Florida State University has recently acquired newly discovered documents to add to the university’s Emmett Till Archives collection.
Emmett Till was a teenager from Chicago who spent the summer of 1955 with relatives in Mississippi. Till was accused of whistling at a White women. For this violation of the unwritten laws of Jim Crow, Till was brutally murdered and his death became a lightening rod for the civil rights movement. A trial with an all-White jury acquitted two White men of Till’s murder. The men later boasted in an interview with Look magazine that they had committed the murder.
The new arcival materials on the case were donated by Ellen Whitten, granddaughter of John Whitten Jr., the lawyer who defended Till’s killers. The donation includes a 33-page research report from journalist William Bradford Huie, as well as correspondence between Huie and Whitten.
Currently, the Emmett Till Archives collection contains hundreds of materials documenting Till’s case, as well as scholarly research and discussion surrounding the case over the past 70 years. The archive was founded by Davis Houck, Fannie Lou Hamer Professor of Rhetorical Studies in FSU’s School of Communication.
The Emmett Till Archives collection is available to the public and can be accessed here.
