After forty-three years as a Tennessee trial attorney, Jim Emison devoted his retirement to investigating the 1940 murder of NAACP leader Elbert Williams. Emison's work has been featured by the Associated Press, NPR, and Nashville Public Television, and led to a renewed Department of Justice review under the Emmett Till Act. Emison is the co-founder of Tennesseans for Historical Justice and a board member of the Tennessee Historical Society. Margaret A. Burnham is the founding director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University, and has been a staffer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a civil rights lawyer, a defense attorney, and a judge. A professor of law, she was nominated by President Biden and confirmed by the US Senate to serve on the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board. She is the author of By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
Description
"At a time of accelerated pushback to hard-won gains of the modern American civil rights movement, this book illuminates the human cost paid to secure voting rights for Black Americans. Expertly researched, it invites us to better comprehend the raw courage of individuals determined to exercise full American citizenship rights in the face of violent white supremacy." --Lecia J. Brooks, Southern Poverty Law Center "A powerful and necessary reminder of the courage and sacrifice that shaped the NAACP's earliest fight for justice. Jim Emison brings to light a painful but pivotal chapter in our history with clarity and care." --Derrick Johnson, president and CEO, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People "Jim Emison brings to light the largely forgotten killing of NAACP organizer Elbert Williams. Through years of research, he reconstructs the violence that followed Black citizens' attempts to register to vote. Murder on the Hatchie restores this story to the history of the civil rights movement." --Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Devil in the Grove "In a day when just being a member of the NAACP could get you killed in the South, Elbert Williams and five other members stood up against the Jim Crow system and attempted to register to vote. Jim Emison captures the courage of Williams and the others in his insightful book, which reminds us why the right to vote remains critical to the survival of our American democracy." --Jerry Mitchell, investigative reporter "A searing excavation of terror and truth, a thunderous reminder that the right to vote has always been paid for in blood. This is not just buried history; it is a reckoning blazing into the light." --Keith A. Beauchamp, filmmaker, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till and Till "This powerful book is no mere cold investigative report of the past, but a warmly inspiring story of a lawyer and a community seeking to find answers for the present and our future. Painstaking research and a poignant story make this book a must-read--and a must-heed." --Rev. Cornell William Brooks, Esq., 18th president and CEO, NAACP, and professor, Harvard Kennedy School "Murder on the Hatchie exposes how racism, fear, and abuse of power shaped both the crime and the community's response to it. More than a true-crime narrative, it serves as a moral reckoning while challenging readers to confront the enduring legacy of racial terror, systemic discrimination, and the importance of historical memory." --India A. Artis, archivist for NAACP, and former business manager of The Crisis magazine "With Murder on the Hatchie, we have it--the right man writing the right book at the right time.... In this invigorating, groundbreaking narrative, Jim Emison recounts the history as can only one who has lived close to it." --Margaret A. Burnham, director, Northeastern University Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Center, and author of By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners "Emison importantly confers on Elbert Williams the greater notoriety he deserves for his heroic efforts as an early civil rights pioneer and member of the NAACP. Williams can now take his place in the pantheon of civil rights martyrs." --Matt Gonzalez, chief attorney of the San Francisco Public Defender's Office "This book is a magnificent legacy that shows how a mighty few can expose our worst behaviors of the past, then come together decades later to win redress." --Hank Klibanoff, director of the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at Emory University and coauthor of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation