- Over 12,000 people have signed an online petition to cancel an opera about the victim of a 1955 lynching,
Emmett Till . - "Emmett Till, A New American Opera" was set to open at John Jay College in
New York City .
Over 12,000 people have signed an online petition to shut down a new opera about the victim of a 1955 lynching, Emmett Till.
The play, "Emmett Till, A New American Opera," was set to open on Wednesday, March 23, at The City University of New York, John Jay College's Gerald W. Lynch Theatre in New York City. However, critics of the play have called it historically inaccurate.
John Jay College of Criminal Justice student Mya Bishop created the change.org petition, writing that the opera, penned by Clare Coss, centers a fictional "white school teacher named Roanne Taylor" and her "white guilt" rather than the torture and murder of Emmett Till, who was lynched by two white men for allegedly flirting with a white woman when he was only 14 years old.
The petition reads, "Clare Coss has creatively centered her white guilt by using this show to make the racially motivated brutal torture and murder of a 14-year-old child about her white self and her white feelings."
"Yes, the opera has a fictional white character — but it isn't about her," composer Mary D. Watkins said in a statement to Playbill. "It is a true story that happened in our American history that could be told by anyone."
Coss, 86, said Till's story touched her as a child and moved her to write this opera.
"[Composer] Mary [Watkins] was 15 in 1955 and I was 20 — each of us deeply and differently impacted by the barbaric lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta and the failure of justice," she wrote in a statement to Playbill. "The one invented white character, Roanne Taylor, a schoolteacher who cares but is silent, reflects Martin Luther King, Jr.'s ultimate tragedy: the silence of the good people. She represents the context of white supremacy in which the world of violence and terror was enabled. She takes a first step forward to break the silence."
Till, who was visiting family in Mississippi at the time of his murder, was falsely accused by Carolyn Bryant Donham, a white woman, of whistling and making advances toward her in 1955 outside the store she and her husband, Roy, owned.
Days later, Till was taken from his bed in the middle of the night by Roy Bryant and his half brother. He was thrown into the bed of a pickup truck, viciously attacked, shot, and tossed into the Tallahatchie River. His brutal murder brought attention to the centuries of violence Black communities suffered in America. His story became a rallying cry of the
Until her death in 2003, Till's mother, Mamie Till, fought to get justice for her son to no avail. The Justice Department closed its third investigation into Till's murder in 2021.