“Emmett Till and the Politics of Public Confession”
Dave Tell, “The ‘Shocking Story’ of Emmett Till and the Politics of Public Confession.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 94 no. 2 (May 2008): 156-178.
ABSTRACT:
In 1955, journalist William Bradford Huie interviewed Emmett Till’s killers and published their confession in Look magazine. Entitled "The Shocking Story of Approved Murder in Mississippi," Huie’s tale dominated the remembrance of Emmett Till for nearly fifty years. I argue that we can understand the power of the “Shocking Story” to control the memory of Till’s murder with recourse to a historically specific form of confession—the expressive confession—the distinctive power of which is a capacity to naturalize historical events and thereby constitute a master narrative in which events happen inevitably and further rhetorical intervention seems unnecessary. So understood, the “Shocking Story” is not just one more recounting of Till’s untimely death, it is also a treatise about the role of speech in the violence of the Mississippi Delta.
