As soon as Mamie Till-Mobley, then Mamie Till, learned of her son’s torture and murder, she got to writing. There was work to be done, a need to understand every detail, a responsibility greater than her own healing. Her memoir — she did not live to witness its publication some 50 years later — reflects, “Emmett was dead. They had pulled his body from the Tallahatchie River … weighted down by a heavy gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire … I had to get everything down … I was the one who was going to have to explain to people.”