The ‘Shocking Story’ of Emmett Till and the Politics of Public Confession

Abstract

In 1955, journalist William Bradford Huie interviewed Emmett Till’s killers and published their confession in Look magazine. Entitled "The Shocking Story of Approved Murder in Mississippi," Huie’s tale dominated the remembrance of Emmett Till for nearly fifty years. This essay argues that the power of the “Shocking Story” to control the memory of Till’s murder resides in its recourse to the “expressive confession,” the distinctive power of which is a capacity to naturalize historical events and thereby constitute a master narrative of inevitably in which further rhetorical intervention seems unnecessary. So understood, the “Shocking Story” is not just one more recounting of Till’s untimely death, it is also a treatise about the role of speech in the violence of the Mississippi Delta.