Review: Landscapes of Exclusion: State Parks and Jim Crow in the American South, by William E. O'Brien and What Can and Can't Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South, by Dell Upton

In late July 2018, someone shot at a historic marker commemorating the place along Mississippi's Tallahatchie River where Emmett Till's mutilated, bullet-riddled corpse was found. Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy, was abducted and viciously murdered by two white vigilantes in the summer of 1955. Vandals stole the site's first sign and then shot up a second one. A third marker had been erected and dedicated only five weeks before the 2018 incident by the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, located in the nearby Sumner, Mississippi, courthouse where Till's murderers were put on trial. A similar spate of vandalism befell a marker sponsored by the Mississippi Freedom Trail, a historical initiative dedicated to marking important sites of civil rights struggles in the state. That marker is located at the former site of Bryant's Grocery in Money, Mississippi, where Carolyn Jones, a white woman, falsely claimed that Till made sexually explicit gestures...