miscarriage of racial justice

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON - LOUIS AND EMMETT TILL

 

Writing to Save a Life: THE LOUIS TILL FILE, by John Edgar Wideman (Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc, New York, NY, 2016, 193 pages).

Book Review by Dennis Moore

“Unclassifiable and harrowing. The path through the very specific ‘American darkness that disconnects colored fathers from sons’ is found and lost and found again through prose that jumps and shimmers, punches and croons. This is one of those books virtually impossible to write…yet it has been written. And by a great American writer.”

  • JOY WILLIAMS, author of Ninety-Nine Stories of God and The Visiting Privilege

May 3, 2017 (San Diego) - John Edgar Wideman, has written an insightful and provocative book that is full of ironies; Writing to Save a Life: THE LOUIS TILL FILE. It is the story of Louis Till, the father of Emmett Till, the young boy from Chicago who was lynched in Mississippi allegedly for whistling at a white woman. Wideman’s book is the untold story of Louis Till, a man of color who suffered a miscarriage of racial justice a full decade before the infamous lynching of his son, Emmett. This really is about a cruel twist of fate and circumstance that is painful to envision.


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