Writing to Save a Life

When Emmett Till was murdered aged fourteen for allegedly whistling at a white woman, photographs of his destroyed face became a flashpoint in the civil rights movement. A decade earlier Emmetts father, Louis, had also been killed - court-martialled and hanged. Though the circumstances could hardly have been more different, behind both deaths stood the same crime, of being black. In Writing to Save a Life, John Edgar Wideman, born the same year as Emmett Till, investigates the tragic fates of fa