A graphic novel biography about one of America's most heinous race crimes, Framing Emmett Till: Exposing Dark Fear follows an anonymous Black writer as he investigates Emmett's murder, confronting not only the unresolved truths of the past, but the ways Black pain is consumed, reshaped, and monetized in the present
On August 28, in the the summer of 1955 in Mississippi, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was abducted, lynched, and his body then thrown into the Tallahatchie River by two white men. A white woman named Carol Bryant had accused young Emmett of making advances on her. Bryant's husband and his half-brother then hunted down, tortured, and murdered Emmett. Three days later, his mutilated body was pulled from the river.
In Emmett's home city of Chicago, his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on an open casket funeral. Tens of thousands of people attended the ceremony, including the media, and the grotesque images of Emmett's body were printed in Jet magazine and quickly spread throughout the nation, serving as a catalyst for the civil rights movement.
Drawing from acclaimed journalist Christopher Benson's firsthand experience collaborating with Mamie Till-Mobley on his first book, Framing Emmett Till: Exposing Dark Fear reexamines history. This graphic novel follows an anonymous Black writer pulled into the seductive, exploitative machinery of Hollywood while interviewing Mamie and revisiting the case decades later. As he investigates Emmett's murder, he confronts not only the unresolved truths of the past, but the ways Black pain is consumed, reshaped, and monetized in the present.
