“Emmett Till” was painted by LHS graduate Lily Platte in 2003 for the Lincoln High production of The Laramie Project.
In 2006, Lincoln High School produced an original play entitled This Unsafe Star: The Story of Emmett Till. The play earned local and national attention. It received a Mayor’s Arts Award for Best Youth Performance and was acknowledged at the 2008 Human and Civil Rights dinner hosted by the National Education Association at its national conference in Washington D.C. This was a landmark moment for Lincoln High because it was the first high school theatre troupe to be invited to perform a stand-alone piece and continued Lincoln High’s tradition of socially relevant theatre as it portrayed the courage of Emmett Till’s mother and Civil Rights icon Maime Till Mobley. Advocate writer Nic Brown portrayed Emmett Till during his freshman year of high school. Now, he is a senior and is embarking on a journey to discover what the experience meant as a high school in Mississippi (site of Till’s murder) embarks on producing the play. During the spring semester he will interview Civil Rights activists from Lincoln, biographer Christopher Benson, members of Emmett Till’s family, acquaintances of Emmett Till, witnesses of crime, Till scholar Christopher Metress, and current students learning about this important event. All the interviewPlease visit this blog throughout 2010 to see how the project is progressing and how this play and this movement still impacts us today.
