Murder on the Hatchie: A Book Talk with Jim Emison
Category: Event Calendar
Date and Time
- Thursday, Oct 15, 2026 6pm - 8pm
Location
450 Mulberry St.
Memphis, TN 38103
Details
The National Civil Rights Museum welcomes author and retired Tennessee trial attorney Jim Emison for a conversation about his book, Murder on the Hatchie: The NAACP’s First Martyr.
The book uncovers the story of Elbert Williams, a founding member of the NAACP chapter in Brownsville, Tennessee, who was lynched in 1940 for his efforts to register Black voters. His murder occurred years before the more widely known killings of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers, yet his story remained largely absent from the history of the Civil Rights Movement.
Drawing on FBI files, Department of Justice correspondence, and eyewitness accounts, Emison reconstructs Williams’s abduction and murder and examines how local and federal officials failed for decades to bring his killers to justice. The book restores Williams’s place in civil rights history while tracing a direct line from Brownsville’s fight for the ballot to the voting rights struggles that followed.
During the program, Emison will discuss his decades of research, the renewed federal review his work helped prompt under the Emmett Till Act, and why Williams’s story remains urgent to the Museum’s work of preserving civil rights history and advancing voting rights education.
A book signing will follow the conversation.
