Have a drive through the Mississippi Delta today and you’ll find a panorama dotted with memorials to major figures and occasions from your civil rights movement. Perhaps the most chilling are those devoted to the murder of Emmett Till, a tragedy of hate and injustice that became a beacon in the fight for racial equality. The methods this event is definitely remembered have already been fraught from the beginning, uncovering currents of controversy, patronage, and racism lurking just behind the placid facades of about Remembering Emmett Till traditional markers.

In Keeping in mind Emmett Till, Dave Inform gives us five accounts of the commemoration of the infamous crime. In a development nobody could possess foreseen, Till’s murder-one of the darkest moments in the region’s history-has become an economic drivers for the Delta. Historic tourism has transformed seemingly innocuous locations like bridges, motorboat landings, gas stations, and riverbeds into sites of racial politics, reminders from the still-unsettled question of how better to keep in mind the victim of this heinous crime. Inform builds an insightful and persuasive case for how these memorials possess changed the Delta’s physical and social landscape, drawing potent connections between the dawn of the civil rights era and our own moment of restored open fire for racial justice.