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Summer 1955. The murder of a young Black teenager becomes a pivotal moment in American history.

At the end of August 1955, the lifeless and disfigured body of a teenager was fished out of the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi. The body was that of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Black boy from Chicago who had come to spend the vacations with his mother’s family. A few days earlier, he had been seen in conversation with Carolyn Bryant, a young white shopkeeper, to whom, according to some witnesses, he had made advances. Roy Bryant, her husband, and J.W. Milam, her brother-in-law, picked up Till in the middle of the night at his uncle’s house. He was never seen alive again.

The two men were quickly arrested and brought to trial. A month later, a jury of twelve white men acquitted them after an hour-long deliberation. Seventy years later, the Till case has become a milestone in American civil rights history. But the criminal case is still not entirely solved as new elements continue to emerge. The Till case will weigh heavily on American history for many years to come.

50 States of Crime: France’s leading true crime journalists investigate America’s most notorious cases, one for every state in the Union, offering up fresh perspectives on famously storied crimes and reflecting, in the process, a dark national legacy that leads from coast to coast.

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Born in Rennes in 1982, Jean-Marie Pottier is an independent journalist, after working as an economic journalist for the magazine Challenges, then as editor-in-chief of Slate.fr. Currently, he works for Sciences humaines, Arte, L’ Express, Retronews, and Society, for which he has written several stories and reports on American politics and society. Passionate about music, he writes regularly for the pop magazine Magic. He is also the author of several essays published with Editions Le mot et le reste, including Ground Zero: A musical history of September 11 (2016) and Alternative Nation: The Independent American Scene, 1979-2001 (2021).

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