Free Cross-Curricular Resources From TeachingBooks.net

In 1955, people all over the United States knew that Emmett Louis Till was a fourteen-year-old African-American boy lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. The brutality of his murder, his open-casket funeral, and the acquittal of the men tried for the crime drew tremendous attention.

August 2005 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Emmett Till's murder. The anniversary will be marked with reflection on how far our country has come toward equal rights and equal justice for all and how far we have yet to travel.

TeachingBooks.net is excited to share with you a dynamic online resource created in collaboration with Houghton Mifflin Company that stimulates discussion about Emmett Till. This multimedia, cross-curricular resource is ideal for middle and high school English, Social Studies, and History classes. It is made freely available on the Web at http://www.TeachingBooks.net/till.

A new poem written by award-winning poet Marilyn Nelson is the centerpiece for TeachingBooks' new program. A Wreath for Emmett Till (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005) is composed in a striking and unusual poetic form, a heroic crown of sonnets. Ms. Nelson describes this format as follows in a written interview that is part of this TeachingBooks resource: "A heroic crown of sonnets is a sequence of 15 sonnets, which are interlinked like the normal crown of sonnets, except that in the heroic crown the last sonnet is made up of the first lines of the previous 14 sonnets. My crown is slightly different because the last sonnet is also an acrostic. So the first letters of each line, if you read down, spell out the phrase, 'RIP Emmett L. Till.'"

TeachingBooks invites you to listen to Ms. Nelson read, in its entirety, her astonishing and haunting poem. Also included in this comprehensive online resource are audio interviews with Ms. Nelson and the book's publisher, an in-depth written interview, and links to numerous resources to teach about Emmett Till and to teach about poetry.

The program is freely available at: http://www.TeachingBooks.net/till

—Nick Glass, Founder, TeachingBooks.net
email: nick@teachingbooks.net