Author Talk: Jim Emison — Murder on the Hatchie

The forgotten lynching that launched America’s fight for Black voting rights–and the federal cover-up that followed.

Murder on the Hatchie uncovers one of the earliest and most consequential crimes in America’s long struggle for Black voting rights: the 1940 lynching of Elbert Williams in Brownsville, Tennessee. A founding member of the local NAACP, Williams was murdered for attempting to register Black voters, decades before the more famous murders of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers.

Through rigorous research and gripping narrative, retired trial attorney Jim Emison reconstructs the events surrounding Williams’s lynching and the federal government’s failure to prosecute his killers. Drawing on FBI files, Department of Justice correspondence, and eyewitness accounts, Emison reconstructs how white officials conspired to silence a community, implicating local law enforcement, federal agents, and even national NAACP leadership.

Emison repositions Brownsville as a pivotal site in civil rights history and exposes how voter suppression, racial terror, and government complicity shaped the American democracy we inherit today. With a foreword by Margaret A. Burnham, Murder on the Hatchie challenges liberal assumptions about justice and the embedded character of Jim Crow. For readers of Blood Done Sign My Name and By Hands Now Known, this is both a gripping true-crime investigation and a vital work of historical restoration.

Jim Emison, after forty-three years as a Tennessee trial attorney, devoted his retirement to investigating the 1940 murder of NAACP leader Elbert Williams. Emison’s work has been featured by the Associated Press, NPR, and Nashville Public Television, and led to a renewed Department of Justice review under the Emmett Till Act. Emison is the cofounder of Tennesseans for Historical Justice and a board member of the Tennessee Historical Society. Murder on the Hatchie: The NAACP’s First Martyr is his first book.

Emison will be in conversation with Aderson Francois, a Professor of Law at Georgetown where he directs the Civil Rights Section of the Institute for Public Representation (IPR) and the Voting Rights Institute. His scholarly interests include voting rights, education law, and the history of slavery and Reconstruction. He has testified before Congress on civil rights issues and drafted numerous briefs to the US Supreme Court. Prior to joining the Georgetown faculty, Francois directed the Civil Rights Clinic at Howard University School of Law, where he also taught Constitutional Law, Federal Civil Rights, and Supreme Court Jurisprudence.