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Clenora Hudson-Weems, Ph.D., was the first to establish the position of the August 28, 1955, brutal lynching of Emmett Louis ?Bobo?Till, the 14-year-old Black Chicago youth, for whistling at a 21-year-old white woman (Carolyn Bryant) in Money, MS, as the catalyst of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. In her 1988 doctoral dissertation, ?Emmett Till: The Impetus for the Modern Civil Rights Movement? (U. of Iowa), later published as Emmett Till: The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement (1994), she carefully documents the Till murder case as having set the stage for the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, since it happened 3 months and 3 days before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus, December 1, 1955. A Ford Fellow, she quests for truth surrounding the underplaying of the case in American history, concluding that Parks? demonstration was more palatable than Till's bloated face, in spite of King's assertion in Stride Toward Freedom that pressed in the minds of the Alabamians during the boycott was the image of Till. Contending that ?Historians will talk about the good and the bad, but they won't deal with the ugly,? informant for her 1988 doctoral dissertation (U. of Iowa), Rayfield Mooty, Labor Union and Civil Rights activist who advised the mother, Mamie, during the ordeal, help to make the case a ?cause c?l?bre.?Many luminaries in the academy praised the author for her bold, brave stance regarding this case, including Yale University's late John Blassingame (?When you really think about it, Hudson-Weems is absolutely right.?); the late C. Eric Lincoln of Duke University (?In Emmett Till, she , , , challenges the most sacred shibboleths of the origins of the Civil Rights Movement.?); and Talmadge Anderson, founding editor of The Western Journal of Black Studies (?Hudson-Weems substantiates the real catalytic event that unleashed the long inhibited Black rebellion against the viciousness and brutality of White racism. . . . The l
