Her memoir, written with Chicago journalist Benson, is told chronologically, with a large portion devoted to the events leading up to the murder and its aftermath. In her view, these two qualities helped cause his death when he journeyed to Mississippi, where the "code" demanded that blacks efface themselves in the presence of whites. As a single mother, she tried to instill Emmett with self-confidence and a sense of life's possibilities. Although the events surrounding the murder have been recounted many times, Till-Mobley fills readers in on her son's childhood in Argo, Ill., and later Chicago. His crime: he inadvertently whistled in the vicinity of a white woman who happened to be the wife of one of his killers. That night they tortured the boy before dumping his lifeless body into the Tallahatchie River. In what came to be seen as a seminal event in the fledgling civil rights movement, two white men abducted 14-year-old Emmett from the home of a relative in rural Mississippi in August 1955. Nearly 50 years after the murder of Emmett Till, his mother, Till-Mobley, has added her perspective on the tragedy.
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