Scholar inspires more plans to memorialize site of Emmett Till tragedy
LAWRENCE – Over the past decade, Dave Tell has become one of the nation’s leading academic experts on the commemoration of the 1955 lynching of Black teen Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi.
The University of Kansas professor of communication studies wrote a 2019 book about the ground-level struggles over the memory of the Till case, which galvanized the 20th century African American civil rights movement.
Till was abducted and beaten to death by a group of white men who were incensed that the teen had whistled at the white woman running Bryant’s Grocery store in the small town. After the murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury, they bragged about getting away with it.
In 2017, Tell wrote an article in the journal Southern Culture describing how the current owners of the store’s skeleton used a state grant designed for civil rights education not to restore the fateful Bryant’s Grocery but to remodel an undistinguished old gas station they also own next door.
That article, in turn, has led to a new one credited to Tell and Torrey Tracy, assistant professor at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas. “Artist’s Project: Memorializing a Site of Sensitivity in Mississippi: Redemption and Reconciliation in the Shadows of Emmett Till” was published in the latest edition of Public Art Dialogue.
“Torrey called out of the blue and essentially said, ‘I read your article about the scandal of memory in Money, Mississippi,'” Tell said. “He wanted to do something about it, so he came up with these drawings that are in the article.
“He's not the first person to have this idea. I have seen other architects and architecture students come up with drawings ... dreams of how to rectify this situation.
“The difference is that after his article was accepted for publication, Torrey and the editor reached out to me and asked, essentially, if I would write a preface for it.”
Tell recaps the Ben Roy’s gas station saga, and Tracy responds with four ideas for commemoration that grapple with both the rotting condition of the old grocery and what Tell calls the “bad-faith restoration” of the gas station.
Tracy calls it a “proposal for a series of schematic architectural interventions.”
“I love the idea of academic work being translated into wildly different formats,” Tell said. “An academic article being converted into a popular-press article happens, maybe not enough, but with some frequency. I think it's cool that, in this case, an academic article is being turned into architectural drawings, or how some of my other work on Emmett Till has been translated into museum exhibits or smartphone apps. I'm very touched by the fact that people would read it in one medium of the academic article and just translate it into another medium entirely.
“I could never make architectural drawings or smartphone apps or museum exhibits by myself. That's beyond me. And so I just think it's cool when these stories get picked up and translated into other mediums.”
Tell said he is optimistic that the younger generation of the landowning family might soon sell the old grocery store property for a memorial.
“I think there's a decent chance that eventually the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, which is the nonprofit we work with, will be able to buy that land and turn the site into a memorial,” Tell said. “Talks have already been happening.”