This week, we bring you A Wreath For Emmett Till, a Coretta Scott King Book Award andMichael L. Printz Award honor book published in 2005 by the Houghton Mifflin Company and written by award winning poet, author, educator, and translator, Marilyn Nelson. Nelson is the daughter of one of the last Tuskegee Airmen, and keeping with the family tradition of making history, Nelson is a three-time finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the Robert Frost medal, served as Connecticut’s poet laureate from 2001 to 2006, and recipient of many other honors and awards.
In the form of a Petrarchan sonnet, Nelson shares the harrowing story of the 1955 lynching of 14 year old Emmett Till. Nelson was nine years old when this atrocity occurred and bore witness to the international outrage stemming from the case’s lack of due-justice. This notoriety led to Emmett Till’s mother Mamie Till Mobley becoming a key civil rights activist. Meant to be used as an educational tool for young adults when covering the topics of racism and hate crimes against Black Americans, Nelson creates a lyrical masterpiece of 14 poems that make reference to many other famous poets’ works, which our copy has a full set of notes on. The ending poem is an acrostic, made up of the first letter from every individual poem’s title, spelling out “RIP EMMETT L TILL”. Each sonnet’s title can be read as a line within the individual poem and can also be read as its own poem when compiled.
This country we love has a Janus face: One mouth speaks with forked tongue, the other reads the Constitution. My country, ‘tis of both thy nightmare history and thy grand dream, thy centuries of good and evil deeds, I sing… .
A perfect selection for anyone wishing to learn more about the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s.
