Let the World See: The Lynching of Emmett Till and the Birth of a Movement

In the sweltering summer of 1955, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago stepped into the Jim Crow South—and never returned. Let the World See is a searing, meticulously researched account of the lynching of Emmett Till, whose brutal murder and open-casket funeral ignited a national outcry and helped spark the modern Civil Rights Movement. Written with clarity, emotional depth, and narrative force, Dareios Little traces Emmett's journey from the vibrant streets of Chicago to the cotton fields of Mississippi, where a whistle in a grocery store became a death sentence. Through vivid storytelling and historical precision, this book reconstructs the events leading to Emmett's abduction, the sham trial that followed, and the decades of reckoning that continue to unfold. More than a retelling, Let the World See is a tribute to Mamie Till-Mobley, whose defiant decision to show her son's mutilated body to the world transformed grief into activism. It is a portrait of courage—of witnesses who risked their lives to speak the truth, and of a mother who refused to let her son be forgotten. Spanning courtroom drama, cultural upheaval, and legislative change, this book reveals how one boy's death became a movement's beginning—and why his legacy still demands our attention today.