What sets Tyson's book apart is the wide-angle lens he uses to examine the lynching, and the ugly parallels between past and present. Emmett, he argues, is the ancestral father of the Black Lives Matter movement, and America, which followed the Obama era with the election of Donald Trump, has steadfastly refused to reject white supremacy, or account for its original sin. Through research and his little-known interview with the late, elderly Carolyn Bryant — the purported 'victim' of the boy's advances — the author sweeps in unsung heroes, puts minor figures in the spotlight, underscores the ground-shaking strength of Emmett's grief-stricken mother and gives depth to familiar villains ... A terrific writer and storyteller, Tyson compels a closer look at a heinous crime and the consequential decisions, large and small, that made it a national issue.
The events of that bitter morning, their motivations and ramifications, have found a meticulous, if not their most exhaustive, retelling in Timothy B. Tyson’s The Blood of Emmett Till, an account of absorbing and sometimes horrific detail ... Black life in America has endured as little more than a fragile truth in the hands of white aggressors. And Tyson does well to remind us just how all-consuming racial terror can be when wielded with brute force.
...as Tyson recounts, applying diligent research, scrupulous perspective and a vigorous aptitude for weaving pertinent public and intimate details, Emmett Till’s murder became a story the nation couldn’t avoid ... As far as Tyson is concerned, 'America is still killing Emmett Till,' not just through 'bludgeons and bullets,' but through violence, poverty and social and economic inequality. Meanwhile, among the those who share the pain of Till’s family is Carolyn Bryant herself, who in an interview with the author more than a half-century after the fact, says, 'Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.'”
...the most valuable service Tyson renders in The Blood of Emmett Till is simply to clear away the underbrush of myth that has accumulated over the decades and restore the immediacy of this quintessentially American story. He accomplishes this feat over the course of just 218 swift-flying and meticulously researched pages, bringing the story back to vivid life with a journalist’s nose for facts and a novelist’s eye for telling details ... Our history is a seething river of unpunished blood. So The Blood of Emmett Till is a work critical not just to our understanding of something that happened in America in 1955 but of what happens in America here and now. It is a jolting and powerful book.
Timothy B. Tyson revisits the circumstances of Till’s death, and brings to bear a wide scope of reporting, historical research, and cultural analysis. It’s not a definitive history of the Till case; other works have synthesized more primary sources and firsthand accounts. Rather, The Blood of Emmett Till is focused on the historicity of race in America ... The surfeit of contextualization verges on digression at times, but serves the ultimate purpose of giving Till’s life weight six decades after his death ... Perhaps most importantly, Tyson considers all the ways in which an American populace was complicit in its acceptance of violence against black people—and then considers all the ways in which it is still complicit in the deaths of people of color today ... The Blood of Emmett Till is a critical book not just because it provides a good reason to revisit a foundational moment in American history—though it manages that feat in spades—but also because it manages to turn the past into prophecy and demands that we do the one vital thing we aren’t often enough asked to do with history: learn from it.
Tyson's account of the times helps the reader to understand the climate in which Till's murder occurred. The early stirrings of civil rights grew as black veterans returned from World War II unwilling to accept the old racist hierarchy ... Carolyn Bryant's confession adds yet another layer of tragedy and irony to Emmett Till's story. Tyson reminds us that it's a story that is not over. Young black men still die for no good reason, no reason at all ... Just as Mamie Bradley's decision shone essential light on what happened to her son, so does this book.
...a concise and urgent book ... Expertly, Tyson demarcates and mines the territory of Till’s murder, including why the killers assumed it would go ignored; of the trial, which indeed concluded with a not-guilty verdict; and of the countrywide reaction to both. Yet his analysis of the big national moment does not upstage his attention to the Till family’s unimaginable personal loss. He writes movingly of what Emmett’s life might have been ... the feather in Tyson’s investigative cap, and what gives this exquisite work the strengths of revelatory reportage as well as scholarship, is his interview with Carolyn Bryant, whose admission that 'nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him' provides the poetic title of Tyson’s opening chapter and a humanity that cuts through the book.
Tyson re-examines every aspect of the case, giving his forensic evaluation the pacing and readability of a crime thriller as he pours over court records and witness statements, including the only interview ever given by the woman whose encounter with Till triggered the whole tragedy. This is an urgent, compelling, often angry book in which no compromises are made with the hard realities of American race relations. 'Emmett Till's death was an extreme example of the logic of America's national racial caste system,' Tyson concludes chillingly. 'Ask yourself whether America's predicament is really so different now.'”
In painstaking, often difficult to read detail, Tyson reaches into the chest cavity of America and pulls out its bloody heart with this acute retelling of Till’s barbaric murder. Even if his own Southern white do-gooder bias occasionally peeks out from behind the otherwise elegant and sophisticated prose, Tyson effectively recasts the killing of an innocent black boy, re-investigates the subsequent trial that took place during the heat of a Mississippi summer when each day the county sheriff would greet the black press on his way into court with a cheerful 'good morning' and a racial epithet ... Tyson successfully connects the dots, and without actually saying so, draws a resolute if symbolic line between Emmett Till and Tamir Rice, and the white supremacist foreground of this country.
...emotional and electric ... Tyson synthesizes an extraordinary amount of previous material, fashioning it into a page-turning, all-too-typical Southern murder story ... A powerful, necessary book.
Along with offering vivid portraits of Southern transplants in Chicago’s 'Black Belt,' Mr. Tyson illustrates the repressive social system that lower-class Mississippi whites such as Ms. Bryant had to navigate, and the power that sheriffs and country judges wielded over their poor, uneducated citizens ... This powerful, moving book doesn’t feature much groundbreaking new research. Mr. Tyson’s sources were largely previously public — newspaper accounts, congressional hearings, press releases, political speeches. But he has expertly unearthed and synthesized them to give a fuller picture than we’ve ever had of the minute-by-minute details of the crime, and of what people were saying and thinking about the Emmett Till case as it unfolded. It will certainly be the definitive account of this crucial catalyst for the civil rights struggle.
