Winter Holiday Schedule

All Library branches will be closed on the following days for the Winter Holiday:

Tuesday, December 24th

Wednesday, December 25th

Thursday, December 26th

Tuesday, December 31st

Wednesday, January 1st

Mr. & Mrs. F.L. Schlagle & Turner Library will also be closed on:

Monday, December 23rd

Friday, December 27th

Monday, December 30th

The Murder of Emmett Till

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Age Group:

Teens, Adults
Please note you are looking at an event that has already happened.

Program Description

Event Details

On August 25, 1955, Emmett Till whistled at a white woman outside a Mississippi grocery store. Three days later, the 14-year-old African-American boy from Chicago was kidnapped, tortured, murdered, and thrown into a river. For the next 50 years, there was not a single memorial to Till’s murder in the Mississippi Delta. Since 2005, however, many memorial sites have been created to tell the story of Till’s 1955 murder. Professor Dave Tell will introduce the audience to the various Till memorials and use them to explore the competing narratives of exactly what happened on the night of the murder.

Dave Tell is a professor of communication studies at KU and co-creator of the Emmett Till Memory Project. His work on Emmett Till has been recognized with a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.