Jim Emison on his roots in Haywood County and Elbert Williams, the NAACP’s first voting rights martyr

On June 20, 1940 in Brownsville, TN, Elbert Williams was overheard vowing to register Black voters. Someone reported him to the local police. That night, police seized him from his home, jailed him, and interrogated him.

Three days later, WIlliams' battered body was pulled from the Hatchie River. His killers sent a chilling message to Black citizens: register to vote and die.

Attorney Jim Emison grew up near the Hatchie in a family of lawyers. Yet he never heard Williams’s story. After retiring, Emison made it his mission to bring this largely forgotten early civil rights era murder to light.

Emison joins us to discuss his new book about the case, Murder on the Hatchie, and his West Tennessee roots and the community that kept the murder a secret for decades.