Of Race and Rivers

This essay tells the story of the nine-year transformation of Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, USA (2005–2014) from a memory desert to the site of the single greatest concentration of Emmett Till memorials anywhere in the world. As I do so, I stress the influence of topography and, above all, the north-to-south path of the Tallahatchie River through the heart of the county. I argue that the hills, rivers, floods, and soils of the county are the very mechanisms through which race, politics, and commemoration mingled and, by mingling, produced the commemorative landscape as we know it. The river and the soils around it were the transfer point through which questions of race came to influence commemoration and by which practices of commemoration evolved in ways that served the racial interests of the planter class. (DT)