THE EMMETT TILL CASE

JEAN-MARIE POTTIER

Summer 1955. The body of an African American teenager is fished out of a river. A crime that will change American history.

At the end of August 1955, the lifeless and disfigured body of a teenager was found in the state of Mississippi. The body was that of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago who had come to spend the vacations with his mother's family. A few days earlier, he had been seen in conversation with Carolyn Bryant, a young white shopkeeper, to whom, according to some witnesses, he had made advances. Roy Bryant, her husband, and J.W. Milam, her brother-inlaw, picked up Till in the middle of the night at his uncle's house. He was never seen alive again.
The two men were quickly arrested and brought to justice. A month later, a jury of twelve white men acquitted them after an hour-long deliberation. Nearly seventy years later, the Till case has become a milestone in American civil rights history. But the criminal case is still not entirely solved. New elements continue to emerge. The Till case still weighs heavily on American history, and is not completely over yet.

In partnership with the French magazine Society, this collection aims to paint a picture of the United States through their biggest criminal cases, with - approximately - one book per state. Society met a huge success with a special editions in two volumes about the Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès case, which sold over 400,000 copies.
The stories are written by French journalists from Society, who were sent to the USA to investigate. Our goal is to offer highly documented and short true crime books that could be read as thrillers, and the result is stunning. The tone is incisive, and straight-to-the-point - as journalists know how to do - and the stories are at the same time as gripping as thrillers, with cliffhangers at the end of chapters.