The Interview That Wasn’t: Reading Timothy Tyson’s The Blood of Emmett Till

Despite the favorable reviews by the New York Times and USA Today and the praise heaped on The Blood of Emmett Till by award-winning authors Diane McWhorter and Jeff Sharlet, I’m not sure what to make of this book or its author, for that matter. With the publication of Devery Anderson’s Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement published in 2015, why the need for another Emmett Till book? Each new book is hailed as the definitive account that offers fresh new insights and groundbreaking new evidence. Tyson’s book is no exception. Truth is, Tyson’s book raises more questions than it answers. This is not to say that the book is without its uses. Tyson does an exemplary job of situating Emmett Till’s murder within the larger racial snake pit (at least where Black people were concerned) that was the state of Mississippi.¹ Readers will also learn much about important civil rights activists not named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, or Medger Evers—people such as Reverend George Lee, Amzie Moore, and Ruby Hurley, to name a few. Aside from that however, those who consider themselves students of the modern civil rights movement, who are well versed in this particular tragic and sordid story, will be hard-pressed to find much that is new.

It is difficult to know whether Tyson was actually in the process of writing this book when he was contacted by the wife of one of Till’s murderers or if he saw an opportunity to capitalize on her entreaty, thus prompting him to embark on a project that had been tackled ad naseum in recent decades by other scholars. Be that as it may, the list of White professors and writers that have made their academic and literary bones writing about Black history, in many cases Black misery, is as long as the San Andreas Fault line. Some are well-intentioned, many are just plain opportunistic, while a few are truth seekers that have a burning desire to set the record straight in hopes that doing so might bring about some level of justice, no matter how delayed. To be fair, the same too can be said of many non-White professors and writers. Anyway, only Tyson himself can speak to the book’s inspiration. What does seem clear is that supposedly, at some point in the late 2000s, after reading Tyson’s 2004 book, Blood Done Signed My Name, about an unlawful murder of a Black man by a White resident of Oxford, North Carolina, Roy Bryant’s ex-wife, with the help of her daughter-in-law, reached out to Tyson and invited him to her home. It was in 2008 over pound cake and coffee that Tyson’s host opened up . . . well sort of, ostensibly for the purposes of coming clean after all these years or perhaps to elicit his help with completing her own writing project.

The Blood of Emmett Till, a book comprised of 18 chapters, starts off, for me at least, rather oddly. Tyson’s framing of Carolyn Bryant Donham as a sympathetic figure, unwittingly or otherwise, is off-putting. In the third sentence Tyson writes, “when she was twenty-one and her name was Carolyn Bryant, the French newspaper Aurore dubbed the dark-haired young woman from the Mississippi Delta ‘a crossroads Marilyn Monroe’” (p. 1) Although this writer has seen just a few photos of the lady in question the comparison to the iconic blonde bombshell of the 1950s that starred in such films as Bus Stop and Some Like It Hot is, well . . . a bit of a reach. Is it possible that the French, unfamiliar with American vernacular and slang, mistakenly wrote “crossroads” when the word they were really searching for was “backwoods?”

In chapter 1 Tyson tells a poignant but all too familiar story about the murder of...