Remembering Emmett Till by Dave Tell

Author:Dave Tell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Conclusion

At virtually every possible moment when Till’s story could have veered over county lines, the ETMC chose to tell it in such a fashion that placed Tallahatchie County at the heart of the Till murder and, more broadly, at the heart of the civil rights movement. From their fascination with a debatable story about Rosa Parks to the composition history of their driving tour signs, the commission always rooted Till’s murder in their own county. In effect, the commission remade the history of the county so that they could win funds with which to remake the history of Till’s murder. There could hardly be a better example of the ecology of memory. Place (Tallahatchie County) had to be given a new racial history in order for the murder of Emmett Till to be remembered.

I close this chapter with a story about an ETMC sign that stood briefly on the site of the Delta Inn—the “old hotel” as locals knew it. Built in 1914, the Delta Inn was a mansion that was the center of midcentury Sumner society and, during the trial, the site at which the jury was sequestered. Although the story is sad in many ways, it illustrates the connections between Tallahatchie County, the movement, and the murder. With the help of Maude Schuyler Clay, the ETMC crafted a noncontroversial message about the history of the hotel and its role in the trial. At the urging of Plater Robinson, they inserted a final line that claimed a cross was burned in front of the Delta Inn midway through the trial—an event for which there is modest evidence.95

Just before the ETMC was formed, John Whitten III purchased the site of the then-crumbling Delta Inn. According to Clay, the hotel began to deteriorate in the 1980s or 1990s. After a failed attempt to register the building on the National Register of Historical Places, the once-grand mansion was “declared a danger and a menace to public safety.”96 Whitten agreed. The son of John Whitten Jr.—defense lawyer for Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam—Whitten III still works in the same brick office building from which his father defended the murderers; he replaced J. J. Breland in the infamous firm of Breland and Whitten.97 Much like his father, his record on race relations is poor. In 2009, the NAACP accused him of a hate crime for organizing a vigilante mob to pursue an untried, unarmed African American man whom he believed was guilty of burglary. He chased the man in a World War II era armored tank.98

Shortly after purchasing the site of the Delta Inn, Whitten hired a Greenwood firm to take it down brick by brick. A newspaper reporter with a keen eye noted, “Once the structure is demolished and the property cleared, Whitten will be left with a spacious vacant corner lot facing the town’s Courthouse Square.”99 Predictably, Whitten was not excited about the prospect of an ETMC sign on his property. Although the sign did not mention his father’s role in

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