Framing Emmett Till: Exposing Dark Fear

A graphic novel biography about one of America’s most heinous race crimes, Framing Emmett Till: Exposing Dark Fear follows an anonymous Black writer as he investigates Emmett’s murder, confronting not only the unresolved truths of the past, but the ways Black pain is consumed, reshaped, and monetized in the present.

Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was abducted and lynched in August 1955 in Mississippi, his body thrown into the Tallahatchie River by two white men. A white woman named Carol Bryant had accused young Emmett of making advances on her. Bryant’s husband and his half-brother then hunted down, tortured, and murdered Emmett. Three days later, his mutilated body was pulled from the river.

In Emmett’s home city of Chicago, his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on an open casket funeral. Tens of thousands of people attended the ceremony, including the media, and the grotesque images of Emmett’s body were printed in Jet magazine and quickly spread throughout the nation, serving as a catalyst for the civil rights movement.

Drawing on acclaimed journalist Christopher Benson’s experience collaborating with Mamie Till-Mobley on Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America–a Pulitzer Prize-nominated, Robert F. Kennedy Award-winning work–Framing Emmett Till: Exposing Dark Fear reexamines the legacy of Emmett Till through a contemporary lens.