Bearing Witness Still: Recovering the Language and the Lives that Made the Civil Rights Movement Move

Death of Innocence: The Story of a Hate Crime That Changed America. By Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson. New York: Random House, 2003; pp xi + 290. $24.95.

The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Speech That Inspired a Nation. By Drew D. Hansen. New York: Ecco, 2003; pp 293. $23.95.

Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. By Barbara Ransby. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003; pp xi + 470. $34.95 cloth; $19.95 paper.

The Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. By John D'Emilio. New York: The Free Press, 2003; pp 568. $35.00.

The Rhetoric of Redemption: Kenneth Burke's Redemption Drama and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" Speech. By David A. Bobbitt. Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004; pp ix + 141. $60.00.

Ring Out Freedom! The Voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement. By Frederick Sunnemark. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004; pp ix + 273. $19.95.

To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Sacred Mission to Save America, 1955–1968. By Stewart Burns. New York: HarperCollins, 2004; pp ix + 502. $27.95.

People had to face my son and realize just how twisted, how distorted, how terrifying race hatred could be. People had to consider all of that as they viewed Emmett's body. The whole nation had to bear witness to this.

Mamie Till-Mobley

A strange historical accident. How else to explain that Emmett Till's murder and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" happened on the same August day, eight years apart? If King's speech recently has become embroiled in an iconographic maelstrom, Till's killing seems more like a trickling fountain: always flowing but hard to hear, see, or remember. The death is shrouded in terrifying absurdity: The 14-year-old black boy from Chicago purportedly flirted with a white-married-Mississippi-female shopkeeper, whose husband took offense and, with the help of a henchman, decided to teach Bo (his mother's term of endearment) a lesson. The cotton gin fan they tied around his neck was supposed to ensure his body never broke the surface of the Tallahatchie. It weighed 75 pounds. A lesson indeed.¹

Fifty years later, these details invite outrage, incredulity, and questions: Till was killed for whistling at an older white woman? What kind of country was America in 1955? In the aftermath of Till's death, how would African Americans possibly find the resources and the courage to talk back to such a heinous crime? How could nonviolent resistance, grassroots leadership, and concerted local organizing provide the means and the stamina to conquer the systematic disenfranchisement and unmitigated brutality blacks had endured for almost a century since Lincoln's proclamation?

And more questions: What to say that might be judged novel and interesting about a speech delivered eight years after Till's murder, an address that has for decades stood as the sin qua non of the civil rights movement? How to make sense of political conservatives' recent appropriation of the speech's "content of their character" line to challenge affirmative action? What might we say to that scared 14-year-old boy, his body so brutally mutilated it was unrecognizable, he who cowers just off the stage in our collective memory? What can we learn from one boy's murder, from a movement's triumphs and failures, that might trump our contemporary obsession with the cult of personality and our facile homage to irony's alluring detachments? How to recover the words and the ideas and the courage that now seem, well, quaint?²

Seven recent books that examine the people, ideas, issues, and problems that surround the content and legacy of the civil rights movement...