Piercing eyes. Stiff collar on his button-down shirt. Gray hair parted on the side.
People stop Jim Emison sometimes to tell him he reminds them of someone, especially with the way he describes the injustice done to Black people across the South in a soft voice and a West Tennessee drawl. Namely, he reminds strangers of a movie character who was voted the greatest hero in the history of cinema by the American Film Institute: Atticus Finch.
Finch was the fictional father-figure, country lawyer, bastion of virtue, created by Harper Lee in her book "To Kill a Mockingbird." Finch was based on her father and played by Gregory Peck in the movie classic. Emison is flattered by the comparison. "I say 'thank you,'" he told The Tennessean.
Emison will be
speaking at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on Oct. 17 at 11 a.m. in the Hiwassee Tent at the Tennessee State Museum. He will be interviewed by journalist John Seigenthaler Jr. about Emison's book, "Murder on the Hatchie: The NAACP's First Martyr."
Emison's book about the death of Black activist Elbert Williams, who was trying to rally people to vote in 1940, will be released for sale on Oct. 20. A national book tour will follow in New York, Boston, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., among many others.
"I was aggrieved at the injustice that was done," Emison said in an interview at his home office in Alamo, Tenn. "A man had been murdered because he wanted to vote."
Growing up in Tennesssee
Jim Emison was born in 1943, three years after Williams was murdered.
The author's father was a country lawyer, a profession that also attracted many members of his extended family. Emison was raised in Alamo with legal arguments happening over Sunday supper.
"My childhood was idyllic − small town, big family, church and school. That's it," he said.
There was one glaring issue that Emison came to realize when he went to Vanderbilt University.
"I didn't know any Black citizens my age," he said. "I didn't know any Black adults, not one."
He attended law school at the University of Tennessee and clerked for judge Hamilton Burnett, who was the Chief Justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court.
In 1972, when Emison joined his father's law practice, the new graduate got his first taste of racial politics in the South. Emison began working on the defense of Joe Louis Nance, a Black man accused of killing a white couple on Christmas Eve.
When Nance was convicted and sentenced to death, Emison worked on the appeal. Nance was granted a new trial.
"By God, we won," Emison said. "I don't think he killed those people. I was pleased and proud of that work."
After that victory, Emison began getting a lot of Black clients.
In his most famous case, he lost (just like Atticus Finch).
Emison represented the Rev. Liston Pack of the Holiness Church of God in Jesus Name. The state wanted to shut down the church because the congregation handled poisonous snakes.
Emison did his research and visited the spot where the snakes were kept.
"I did not linger on the edge of that pit," Emison said. "And I did not attend a service (in which snakes were used). My feeling was if they want to handle snakes, let them handle snakes."
The Tennessee Supreme Court disagreed, but Emison became well-known in his community for his pro-First Amendment stance. He has lived in the same stately house in Alamo since 1980.
How research turned into a whole book
Emison retired in 2011. His dream was to write a book.
So he started researching a case about a white mob that murdered 16 Black men in the 1870s.
Doing that research, he ran across an article about a lynching in Tennessee, not far from where he was raised. Emison prides himself on his knowledge of West Tennessee history. But he had never heard of Elbert Williams. Williams was a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Brownsville in 1939. The goal for that group was to get more Black people to sign up to vote.
"That's what ignited the fire," Emison said. "Police kidnapped Elbert... They had no warrant. No probable cause. No crimes were committed."
The book that came out of Emison's research, "Murder on the Hatchie" (the Hatchie is a river), is about what happened when white city officials and police tried to stop Black people from registering to vote.
At first, police took Elbert Williams to jail. Then, on June 23, 1940, two fishermen found Williams' body floating in the Hatchie River.
"This was very carefully orchestrated," Emison said. "They wanted to create terror. They wanted his (Williams') death to be so horrific that no Black person in Haywood County would forget it."
The result was indeed traumatic for the Black community of West Tennessee. Not many Black people signed up to vote in the surrounding area.
"The terrorists were successful," Emison said. "There was no trial."
Exposing what happened to Williams drove Emison to write the book.
"I didn't want this man to be forgotten," Emison said. "He's a civil rights hero."
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Shocking murder of Black activist in 1940 explored in new book
