This March, national media gathered in small-town Sumner, Miss. to document the opening of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center.<\/p>\n
The museum\u00a0opened\u00a0nearly six decades after the brutal slaying of Emmett Till,\u00a0a 14-year-old black boy visiting the Delta who was murdered after being accused of whistling at a white woman in Money, Miss.<\/p>\n
In Sumner, two white men were acquitted of his murder, which some\u00a0credit with helping spark the U.S. civil rights movement.<\/p>\n
The museum’s exhibits cover\u00a0the 1955 murder and crucial\u00a0moments in the trial, which\u00a0also attracted news media at the time.<\/p>\n
Delta State University and the University Archives & Museum are doing their\u00a0part to help recognize one of Mississippi’s most significant cases by\u00a0collaborating with the Interpretive Center. University archivist Emily Jones\u00a0has partnered with the center’s director, Patrick Weems, to share the university’s Emmett Till Traveling Exhibit.<\/span><\/p>\n The late Dr. Henry Outlaw, former employee with Delta State’s\u00a0Delta Center for Culture and Learning, obtained grant support through the Mississippi Humanities Council to collect a series of oral histories in 2005, 50\u00a0years after murder. In the process, he set in motion a series of events that brought Till and his story back to the centerstage for a new generation to discover.<\/span><\/p>\n In 2007, Jones used the interviews and documents uncovered through Outlaw\u2019s research to create the\u00a0traveling exhibit, which debuted in Tupelo, Miss. The exhibit was also funded by the Mississippi Humanities Council. Since 2007, the exhibit has visited countless\u00a0cities and towns across the nation and been viewed by thousands of school children and community members.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “We were thrilled to work with the Patrick Weems of the center to create a brand new introductory video element to complement the permanent exhibit the enter now displays,” said Jones. “The Archives & Museum received a grant from the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi, which allowed us to work with Laeitta Wade, a student in the Delta Music Institute\u00a0program, to create an entirely new and complimentary video component for the Emmett Till Interpretive Center.<\/p>\n “Since its first travels in 2007, the Emmett Till Traveling Exhibit has been all over the United States providing a platform for discussion, introspection and understanding of what has been referred to by historians as the moment the civil rights movement began in 1955.”<\/p>\n To schedule the exhibit in\u00a0your town, contact Jones at\u00a0ejones@deltastate.edu<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0<\/span>662-846-4780. For more information on the exhibit, visit https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/academics\/libraries\/university-archives-museum\/traveling-exhibit\/exhibit-info\/<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This March, national media gathered in small-town Sumner, Miss. to document the opening of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center. The museum\u00a0opened\u00a0nearly six decades after the brutal slaying of Emmett Till,\u00a0a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":144,"featured_media":63601,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,22,418,28,38,296],"tags":[1413,412,220,1435,1440,1439],"class_list":["post-63600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-archives","category-archives-and-museum","category-community-3","category-delta-center","category-delta-music-institute","category-facultystaff","tag-archives-and-museum","tag-delta-center-for-culture-and-learning","tag-dmi","tag-emmett-till","tag-emmett-till-interpretive-center","tag-traveling-exhibit"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63600"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63609,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63600\/revisions\/63609"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltastate.edu\/news-and-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}