Murder on the Hatchie: The NAACP’s First Martyr | Jim Emison and Dr. Margaret Burnham

In 1940, Elbert Williams, a founding member of the Brownsville, Tennessee NAACP chapter, was lynched for his work registering Black voters. It happened years before the more widely known killings of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers, and for decades his killers were never brought to justice. In this recorded conversation, author and retired trial attorney Jim Emison discusses his book Murder on the Hatchie: The NAACP’s First Martyr, which draws on FBI files, Department of Justice correspondence, and eyewitness accounts to reconstruct how Williams was taken from his home and killed, and how local and federal officials failed to act. Moderated by Dr. Margaret Burnham, Emison shares: his decades of research into the case, the renewed federal review his work helped prompt, how Brownsville’s fight for the ballot connects directly to the voting rights battles that followed, and why Williams’s story remains urgent today. The book restores Elbert Williams’s story to its rightful place in the history of the Civil Rights Movement. His story also reflects the Museum’s ongoing work to preserve civil rights history and advance voting rights education.