Jim Emison at Harvard Book Store
Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA
Admission: Free
Harvard Book Store welcomes Jim Emison —retired Tennessee trial attorney, co-founder of Tennesseans for Historical Justice, and a board member of the Tennessee Historical Society—for a discussion of his book, Murder on the Hatchie: The NAACP’s First Martyr. He will be joined in conversation by Cornell William Brooks —Hauser Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit Organizations and Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership and Social Justice at the Harvard Kennedy School. About Murder on the Hatchie A groundbreaking work of true crime and civil rights history, Murder on the Hatchie uncovers the 1940 lynching of NAACP leader Elbert Williams–America’s first martyr for Black voting rights–and the federal failures that buried the case for more than eighty years. The forgotten lynching that launched America’s fight for Black voting rights–and the federal cover-up that followed. Murder on the Hatchie uncovers one of the earliest and most consequential crimes in America’s long struggle for Black voting rights: the 1940 lynching of Elbert Williams in Brownsville, Tennessee. A founding member of the local NAACP, Williams was murdered for attempting to register Black voters, decades…