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July 27, 2006

A Wreath for Emmett Till by Marilyn Nelson and Philippe Lardy

emmettilll.jpgIn 1955, people all over the United States knew that Emmett Louis Till was a fourteen-year-old African American boy lynched for supposedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. The brutality of his murder, the open-casket funeral, and the acquittal of the men tried for the crime drew wide media attention. Award-winning poet Marilyn Nelson reminds us of the boy whose fate helped spark the civil rights movement. This martyr's wreath, woven from a little-known but sophisticated form of poetry, challenges us to speak out against modern-day injustices, to "speak what we see."

Posted by Topher McCulloch at July 27, 2006 09:19 PM | Emmett Till | Fall 2006

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