Concurrent Session 3-B

Location

Bryant Hall, Room 200

Start Date

15-3-2025 9:00 AM

End Date

15-3-2025 10:45 AM

Description

  • WHO, to America, IS EMMETT TILL: Memorializing Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley and One Community’s Mission to Reconcile with Its Past
    The Emmett Till Interpretive Center Staff (Daphne R. Chamberlain, Benjamin Saulsberry, Jay Rushing, Jessie Jaynes-Diming)
    In August 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Louis Till was kidnapped and killed in the Mississippi Delta. Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were ultimately acquitted of his murder by an all-white, male jury at the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner. While the local community went silent for 50 years after the trial ended, the American Civil Rights Movement gained momentum and Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, devoted the rest of her life to fighting for justice in the murder of her son. In 2006 just after the 50th anniversary of Till’s murder, the Sumner community began to engage in conversations about how to commemorate his life and tell the truth about what happened to him in the Delta. As a result, the Emmett Till Memorial Commission was founded; and the Emmett Till Interpretive Center was born out of the Commission’s community engagement work and was established in 2015 to interpret the restored Tallahatchie County Courthouse and its role in the Till story, while also working to promote restorative justice and racial healing through memorialization. 2025 marks the 70th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till which had an impact on Mississippi, the South, and the nation. This workshop will give attention to the origins of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center (ETIC) while also giving testimony to the organization's work in historical preservation, truth-telling, and racial reconciliation. This session will also expound on organizational goals and practices employed for almost two decades to engage various audiences and stakeholders to preserve the history and legacy of Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley through memorial work and youth and public engagement.
  • Memorial Monuments: From Glorified Pasts to Reparative Possibilities
    RoAnne Elliott, Independent Scholar, Washington County Community Remembrance Project; and Valandra, Professor of Social Work and African & African American Studies, University of Arkansas
    Memory as a topic of human interest has found its way into the work of many genres since antiquity, but in recent decades, historians and scholars across the humanities and social sciences have lived through what Jay Winter has termed a ‘memory boom’, an explosion of interest in collective memory as an organizing concept for analysis and discourse. This boom is evident in an expanding body of research exploring how organized societies commemorate and memorialize the past. One provocative impact of increased focus on public memorialization in scholarship and in public discourse is a strong pivot away from work that upholds a view of the glorious past and valorous heroes of a nation or community, and into work that subjects this past and its heroes to rigorous examination under the unfiltered light of new, deepened analysis addressing previously muted questions. This work has illuminated events, circumstances, and lived experiences previously dismissed as inconsequential, unknowable, and irrelevant. New inquiries within and beyond the academy have inspired critique of the familiar and treasured narratives through which people remember and make meaning of their personal and collective past, envision the future, and claim the people and places that hold the significance of heritage. In this paper we illustrate memory work that bares entrenched wounds, and offers reparative possibilities, and potential ways forward for the nation and for local communities. The National Memorial to Peace and Justice of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery Alabama, a large scale project, and an off-shoot, small, community memorial project in Northwest Arkansas both memorialize victims of anti-Black racial terror through processes that honor descendants of victims, engage communities, and connect a society’s past racial harm to its present challenges and possibilities. Neither project is a static representation of the past.
  • Chair: Valandra, Professor of Social Work and African & African American Studies, University of Arkansas

Relational Format

Conference proceeding

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Mar 15th, 9:00 AM Mar 15th, 10:45 AM

Concurrent Session 3-B

Bryant Hall, Room 200

  • WHO, to America, IS EMMETT TILL: Memorializing Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley and One Community’s Mission to Reconcile with Its Past
    The Emmett Till Interpretive Center Staff (Daphne R. Chamberlain, Benjamin Saulsberry, Jay Rushing, Jessie Jaynes-Diming)
    In August 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Louis Till was kidnapped and killed in the Mississippi Delta. Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were ultimately acquitted of his murder by an all-white, male jury at the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner. While the local community went silent for 50 years after the trial ended, the American Civil Rights Movement gained momentum and Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, devoted the rest of her life to fighting for justice in the murder of her son. In 2006 just after the 50th anniversary of Till’s murder, the Sumner community began to engage in conversations about how to commemorate his life and tell the truth about what happened to him in the Delta. As a result, the Emmett Till Memorial Commission was founded; and the Emmett Till Interpretive Center was born out of the Commission’s community engagement work and was established in 2015 to interpret the restored Tallahatchie County Courthouse and its role in the Till story, while also working to promote restorative justice and racial healing through memorialization. 2025 marks the 70th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till which had an impact on Mississippi, the South, and the nation. This workshop will give attention to the origins of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center (ETIC) while also giving testimony to the organization's work in historical preservation, truth-telling, and racial reconciliation. This session will also expound on organizational goals and practices employed for almost two decades to engage various audiences and stakeholders to preserve the history and legacy of Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley through memorial work and youth and public engagement.
  • Memorial Monuments: From Glorified Pasts to Reparative Possibilities
    RoAnne Elliott, Independent Scholar, Washington County Community Remembrance Project; and Valandra, Professor of Social Work and African & African American Studies, University of Arkansas
    Memory as a topic of human interest has found its way into the work of many genres since antiquity, but in recent decades, historians and scholars across the humanities and social sciences have lived through what Jay Winter has termed a ‘memory boom’, an explosion of interest in collective memory as an organizing concept for analysis and discourse. This boom is evident in an expanding body of research exploring how organized societies commemorate and memorialize the past. One provocative impact of increased focus on public memorialization in scholarship and in public discourse is a strong pivot away from work that upholds a view of the glorious past and valorous heroes of a nation or community, and into work that subjects this past and its heroes to rigorous examination under the unfiltered light of new, deepened analysis addressing previously muted questions. This work has illuminated events, circumstances, and lived experiences previously dismissed as inconsequential, unknowable, and irrelevant. New inquiries within and beyond the academy have inspired critique of the familiar and treasured narratives through which people remember and make meaning of their personal and collective past, envision the future, and claim the people and places that hold the significance of heritage. In this paper we illustrate memory work that bares entrenched wounds, and offers reparative possibilities, and potential ways forward for the nation and for local communities. The National Memorial to Peace and Justice of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery Alabama, a large scale project, and an off-shoot, small, community memorial project in Northwest Arkansas both memorialize victims of anti-Black racial terror through processes that honor descendants of victims, engage communities, and connect a society’s past racial harm to its present challenges and possibilities. Neither project is a static representation of the past.
  • Chair: Valandra, Professor of Social Work and African & African American Studies, University of Arkansas