Emmett Till Memorial: A Community Engaged Studio Project

In 1955, Emmett Till was 14-year-old when he was kidnaped and brutally murdered by two white men in the Mississippi Delta. This racist incident was one of the key events that galvanized the Civil Rights Movement’s work. Through a community engagement project to design a memorial dedicated to Emmett Till, this essay explores a studio pedagogy that aimed to introduce social justice in architecture studios. The “Emmett Till Memorial” community engaged project took place in Spring 2020 in the first-year architecture studio of the School of Architecture at Mississippi State University. In this project, we partnered with the Emmett Till Memorial Commission (ETMC) to design a memorial at the Graball Landing site where it is believed Emmett’s body was found. Since April 2008, the ETMC attempts to commemorate this site and it has become a nationally recognized memory site. Unfortunately, the site has been subjected to repeated vandalism. This paper describes the different stages of this community engaged project in a contested site that aimed to embrace transformative service-learning ideas and critical reflection. The service-learning design project integrated field experiences, including visits to historic sites related to Emmett Till’s history and an immer¬sive experience with activists and community organizers from the ETMC. Using critical reflection as a pedagogical approach, discussions among students and community members cen¬tered on how the design outcome of this community engaged project would contribute to community conversations about the future development of the Graball Landing site as well as design vision and values that could be included in the new memorial and its restorative narrative. Students’ design proposals exhibited a wide range of design intentions and sources of inspiration. Employing symbolic and educational features, the diverse design proposals responded to specific environmental conditions of the place and explored how to engage visitors with Emmett Till’s history, the civil rights movement, and the future of racial reconciliation. Finally, this paper discusses how African-American historical sites have intentionally been ignored and marginalized and how architecture educators, students, and community members can partner to preserve sites of memory and to dismantle systematic racism in urban design and architecture.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.109.83

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ISBN
978-1-944214-37-1