In a time when discussions of race are once again coming to the fore, the event that launched the civil rights movement -- the 1955 lynching of a fourteen-year-old black boy named Emmett Till -- is now reexamined by an award-winning author with access to never-before-heard accounts from those involved as well as recently recovered court transcripts from the trial.

In 1955, white men in the Mississippi Delta lynched a visiting fourteen-year-old from Chicago named Emmett Till. His murder was part of a wave of white terrorism in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared public school segregation unconstitutional. The national coalition organized to protest the Till lynching became the foundation of the modern civil rights movement. But what actually happened to Emmett Till? Not the icon of injustice, but the flesh-and-blood boy? Tyson draws on a wealth of new evidence--including the only interview ever given by Carolyn Bryant, the white woman in whose name Till was killed--to present a half-detective story, half political history. --