Debra Schultz

“In the Footsteps of Emmett Till” supports a participatory action research trip with Kingsborough Community College (KCC) students to civil rights sites in Mississippi; an Emmett Till symposium at KCC and Till film preview with Brooklyn-based filmmaker Keith Beauchamp; and new historical scholarship on the politics of civil rights memory. The project is based upon a series of visits to Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and North Carolina, as well as interviews with “memory advocates” including Congressman John Lewis; Pamela Junior, Founding Director of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum; Lonnie Bunch, Smithsonian Institution Secretary and founder of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History; and Bryan Stevenson, founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative and Montgomery’s new Lynching Memorial and Museum.