Murder on the Hatchie: A Book Talk with Jim Emison

October 15 | 6:00 pm

National Civil Rights Museum

 

The National Civil Rights Museum welcomes author and retired trial attorney Jim Emison for a conversation on his book, Murder on the Hatchie: The NAACP’s First Martyr, which uncovers the 1940 lynching of Elbert Williams, a founding member of the Brownsville, Tennessee NAACP chapter murdered for his work registering Black voters, years before the more widely known killings of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers.

Drawing on FBI files, Department of Justice correspondence, and eyewitness accounts, Emison reconstructs how Williams was taken from his home and killed and how local and federal officials failed for decades to bring his killers to justice. The book restores Williams’s story to the history of the Civil Rights Movement and traces a direct line from Brownsville’s fight for the ballot to the voting rights battles that followed.

Emison will discuss his decades of research into the case, the renewed federal review his work helped prompt, and why Williams’s story remains urgent to the Museum’s ongoing work preserving civil rights history and advancing voting rights education.

A book signing will follow the conversation.