About Me
Hello,
my name is Devery Anderson. I want to personally
thank you for your interest in the Emmett Till case, and for taking the time
to look over this website.
I first became acquainted with Emmett Till in
the fall of 1994, as a student at the University of Utah, after watching the
first segment of the PBS documentary series on the Civil Rights Movement, Eyes
on the Prize. Emmett’s murder and the subsequent acquittal of his killers
left me full of questions. What happened to the killers after their
acquittal? What happened to Emmett’s mother? Was she alive, or had she died
somewhere in obscurity? Why was I not already familiar with this case?
Several months later I discovered that there
was at least one book on the subject in print, and so I purchased Stephen
Whitfield’s A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till. As fate
would have it, Clenora Hudson-Weems, professor of
English at the University of Missouri-Columbia, came to speak at the
University of Utah in May 1995. Although her lecture was on another topic,
the school newspaper noted that she was the author of the book, Emmett
Till: The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Right’s
Movement. I attended her lecture, purchased her book and was full of
questions. I read both of these books and wanted to learn more. Both were
written at a time when research, writing, and interest in the Till case was
in its infancy, and I eventually discovered that they contained many factual
errors, but they did whet my appetite for more.
I found that this case was consuming me in ways
I could not quite explain. In 1996, while still a student at the University
of Utah, I took a class on racism. Students were given a major assignment,
due at the end of the quarter, that we would each
present to the class. I decided that I would put together a scrapbook on the
Emmett Till case and include an original interview with Mamie Till-Mobley,
Emmett’s mother. Luckily, I found her listed in the Chicago telephone
directory and wrote her a letter. After later calling her, we arranged a time
for a telephone interview. Although she thought she could only spare 45
minutes, we talked for over two hours. That conversation on December 3, 1996
was the first of dozens that we held over the next six years. Our last
conversation was a month before her January 2003 death. When she died, I felt
like I had lost a family member. I had certainly lost one of the most
compassionate and courageous people I had ever known.
This website is one way for me to contribute to
the spread of knowledge about the Emmett Till murder. I will update it
regularly as I continue to do research and gather information. In addition to
managing this site, I am researching and writing my own book on Emmett Till,
which I believe will be the most comprehensive study to date. It is
tentatively titled, The Boy Who Never Died: The Saga of the Emmett Till
Murder, and will be based on hundreds of hours of archival research,
sifting through dozens of newspapers, as well as interviews with those who
witnessed the case unfold, including Emmett Till’s family members who were
with him in Mississippi. It will bring the case up to the present. I have
been making great progress on the book lately and expect to have a completed
manuscript by the end of March, 2012.
My article, "A Wallet, A White Woman, and
a Whistle: Fact and Fiction in Emmett Till's Encounter in Money,
Mississippi" was published in the Summer 2008 issue of The Southern
Quarterly. Besides my work on the Emmett Till case, I am a writer and
researcher of other areas of American social and religious history. I have
published several articles and am co-editor of three books on Mormon history
that were released in August 2005, which together, won the award for Best
Documentary at the annual meeting of the Mormon History Association in
Casper, Wyoming in May, 2006 . I am also editor of a third volume that was
published in March 2011, called The
Development of LDS Temple Worship, 1846-2000: A Documentary History.
I currently live in Salt Lake
City, Utah, and am the father of three children, Amanda, Tyler, and Jordan. I
have a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Utah.
Please send any suggestions for
improving the design and use of this website to: devery@emmetttillmurder.com
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Photo by
Emily Hatch
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