Florida State University Professor Davis Houck is one of the leading experts on Emmett Till, whose 1955 murder in the Mississippi Delta sparked protests across the country. Till, 14, was kidnapped, beaten and shot after he allegedly flirted with a white woman.
Houck helped lead the Emmett Till Memory Project to commemorate the death and memory of Till. The project focuses on 51 sites in and around the Delta that played a significant role in the history and memory of Till’s murder. Niantic’s Field Trip app allows people to learn new stories about Till’s murder — stories that, in some cases, have never yet been told — from the very places where they happened.
“The Emmett Till Memory Project is designed to emphasize the fragility of memory rather than its finality,” Houck said. “Rather than determining the facts once and for all, our bigger aim is to record the ever-shifting memory of Emmett Till.”
Houck is a professor in the FSU College of Communication and Information who co-authored “Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press” with Matthew A. Grindy. He also is collaborating with the Florida State University Libraries’ Special Collections and Archives Division to establish what will become the foremost research collection on the life and death of Till. A link to the archive is available here: http://guides.lib.fsu.edu/Till.
More background on Houck's Till research: https://news.fsu.edu/?s=emmett+till
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