04. General Nonfiction Text

Getting Away with Murder:
The True Story of the Emmett Till Case
 By  Chris Crowe

Annotation:

In August 1955, two White men kidnapped and killed a Black child in the Mississippi Delta but were acquitted at trial by an all-White jury – sparking such national outrage, the story became a cause célèbre of the civil rights movement.

Recommendation:

Looking at its well-designed cover -- Brigham Young University English professor, Chris Crowe, is listed as the writer responsible for Getting Away with Murder. Positioned beneath the dramatic title is a sepia-fashioned photo collage, and a subtitle: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case. The book is unambiguously billed as a work of nonfiction on the outside jacket flap. What's actually inside, however, proves to be a different story.

Along with the old adage to "never judge a book by its cover," Crowe's slickly packaged but poorly synthesized research points to another, equally meaningful old maxim:

That which is probable
is the greatest enemy to truth.

Chris Crowe’s handsome publication features dozens of photos and drawings. Text and tone are appropriate, as is Crowe’s thesis – that Till’s case was for many, "the last straw in centuries of racial oppression and abuse." The information is well organized and easy to read. Using a creative nonfiction format, Crowe employs primary sources -- testimony, news reports and interviews -- to produce a narrative story.

Theoretically, this book could be used in classrooms as a history text as well as a model of research techniques. However, Crowe clearly did not know Till's full story, and he filled in the blanks of his research with his own assumptions about what probably happened.

Crowe failed to critically analyze previously published material on the matter. He also missed an opportunity to introduce young people to the real Emmett Till -- the fun-loving, 14-year-old at the center of the most infamous act of racial violence in U.S. history.

Regardless of the prose and photos, in order to succeed, a book – any book – must finally deliver the truth. That’s actually harder to do in a work of nonfiction than in a novel. One cannot objectively check the facts in a novel, any more than one can objectively judge the colors in a painting. But the facts in Crowe’s colorful account of Emmett Till’s story are verifiable.

In many instances, Crowe’s facts are wrong.


Along with several arguably minor factual errors and name misspellings, Crowe’s nonfiction narrative includes two major falsehoods: the claim that Curtis Jones accompanied Till on his train ride (pages 35, 47, 55), and the assertion that Jones was an eyewitness to Till’s alleged "wolf whistle" toward Carol Bryant (page 55). Jones publicly recanted his statements in 1985, almost twenty years prior to Professor Crowe's publication.

Significantly, other than Jones, Carol Bryant is the only adult who claimed Till made the lewd remarks and whistles that later led her husband to seek revenge. Carol Bryant’s testimony is questionable, since her tale changed and grew over time.

A probable story
is the first weapon of calumny.

Of course, legally, the truth about Till’s behavior is not even at issue. But socially and culturally, the "wolf whistle" is central to this story. It goes to the truth of Emmett Till’s character.

In Crowe’s story, "the boy who triggered the civil rights movement" was playing with fire. Crowe first admits "it’s impossible to know exactly what was said or done in a small country store some fifty years ago," but then says the "evidence suggests" Emmett Till was guilty of disrespecting the White female – an offense which, for a Black man in 1950s Mississippi, was considered by many to be a capital crime. In the court of public opinion -- if you play with fire, you get burned.


In truth, there is no evidence to prove, nor any reason to believe Emmett Till let out with a suggestive “wolf whistle,” or that the happy-go-lucky boy threatened Carol Bryant in any way.

Crowe has built his narrative on rumors and reports which characterized Till as an uppity Black from the North, unaware that his boldness would get him killed in the Deep South. Those were lies, yet Professor Crowe writes of Till's "cocky and naive indiscretion in Money, Mississippi."

Getting Away with Murder also uncritically includes the two confessed killers' outrageous depiction of their victim as combative and relentlessly mouthy throughout the kidnapping, torture and killing. Chris Crowe's implication, that Till showed heroic resolve by repeatedly standing up to his abusers, is a clumsy cultural misstep, and a factual improbability. Most importantly, such behavior is inconsistent with the upbringing, good sense, and true character of Emmett Louis Till.

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Nomination: No

Genre Classification: General Nonfiction, Multicultural

Citation: Crowe, Chris. Getting Away With Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case. New York: Dial, 2003. Print.

Emmett Till info:
http://www.emmetttillmurder.com/

Words of a Feather

Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America
By Mamie Till Mobley and Christopher Benson

The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative
Edited by Christopher Metress 

Website:
Famous Teenagers in History

Posted in: RECOMMENDED READS