an atrocity to happen again. Black literary texts—
short stories, poetry, autobiography, and drama—
have made the Till case a familiar one and made
the painful lessons to be learned much easier to
grasp. Examples abound, including Arthenia Bates
Milligan’s “Lost Note,” a short story; GWENDOLYN
BROOKS’s “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Em-
mett Till,” a 10-line poem rendering the response of
Till’s mother to the news of her son’s death; ANNE
MOODY’s autobiographical novel, Coming of Age in
Mississippi, which contains two powerful chapters
on Till’s lynching; and two plays that dramatically
render the lynching and its significance: Endesha
Ida Mae Holland’s From the Mississippi Delta and
JAMES BALDWIN’s Blues for Mr. Charlie. Whereas
Holland’s work opens with a rendition of the Till
incident, focusing on the setting and the victimiza-
tion of blacks in the South and particularly blacks
in Mississippi, which had become a symbol of bru-
tal American racism, Baldwin’s play dramatizes the
murder to emphasize the insidious arrogance of a
culture that refused to see itself as accountable for
such crimes. In the state of Mississippi, blacks had
no rights that whites were bound to respect.
In many of the black literary texts of the second
half of the 20th century, Emmett Till’s lynching
became a living testimony. These texts provide the
true legacy of Emmett Till, a catalyst of the Civil
Rights movement.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hudson-Weems, Clenora. “Emmett Till: The Impetus
of the Modern Civil Rights Movement.” Disserta-
tion. University of Iowa. 1988.
———. Emmett Till: The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil
Rights Movement. Columbia: University of Mis-
souri Press, 1994.
Clenora Hudson-Weems
Tolson, Melvin B. (1898–1966)
Politician, professor, and poet Melvin Beaunorus
Tolson was born on February 6, 1898, in Moberly,
Missouri. Labeled a black modernist in part for his
complex poetic constructions and allusions, Tol-
son infused the modernist project with African-
American issues and images, declaring at one point
that he would “visit a land unvisited by Mr. Eliot”
(quoted in Nelson, “Harlem Gallery.” xl).
After attending Fisk University, Tolson trans-
ferred to Lincoln University, where he graduated
with honors in 1922. That same year he married
Ruth Southall. For a time he taught and coached
at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, but left in 1931
to attend Columbia University on a Rockefeller
Foundation scholarship. This sojourn at Colum-
bia brought him to New York City near the end
of the HARLEM RENAISSANCE; he conducted inter-
views for his thesis that brought him introductions
to many of the leading lights of that movement,
especially LANGSTON HUGHES. His research and im-
mersion in this artistic swirl led to his first pub-
lished poetic efforts. He returned to Wiley College
to teach and remained there until 1947. He was
named poet laureate of Liberia that year and was
commissioned to write a poem in celebration of
the former American colony’s centennial. In 1947
Tolson left Wiley College to teach at Langston Uni-
versity in Langston, Oklahoma. He also served as
Langston’s mayor from 1954 to 1960. Tolson, who
continued working as a poet and cultural critic
at the onset of the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT of the
1960s, won the Arts and Letters Award for Litera-
ture from the American Academy and Institute of
Arts and Letters in 1966, just before his death on
August 29, 1966.
Though Tolson published a few poems that
originated in his year at Columbia, most of his
early efforts remained unpublished until Robert
Farnsworth compiled and published A Gallery of
Harlem Portraits (1979). “Dark Symphony,” which
was first published in Atlantic Monthly in Septem-
ber 1941, was among the most important poems
in this collection. In it Tolson uses six stanzas to
explore the New Negro’s experience and journey
through American history. Assigning each stanza
a musical signature, Tolson moves the Negro from
the moderately quick pace of the allegro moderato
of Crispus Attucks, who “taught / Us how to die /
Before white Patrick Henry’s bugle breath” uttered
his famous cry for liberty or death, to the power-
fully hopeful marching pace of the tempo di marcia
in which “We advance!” Between the two, as RI TATolson, Melvin B. 499