
“It will teach the user not simply where Till was killed or where his body was recovered, but how, why and through whom we think we know the answers to many of these questions,” said Houck. “We aim to preserve the uncertainty of the past while commemorating the brutality of the crime and the politics of its memory.
The Emmett Till Memory Project app can be downloaded for free through the Google Play Store or Apple’s App Store.
Houck co-authored the book “Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press” with Matthew A. Grindy.
Since last year, Houck has been collaborating with FSU’s Special Collections and Archives division to compile a substantial collection of research materials on Till.
Houck was assisted in the app’s development by University of Kansas professor Dave Tell, Pennsylvania State University lecturer Chris Spielvogel and FSU doctoral student Pablo Correa.
• Contact Nick Rogers at 581-7235 or nrogers@gwcommonwealth.com.
